What Happened in the Crypto Market this Weekend?

Key Takeaways:

• The ETH developers have been working on a new launch that failed to take place.
• An open letter to the hackers of CoinEx with a plea.
• A possible US crypto bill to be passed by the end of this year, says Greyscale CEO.

Read more: Greyscale vs SEC

ETH’s Failed to launch Testnet

According to the Ethereum infrastructure firm Nethermind, earlier in the weekend, Ethereum developers were ready to go live with a new test network, Holesky, on September 16. However, the launch did not go through due to some technical issues. The test net had attempted to launch the testnet with about 1.5 million validators but could not do so, as there were not enough active validators for the testnet to reach finality.

Parithosh Jayanthi, the Ethereum Foundation engineer, took to Twitter to share more insight on the matter. He explained that while some validators manually worked to fix the configuration issue; that enabled the Holesky testnet to start, it still lacked the required number of active validators for the network to reach its finality.

We had a misconfiguration in the el genesis file and that led to the holesky network improperly launching. Some validators manually fixed the config and were able to start the chain, but not enough for the network to finalize. https://t.co/5fchlRBCP3

— parithosh | 🐼👉👈🐼 (@parithosh_j) September 15, 2023

Nethermind has said that the Ethereum developers have agreed to make another attempt to launch the testnet. Jayanthi has apologized for the failed launch and has also said that the next attempt will probably be taken within the next two weeks.

Sorry for the chaos! We’ll add some more validation steps and better docs to try and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

— parithosh | 🐼👉👈🐼 (@parithosh_j) September 15, 2023

The Holesky testnet his set to replace the Goerli testnet and has been designed to facilitate staking, infrastructure and protocol development. As per the host of the Ethereum show The Daily Gwei, Anthony Sassano, this launch is going to the the largest public testnet launch for Ethereum.

Plea to Hackers in a open letter from CoinEx

CoinEx, the crypto exchange that recently became a victim to a $70 million heist, posted an open letter addressing the hackers to talk about a possible return of the funds that they have taken.

#CoinExResponseUpdate – CoinEx’s Open Letter to Hackers

To Hackers,

We entered this industry with a vision of “making the world a better place via blockchain.” Like millions of blockchain enthusiasts who share the same faith, we strive to build an open, interconnected, and…

— CoinEx Global (@coinexcom) September 15, 2023

Though they have added a similar way forward, like how hacked exchanges do, they have agreed to pay them a ‘generous’ bug bounty reward; what stood out odd is their applauding the ‘technical expertise’ of the hackers and inviting them to come to CoinEx to help them upgrade their security. They said, “If possible, we sincerely invite you to discuss the future upgrade of CoinEx’s security system. Together with global blockchain enterprises and practitioners, we will safeguard a free, open, secure, and trustworthy blockchain ecosystem.”

‘Unnecessarily Obstrusive’ questions from SBF

The prosecutors of the United States have said that some of the proposed questions from the lawyers of Sam Bankman-Fried that they plan to ask the prospective jurors for his upcoming trial are “unnecessarily intrusive.” To this the prosecutors have argued in their September 15, 2023 letter to the U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan; saying that a fair trial is not prejudiced by SBF’s public image. They feel like it is not fair to ignore completely what they have seen on the news previously, on Sam Bankman-Fried.

Source: Courtlistener/Cointelegraph

The trial on Bankman-Fried is set to take place on October 2, 2023.

Read more: Sand Bankman Fried FTX Exchange Collapse

A possible US crypto bill to be passed this year; Greyscale CEO

According to Michael Sonnenshein, the Grayscale Investment CEO, a crypto bill from the United States Congress is possible by the end of this year. While speaking to Yahoo Finance earlier, on September 14, 2023,  Sonnenshein mentioned that “I’m optimistic that we absolutely could [see legislation passed] if any Congress to date could do it it certainly could be this Congress.” He also went ahead and said that his firm has been influenced by what they have seen the lawmakers work on, in the past 12 months.

He commented, “Many of the folks that have been involved in drafting that legislation and those that have voted for it are really hoping to build on that momentum that now that Congress is coming back into session that they can re-engage on these topics and get broader members support for it.”

Other News

According to reports, the United States House Financial Services Committee is taking steps with legislation that is aimed to prevent the issuance of a CBDC or a central bank digital currency. There were two bills announced:

• On one, Chairman Patrick McHenry said to prohibit the Federal Reserve from initiating any pilot programs in order to test CBDCs without prior approval from Congress.
• The other bill attempted to prohibit banks in offering certain financial products to individuals.

Source: Cointelegraph

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