Crypto Market Overview May 17th | Dex-Trade
Deal Deadlocked: Musk Doesn't Complete Twitter Purchase Due to Spam Bots
As soon as the market “leaps” of Twitter shares subsided after the announced purchase of the social network by Elon Musk, the latest news added a pinch of ambiguity to the deal: the entrepreneur said that he would not buy the social platform until its management proved that the number of advertising bots among registered users was less than 5%. Musk tweeted this morning that he believes the number of fake or spam accounts on the platform could be much higher than the 20% he had previously thought. The businessman said that the reasoning of his opinion is based on Twitter SEC filings, and indicated that the CEO of the company has not yet publicly provided evidence that bots make up less than 5% among users. Naturally, "fathers’ of e-cars” position is hurting Twitter's stock value. Last week, Musk's yet-to-be-announced rumored ultimatum sent the media giant's share price down from $49 on Monday, May 9 to $40 on Friday, May 13. Today, the company's valuable shares are trading at $37.39 (at the time of writing). Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweets that spambots are hard to spot online, but the company's internal estimates for the last 4 quarters have been well below 5%. But he clarified that it’s unrealistic to conduct an accurate count of the number of bots from the outside, since this would require the use of both public and private information. Musk replied to this with a poop emoji.
Terra is Leaking Huge Amounts of BTC in an Attempt to Restore Its Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) said that it has spent most of its reserve of 80,394 Bitcoins in order to restore the peg of the UST stablecoin to the US dollar, but it didn't work and the crypto continued to “bottom out” because at the time of writing it the exchange rate is $0.11. As of May 7, LFG reserves included BTC, BNB, USDT, USDC, AVAX, UST, and LUNA. At the moment, it’s known that out of 80,394 BTC (which is approximately $3 billion), the fund has only 313 BTC (that is, about $9.5 million) left. By the way, as soon as the price of UST began to fall significantly below one dollar, LFG began to convert its USDC and USDT reserves (which is $50,200,071) into UST. The fund carried out the conversion process by directly performing swaps on the network and transferring to the counterparty first 52,189 BTC for 1,515,689,462 UST, and then another 33,206 BTC for 1,164,018,521 UST. None of this worked. LFG released information about its actions due to pressure from the crypto community on Twitter, which sharply criticized the company's management for not informing the public about its crypto reserves during the prices collapse of Terra assets.
Iranian Regulator Blocks 9,000 Bank Accounts Due to Suspicious Fiat and Crypto Transactions
The Iranian government froze 9,219 bank accounts belonging to 545 people, which accounted for about $2 billion (or 60 trillion Iranian tomans), a precedent for which was suspicious transactions with foreign fiat and cryptocurrency. In addition, the country's leadership announced the closure of almost 7,000 unauthorized cryptocurrency mining centers. These actions were carried out as part of the Iranian government's fight against illegal trade in foreign exchange and cryptocurrencies by the joint efforts of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and the country's central bank. On top of this, the Iranian State News Agency (IRNA) released a statement stating that currency exchanges, banks and lending institutions “should avoid any sale or purchase of these currencies or taking any action to promote them.” Such actions of the government are partly explained by high inflation in Iran due to the resumption of US sanctions. The trick is that many crypto traders and investors in the country resort to crypto as a means of protection against inflationary processes, which the authorities clearly do not like.
