PayPal has halted the debut of its stablecoin amid heightened regulatory scrutiny in the crypto industry and news of a probe by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDF) into its key partner, Paxos.

Crypto firm Paxos was working closely with PayPal to launch a ‘PayPal Coin,’ announced last year when it was leaked by Bloomberg. The coin was intended to be backed by the US dollar. However, the incumbent launch was halted on Friday.

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Paxos has announced that from February 21, it will no longer issue new Binance USD (BUSD) tokens.

Binance USD is a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Paxos that carried the Binance brand name. Protos previously reported on the work of Jonathan Reiter which showed that Binance Peg BUSD, a token pegged to BUSD issued by Binance, hadn’t always been appropriately backed.

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Crypto wallet holders were targeted this weekend when domain registrar Namecheap was hacked, allowing scammers to send out a raft of phishing emails impersonating MetaMask and DHL, reports BleepingComputer.

Namecheap’s email system was breached on Sunday and messages attempting to steal personal details and crypto wallets were fired out via the company’s email platform SendGrid. 

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A woman in Hong Kong lost nearly $800,000 when she attempted to adopt a kitten but instead got caught up in an elaborate crypto scam, reports Alarabiya News.

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Crypto exchange Kraken has agreed to pay $30 million and discontinue offering staking-as-a-service in the US, in order to settle charges of offering an unregistered security with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The complaint against Kraken details how the SEC feels that the pooling of staking user assets and efforts to derive profits for them results in the staking product being a security.

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At the end of 2022, I vowed to start the new year with a column called So You Don’t Have To. 

The idea was simple: I’d read crypto books, watch fluff documentaries, and play Ponzi games. Then, after torturing myself enough, I’d report back with an honest review.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t have started with a more loathsome, vanilla, and hypocritical book than Catching Up To Crypto: Your Guide to Bitcoin and the Digital Economy by the equally loathsome, vanilla, and hypocritical Ben “BitBoy” Armstrong.

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Tether has released a new assurance from BDO Italia, as required by its settlement with the New York Attorney General (NYAG), revealing an increase in Tether ‘Shareholder Capital Cushion’ to over $960 million.

Interestingly, this number seems quite different from what Tether had previously disclosed on its transparency page.

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A dramatic week has resulted in the mass-resignation of Umami Finance’s core team and a crash in the price of the UMAMI token, as the project’s ex-CEO allegedly dumped his token holdings.

Umami Finance claims to be “pioneering the institutional adoption of DeFi,” but TradFi investors are likely to be put off by recent developments.

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