My Big Coin founder sentenced to 8 years in prison; Ethereum staking testnet to launch on Feb 1; Crypto companies laid off nearly 3,000 employees in January
My Big Coin founder sentenced to 8 years in prison
Randall Crater, the founder of the scam project My Big Coin, is facing a 100-month prison sentence. Crater’s sentence did not end with just jail time. Crater was also fined $7.6 million.
Crater was sentenced on January 31 by US Massachusetts District Court Judge Denise Casper. The My Big Coin founder’s jail time and fines came in the wake of accusations of four major bank frauds, three illegal monetary transactions, and one unlicensed coin trading.
Founded by Randall Crater in 2013, My Big Coin was introduced as a cryptocurrency payment service that caught the attention of its victims between 2014 and 2017.
At the time, Crater claimed that the tokens in My Big Coin were fully functional and gold-backed, as well as having partnerships with Mastercard. According to the statements made, a house, several cars and antiques, works of art and jewelry were purchased for $ 7.6 million.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/founder-of-7-5m-brazen-fraud-scheme-to-see-8-years-behind-bars
Ethereum staking testnet will launch on Feb 1.
Ethereum staking testnet Zhejiang will launch tomorrow and will give a first impression of how withdrawals and functionality will look after the Shanghai update.
Users will not be able to use all the withdrawal features available in Shanghai and Capella updates. Users will only be able to experience depositing money with validators and get an idea of how the interface works.
Ethereum developer Barnabas Busa, in a statement on Twitter, noted that the developer team will make various adjustments to make the experience better.
The Shanghai hard fork, which will be the first upgrade after the Merge upgrade, will allow stakers to withdraw their assets.
The Shanghai hard fork is also eagerly awaited by traders. Because such upgrades often result in an increase in the price of the asset.
Ethereum developers recently launched a shadow hard fork for the Shanghai upgrade. Shadow hard fork allows Ethereum developers to see if a piece of code will work properly on the network.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-staking-withdrawal-testnet-zhejiang-to-go-online-feb-1
Crypto companies laid off nearly 3,000 employees in January
According to a report by Bloomberg, the rate of layoffs has become more frequent in recent weeks. Crypto platform Matrixport said goodbye to 30 employees, while cryptocurrency exchange Gemini laid off 100.
The crypto company that made the most personnel recruitment in January was the Coinbase exchange. Coinbase laid off 950 employees in the past year.
Rival exchanges Luno, Crypto.com and Huobi terminated their employment of 500, 330 and 320 personnel, respectively.
Crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group (DCG), which has been grappling with class action lately, and its subsidiaries, cut off a total of 485 employees in January.
However, the NFT sector continued to shed its leaves. NFT marketplace SuperRare also saddened the news of the termination of 20 employees.
The rise in Bitcoin price in the last month seems not enough to bail out crypto companies. He thinks that even the news of layoffs that occurred in January alone caused significant damage to the market.
The year 2022 has not only been bad for the crypto industry. Macroeconomic conditions were on the agenda all over the world. All the negativities, from geopolitical tensions to political strategies, have deeply shaken both traditional and digital markets.
However, there were some technology giants that laid off 48,000 employees in January alone. These companies were Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-firms-cut-nearly-3-000-jobs-in-january-despite-bitcoin-s-rise