Australia is now the 4th largest crypto ATM hub
Hello,
In today’s dispatch we have:
Australia has got more crypto ATM than El Salvador
SBF denies moving funds from Alameda wallets
December saw the lowest crypto heists
Crypto ATMs have grown in popularity since their debut in a Vancouver coffee shop in October 2013. Why? Because these ATMs make buying and selling crypto very easier.
You can buy crypto with cash without going through an exchange or waiting for your bank transfer to clear, and they involve no personal information from the user apart from their cash deposit amount.
There are currently 39,678 such devices spread across 84 countries, with more than 85% in the United States of America.
Canada comes in second with 2649 crypto ATMs, and Spain is now the third largest crypto ATM hub, having increased its ATM count from 215 to 272 and counting.
And now, Australia and Poland have surpassed El Salvador to become the fourth and fifth largest crypto ATM hubs.
To reach this position, Australia has been installing 99 cryptocurrency ATMs across the country since the fourth quarter of 2022. They now have 225 crypto ATMs, accounting for 0.6% of global crypto ATM installations.
China and Singapore have zero number of crypto ATMs. Not surprised about China, but Singapore wants to become a cryptocurrency hub and yet has no crypto ATMs.
With the increased use, many countries are prompting authorities to impose transaction limits. In Nigeria, for example, you can withdraw up to $225 per week.
SBF denies moving funds from Alameda wallets
SBF tweets for the first time since he was arrested on December 12 in the Bahamas. There have been allegations that he may have been responsible for moving funds out of Alameda wallets. SBF denied any involvement in the movement of funds from Alameda wallets.
"None of these are me," Bankman-Fried tweeted, linking to a media report about the transfers. "I'm not and couldn't be moving any of those funds; I don't have access to them anymore."
Apparently, a portion of the funds was swapped to USDT, while the remainder was routed to a mixing service.
The movement of funds, as well as how it was moved, raised suspicions among the crypto community that it was SBF was behind it. The Alameda wallet was discovered to exchange ERC-20 bits for ETH and Tether, which were then routed through instant exchanges and mixers.
According to an on-chain investigation conducted by DeFi educator BowTiedIguana, SBF allegedly cashed out $684,000 in cryptocurrency while under house arrest via an exchange in Seychelles. If that's the case, SBF may have violated his release conditions by spending more than $1,000 without court permission.
December saw the lowest crypto heists in 2022
December saw $62.2 million worth of cryptocurrencies stolen, and it was the "lowest monthly figure" of the year, according to CertiK. All the thieves were probably busy spending holidays with their parents.
Anyway, the method that stole the most value over the month was $15.5 million worth of exit scams, followed by $7.6 million worth of flash loan-based exploits.
The 23 largest exploits accounted for approximately 98.5% of the $62.2 million total. The largest of them was the$15 million Helio Protocol hack - a trader took advantage of a price difference in Ankr Reward Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc) to borrow millions of HAY, the protocol that manages the stablecoin HAY (HAY) suffered a loss.
The second largest was the defrost incident - On December 23, an attacker carried out a flash loan attack using a fake collateral token and a malicious price oracle to liquidate the protocol, resulting in a $12.9 million exploit of Defrost Finance's v1 and v2 protocols.