Free Republic

Oil and gas will play a role in the global energy needs for a "long, long, long time to come," said Shell chief executive Wael Sawan today. Sawan is working to move beyond a dialogue that "seems to fixate" on the notion one must choose between fossil fuels like oil and gas or renewables like solar and wind. "It's all. And we need them in abundance," Sawan told participants at CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston today. Stable oil production is deemed necessary by Shell as it transitions its customers to lower carbon solutions over the course of decades....

Latest results from just now 93% OF VOTES IN Republican Caucus race called Republican Caucus Candidate Votes PercentPct. Chart showing percent DelegatesDelegates Donald J. Trump 52,263 +50.9%50.9% 16 Ron DeSantis 21,857 +21.3%21.3 4 Nikki Haley 19,558 +19.1%19.1 4 Total reported 102,655

The Republican National Committee on Friday afternoon said it would pause participation in further Republican presidential primary debates, effectively leaving decisions around future debates up to media organizations and the 2024 Republican presidential candidates themselves.

Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, pleaded guilty to money laundering violations, the government said on Tuesday, a stunning blow to the most powerful and influential figure in the global crypto industry. Binance itself also pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines and restitution [and much, much more]

New report from industry researchers finds that 95 percent of the once-hyped crypto assets have hit rock-bottom valuation NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, once vaunted as a revolution in crypto and digital art, are largely worthless. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH) The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value. What’s more, supply vastly outstripped demand for NFTs. Just 21 percent of the collections included in the study can claim full ownership, meaning around four out of every five...

RNC this week released eligibility criteria for presidential candidates to make the second GOP debate. Candidates ... will need to have a minimum of 50,000 unique donors, including 200 donors in 20 states or more each ... Candidates will also need to register at a minimum of 3 percent in two national polls or poll at 3 percent in one national poll and 3 percent in two polls conducted in two early states, which include Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada ...

Federal Reserve System, FDIC, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) [joint statement] ... [The Money Quote]: Based on the agencies’ current understanding and experience to date, the agencies believe that issuing or holding as principal crypto-assets that are issued, stored, or transferred on an open, public, and/or decentralized network, or similar system is highly likely to be inconsistent with safe and sound banking practices. ... Banking organizations should be aware of, including: • Risk of fraud and scams among crypto-asset sector participants. • Legal uncertainties related to custody practices, redemptions, and ownership rights, some of which...

The bankruptcy of crypto’s marquee lender, Genesis Global Capital, may be one more blow than the industry can withstand, at least in its current form. The list of bull-market stars laid low now includes nearly every major player to have captured the public’s attention by offering market-beating returns for the simple act of depositing tokens. Genesis joins BlockFi, Celsius Network and Voyager Digital among firms whose collapse have left countless clients angry and unlikely to risk more money on their daredevil exploits. Acting as de facto banks, these firms took in assets which they then lent out freely across the...

Genesis owes over $3.5 billion to its top 50 creditors, among which include Crypto exchange Gemini, trading giant Cumberland, Mirana, MoonAlpha Finance and VanEck’s New Finance Income Fund, according to the bankruptcy filing published late Thursday. Shortly after FTX collapsed into its own bankruptcy case in November, Genesis Global Capital was forced to suspend customer withdrawals, which hurt customers of a yield product offered by the Winklevoss twins' crypto exchange, Gemini. Genesis had been scrambling to raise fresh capital or reach a deal with creditors. It – along with parent company Digital Currency Group (DCG), which also owns CoinDesk –...

Illicit use of cryptocurrencies hit a record $20.1 billion last year as transactions involving companies targeted by U.S. sanctions skyrocketed, data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis showed on Thursday. Even as overall crypto transaction volumes fell, the value of crypto transactions related to illicit activity rose for the second year running, Chainalysis said. Transactions associated with sanctioned entities increased more than 100,000-fold in 2022 and made up 44% of last year's illicit activity, Chainalysis said.

Silvergate Capital Corp reported a sharp drop in fourth-quarter crypto-related deposits on Thursday and said it would cut its workforce by 40%, or about 200 employees, as withdrawals surged following the collapse of industry major FTX. Shares in the company, which lost roughly 88% of their value in 2022, were down 40% in premarket trading. Total deposits from digital asset customers declined to $3.8 billion at the end of December 2022, compared with $11.9 billion at Sept. 30, 2022, the crypto-focused bank said in a preliminary earnings report. To maintain liquidity, the bank sold $5.2 billion of debt securities at...

Crypto payments and infrastructure provider company Wyre is shutting down ... Wyre was first founded in 2013 by Michael Dunworth and Ioannis Giannaros and had raised a total $29.1 million across nine rounds of funding, data from Crunchbase shows. Some of its investors include Pantera Capital, Stellar Development Foundation and Amphora Capital.

A bankruptcy judge ruled that digital coins deposited in Celsius Network LLC’s interest-bearing accounts belong to the firm, ruling against thousands of customers and deciding a key legal issue in crypto-related insolvencies.

Bitcoin miners had a rough 2022, showing “how to not build a mining business,” However, industry experts don’t see 2023 as any better, unless markets improve significantly. high energy prices, increasing competition for Bitcoin blocks and a bear market hit miners, knocking out those with high leverage. The sector was shaken by bankruptcies and loan defaults, and next year will likely bring even more pain. lots of money was spent over the last year to boost hashrate ... but those investments didn’t pay off, as companies loaded up on debt to finance the growth only to see the economics of...

Solana has lost over $50 billion in value since the beginning of 2022, a year marked by outages, overloads, and significant exposure to Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange. Proponents argue that Solana is more critical than ever as a decentralized finance platform Solana was touted as the cryptocurrency that would challenge ether with an eco-friendlier approach, faster transaction speeds and more consistent costs. Developers raved about Solana's support for smart contracts Consensus mechanisms are how blockchain platforms assess the validity of an executed transaction Barely a month into the year [2022], a network outage took Solana down for over 24 hours....

It’s been a brutal year for the cryptocurrency market. In the latest blow to the crypto space, Core Scientific, one of the largest publicly traded crypto mining companies in the U.S, which primarily mints bitcoin, filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 21, citing falling crypto prices and rising energy costs. And the implosion of FTX, a now-bankrupt crypto trading platform that was once valued at $32 billion, has shattered investors’ confidence as the ripple effects of the company’s collapse continue to spread throughout the crypto industry. “Many Americans are coming to realize that cryptocurrency is just a speculative mania and the...

Data negates the possibility of liquidators behind the fund transfers due to the use of mixing tools and extensive planning to hide transaction paths. 30 cryptocurrency wallets linked to Alameda Research, the bankrupt sister company of crypto exchange FTX, became active on Dec. 28 following four weeks of inactivity. These wallets swapped and mixed over $1.7 million worth of crypto assets through various crypto-mixing services. As Cointelegraph reported on Dec. 28, the sudden movement of funds from Alameda wallets just days after Sam Bankman Fried was released on bail raised suspicions across the crypto community. Nearly 24 hours later, it...

in its 14-year existence, the cryptocurrency world has failed to generate any significant real-world use case apart from the financing of crime. It has mainly been a speculative investment, which only worked as long as real dollars were entering the system. Crypto has never known anything but easy money ... There’s a brutal liquidity squeeze going on in global markets, and money is being sucked out of risky asset classes.” Cryptocurrencies have been about as risky as it gets. But the real promise was that cryptocurrency would always go up in price ... The promise in cryptocurrencies has always been...

Core Scientific, one of the largest publicly traded crypto mining firms in the U.S. listed on Nasdaq as $CORZ, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy [ruh roh] Core Scientific is still generating positive cash flow, but it is insufficient to repay the financing debt Instead of liquidating, the company will continue regular mining operations while trying to reach a deal with senior security noteholders The company owns approximately 5% of Bitcoin’s global hash rate The loss in Bitcoin’s value and higher energy prices have narrowed profit margins of BTC miners worldwide [bummer]

crypto trading looks a lot like the forms of finance we’re all familiar with. It’s made up of things called “exchanges,” “brokers,” “lenders,” “deposits” and “hedge funds.” Crypto also carries the special mystique of the blockchain, which has let traders treat critics as anti-innovation Luddites. [however] the purposelessness of the crypto trading system emulates finance the same way the board games Risk and Monopoly emulate war and real-estate investing. Crypto trading is also gambling. It performs no intermediation function to help expand the economy or improve society. Crypto trading is, as “Seinfeld’s” George Costanza might have said, finance about nothing....