The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a media and entertainment company with conducting an unregistered securities sale when it sold NFTs in 2021. Meanwhile, Laos decided to chop the electricity supply for crypto mining firms an critics of the decentralized social media app Friend.tech are already heralding its potential demise.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged a podcaster with conducting an unregistered securities sale when it sold nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in 2021. It was the safety regulator’s first claim against an NFT offering.
The Los Angeles-based Impact Theory raised almost $30 million through the sale of NFTs between October and December 2021. The SEC said Impact Theory “encouraged potential investors to view the acquisition […] As an investment into the business.”
How it began How it’s going pic.twitter.com/REUcdwwY0k
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) August 28, 2023
Impact Theory has been ordered to pay over $6.1 million in disgorgement, prejudgement interest and civil penalty. It was also ordered to destroy the NFT collection and inform investors that the gathering would stop trading immediately.
U.S. securities regulators have been broadening their enforcement motion within the crypto and blockchain space. Earlier this 12 months, the SEC filed lawsuits against crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase for allegedly offering unregistered securities.
SEC charges media company in NFT offering
Laos pulls the plug on crypto mining electricity supply after drought
Laos’ state-owned electricity distribution company, Électricité du Laos (EDL), decided to suspend electricity supply for crypto mining operations within the country after drought conditions within the region negatively impacted power generation.
Laos experienced a drought in the primary half of 2023. Extreme heat resulted in higher demand for electricity and caused hydropower plants to struggle to generate enough power.
The EDL said that hydropower plants generate 95% of the country’s power, and it goals to produce electricity locally and export large volumes to Thailand in 2024.
Friend.tech critics call app “dead” after volume, activity plummets
Less than three weeks after its launch, the decentralized social network Friend.tech has already been declared “dead” by critics following a drop in key metrics reminiscent of activity, inflows and volume.
The decentralized app, hosted on Coinbase’s Base network, saw record highs around Aug. 21, when every day fees peaked at $1.7 million and transactions hit 525,000.
However, recent data shows that fees have since dropped 87% to around $215,000 on Aug. 26, in accordance with DefiLlama. Meanwhile, Dune Analytics data shows the app recorded over 51,000 transactions on Aug. 27, down 90% from its peak.
In an Aug. 27 post on X (formerly Twitter), Coinbase payments risk manager Lisandro Rodriguez opined that the platform is “dead” because of “greed and poor execution.” Another user simply commented, “RIP Friend Tech August 2023 – August 2023.”
Friend tech is dead due to greed and poor execution. We can see that after the initial influencer pump volume has fallen off a cliff. Let’s dig into how this failure got here to be pic.twitter.com/WDQncTQJ21
— Lisandro (@TheRealLisandro) August 27, 2023
Last week, crypto commentator Yazan told Cointelegraph that he believed Friend.tech had between six to eight weeks before it could see a decline in share prices and activity.
This article doesn’t contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their very own research when making a call.
