📉 Market dips, wiping over $600 millions of longs

📉 Market dips, wiping over $600 millions of longs 🥷 KuCoin Twitter gets hacked, CEX is offering to reimburse the victims 🪙 Chinese city starts paying its government employees with CBDCs

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Here's what recently happened in the space:

📉 Market dips, wiping over $600 millions of longs 

      🥷 KuCoin Twitter gets hacked, CEX is offering to reimburse the victims

      🪙 Chinese city starts paying its government employees with CBDCs

Market dips, wiping over $600 millions of longs

The crypto market dipped this week, resulting in market-wide losses and $650.9 million in long liquidations across derivatives exchanges. Bitcoin fell over 9%, trading below $28,000. The largest liquidation of its kind in these past 30 days. Ether followed similar trends, shedding around 13% of its value.

The massive liquidation was primarily driven by a lack of liquidity and a large sell order on Binance by Noelle Acheson, the former head of market insights at Genesis Trading. It's worthy of note however that despite the large sell order, Acheson still remains bullish on cryptocurrencies, as she's still running her Crypto is Macro Now newsletter on Substack.

The market dip has resulted in heightened volatility, leading some investors to reassess their portfolio strategies. The general sentiment in the market is that this dip may be short-lived - most traders are still super optimistic about the long-term prospects of crypto. But as always, it pays to be wary of the current market conditions.

KuCoin Twitter gets hacked, CEX is offering to reimburse the victims

KuCoin's twitter account got hacked yesterday by an unknown hacker.

The hacker posted a malicious link to a phishing site with a fake giveaway. KuCoin has identified 22 transactions where users have lost funds as a result of interacting with the phishing site. As a result, KuCoin users have lost a total of 22,628 Tether (USDT).

KuCoin is offering to fully reimburse all verified asset losses caused by the social media breach and fake activity. KuCoin has also assured users that the hack was limited only to the social media account and that all funds on the exchange are safe. KuCoin also said that it's working on examining and blocking suspicious addresses to prevent further victimization and that it launched an in depth investigation into the incident.

The practice of hacking official accounts to promote fake giveaways and airdrops is becoming more common, as we saw with the hack of Circle’s CEO Twitter account and Robinhood's just a few months ago. Remember to always exercise extreme caution when clicking on suspicious links but also don't forget about the common sense. There's always free cheese, usually though it's in a mousetrap.

Chinese city starts paying its government employees with CBDCs

Chinese city of Changshu is making a first step in the adoption of digital currencies, by allowing its government employees to receive their salaries in the form of central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The plan, announced by an affiliate of China’s official state news agency, will reportedly become effective from May this year. This means that civil servants, school teachers, medical professionals, technicians and journalists working in Changshu will receive their salaries in the digital yuan, rather than cash or other payment methods.

China is one of the world's first developed countries to experiment with CBDCs and this move indicates that it’s quickly expanding its CBDC program.Moreover, the idea is not entirely new in Changshu. News reports suggest that since June 2022, around 4,900 workers from various enterprises have received a cumulative sum of 2.5 million yuan ($363,000) as additional pay for the extra hours worked.

Countries around the world are developing digital currency projects, with over a dozen currently in pilot phases. China has one such project, and India recently launched a retail pilot of its digital rupee in four cities. The Bahamas' Sand Dollar and Jamaica's JAM-DEX are examples of fully live CBDC projects. Some believe these projects are part of efforts to diminish the reliance on US dollar-dominated financial system, but the most likely explanation is that the control tools that CBDCs offer is attractive to governments like China.

The Chinese government has plans to expand the digital yuan's usage beyond state employees and local businesses, but it remains uncertain if or when that will happen.