Amid tsunami of bankruptcy amongst the fraudulent crypto corporations, cryptocurrency exchange Kraken said it had decided to cease its operations in Japan and deregister from the country’s regulatory agency as of January 31, 2022. The company said the move reflects “current market conditions” in the country as well as a weak global crypto market.
Kraken is one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, with trading volumes of US$408.9 million per day.
This will be the second time Kraken has closed its Japanese operations after doing so in 2018. It relaunched in the country in 2020 after securing registration from regulators, CNBC reported.
Meanwhile, commenting on the ongoing huge crisis centering crypto, experts said, “You will hear many stories like these in the coming weeks and months. Crypto is a fraud from day one. The fake inventor named Satoshi Nakamoto should have been a big red flag for Wall Street. The total collapse of Crypto will occur in 2023”.
This has been a disastrous year for cryptocurrencies and those behind such Ponzi schemes. Market conditions that have hampered equity markets as well as crypto-specific issues have weighed on the industry.
The biggest news story of the year has been the fall of fraudulent crypto exchange FTX and its former chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried. A couple of weeks ago the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the US Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled charges against Sam Bankman-Fried for a scheme to defraud investors in FTX.
According to Chainalysis, the downfall has caused US$9 billion of losses for FTX clients, but this number doesn’t take into account potential losses for people who deposited their funds with the exchange. The likelihood of these investors recovering them is seen as mission impossible.
Meanwhile, according to media reports, Sam Bankman-Fried is expected to enter a plea next week to criminal charges he defrauded investors and looted billions of dollars in customer funds at his failed FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
The 30-year-old is expected to be arraigned on the afternoon of January 3, 2023, before US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan federal court, court records on Wednesday showed.
Kaplan was assigned to the case, after the original judge recused herself because her husband’s law firm had advised FTX before its collapse.
Prosecutors have accused Sam Bankman-Fried of engaging in a years-long “fraud of epic proportions”, by using customer deposits to support his Alameda Research hedge fund firm, buy real estate and make political contributions.
Sam Bankman-Fried is charged with two counts of wire fraud and six counts of conspiracy, including to launder money and commit campaign finance violations, and if convicted could spend decades in prison.
Before his December 12 arrest, Bankman-Fried acknowledged risk-management failures at FTX, but said he did not believe he was criminally liable. Two of his associates, former Alameda chief executive Caroline Ellison and former FTX chief technology officer Gary Wang, have pleaded guilty over their roles in FTX’s collapse and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
