Binance halts bitcoin withdrawals after Celsius blocks all redemptions
Bitcoin tumbles to lowest level since late 2020 as strains on crypto market intensify
Binance on Monday halted withdrawals of bitcoin hours after crypto lender Celsius blocked customers from pulling funds from its platform in moves that fuelled a broad sell-off across the digital asset market.
Bitcoin, ether and other major tokens dropped sharply on Monday following a turbulent weekend as the market infrastructure that underpins the digital asset market showed worsening signs of strain.
Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, suspended customer withdrawals of bitcoin on Monday afternoon. The pause came after Celsius, another major player in crypto that lets users lend out their tokens for high returns, halted redemptions due to “extreme market conditions”.
The crypto market has been shaken in recent weeks amid a broader flight from speculative assets prompted by an abrupt tightening of monetary policy by global central banks in response to intense inflation.
Bitcoin, the world’s most actively traded cryptocurrency, has dropped almost 20 per cent since Friday to below $24,000, its lowest level since December 2020, according to CryptoCompare data. Meanwhile, the market value of the broader crypto market has fallen from a peak of $3.2tn in November to around $1tn on Monday.
Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange by volume, said it had temporarily suspended withdrawals of bitcoin from its platform due to a “stuck transaction”. The company, which processed $1.2tn in crypto spot and derivatives trades last month, could not immediately provide further details on the matter.
Celsius is one of the biggest players in the market for digital yield products, providing users with the ability to lend out their tokens as collateral for other crypto projects. In return for lending their tokens, traders were able to earn annual yields of as much as 17 per cent.
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Sentiment towards these high-risk projects cooled sharply after the terra and luna tokens — which were the foundation of another popular yield platform — collapsed in a matter of days. The value of assets deposited on Celsius’s platform shrivelled to less than $12bn as of May 17 from more than $24bn in late December.
Ether, which is considered a proxy for sentiment for digital asset projects that offer investors high yields, has dropped almost 30 per cent since Friday, leaving it down two-thirds in dollar terms this year to trade at $1,195.
Selling on Monday also ricocheted into the shares of crypto-focused companies. MicroStrategy, a tech company that invests heavily in bitcoin, lost a quarter of its value in early trade on Wall Street while Nasdaq-listed crypto exchange Coinbase fell 16 per cent.
Celsius last year raised $400mn in an equity funding round led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Canada’s second-largest pension fund, and WestCap, the fund set up by former Airbnb and Blackstone executive Laurence Tosi.
That fundraising came even as US regulators indicated they were scrutinising the industry. State authorities in Texas and New Jersey have alleged that Celsius’s yield-bearing accounts amount to an unregistered securities offering.
Celsius’s halt to withdrawals early on Monday was also a U-turn after it had spent several days rebutting accusations that customers could not make withdrawals. Chief executive Alex Mashinsky challenged critics at the weekend to find “even one person who has a problem withdrawing”.
Celsius, which has offices in the US, UK and Lithuania, said the redemption freeze was done for the “benefit of our entire community in order to stabilise liquidity and operations while we take steps to preserve and protect assets”.
The group’s own coin, known by the ticker CEL, has lost half its value in the past 24 hours, according to CryptoCompare data.
Prologis to Buy Duke Realty in $26 Billion Deal, Including Debt
Agreement follows increased offer in which Duke Realty shareholders will receive 0.475 times a Prologis share
Prologis Inc. PLD -4.04%▼ is buying Duke Realty Corp. DRE -3.86%▼ in a deal valued at $26 billion, including the assumption of debt, the companies said Monday.
The respective boards of directors for Prologis and Duke Realty have unanimously approved the transaction.
Under the terms of the agreement, Duke Realty shareholders would receive 0.475 times a Prologis share for each Duke Realty share they own, an improvement from Prologis’s previous exchange offer of 0.466 times.
In May, Duke Realty rejected a nearly $24 billion buyout offer from Prologis, calling the unsolicited offer insufficient. Prologis had offered to buy Duke Realty for $61.68 a share.
Under the current deal, Prologis is gaining high-quality properties for its portfolio in key areas, including southern California, New Jersey, South Florida, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.
Prologis plans to hold 94% of the Duke Realty assets and exit one market.
Prologis said the transaction is expected to have immediate accretion of $310 million to 370 million from corporate general and administrative cost savings and operating leverage as well as mark-to-market adjustments on leases and debt. In the first year, the transaction is expected to increase annual core funds from operations by 20 cents to 25 cents.
The transaction is currently expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Bitcoin tumbles as crypto lender Celsius halts withdrawals
World’s leading digital token sinks to lowest level since 2020 as market comes under mounting pressure
Bitcoin and other leading cryptocurrencies tumbled on Monday after $12bn lender Celsius Network halted customer withdrawals, in the latest sign of intensifying strains across the digital assets industry.
The fall followed a suspension of withdrawals and transfers between accounts on Celsius, one of the world’s biggest crypto lending platforms, which blamed “extreme market conditions”.
The move dealt a heavy blow to the broader digital asset market. Bitcoin, the world’s most actively traded cryptocurrency, has dropped almost 20 per cent since Friday to below $24,000, its lowest level since December 2020, according to CryptoCompare data.
Selling had started at the weekend as concerns swirled among some traders that market tumult could imperil Celsius’s ability to meet redemption requests.
The platform is one of the biggest players in the market for digital yield products, providing users with the ability to lend out their tokens as collateral for other crypto projects. In return for lending their tokens, traders were able to earn annual yields of as much as 17 per cent.
Sentiment towards these high-risk projects cooled sharply after the terra and luna tokens — which were the foundation of another popular yield platform — collapsed in a matter of days. The value of assets deposited on Celsius’s platform shrivelled to less than $12bn as of May 17 from more than $24bn in late December.
Ether, which is considered a proxy for sentiment for digital asset projects that offer investors high yields, has dropped almost 30 per cent since Friday, leaving it down two-thirds in dollar terms this year to trade at $1,195.
Selling on Monday also ricocheted into the shares of crypto-focused companies. MicroStrategy, a tech company that invests heavily in bitcoin, tumbled 25 per cent in pre-market trading on Wall Street. US-listed crypto exchange Coinbase fell 17 per cent.
Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange by volume, added to the sense of gloom across crypto markets after it announced on Monday afternoon that it had temporarily suspended withdrawals of bitcoin from its platform due to a “stuck transaction”. The company could not immediately provide further details on the matter.
Celsius last year raised $400mn in an equity funding round led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Canada’s second-largest pension fund, and WestCap, the fund set up by former Airbnb and Blackstone executive Laurence Tosi.
That fundraising came even as US regulators indicated they were scrutinising the industry. State authorities in Texas and New Jersey have alleged that Celsius’s yield-bearing accounts amount to an unregistered securities offering.
Celsius’s halt to withdrawals early on Monday was also a U-turn after it had spent several days rebutting accusations that customers could not make withdrawals. Chief executive Alex Mashinsky challenged critics at the weekend to find “even one person who has a problem withdrawing”.
Celsius, which has offices in the US, UK and Lithuania, said the redemption freeze was done for the “benefit of our entire community in order to stabilise liquidity and operations while we take steps to preserve and protect assets”.
The group’s own coin, known by the ticker CEL, has lost half its value in the past 24 hours, according to CryptoCompare data.
Scientists map Milky Way stars using European space telescope
Data from the Gaia observatory will help to reconstruct our galaxy’s evolution and predict its development
A European space telescope has revealed extensive details of the stellar diversity within our Milky Way, which will help scientists to reconstruct the galaxy’s evolution and predict its development billions of years into the future.
Astronomers are using new data from the Gaia observatory to map the movements and chemical signatures of almost 2bn stars — giants and dwarfs, old and young — including some vibrating violently during events known as “starquakes”.
The multidimensional cosmic survey was released on Monday by the European Space Agency (ESA). Astronomers compared its impact on their field to genomic analysis in biology.
“Our galaxy is a beautiful melting pot of stars,” said Alejandra Recio-Blanco of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and a member of the Gaia collaboration. “This diversity is extremely important because it tells us the story of our galaxy’s formation . . . It also clearly shows that we all belong to an ever changing system, formed thanks to the assembly of stars and gas of different origins.”
Gaia is in a special orbit 1.5mn km from Earth, called Lagrange point L2, close to the new James Webb telescope which was fired into space late last year. Gaia’s sample of 1.8bn stars is about one per cent of the Milky Way’s total stellar population.
“Gaia is a survey mission,” said Timo Prusti, project scientist at ESA, in contrast to many other observatories, such as the Webb and Hubble space telescopes. He said this approach means “Gaia is bound to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss.”
“We can’t wait for the astronomy community to dive into our new data to find out even more about our galaxy and its surroundings,” said Prusti.
The data release adds new information about stars’ chemical composition, temperature, mass and speed of movement toward or away from the solar system. Many stars such as the sun contain heavy metals recycled from previous generations of stars that have been born and died over the 13.6bn year history of the Milky Way, though some contain only the primordial light elements hydrogen and helium.
An unexpected discovery emerging from the new data is the ability of Gaia to detect starquakes — strong oscillations, like stellar tsunamis, detected in thousands of stars. Conny Aerts, an asteroseismologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, said: “Starquakes teach us a lot about stars, notably their internal workings . . . in the same way as earthquakes help us to understand what is going on inside our planet.”
Although Gaia was launched in 2013 primarily to map stars, it is also cataloguing other objects, from millions of galaxies far beyond the Milky Way to asteroids inside our solar system.
The telescope is beginning to detect planets orbiting around the stars it surveys, known as exoplanets. Anthony Brown, chair of the Gaia data analysis consortium, said about 200 probable planets elsewhere in the Milky Way had been identified so far “but it should be capable of identifying tens of thousands of exoplanets as we receive more data”.
Research Calls I
- Upgrades:
- Fidelity Nat'l Info (FIS) upgraded to Outperform from In-line at Evercore ISI; tgt raised to $135
- New Oriental Education & Technology (EDU) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JP Morgan; tgt raised to $24
- Quanta Services (PWR) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at UBS; tgt raised to $156
- Tesla (TSLA) upgraded to Outperform from Sector Perform at RBC Capital Mkts; tgt lowered to $1100
- Downgrades:
- Covetrus (CVET) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Stifel; tgt $22
- DocuSign (DOCU) downgraded to Underperform from Peer Perform at Wolfe Research; tgt $50
- Invesco (IVZ) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at BMO Capital Markets; tgt lowered to $20
- Kosmos Energy (KOS) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Berenberg
- Micron (MU) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Summit Insights
- New Residential Investment (NRZ) downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at Piper Sandler; tgt lowered to $10
- T. Rowe Price (TROW) downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at BMO Capital Markets; tgt lowered to $135
- Volta (VLTA) downgraded to Neutral from Overweight at Cantor Fitzgerald; tgt lowered to $4
- Zendesk (ZEN) downgraded to Equal-Weight from Overweight at Morgan Stanley; tgt lowered to $80
- Others:
- Bausch Health (BHC) resumed with an Overweight at JP Morgan; tgt $12
- EQRx (EQRX) initiated with a Buy at Goldman; tgt $8
- Forma Therapeutics (FMTX) resumed with an Overweight at Cantor Fitzgerald; tgt lowered to $21
- Silvergate Capital (SI) initiated with an Overweight at Wells Fargo; tgt $120
- Starry (STRY) initiated with a Buy at MoffettNathanson; tgt $11
Gapping down
(note - With US futures trading 2-3% lower, most stocks are trading down. The following represents decliners that have identified catalysts)Select ETFs showing early weakness:
- QQQ -3%, IWM -2.5%, SPY -2.3%, DIA -1.9%
Other news:
- ASTR -21.8% (tweets "We had a nominal first stage flight. The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit. We have shared our regrets with NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data review")
- COGT -12.7% (commenced an underwritten public offering of $125 million of shares of its common stock)
- DWAC -8% (provides investigation updates)
- USEG -4.9% (files for 19905736 share common stock offering by selling shareholders)
- CRGY -4.4% (files for 5 mln share common stock offering)
- SOL -3.5% (reports award of 20-year renewable energy credit contracts for two solar projects in New York and Illinois)
- PLAB -3.3% (files to delay its 10-Q as the information required is not available as of the 10-Q required filing date)
- CVE -3.1% (to purchase the remaining 50% of the Sunrise oil sands project in northern Alberta from bp)
- GMAB -3% (reports late-breaking Phase 2 trial results of investigational Epcoritamab)
- NVO -2.9% (reports Investigational phase 3 data for Sogroya)
- HZNP -2.9% (reports pooled data from TEPEZZA)
- BGNE -2.4% (has extended the Prescription Drug User Fee Act goal date by three months to January 20 2023 for the supplementary new drug application for BRUKINSA as a treatment for adult patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia or small lymphocytic lymphoma)
- GS -2.1% (report SEC is investigating ESG funds according to WSJ)
Analyst comments:
- VLTA -10% (downgraded to Neutral from Overweight at Cantor Fitzgerald)
- ZEN -6.1% (downgraded to Equal-Weight from Overweight at Morgan Stanley)
- DOCU -5.8% (downgraded to Underperform from Peer Perform at Wolfe Research)
- KOS -5% (downgraded to Hold from Buy at Berenberg)
- MU -4.2% (downgraded to Hold from Buy at Summit Insights)
- TROW -3.3% (downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at BMO Capital Markets)
- NRZ -2.7% (downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at Piper Sandler)
- IVZ -2.5% (downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform at BMO Capital Markets)
Gapping up
News:
- DAWN +67.7% (Initial Data from Pivotal FIREFLY-1 Trial of Tovorafenib (DAY101) in Relapsed Pediatric Low-Grade Glioma)
- GRCL +12.1% (Presents Updated Clinical Data for BCMA/CD19 Dual-targeting FasTCAR GC012F in RRMM at EHA2022 Congress, Highlighting 100% MRD Negativity Rate in All Treated Patients)
- VXX +6.1% (trading higher with US futures down over 2%+)
- CHH +5% (acquires Radisson Hotel Group Americas for $675 mln)
- OPTN +2.7% (top-line results of ReOpen2, its second phase 3 clinical trial of XHANCE for treatment of chronic sinusitis)
- IONS +2.6% (treatment for Angelman syndrome receives orphan drug and rare pediatric disease designations from U.S. FDA)
- APLS +2.3% (receives FDA orphan designation for Pegcetacoplan, treatment of immune complex-membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis)
- MUDS +0.7% (Blue Nile to combine with Mudrick Capital Acquisition Corporation II )
- SKIL +0.6% (to sell SumTotal to Cornerstone for $200 mln)
Analyst comments:
- EDU +9.8% (upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JP Morgan)
Early premarket gappers
- Gapping up:
- DAWN +28.2%, GRCL +11.8%, VXX +6.7%, APLS +2.4%, SKIL +1.8%, MUDS +0.7%
- Gapping down:
- COGT -16%, DWAC -7.7%, USEG -6.3%, CRGY -4.4%, CVE -4.2%, HZNP -2.9%, QQQ -2.8%, NVO -2.4%, IWM -2.3%, SPY -2.2%, GMAB -2.2%, GS -2.1%, DIA -1.8%, PLAB -1.2%
US unions accuse hedge funds of misinformation campaign to beat finance rules
SEC has proposed measures to increase stock market transparency after collapse of Archegos
America’s largest trade unions have accused hedge funds of falsely claiming to have their support in a misinformation campaign to fight new financial regulations.
The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a series of new rules in December to increase stock market transparency in the wake of the collapse of Archegos Capital Management.
The plans have already provoked a backlash from hedge funds and a stand-off between investment funds and many of the large companies in which they invest. But the fight escalated last week as the labour movement complained it was being unfairly dragged into the fray.
Brandon Rees, deputy director of corporations and capital markets at the AFL-CIO trade union federation, said labour activists “wanted to put the record straight” after press reports and rumours around Capitol Hill claimed they were also opposed to the rules.
“Activist hedge funds don’t view themselves as being particularly sympathetic parties so they’re seeking strange bedfellows to support them, but they should be honest and forthright in expressing their concerns and not be creating false narratives,” added Rees.
Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, said he had been contacted by a group of academics earlier this year who encouraged him to “add my voice” to an alleged chorus of opposition from workers, before he realised the concerns were not accurate.
The Managed Funds Association, which represents hedge funds, declined to comment.
The AFL-CIO and 11 unions wrote to the SEC last week — two months after the initial deadline for comments — to “clear up any misunderstandings” and express their strong support for the regulator’s plans.
The SEC has been pushing to reform swaths of the financial landscape since President Joe Biden named Gary Gensler as its new chair last year.
The first set of proposals, put forward in December, would stop investors from using swaps — derivative products tied to the value of an underlying asset — to secretly build up holdings in public companies without disclosing their positions. Further proposals put forward in February would halve the amount of time investors have to reveal large stock holdings, and make it harder for multiple investors to work together to build large stakes.
Opponents fear the changes would strangle activist investing, create excessive logistical burdens for investors and make it impossible for them to engage in legitimate communication with each other.
Activist funds and their supporters have repeatedly stressed that their actions benefit the broader market and economy by investing on behalf of groups including workers’ pension funds, and holding bad management teams to account. Paul Singer’s Elliott Management argued in a recent letter that activists were “one of the few independent voices in the marketplace to protect shareholder interests and enhance market efficiency”.
Americans for Financial Reform, a left-leaning lobby group, countered that view. “This is the [hedge fund industry’s] go-to argument but people who represent workers and save for them do not agree,” it said.