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A Shadow Stalks GIGA 👤

A Shadow Stalks GIGA 👤

Plus, 🏆 Now for $200K!, 🏛️ A crypto candidate for the SEC, 📈 Trading takes off, and more!

December 05, 2024

I’m Juan Aranovich, managing editor of Unchained.

In today’s edition:

🎭 The GIGA influencer who scammed investors
✅ Trump picks pro-crypto Atkins for SEC
🏆 Bitcoin tops a ton
✌️ Solana exec leaves for pastures new
💹 Spot and derivatives volumes break records
🚚 $2.8B BTC shifted by Mt. Gox wallets

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What’s Poppin’?

By Sage D. Young, Veronica Irwin and Tikta

This GIGA Influencer Was Charged by the SEC for Defrauding Investors

Early on Wednesday, Coinbase added to its listings roadmap the memecoin GIGA, one of whose biggest influencers is a former equity fund founder charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June with defrauding investors of at least $3 million.

Unchained identified that individual as Joshua Goltry, who goes by the nickname Tiger and the username @NotChaseColeman on X.

Goltry uses his online platform of nearly 50,000 followers to promote GIGA, which, in light of its inclusion on Coinbase’s listings roadmap on Wednesday, jumped more than 50% from 4 cents at 9:30 a.m. EST to 6 cents by 9:40 a.m.

By press time, it had settled at just under 5 cents, market data from CoinGecko show.

GIGA currently has a $477 million market cap and 56,202 holders on the Solana blockchain.

Bitcoin Tops $100K

Bitcoin surged to a new record high ahead of $100,000 late on Wednesday — an important psychological threshold for both long- and short-term holders of the OG cryptocurrency.

Shortly after 11 p.m. ET, bitcoin touched an intraday high of $103,900, a 7% increase over the previous 24 hours, before retreating to around $102,700 at the time of writing.

The rally comes after president-elect Donald Trump officially announced that he was nominating pro-crypto former Securities and Exchange Commissioner and digital asset industry lobbyist Paul Atkins for the role of SEC chairman (which we’ll delve into in a second).

The price of bitcoin has more than doubled this year, rising 130% as it is increasingly accepted as a legitimate asset class by institutional and retail investors alike.

Trump Nominates Paul Atkins for SEC Chair

President-elect Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social social media platform on Wednesday that he was nominating crypto lobbyist and former Securities and Exchange Commissioner Paul Atkins to chair the SEC, delivering on a promise he made to the crypto community during his campaign. On Tuesday, Unchained was first to report that Trump had asked Atkins to be his nominee for the position.

“Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,” Trump said in the post. “He believes in the promise of robust, innovative capital markets that are responsive to the needs of Investors, & that provide capital to make our Economy the best in the World. He also recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.”

Solana Strategy Lead Quits to Start New Protocol

Austin Federa, the Solana Foundation’s head of strategy, has stepped down from his role after four years as he sets out to head up a new protocol named DoubleZero.

“The decision to leave the Solana Foundation was the hardest professional decision I've had to make,” he said in a statement posted on X. “There's an incredible collection of people working on Solana, and I'm thrilled to still be involved in the network – from the other side.”

Federa described DoubleZero as neither a layer-1 nor a layer-2 protocol, but rather, a neutral base-layer infrastructure for a distributed world, or “the world’s first N1.”

He claimed the network architecture would be capable of supporting tens of millions of transactions per second.

Crypto Trades Hit $10T in November

Trading volumes on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges reached an all-time high in November, surpassing $10 trillion across both the spot and derivatives markets, according to a report by digital asset data firm CCData.

Spot markets were particularly active, with a surge in trading volume of more than 130% to top $3.4 trillion.

Trading in derivatives, which accounted for $7 trillion in trading volume, increased 90% month over month.

Institutional trading venue the Chicago Mercantile Exchange saw a 83.7% rise in aggregate trading volume, to $245 billion, but the bourse lost market share to retail-dominated exchanges Binance and Kraken during the month.

Mt. Gox Sends $2.8B of Bitcoin to New Wallet

Wallets tied to bankrupt Japanese crypto exchange Mt. Gox moved 27,871 BTC worth around $2.8 billion to a new wallet on Wednesday, according to data from blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence.

The transfers took place just after bitcoin breached the $100,000 mark — something that likely contributed to its brief price dip before it rebounded later in the day.

Mt. Gox still holds roughly 39,878 BTC, valued at $4.1 billion, in its wallet.

The exchange, which began paying off creditors earlier this year, has extended the payout timeline to Oct. 31, 2025, citing ongoing verification and processing requirements for claimants.

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Daily Bits… ✍️✍️✍

🌟 Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell described Bitcoin as "digital gold," distinguishing it from the U.S. dollar, which briefly boosted bitcoin's price before it settled near $98,500 amid ongoing comparisons with gold's market value.
🇷🇺 Russian President Vladimir Putin highlighted bitcoin’s resistance to sanctions and its inability to be banned, presenting it as a viable alternative in an evolving global financial landscape.
🎉 New York City Mayor Eric Adams, reflecting on his bitcoin paychecks amid the cryptocurrency’s massive surge this year, boasted about his gains while reaffirming his pro-crypto stance.
🔍 U.S. Rep. French Hill pledged to investigate allegations of government pressure on banks to deny services to crypto firms, vowing bipartisan action in the next Congress to protect access for legal businesses.
🚨 A supply chain attack on Solana’s Web3.js library compromised private keys, leading to the theft of $160,000 of crypto assets before developers patched the breach, leaving major wallets such as Phantom unaffected.

The $$$ Corner…

📲 DeFi.app raised $2 million in seed funding at a $100 million valuation, aiming to simplify decentralized finance through a user-friendly app while emphasizing community-driven token sales for its upcoming HOME token.

What Do You Meme?

📈 Your Market Update 📉

BTC is up 6.8%, trading at $102,865
ETH is up 5.3%, trading at $3,937
BTC dominance: 52.41%
Crypto market cap: $3.88T

*All data as of today, 07:10 am ET. Source: CoinGecko

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