Welcome to Law Decoded, your weekly digest of all the major developments in the field of regulation. So, Sam Bankman-Fried, public enemy number one, won’t appear in front of Senators on Dec. 14, as he missed the deadline for responding to a Senate Banking Committee request. However, we could witness the entrepreneur appear before Congress even a day earlier, on Dec. 13. Replying to a thread of tweets from Representative Maxine Waters, Chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee, the former CEO of FTX expressed his willingness to testify at a committee hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives. John Ray, …

Minnesota Senator Tom Emmer ha slammed United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler for his flawed “crypto information-gathering efforts” and insisted Gensler should appear before Congress to explain the cost of his “regulatory failures.” Emmer’s comments came from a Dec. 10 tweet to his 67,500 Twitter followers, where he made reference to a bipartisan Blockchain Caucus letter he co-authored to the SEC Chairman on Mar. 16. Emmer said, “we now know Gensler's crypto information-gathering efforts were ineffective” citing the collapses of the Terra ecosystem and bankrupt crypto platforms Celsius, Voyager and FTX. He declined to provide Congress with …

A federal judge has ordered crypto lender Celsius to return crypto worth around $44 million to the platform’s custody program customers. According to Bloomberg, the verbal order was delivered by United States Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn in a Dec. 7 hearing, with the judge noting: “I want this case to move forward. I want creditors to recover as much as they possibly can as soon as they possibly can.” The amount — which applies only to crypto held within custody accounts — is a tiny fraction of the billions Celsius owes creditors, and the latest decision comes after an agreement …

A new CNBC survey suggests that only 8% of Americans have a favorable view of cryptocurrency as of the end of November, down significantly from the 19% recorded in March. CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey was conducted between Nov. 26 and Nov. 30. It, however, should be taken with a grain of salt as, despite its name, it had a relatively small sample size of 800 respondents across the U.S. in total, with a margin error of +/- 3.5%. The survey was published on Dec. 7, and alongside the declining number of crypto friendly respondents, CNBC highlighted that the number of …

Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius was granted an extension on its exclusivity period until Feb. 15, 2023. The court approval would give the troubled crypto lender another couple of months to file for a Chapter 11 restructuring plan. The approval to extend the exclusivity period came after two court hearings on Dec. 6. Celsius, in an official tweet, said that they requested approval to permit the sale of stablecoin, aimed at providing liquidity for continued operations The Judge has indicated that he will share his decision soon, likely next week. Celsius hopes to use the extension period to develop a plan …

Mike Novogratz-led investment firm Galaxy Digital Holdings has won the bidding to buy GK8, an institutional digital asset self-custody platform owned by Celsius Network — pending court approvals and certain closing conditions. According to a Dec. 2 blog post from GK8 and a press release from Galaxy, if the acquisition goes ahead, Galaxy will acquire the platform's nearly 40-strong team as part of the deal including cryptographers and blockchain engineers and the GK8's team office in Tel Aviv. GK8 is a self-custody platform for managing blockchain-based assets which offers custody, staking, DeFi, NFT support, tokenization and trading. The team behind …

The downfall of FTX and a number of other CeFi platforms in 2022 has reinforced a Bitcoin maximalist narrative, according to which most of the crypto ecosystem will eventually collapse due to its centralization. Jeff Booth, Bitcoin proponent and author of "The Price of Tomorrow", believes centralized crypto platforms such as FTX and Celsius have ended up replicating the traditional financial system with all its inherent flaws. "All of crypto is trying to rebuild a financial system that we already have based on manipulation and centralization," said Booth, in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. Even Defi platforms, which seek to …

The United States Trustee handling FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings has referred to the now-defunct exchange as the "fastest big corporate failure in American history," and is calling for an independent probe to look into its downfall. In a Dec. 1 motion, U.S. Trustee Andrew Vara noted that over the course of eight days in November, debtors "suffered a virtually unprecedented decline in value" from a market high of $32 billion earlier in the year to a several liquidity crisis after a "proverbial 'run on the bank.'" "The result is what is likely the fastest big corporate failure in American history, resulting …