Bitcoin continued to climb overnight and was trading almost 4.4% higher early Saturday morning at nearly $61,700.
Bitcoin rivals Ethereum and Dogecoin were trading around $3,915 (+3.41%) and nearly 24 cents (+4.6.9%) per coin, respectively, Coindesk reported.
Cryptocurrency Tether and crypto exchange Bitfinex have agreed to pay $42.5 million to settle civil charges from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over allegedly making misleading statements and making illegal transactions, Reuters reported.
Firms doing business as Tether agreed to pay $41 million to resolve CFTC charges they made misleading claims about Tether’s cryptocurrency stablecoin, the CFTC said in a statement on Friday. According to the regulator, at various times from June 2016 to late February 2019, Tether made misleading or untrue statements about whether it held sufficient U.S. dollar reserves to fully back up its U.S. dollar tether token.
In a separate order, firms doing business as Bitfinex agreed to a $1.5 million penalty over charges their controls were not adequate to keep U.S. customers from illegally engaging in retail commodity transactions on the exchange, the Reuters report said. This violated U.S. law and a 2016 settlement with Bitfinex over similar allegations, the CFTC said.
Neither Tether or Bitfinex, which are controlled by the same parent company, admitted nor denied the findings.
In other cryptocurrency news, The Associated Press reported 300 computers are working nonstop at a geothermal power plant near El Salvador’s Tecapa volcano making complex mathematical calculations day and night verifying transactions for the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
The pilot project, the brainstorm of President Nayib Bukele who made bitcoin legal tender in September, promises cheap, renewable energy for so-called bitcoin “mining.” Such operations, including ones industrial in scale, have been harshly criticized elsewhere in the world for the massive amounts of electricity they use and the resulting carbon footprint.