BDO Italia, a member of the BDO Global accounting organization, will begin producing monthly attestations of Tether’s USDT backing. In a step toward greater transparency and better alignment with international accounting standards, stablecoin operator Tether Holdings Limited has tapped BDO Italia to conduct regular reviews and attestations of its dollar reserves. Tether, which operates the USDT stablecoin, officially began working with BDO Italia in July, the company disclosed on Thursday. BDO Italia will be responsible for conducting an independent review of Tether’s stablecoin reserves to ensure that each unit of USDT is backed by cash or cash equivalents. Through BDO’s reviews, Tether aims to release public attestation reports monthly instead of quarterly. The attestations will include updates about the number of USDT tokens issued, as well as the company’s reserves.BDO Italia is the Italian arm of BDO Global, an international network of public accounting firms that maintains its headquarters in Zaventem, Belgium. BDO Global ranks among Europe’s five largest accounting firms by total revenue. The company maintains offices across North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region. Tether is looking to eventually get rid of commercial paper backing for its U.S. dollar-based stablecoin “without any incurrences of losses.” The firm expects to decrease its volume from $11B to $8.4B by the end of June. https://t.co/IzzjTKnpPq— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) June 15, 2022 Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief technology officer, said his company’s pledge to offer more transparency reflects its growing mandate beyond just offering liquidity to crypto traders:“The utility of Tether has grown beyond being just a tool for quickly moving in and out of trading positions, and therefore it is mission-critical for us to scale alongside the peer-to-peer and payments markets.”Tether began publishing quarterly attestations of its stablecoin reserves in May 2021 as part of a…

Inflation surprises keep coming, while the European central bank refuses to rule out even higher numbers in future. Bitcoin (BTC) shifted higher on Aug. 18 as the latest data confirmed the European Union’s highest ever inflation.BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingViewSupport and resistance close in on BTC spot priceData from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD passing $23,500 at the time of writing, having preserved $23,000 as support overnight.Concerns over a deeper risk asset drawdown had become widespread over the week, with Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) notably unable to crack long-term resistance levels.With bulls seemingly on the back foot, the mood among analysts was naturally wary. “BTC did break down from this huge rising channel/wedge everyone seems to be watching,” Daan Crypto Trades wrote in part of his latest Twitter update. “23.8-24K will act as resistance. Break back in and this would be a big bear trap. Bearish rejection and we head down.”Near-term support meanwhile came in the form of whale buy-ins at $22,800 and up, on-chain monitoring resource Whalemap argued. Now just below Bitcoin’s 200-week moving average, the $22,800 zone should be the line in the sand to watch in the event of a market downturn.“Back to square one,” the Whalemap team summarized alongside a chart showing the extent of hodled whale coins by price point. “Whale accumulations at $23,400-$22,800 is still the closest support we have for Bitcoin (if we start falling).”Bitcoin whale wallet inflows annotated chart. Source: Whalemap/ TwitterInflation beats recordsMacro triggers were clearly inflation-skewed on the day, with the EU’s 9.8% July print headlining.Related: Bitcoin miners hodl 27% less BTC after 3 months of major sellingThe figure for July marked the bloc’s highest ever inflation reading, up from 9.6% year-on-year in June. For context, in July 2021, inflation was 2.5%.“The lowest annual rates were registered…

David Schwartz compared crypto miners in the Ethereum and Bitcoin ecosystem akin to shareholders of eBay, which he believes makes BTC and ETH a security as well. David Schwartz, the chief technical officer of Ripple, didn’t take Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s dig on XRP very kindly. In a discussion that started around the recent $30,000 limit imposed by the Ontario crypto exchange on altcoins purchases barring Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).Buterin, in a quoted response to a tweet, lauded the Ethereum community’s pushback against regulations that privilege ETH over other legitimate cryptocurrencies. David Hoffman, the founder of decentralized media and education platform Bankless.eth responded to Buterin and said that he wouldn’t have minded if they had restricted XRP.XRP already lost their right to protection when they tried to throw us under the bus as “China-controlled” imo:https://t.co/t6cbMtjsEV— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 17, 2022 Buterin joined on the XRP bashing claiming they lost their right to protection when they tried to “throw us under the bus as China-controlled.” The response from Buterin created a storm among XRP followers on Twitter, and the debate was later joined by Ripple CTO David Schwartz himself.Buterin was referring to Ripple’s defense in their ongoing court battle against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where they claimed XRP shouldn’t be deemed as security since Ethereum and Bitcoin are similar in nature and even called the top two cryptocurrencies as Chinese controlled. Ripple is fighting a security lawsuit from the SEC over the unlicensed sale and issuance of XRP tokens. Schwartz reiterated Ripple’s earlier claims of ETH and BTC being security and compared miners in the ecosystem akin to shareholders of eBay. He said:“I do think it’s perfectly fair to analogize miners in PoW systems to stockholders in companies. Just as eBay’s stockholders earn…