According to CoinGecko, Bitcoin is down nearly 14.6% in the last seven days. After hitting an all-time high of $69,044 on Nov. 10, bitcoin fell below $60,000 on Tuesday. It’s currently trading at around $56,201.

Ether is down nearly 12.4% in the last seven days and is currently trading at around $4,085.

U.S. to sell cryptocurrency worth $56 million after seizure in BitConnect case
On Tuesday, authorities announced that the U.S. Justice Department will sell off $56 million worth of cryptocurrency it seized as part of a case against a man who promoted crypto lending program BitConnect. The proceeds will be used to reimburse victims of the BitConnect fraud.

BitConnect is alleged to have scammed people in the U.S. and abroad out of more than $2 billion worth of bitcoin from January 2017 to January 2018.

Crypto.com buys naming rights to Staples Center in a $700 million deal

Crypto.com secured a 20-year contract deal worth $700 million with the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) to buy the naming rights to the Staples Center in Los Angeles, home to the Los Angeles Lakers.

The name change will take effect on Christmas Day, when the Lakers host the Brooklyn Nets.

After the deal was announced Tuesday night, Crypto.com’s coin, called CRO, rallied. And on Sunday, it hit an all-time high of 79 cents.

Lawmakers introduce a bipartisan bill to address crypto tax reporting requirement

After President Joe Biden signed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill into law on Nov. 15, a bipartisan group of House representatives introduced a bill to amend a cryptocurrency tax provision on Thursday.

The provision would require each “broker,” which will mainly be exchanges, to report their cryptocurrency gains in a type of 1099 form. “Brokers” will also have to disclose the names and addresses of their customers.

On Friday, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton spoke about cryptocurrencies at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.

Clinton mentioned that “the rise of cryptocurrency” is an area that she hopes “nation-states start paying greater attention to.”

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin outbids ConstitutionDAO

On Thursday, billionaire Ken Griffin, CEO of hedge fund Citadel, paid $43.2 million for a copy of the U.S. Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction. Sotheby’s estimated the copy would sell for $15 million to $20 million.

He outbid ConstitutionDAO, a group of cryptocurrency investors who planned to buy the document. The DAO raised over $40 million within days for the effort.

El Salvador plans to create a ‘Bitcoin City’ and raise $1 billion via a ‘Bitcoin Bond’

El Salvador plans to construct a “Bitcoin City” funded by the cryptocurrency, the country’s President Nayib Bukele announced Saturday.

The city will be built near Conchagua volcano in south eastern El Salvador and will have no taxes except from value-added tax, which is a levy on goods and services at each step along the supply chain. Construction will begin in 2022.

El Salvador plans to raise about $1 billion through a “Bitcoin Bond.” The country plans to partner with Blockstream, a digital assets infrastructure company, to raise the funds, half of which will be used to buy bitcoin.

The hack, which affected tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange Server customers around the world and triggered a “whole of government response” from the White House, reportedly left a number of backdoors that could let any number of hackers right into those systems again. Now, the FBI has taken advantage of this by using those same web backdoors to remotely delete themselves. The US Justice Department explained:

“The FBI conducted the removal by issuing a command through the web shell to the server, which was designed to cause the server to delete only the web shell (identified by its unique file path).”

The wild part here is that owners of these Microsoft Exchange Servers likely aren’t yet aware of the FBI’s involvement; the Justice Department says it’s merely “attempting to provide notice” to owners that they attempted to assist. It’s doing all this with the full approval of a Texas court, according to the agency.

The FBI says that thousands of systems were patched by their owners before it began its remote Hafnium backdoor removal operation and that it only removed one early hacking group’s remaining web shells which could have been used to maintain and escalate persistent, unauthorized access to U.S. networks.