 Hey there, I'm Olly Jane and this is your Weekly Hodler's Digest. If you're watching this for the first time, click the subscribe button to get weekly roundups, market updates, funny videos to lift your mood, documentaries about some of the most crypto-friendly places in the world, and lots more. But what's new in the crypto space this week? There is the usual FUD. It seems that the CBOE has decided not to list Bitcoin futures this March, sending a need to assess its approach to digital assets and a blog post that didn't really say anything at all. On the other hand, for once some of the crypto scammers that people love to make fun of online actually got some real life justice, as one of the two Bulgarian siblings responsible for the multi-million dollar one coin pyramid scheme was swooped up and arrested by Los Angeles police this week. In a quick recap of other news that didn't make the cut for this roundup, it seems like Tether isn't actually backed one-to-one to the US dollar, and I doubt many people are surprised. The Quadriga CX debacle has continued with more court appearances and requests for reimbursement, but no one seems to care based on how many views our articles about that actually get. And Monero may no longer be the crypto-jackers coin of choice after their ASIC-resistant mining update. For all other news, some interviews and some pretty fast graphics, stay tuned and remember, I'm Molly Jane, and stick around for this week's Hodler's Digest. Let's take a look at the markets. Up to 88% crypto trading volume registered in February on exchanges may be totally fake. That is the main outcome of a recent report published by Crypto Integrity, a research organization focused on detecting fraud and fostering integrity in the cryptocurrency market. According to the report, maliciously inflated trading volumes were detected on a number of well-known crypto exchanges, such as OKX, CoinTiger, Huobi Global, and HitBTC. The analysis took into account 11 among the most prominent crypto exchanges, which counter for 33% of total adjusted volume in February 2019. As pointed out by Crypto Integrity, the exchanges were selected because of their suspicious trading activity. Thus, they are not representative of the whole market. However, the study still aims at giving a sense of the scale of this WASH trading, the practice of selling and buying the same asset to create fake demand. As the business model of crypto exchanges highly depends on trading volumes, many of them have been engaging in WASH trading to survive the bear market, it seems. As some analysts noted on social media, trading volumes have been suspiciously increasing since October, despite the failing or best stagnating Bitcoin prices. If the report proves to be accurate, it could mean a major blow to analysts who predicted the next crypto rally to happen on the back of these high volumes. We talked to the authors of the report who agreed to comment on the findings under a condition of anonymity. You might look at the chart of some liquid symbols of this exchange and compare the volume during some period of time, one minute, one hour or one day. If the volume is approximately the same, regardless of the drops or increases in price of the underlying asset, it does look suspicious and it makes us investigate further into this exchange. So we compare the price of a trade with the best us or best B price at the moment when the trade happened. If a trade is outside or inside the bid-ask spread, we market as an ins spread or out-of-spread trade. For us, this is a suspicious trade. I hardly can imagine the situation when a trade can occur within the spread without actually a limit order appearing in the order book before this trade happened. The only way I can justify it is that the exchange has some OTC desk and their report OTC volume on the counter volume. But they should disclose this information and the exchanges that we've covered in our research have not disclosed it. Simple idea that came to our mind is that they want to increase their volume in order to increase the attractiveness of the exchange and also behind the rankings and to have high value in the eyes of the major stakeholders of coins. This crypto-winter seems to be slowly turning into alt-season. The term indicates when the price of altcoins usually correlated to Bitcoin's price display independent behavior, which is exactly what's been happening in recent weeks when a number of altcoins rallied, some of them with double-digit gains, despite Bitcoin's more or less stable trend. In particular, analysts drew attention to Litecoin, Financecoin, Tron, and Maker, which had been trading above their 200-day moving average, a sign commonly interpreted as indicating healthy markets. The trend is also visible in terms of year-to-date gains. For instance, while the main cryptocurrencies up a modest 4% since the start of the year, Litecoin registered over 80% year-to-date gains while Binance, Coin, and Holochain went up 140%. A growing interest towards altcoins can be noted by looking at Google Trends charts where altcoin-related searches have never been so frequent since the last crypto bullrun. The equivalent graph for Bitcoin shows a far less enthusiastic trend. As Etoro's senior market analyst Maddie Greenspan told Bloomberg, despite Bitcoin having recovered around 20% of its price in the last three months, investors are seeing more potential in some of the smaller tokens. Popular trader Nick Patel, author of an altcoin trader's handbook, expects altcoin prices to continue rallying until Bitcoin's price breaks above its current range. At that point, he said, altcoins will be sold off to fuel the larger Bitcoin move towards 6K. The US Securities and Exchange Commission does not consider Ethereum and similar crypto currencies to be securities. At least, that's how many interpreted a recent statement by SEC Chairman Jay Clayton. Last year, SEC Director of Corporation Finance William Hinman had said that Ethereum did not exhibit the properties of a security as you could not identify any central group managing the cryptocurrency. Replying to Congressman Ted Budd, who asked him whether he agreed with the statement, Clayton said, I agree with Director Hinman's explanation of how a digital asset transaction may no longer represent an investment contract if, for example, purchasers would no longer reasonably expect a personal group to carry out the essential managerial or entrepreneurial efforts. He also said that the designation of a cryptocurrency under US law is not immutable and can change over time depending on the way it is offered and sold. Clayton did not mention Ethereum directly, and a circuitous statement caused heated debate to spark on social media. While Morgan Creek's Anthony Pompiliano interpreted it as a clear-cut statement defining Ethereum as a non-security, Bitcoin maximalist Tony Vaze is convinced that this cannot be considered the SEC's official position on the issue. The US SEC seeming to define Ethereum as a non-security as seen as a bullish sign by many in the industry, as it would mean that investors don't need to be accredited in order to purchase the underlying asset. The SEC's possible clarification is also a step forward towards forming a clear cryptocurrency regulatory environment in the United States. The brother and sister behind the now infamous one-coin have been charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering. One coin made over $3.7 billion in sales and made about $2.5 billion in profits, rivaling BitConnect with the title of biggest ever crypto Ponzi scheme. Konstantin Ignatov, the brother, was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport according to New York prosecutors. His sister, who hasn't been seen in over a year, is still at large. The scheme described by prosecutors as smoke and mirrors more than zeros and ones was founded in 2014 in Bulgaria and raised around $4 billion from investors all over the world. As recently as this February, Konstantin was apparently in Las Vegas berating investors for even thinking of cashing out, accusing them of not understanding the project. Investors were lied to by the fraudster siblings in order to inflate the value of a single one-coin from $0.56 to about $33.65. The siblings apparently described their exit strategy in an email, writing, Take the money and run and blame someone else for this. Konstantin, although he's the one arrested, is only charged with one count of wire fraud. His sister, on the other hand, has been charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. All of those charges combined amount to a maximum prison sentence of 105 years. Mark Scott, a third suspect, was arrested back in September and faces a potential 20 years behind bars for laundering over $400 million as part of the scheme in the Cayman Islands and the Republic of Ireland. Last year, when I heard there was a film coming out called Crypto, starring Kurt Russell and an ex-Gilmore girl, I was excited. Finally, I thought to myself, a film that explores the incredible potential of crypto and blockchain from a filmmaker who knows what he's talking about. Sadly, this appears to not exactly be the case. Crypto is a B-list thriller set in the financial world and has very little to do with cryptocurrency at all. It tells the story of a guy who works on Wall Street at first, but ends up as an AML officer that discovered his company is involved in money laundering for, you guessed it, the Russian mafia. They combine a hacky trope from the film world with a hacky trope from the crypto world. The villains are always Russians and crypto is only used for money laundering. There is, however, a subtle hint that the filmmaker may be a hodler after all. In this screenshot, you can only see Ethereum, Wave, Stellar and Neo. The leading crypto is not on screen, so perhaps he only holds Bitcoin. If you guys want to attend one of the top crypto events out there, we have prepared a special offer with our partner Blockshow, who are organizing the top crypto conference this November in Singapore. Use the promo code HODLERS88 and get the tickets at only $88 instead of 488. Hurry up while this offer is active. The link is in the description below. In the comments below, give us your elevator pitch for a crypto movie. Include the basic plot, actors, and director. And as always, remember to like, subscribe, and hodl.