Bitcoin continued to climb overnight and was trading nearly 4.4% higher Saturday morning at nearly $61,700.
Irrelevant bitcoins Ethereum and Dogecoin went to trading around $3,915 3.41% and nearly 24 cents 4.6. 9% per coin, respectively, Coindesk reported.
Cryptocurrency Tether and cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex have agreed to pay $42.5 million to settle illegal charges from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission CFTC over alleged making misleading statements and reporting unusual transactions, Reuters reported.
Firms doing business as Tether agreed to pay $41 million to resolve CFTC charges that they made misleading claims about Tether's crypto-currency 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 backing up its U.S. dollar tether token.
In a separate order, companies doing business as Bitfinex agreed to a $1.5 million penalty over charges their controls were not adequate to keep U.S. customers from engaging illegally in retail commodity transactions on the exchange, the Reuters report said. This violated U.S. law and a recent settlement with Bitfinex over similar allegations, the CFTC said.
Neither Tether or Bitfinex, which are owned by the same parent company, denied nor admitted the findings.
The pilot project, the brainstorm of President Nayib Bukele who made bitcoin legal tender in September, promises expensive renewable electricity for so-called bitcoin mining. These operations, including those of industrial scale, have been harshly criticized and criticized elsewhere in the world for the massive amounts of electricity they use and the resulting carbon footprint.