Justin Sun Buys $1B Stake in Huobi, Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Reaches ATH–Top 5 Crypto Stories for Oct 10

Here’s a quick breakdown of the biggest news stories and developments in the cryptocurrency sector for October 10, 2022.

1. TRON’s Justin Sun is reportedly acquiring Huobi founder’s entire stake for $1 billion

On Saturday, Huobi published a statement saying that the exchange’s founder Leon Li penned an agreement to sell his entire shareholding stake to About Capital. 

“The transaction only involves the change of controlling shareholder and has no impact on Huobi’s core operation and business management teams,” wrote Huobi.

According to a prominent blockchain journalist Colin Wu, the core investor behind About Capital is none other than TRON founder Justin Sun. Colin wrote that the estimated value of Li’s share in Huobi is $1 billion. The China-based reporter added that FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried might have been involved in the deal.

Exclusive: The real buyer of Huobi is Tron Founder Justin Sun, possibly with the help of SBF. https://t.co/bPMtE2Youe

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) October 10, 2022

Following the news, the price of Huobi Token, the native asset of the Huobi digital asset exchange, rallied by over 24% and hit a five-week high of $5.17.

2. Bitcoin mining difficulty increases over 13% to hit 35.61 trillion hashes

Today’s increase in Bitcoin mining difficulty has brought the computing power necessary to mine a new block on the Bitcoin blockchain to an all-time high of roughly 35.6 trillion hashes. Due to the latest increase, Bitcoin has become 13.5% more difficult to produce, compared to just two weeks ago. 

Bitcoin mining difficulty over time: Image source: BTC.com

As a rule of thumb, an increase in BTC mining difficulty means that the competition between miners competing for block rewards is growing. That means that the already slim margins earned by miners due to the poor market performance of Bitcoin in the past couple of months are only going to get slimmer. BTC.com predicts another, albeit much more modest, increase in mining difficulty in late October.

3. SBF announces a series of improvements will roll out with the launch of FTX: V2

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, has revealed users can expect lower latency trading and other general platform improvements that will go live with the launch of the new version of the FTX exchange on November 21.

FTX: V2, as Bankman-Fried calls it, will bring an enhanced matching engine, consisting of a “whole new order matcher, lower latency API pathways, and a whole slew of other features.” The crypto billionaire added that some features will go live ahead of the official launch in the second half of November. 

1) This Thanksgiving:

FTX, Evolved.

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) October 10, 2022

According to the CEO, FTX users should see order latency decrease by 50%, while getting to benefit from a 100% increase in the order throughput.

4. EU Commission wants to automate Ethereum DeFi data collection

The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, has released a bid on the viability of deploying a system for “automated supervisory data gathering” of decentralized finance (DeFi) transactions.

According to the document, which estimates the total value of the pilot program to be 250,000 EUR, the project will take advantage of the open-source nature of the Ethereum blockchain to gather data.

“The project will seek to benefit from the open nature of transaction data on the Ethereum blockchain, which is the biggest settlement platform of DeFi protocols.”

Brussel’s goal is reportedly to provide real-time DeFi activity data for financial regulators.

5. Record number of Brazil companies declare crypto on their balance sheets

According to local news outlets, the number of Brazil-headquartered companies with crypto on their balance sheets reached a record high in August. Data from the Brazilian federal revenue service agency Receita Federal do Brasil (RFB) shows that over 12,000 companies in Brazil declared crypto holdings in the month, beating the previous high of 11,360 in July.

The cryptocurrency thaw saw the biggest share of transactions was Tether (USDT), with nearly 80,000 transactions totaling at over $1.42 billion in volume. The second most transacted digital asset was Bitcoin, with its total transactions tally reaching roughly $270 million. 

According to data curated by blockchain infrastructure company TripleA, Brazil ranks 7th on the list of countries with most crypto owners. It is estimated that roughly 16.6 million Brazilians, or 7.75% of the entire population, hold some kind of digital asset.