Company: HODL
Filing Date: 2025-03-26
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000930413-25-000995
Chunk: 64

Company: VanEck Bitcoin ETF
Filing Date: 2025-03-26
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 64
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 cryptocurrency trading platform Youbit,
suspended digital asset trading and filed for bankruptcy following a hack that resulted in a loss of 17% of Yapian’s assets.
Following the hack, Youbit users were allowed to withdraw approximately 75% of the digital assets in their platform accounts,
with any potential further distributions to be made following Yapian’s pending bankruptcy proceedings. In addition, in January
2018, the Japanese digital asset trading platform, Coincheck, was hacked, resulting in losses of approximately $535 million, and
in February 2018, the Italian digital asset trading platform, Bitgrail, was

38 

hacked, resulting in approximately $170
million in losses. In May 2019, one of the world’s largest digital asset trading platform, Binance, was hacked, resulting
in losses of approximately $40 million. In November 2022, FTX, one of the largest digital asset trading platform by volume at
the time, halted customer withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy, which revealed a shortfall of customer funds. Shortly thereafter,
FTX’s CEO resigned and FTX and many of its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in the United States, while other affiliates
have entered insolvency, liquidation, or similar proceedings around the globe, following which the U.S. Department of Justice
brought criminal fraud and other charges, and the SEC and CFTC brought civil securities and commodities fraud charges, against
certain of FTX’s and its affiliates’ senior executives, including its former CEO. Around the same time, there were
reports that approximately $300-600 million of digital assets were removed from FTX and the full facts remain unknown, including
whether such removal was the result of a hack, theft, insider activity, or other improper behavior.

In 2019 there were reports claiming that
80.95% of bitcoin trading volume on digital asset trading platforms was false or noneconomic in nature, with specific focus on
unregulated exchanges located outside of the United States. Such reports alleged that certain overseas trading platforms have
displayed suspicious trading activity suggestive of a variety of manipulative or fraudulent practices, such as fake or artificial
trading volume or trading volume based on non-economic “wash trading”.

Other academics and market observers have
put forth evidence to support claims that manipulative trading activity has occurred on certain bitcoin trading platforms. For
example, in a 2017 paper titled “Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Cyber
Research