Hello McFinancers! We wanted to take a special look at the crypto world with so much news and attention over the past week.

The latest in financial news: CZ pleads guilty to money laundering, MicroStrategy continues to hold BTC, and Jim Cramer approves of BTC.

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CZ Pleads Guilty To Money Laundering

Over this past week, the founder and former CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), has pleaded guilty to money laundering violations from the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Treasury Department, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This is the second big case for the DOJ against firms involved with crypto. The DOJ has stated that they are going to remain aggressive against firms that perform crimes with crypto.

This has shown that another major central exchange had been using crypto for their own advantages like what Sam Bankman-Fried had done with FTX. As with FTX, this is an issue with people using bad business practices with crypto. This isn’t an issue with crypto but with people. As more and more interest comes into crypto, governments around the world have been learning and enacting new regulations about cryptocurrencies to ensure fairness and prevent similar things from happening. This also helps to show how important decentralized finance is. It offers people the opportunity to own their own cryptos and to use them for lending, staking, and buying.

MicroStrategy Continues To Hold Bitcoin

MicroStrategy, a Bitcoin-focused enterprise business firm, saw its shares surpass $500 on Black Friday, reaching a level not seen since December 2021 and accumulating a market cap of $7.33 billion. The company, led by founder and chairman Michael Saylor, adopted a long-term strategy of holding Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, a move that proved successful as its stock price doubled within a month despite starting the year with a quarterly loss. MicroStrategy is now one of the largest institutional holders of Bitcoin, with Saylor expressing bullishness for the next 12 months, anticipating increased demand and reduced supply, which he considers unprecedented in Wall Street history. In April, the company's Bitcoin holdings turned profitable as the cryptocurrency's price exceeded $30,000, and with the acquisition of additional Bitcoin.

Jim Cramer Approves of Bitcoin

Whether you like him or not, Jim Cramer, the host of Mad Money on CNBC, has recently changed his opinion on Bitcoin. His change in opinion comes as more and more interest from Wall Street gets into Bitcoin and crypto. There has been a lot of interest in the spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs over the past year. It would allow thousands of institutions and people to get exposure to owning crypto without requiring the need to own it yourself. This would allow people to invest in crypto by using their 401k, IRAs, and brokerage accounts.

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