August 17, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin
Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️
- Crypto lender Hodlnaut, which froze operations last week, has now filed for judicial management
- Celsius received approval to sell mined BTC in order to meet operational expenses.
- Jump Crypto partnered with the Solana Foundation to create a second validator client for the network.
- Dogecoin’s token DOGE, the memecoin supported by Elon Musk, has experienced massive gains over the last few days.
- The Financial Times reports Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky took control of the company’s trades in January and made some bad choices.
- Tencent, a Chinese tech company, will stop selling NFTs on its platform due to regulatory scrutiny.
- Crypto derivative traders are betting on an 8% staking yield after the Merge.
- Research firm FSInsight thinks the Flippening could happen over the next 12 months.
- As a precautionary measure, Coinbase will pause new ETH and ERC-20 token deposits and withdrawals during the Merge.
- DeFi protocol Compound is ready to launch its third version and will soon be put to governance vote.
Today in Crypto Adoption…
- Unstoppable Domains, a crypto domain provider, is launching an iPhone app to boost Web3 adoption.
- BTG Pactual, Brazil’s largest investment bank, launched a crypto trading platform.
- Crypto investment company Digital Currency Group registered its vice president of public policy as a lobbyist.
The $$$ Corner…
- Crypto mining company Prime Blockchain and 10X SPAC terminated a $1.25 billion merger agreement.
What Do You Meme?
What’s Poppin’?
Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint against Dragonchain for an unregistered securities offering.
Dragonchain calls itself “an enterprise and start up ready platform to build flexible and scalable blockchain applications.”
The SEC is targeting the entities behind Dragonchain and its founder John Joseph Roets for raising $16.5 million in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in 2017, and allegedly failing to register as a securities offering.
“The commission is trying to shoehorn software technology into incompatible securities law from the 1930’s (…) This calls into question whether the commission understands the technology enough to effectively regulate it,” wrote Roets a few months ago.
This represents yet another move from the SEC against the crypto industry. Last month, the SEC claimed that Coinbase had listed nine tokens on its platform as unregistered securities.
“Litigation over 2020 projects hasn’t even really started yet (barely) so we have a long road ahead & I expect to see the first big DeFi action by SEC before end of September,” said crypto regulation expert Gabriel Shapiro.
In other regulation news:
- The Fed released new guidance to banks. According to the supervisory letter, banks that are supervised by the Federal Reserve Board will have to notify the board before engaging in crypto-related activities.
- A court in California allowed the US Internal Revenue Service to issue a “John Doe ” summons to SFOX, a crypto prime brokerage. This would allow the IRS to ask for information about any “U.S. taxpayers who conducted at least the equivalent of $20,000 in transactions in cryptocurrency between 2016 and 2021 with or through SFOX.”
Recommended Reads
- Buhlaque on ETH decentralization
- Zac Williamson, CEO of Aztec Network, on the future of privacy networks
- Vivek Ventures on how ETH governance works
On The Pod…
Surojit Chatterjee, chief product officer at Coinbase, comes to talk about what products Coinbase is building, how it can thrive in such a competitive landscape, how to onboard billions of users into crypto, and much more. Show highlights:
- how Surojit got into crypto and ended up at Coinbase
- what sets Coinbase apart from the competition
- how to bring billions of customers to crypto
- Surojit’s mental model of a bridge between the fiat world and the crypto world
- how Coinbase is integrating its main app with Web3
- whether crypto can become a utility rather than an investment asset
- how Coinbase is building a product in such a way that it attracts even “crypto-native” people
- what happened with Coinbase NFT Marketplace’s failure and whether the company will keep investing in NFTs
- whether Coinbase has lost crypto-embedded people among its employees
- how the partnership with BlackRock indicates how far crypto has come
- the amount of money that institutions could potentially pour into crypto
- how Coinbase will prevent itself from having the largest percentage of staked ETH
- how the company is monetizing the Coinbase wallet and what would happen to revenue if the trading volume were to move from the exchange to Coinbase wallet swaps
- why Coinbase is suffering a decline in trading volume
- whether Coinbase can compete with newer exchanges like FTX and Binance and why Surojit still thinks Coinbase will win
- why it is important to keep investing and building through this crypto winter
- Surojit’s take on the frontrunning of coins about to be listed on the platform
- why the Howey test (which determines whether something is a security) is outdated
- how Coinbase understands securities, and whether the firm thinks the tokens listed on the platform are securities
- how can Coinbase compete with decentralized exchanges like Uniswap
- why Surojit is worried about regulatory clarity and stablecoins
- how hacks and security give the crypto industry a bad reputation
- what Surojit’s dreams are for the industry
Book Update
My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, is now available!
You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians
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