September 20, 2022    /    Unchained Daily    /    Laura Shin
Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️
- The Financial Conduct Authority said FTX is not authorized to provide services to customers in the UK.
- Crypto exchange WazirX will delist USDC, and other stablecoins, and convert them into Binance’s BUSD.
- ICO promoter Ian Balina was charged for violating securities laws by the SEC.
- According to a poll commissioned by a conservative group, many voters in battleground states are against a central bank digital currency.
- Crypto backed political action committee (PAC) has spent more than $10 million in primary races.
- A hacker stole $3.3 million from wallets created with the Profanity tool.
- A trader manipulated the price of AVAX in the decentralized exchange GMX and profited $500,000.
- Two men who financed terrorism via crypto in France were sentenced to prison.
- Coinbase partnered with ENS Domains to create cb․id usernames.
Today in Crypto Adoption…
- An Australian politician wants to prepare his country to adopt and accept China’s digital Yuan.
- The PGA Tour partnered with Autograph to launch a golf-focused NFT platform.
The $$$ Corner…
- Polychain Capital led a $40 million funding round for African crypto exchange Yellow Card.
- Switzerland-based GRNGrid received a $50 million investment commitment from GEM Digital, a digital asset investment firm.
What Do You Meme?
What’s Poppin’?
Authorities Requested a Red Notice for Do Kwon
South Korean authorities are asking Interpol to issue a red notice for Do Kwon, the cofounder of Terraform Labs, the entity behind the collapsed Terra blockchain.
According to the Financial Times, the Seoul Southern District Prosecutor’s Office “began the procedure to place him on the Interpol red notice list and revoke his passport.”A red notice is a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action.
Kwon’s whereabouts are unknown. Reuters reported that the police confirmed that he is not in Singapore.
The news comes after a court in South Korea issued an arrest warrant against Kwon for allegedly violating the country’s capital markets law last week, and the nation’s Ministry of Finance stated its intent to void Kwon’s passport to force him to return to South Korea.
Someone from the Office also said that Kwon is “clearly on the run.” Kwon said three days ago that he was not and that he doesn’t have “anything to hide” and is “in full cooperation.” He even joked about it as he said, “Tbh [to be honest] haven’t gone running in a while, need to cut some calories.”
The efforts to catch Kwon come four months after the collapse of the Terra ecosystem, which wiped out approximately $60 billion worth of crypto in LUNA, UST and other tokens.
Interpol has not yet added Kwon to the red notice list.
Recommended Reads
- Arjun Chan and Mark Murdock (former intern of Unchained) on arbitrary messaging bridges
- Tom Dunleavy and Kunal Goel on the state of Ethereum
- Varun Shenoy on zero knowledge proofs
On The Pod…
In a heated debate, Eric Wall, crypto blogger and investor, and Justin Bons, founder and chief investment officer of Cyber Capital, discuss Bitcoin’s security model, whether there are fundamental flaws in its design, and which is the best consensus mechanism. Show highlights:
- why Justin stopped believing in Bitcoin and why he calls it “technically one of the worst cryptocurrencies”
- how Eric’s views on Bitcoin changed over time
- the problems they see with Bitcoin’s security
- why Eric attacks BTC maximalism, even when he is a Bitcoiner
- how the Bitcoin community will change in the next decades, and why the security problem is a challenge that could be solved
- whether BTC should increase its inflation and whether that would break the store of value proposition
- why Justin thinks that BTC fails as money and won’t play a relevant role in the future
- what happened around the time of the blocksize debate back in 2015-2017
- whether there’s something wrong with Bitcoin’s culture and why Eric compares it to a doomsday cult
- why Ethereum has external dependencies that can impose systemic risks, according to Eric
- whether proof of stake or proof of work is a better consensus mechanism
- whether Ethereum is more censorship resistant than Bitcoin
- why BTC is a speculative asset and what Justin believes is needed for crypto to finally flourish
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
