July 4, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

• FTX will provide a $400 million credit line to BlockFi and could potentially buy them for $240 million.
• Sam Bankman-Fried might start buying crypto mining companies too.
• KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu dismissed insolvency rumors.
• Voyager Digital suspends all trading, withdrawals, and deposits.
• Meta (disclosure: I write a Meta Bulletin newsletter) will shut down its crypto payments wallet Novi in September.
• TPS Capital, Three Arrows Capital’s OTC trading desk, is still active but its complex ownership structure might make it difficult to recover assets
• Alex Atallah, OpenSea cofounder, will be leaving the company.
• Babel Finance, a distressed crypto lender, is hiring an investment banking firm to help them restructure.
• Tether reduces its commercial paper holdings by almost 60%.
• Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, keeps buying BTC after having millions in unrealized losses.
• DeFi protocol Wonderland will invest $25 million in Sifu Vision, a project run by an ex-convict charged with identity theft.
• Two remote procedure call (RPC) interfaces for the Polygon and Fantom blockchains were impacted in a domain name system (DNS) hijack attack.
• Crema Finance, a DeFi protocol on Solana, temporarily halted its services due to a hack.
• Celsius dismissed 150 employees amid its financial crisis.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Kylian Mbappé, soccer mega-star, signed a deal with NFT project Sorare and caused the prices to soar by 700%.
• Facebook began testing Ethereum and Polygon NFTs on profiles with some users in the US. (Disclosure: I write a Meta Bulletin newsletter and am part of the pilot.)

The $$$ Corner…

• Raoul Pal announced the launch of a new token venture asset business in web3.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Three Arrows Capital Files for Chapter 15 Bankruptcy

By Juan Aranovich

Cryptocurrency investment firm Three Arrows Capital, also known as 3AC, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy last Friday.

The purpose of Chapter 15, is to provide effective mechanisms for dealing with insolvency cases involving debtors, assets, claimants, and other parties of interest involving more than one country. Basically, it enables cooperation between international and U.S. court systems and is typically filed in an effort to protect the debtor’s assets.

“The Debtor faces litigation and other demands on payment that it cannot meet, and the Debtor is at significant risk of the diminution in value of its assets without immediate relief imposing a stay of actions by creditors,” was written in the filling by 3AC, which is being legally represented by Law firm Latham & Watkins LLP.

The petition was submitted to the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Three Arrows Capital was founded and run by Zhu Su and Kyle Davies and, as of March, had an estimated $10 billion in assets under management, according to Nansen, a blockchain analytics company.

Last Monday, Voyager Digital issued 3AC with a default notice, as 3AC failed to repay a loan worth approximately $650 million. The exposure to 3AC put Voyager Digital in a fragile financial situation, and it was one of the catalysts for the platform to pause all withdrawals, deposits, and trading. On Wednesday, a court in the British Virgin Islands ordered 3AC to be liquidated.

Recommended Reads

1) Tascha Che on utility tokens:

2) Argent on account abstraction (AA):

3) Patrick Hansen, crypto venture advisor, on Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation:

On The Pod…

Badiucao, Chinese artist and activist, talks about the importance of NFTs for political activism, the role of China in his career as an artist, the significance of blockchain technologies to resist censorship, and much more. Show highlights:

• why Badiucao became an artist and how the censorship in China brought him to NFTs
• how Badiucao only learned about Tiananmen Square when he was 22 years old
• why Badiucao took up work as a preschool teacher in Australia
• how anonymity is important for Chinese activists for their family’s safety
• the intention of Badiucao’s art and what is he trying to express
• the repercussions of Badiucao’s activism
• why Badicuao eventually gave up his anonymity
• why Badiucao decided to issue art as NFTs and what possibilities he sees in NFTs
• how Badiucao enabled people to write a message of protest in the blockchain with the launch of his NFT and how this represented the first large mass protest written into the blockchain
• whether the Beijing Winter Olympics is an outrage and a disgrace for the international community and how this inspired Badiucao’s NFT collection Beijing 2022
• how Niki approached the issue of the possibility of having the art taken down
• how Badiucao used NFTs to help Ukraine due to the war
• the reasons political art has so much value, and how NFTs enable possibilities for all political artists around the world
• whether NFTs are much more than just some apes, and how learning about art is important
• how to get started as a political artist and the importance to remain truthful
• the significance of using power as an artist

Book Update

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians