The week after Burning Man was a bit sleepy, but several trends continued apace. Regarding stablecoins, Binance will launch a USD-pegged cryptocurrency. And the interest of big tech in crypto has now spread to Apple. Plus, yet another DAO has been proposed, this one married a bit more to the traditional legal world.

On Unchained this week, we explore DAOs further through an interview with Luis Cuende of Aragon One, in which he describes Aragon, a platform for DAOs. And on Unconfirmed, I talk with Yan Liberman of Delphi Digital about Bitcoin’s dominance, which is at 70% — more than double its all-time low of 33% during the top of the crypto bubble in the winter of 2018.

No matter what, be sure not to miss Reid Hoffman’s excellent crypto rap video! (I think my favorite moment might be Charlie Lee’s fist pump when Hamilton says, “Litecoin.”)

This Week’s Crypto News…

Binance USD Will Launch With NYDFS Approval

Binance’s Venus plan to establish stablecoins across the globe will soon reach the US through a partnership with Paxos.

The Growing Crypto Insurance Industry: Aon, Lloyd’s of London and Others

By one estimate, the crypto insurance industry is “worth between $200 million and $500 million in premium revenue.”

Apple ‘Watching’ Cryptocurrency 👀

Jennifer Bailey, the vice president of Apple Pay, told CNN, “We think it has interesting long-term potential.” (Meanwhile Samsung is releasing a blockchain-friendly version of its flagship phone, but tied to a Korean crypto platform.)

Vitalik Buterin Proposes Variation on Quadratic Voting

Don’t be scared by the equations — you can skim them, especially the fancier ones. Vitalik uses his clear writing skills to explain his proposal for a new variation on quadratic voting called sortition, in which a randomly selected subset of the voting population participates, giving more weight to the vote of any individual participant.

Fraudsters Used AI to Fake CEO’s Voice

While not directly a crypto story, this is a scheme that could very well be used to target people in the community, so be aware, folks.

The LAO: Delaware-Incorporated Version of the DAO

Everyone wants to resurrect the DAO these days. One proposal is to do so in a way that connects to the traditional legal world through a Delaware limited liability entity. The LAO will use smart contracts “to handle mechanics related to voting, funding, and allocation of collected funds.”

Crypto VC Blogs and Pods

  • Fred Wilson of USV wrote up a post on the current state of crypto that people felt was him talking up his firm’s investments; the next day he posted that he got “schooled” and one of his main lessons was that crypto networks are not startups.
  • Joel Monegro of Placeholder Capital blogged about how Ethereum’s lead could very well be insurmountable at this point. “Anyone coming for Ethereum has a lot of catching up to do. Getting hundreds of wallets, exchanges and custodians to support your new network is hard. Building liquidity to the billions per day is hard. Building a large developer community is hard. Getting them to build apps is hard, successful ones even harder. Plugging into the mainstream consciousness and onboarding users is hard. Developing network self-sovereignty is hard. And even if you’re excellent at every single one of those, at the very least it takes time, and lots of it. And you’ll be chasing a moving target because Ethereum will continue to grow in the meantime.”
  • A16z released the opening interview with Marc Andreessen interviewed by Katie Haun from its regulatory conference in May. The Wall Street Journal published an article in which some questioned the propriety of such a conference.

Epic Crypto Rap Battle Featuring Crypto Luminaries

LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman created this awesome video of Hamilton and Satoshi conducting a rap battle over centralized banking vs. Bitcoin, featuring cameos from a number of crypto personalities such as Charlie Lee, Zooko Wilcox, Meltem Demirors, Adam Back, Wences Casares, Soona Amhaz, Ben Davenport, Lily Liu and more. You can also see me participating remotely! Hoffman told CoinDesk what inspired him to create this genius video.