July 5, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Bitcoin mining difficulty fell ~28% on Friday — the largest drop on record. 
  • Thailand’s SEC filed a complaint against Binance over unregistered operations. 
  • The Bitcoin Mining Council claims that 56% of electricity used in Bitcoin mining is sustainable.
  • Cryptocurrency exchange volume was $958B in June, down from $2.18T in May.
  • Marathon Digital increased its Bitcoin mining production by 17% in June.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

USDC is poppin’. 

According to research from Messari’s Ryan Watkins, USDC is becoming the go-to stablecoin on Ethereum.

Data from The Block confirms the trend, with Tether’s market share hitting an all-time low of 59%. 

USDC currently makes up 22.85% of the total stablecoin supply across the cryptocurrency industry, an increase of nearly 10% since January 1st. 

Watkins points to USDC’s popularity in DeFi transactions as a reason for its potential boom, noting that “over 50% of the USDC supply now sit in smart contracts… and has become the preferred stablecoin in DeFi for now.” 

Only about 20% of USDT sits in smart contracts.

Recommended Reads

  • CoinDesk’s Chief Content Officer, Michael Casey, also on America and stablecoins:

  • Dante Disparte, chief strategy officer at Circle, also on America and the digital currency race (paywall):

  • Amy Wu is thinking about blockchain media (thread):

On The Pod…

FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Gives the Tom Brady/Gisele Bundchen Backstory

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and founder of FTX, explains FTX’s sports-centric advertising model and talks about what is on his regulatory wish list going forward. Show highlights:

  • why Sam is so excited to bring Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen onto the FTX team

  • how FTX decides on who to sponsor

  • why so many of FTX’s sponsorship are targeting US customers

  • what makes the sports industry such an attractive place to advertise for FTX

  • how FTX’s tokenized stocks work

  • what Sam learned from the GameStop/Robinhood situation

  • what makes FTX’s tokenized stocks different from Binance’s offering

  • how FTX is dealing with regulatory obstacles

  • what item is on the top of Sam’s regulatory wishlist

  • whether FTT is a security

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Nov. 2nd. Pre-order it today!

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