July 19, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Aave plans to launch a Twitter alternative on Ethereum later this year.

  • Bank of America approved futures trading for some clients.

  • US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is meeting with the PWG, OCC, and FDIC to discuss digital assets today.

  • Ripple may depose the SEC official who said ETH was not a security in 2018.

  • Binance has ended support for tokenized stocks.

  • A SoftBank business unit is set to invest $75M in the soon-to-be public exchange Bullish.

  • Terraform Labs raised $150M to sponsor projects built on the Terra blockchain.

  • THORChain will repay users affected by last week’s $5M hack using its treasury.

  • J.C. Flowers agreed to purchase 30% of LMAX, a forex and crypto exchange, for $300M.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Axie Infinity, the NFT-based breeding game, is still poppin’.

The NFT marketplace generated the most revenue of any protocol, blockchain, or dapp in the crypto industry on Friday and Saturday.

Source: Token Terminal

Recommended Reads

  • a16z’s Chris Dixon on NFTs:

  • The Fed + Yale on the US’s stablecoin options:

  • Andrew Beal on why culture matters when building DAOs:

On The Pod…

Why It Might Be Too Late for Binance to Avoid Regulatory Action

Christine Parker, partner at Reed Smith, summarizes the slew of regulatory headlines facing Binance and how such scrutiny may affect the exchange going forward. Show highlights:

  • which countries are investigating Binance

  • why it has been difficult for governing bodies to regulate Binance

  • whether the reports that regulatory bodies, like the CFTC/IRS/DOJ, coming after Binance are correct

  • when Christine expects regulators to make a move against Binance

  • how hiring ex-regulators might help Binance in Congress

  • whether Binance’s strategy of leaving countries with tight regulations helped or hurt the exchange

  • what Christine thinks of Binance’s strategy to localize its business model

  • whether or not it is too late to avoid regulatory penalties for Binance

  • why transitioning to a DAO business model would not absolve Binance of prior infractions

  • how the BitMEX situation could inform Binance

  • whether criminal charges could be in Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s future

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