September 29, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin
Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️
- Circle, the entity behind stablecoin USDC, announced a cross-chain transfer protocol to support USDC interoperability.
- Chainlink, the largest oracle in the industry, announced staking plans and a new economic model.
- Lightning Labs released Taro, which will allow users to issue and transfer assets on the bitcoin blockchain and Lightning.
- Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Caroline Pham proposed a new office for crypto retail protection.
- OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace on Ethereum, paid a $200,000 bounty to two white hat hackers.
- Safe, a decentralized crypto custodian, airdropped its token to over 43,000 users.
- Coinbase Cloud partnered with Chainlink Labs to introduce NFT floor pricing feeds.
- Genesis co-head of sales and trading will step down and take on an advisory role.
Today in Crypto Adoption…
- Decrypt Studios, the production studio arm of Decrypt Media, announced the launch of The Crypties, crypto’s own version of The Oscars.
- Xterio, a game development firm valued at $300 million, partnered with blockchain gaming platform XPLA.
- Blankos Block Party, which is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, became the first metaverse game launched on the Epic Games Store.
The $$$ Corner…
- Solana-based Coral closed a $20 million strategic funding round co-led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto.
- Pantera Capital is seeking to raise $1.25 billion for a second blockchain fund.
- Re, a blockchain-powered reinsurance company, raised $14 million in a seed funding round.
- AQUA, a Web3 community platform for gamers, announced a $10 million investment from DIGITAL, an investment firm backed by Steve Cohen.
What Do You Meme?
What’s Poppin’?
Terraform Labs: Luna Case Is ‘Highly Politicized’
Terraform Labs, the entity behind the failed Terra blockchain, accused South Korean prosecutors of overreaching their authority, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Following the arrest warrant issued against Do Kwon, the cofounder and chief executive officer of Terraform Labs, the firm sent a defense statement to the financial news outlet yesterday. The company believes that prosecutors are acting unfairly.
“We believe that this case has become highly politicized, and that the actions of the Korean prosecutors demonstrate unfairness and a failure to uphold basic rights guaranteed under Korean law,” the company told the WSJ.
In addition, Terraform Labs is claiming that Luna wasn’t a security. Therefore, the violation of the capital-markets law which Do Kwon is being accused of, wouldn’t apply.
These statements affirm the theory outlined in Tuesday’s show: Kwon is unwilling to return to Korea for his arrest warrant because he believes being charged with violations of the Capital Markets Act are not justified. Korea does not have specific guidelines outlining which tokens would be considered securities, so prosecutors have come up with their own reasoning, rather than drawing in regulations established by Korea’s equivalent of the SEC, crypto lawyer Jongbaek Park explained on Tuesday’s Unchained show.
Earlier this week, Interpol issued a red notice for Kwon. Although his whereabouts are still unknown, the South Korean developer has been quite active on Twitter. He assured his followers he “is not on the run” and said that he is “making zero effort to hide.” Yesterday, he replied to a lunch invitation by Eric Wall by asking who was buying. When Wall suggested they decide it via a thumb war, he put a twist on a characteristic joke of his: “My thumb is not thumb.”
Following Kwon’s comments, crypto influencer FatManTerra posted several heartbreaking stories that portray the impact of the collapse of Terra on many people’s lives. The influencer called this “Do Kwon’s legacy.”
Recommended Reads
- Tasche Che on fan tokens
- Jack Chong on real world assets
- Patrick Collins on the succession problem in Web3
On The Pod…
Zack Guzman, journalist and Coinage host, and Jongbaek Park, partner specializing in blockchain and crypto assets at Bae, Kim & Lee, discuss how the case in South Korea against Do Kwon and TerraForm Labs will likely go, whether Do Kwon is on the run, and what his sentence could be. Show highlights:
- Jongbaek’s and Zack’s disclosures regarding Terra
- how big the Terra phenomenon was in South Korea and how Do Kwon was perceived in the country
- whether Do Kwon posed any conditions for his interview with Zack
- what Do Kwon is being charged with
- the colliding opinions on which tokens are considered securities
- whether the collapse of Terra had any negative impact on the South Korean President’s image
- whether Do Kwon feels like a charge for violating the capital markets law is unfair
- whether Do Kwon is “on the run,” despite his denials
- how the potential revocation of Kwon’s passport could make him go back to Korea
- whether Terra was a failure or a fraud, and how prosecutors are looking into it
- whether Terra was centralized
- the chance of prosecutors going after other people from Terraform Labs and the probability of the entity’s assets being frozen
- how much jail time Kwon could be facing and whether he is prepared to go to prison
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
