June 7, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

  • With class-action lawsuits on the table, IRA Financial Trust sues Gemini over $36 million customer loss.

  • Mining firm Hive Blockchain moves to sell 10,000 ETH to take profit, fund Intel “strategic partnership.”

  • US Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) prepare to release legislative proposal on stablecoins and future crypto regulation.

  • Katie Biber, 2012 Romney campaign staffer, joins Paradigm from Brex, a fintech firm, as chief legal officer.

  • Justin Sun announces USDD is the “first over-collateralized decentralized stablecoin”.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

  • Prominent NFT photographer Justin Aversano opens physicalNFT gallery in Santa Monica.

  • Bitcoin ATM installations worldwide pick up after major downtrend.

  • Gala’s wild west shooter game GRIT will be released through Epic and support NFTs.

The $$$ Corner…

  • The Block reports personal asset management firm BlockFi is in midst of raising a down round at a $1 billion valuation, down from $3 billion in March 2021.

  • Binance Labs discloses investment in PancakeSwap governance token CAKE; token price is up 10% from weekly lows as of writing.

  • Tax and accounting software firm Cryptio announces $10 million Series A round.

  • OKX backs WAX blockchain supporting NFTs, GameFi, and collectibles with $10 million.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Binance Faces New Regulatory Pressures Amidst Money Laundering Concerns

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the SEC is investigating the ICO of Binance’s BNB coin. The $15 million Binance ICO involved the public sale of 100 million tokens against a max circulation of 200 million (44.4% of that max circulation being earmarked for the firm’s founders).

Also yesterday, Reuters reported that Binance saw $2.35 billion in money laundering on its platform during the period 2017 through 2021. The alleged money laundering activities were carried out at least in part by North Korean hacking group, Lazarus. Lazarus, if you recall, was also responsible for the $540 million exploit of Ronin back in March.

Binance has refuted the report in a statement on their website arguing that the Reuters report “is rife with falsehoods, massive leaps to conclusions, and relies on poor data that could have been fact-checked by reaching out to one of the major on-chain analyst firms, like Chainalysis or TRM.”

Over the past several months, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao and his teams have been lobbying for more recognition and favorable treatment from regulators around the world. Zhao has been publicly visible in conversation with state actors in places as far flung as the UK, Abu Dhabi, and El Salvador.

Recommended Reads

  1. Andrew T on VC token sales

  1. Jonathan Hillis on how decentralized organizations outcompete centralized ones:

  1. @resdegen on USDD’s “overcollateralization” claim:

On The Pod…

How Soulbound Tokens Could Reduce Speculation and Improve DAO Voting

Glen Weyl, RadicalxChange Foundation founder and political economist & social technologist at Microsoft Special Projects, and Puja Ohlhaver, strategist at Flashbots, discuss “soulbound tokens” and their implications for collaboration and social organization in a variety of spaces.

Topics covered include:

  • how Glen got involved in crypto, wrote a book, and came to co-write a paper with Vitalik Buterin

  • how Puja studied economics and got in touch with Glen in pursuit of a middle ground between left and right politics

  • what soulbound NFTs are and how they work

  • how Vitalik’s paper articulated how the concept of the soulbound token could advance decentralized collaboration in web3

  • how decentralized reputation can enable larger networks of coordination

  • how identity can be understood through the lens of community participation

  • how the name ‘soulbound token’ came about

  • how these tokens could provide a technology for those who value scarcity but disdain speculation

  • how identity-dedicated tokens could work on a technical level (including recovery)

  • what is DeSoc and why is it important?

  • how non-transferable tokens can improve DAO organization, including resolving issues with quadratic funding

  • how identity-locked tokens can be protected from bots and AI abuse

  • how these tokens could support community privacy and responsible information disclosure

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