August 23, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • A Deloitte survey shows that 76% of financial professionals think digital assets will provide a strong replacement or outright replace fiat within 5-10 years. 
  • VanEck and ProShares both withdrew SEC submissions for ETH ETFs. 
  • FinTech Collective, a VC firm, raised $250M to invest in fintech, digital assets, and DeFi.
  • OKEx plans to launch a $10M fund to develop play-to-earn projects. 
  • Led by a16z, the play to earn company Yield Guild Games brought in $4.6M in its most recent round. 
  • Fractional, an NFT platform, completed a $7.9M round in seed funding. 
  • Promoters from the alleged Ponzi scheme BitConnect settled with the SEC for approximately $12M in cash and BTC. 
  • 5% of $164M Neuberger Berman’s Commodity Strategy Fund can now be invested in Bitcoin futures and ETFs. 
  • Solana DeFi project Luna Yield went dark after the developers allegedly took off with $6.7M in cryptocurrencies. 
  • Dan Tapiero’s 10T Holdings invested $100M into the bitcoin derivatives platform Deribit.

What Do You Meme?

A JPEG of a rock was sold to Justin Sun for $581,576.37 in ETH yesterday afternoon. 

What a bargain…

What’s Poppin’?

Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, is now requiring all new users to complete its Intermediate Verification process, according to an announcement from the company on Friday. Existing users who have not yet completed Intermediate Verification will see their accounts severely limited.

This means customers will need to submit a government-issued ID along with a selfie to obtain approval to trade, deposit, and withdraw on the platform without restriction. Binance is giving users until October 19, 2021 to complete the verification in an effort to “minimize user experience disruption.” The move is meant to “align” Binance with “the evolving global compliance standards,” which the crypto exchange has become intimately familiar with as of late. 

The new verification mandate is the latest in a string of compliance-friendly moves from the exchange. A few weeks ago, Binance further reduced the daily withdrawal limit for non-verified accounts from 2 BTC to .06. Furthermore, the company also recently capped trading to a maximum of 20X leverage, down from 100X, in July.

Since the beginning of 2021, Binance has faced an onslaught of regulatory issues, with a growing list of countries coming after the exchange for illegally operating within its borders without proper authority, registration, or the correct licenses. Here is a partial list:

The crackdown is likely even affecting the “separate” US entity, which recently saw the hasty departure of its just-appointed CEO, Brain Brooks, whose prior position was the acting head of the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. 

Recommended Reads

  • Other Internet, a research company, on Uniswap’s online community:

  • Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin on how to improve NFT sales:

  • Decrypt on how Vine’s co-founder plans to make NFTs playable:

  • Coin Center’s Jerry Brito on crypto regulatory challenges: 

On The Pod…

SOL Is Up 3,800% YTD. Could It Eventually Displace Ethereum?

SOL is up 75% over the past seven days, 205% in the past month, and 3,800% YTD. On Unchained, Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani discusses the DeFi projects fueling Solana’s growth, why he thinks Solana could make Ethereum obsolete, and the spectrum of decentralization. Show highlights:

  • what factors have contributed to SOL’s growth this year

  • what two milestones occurred last week that Kyle thinks supercharged SOL’s popularity

  • why Kyle thinks the issues with the Degen Ape Academy NFT drop were not actually a problem with the Solana blockchain

  • what projects will be possible on Solana that are impracticable on Ethereum

  • why Kyle thinks some combination of NFTs and social token apps will be the first breakout app on Solana

  • why Solana decreases the risk of massive liquidations — like the crypto industry saw on Black Thursday in March 2020

  • how Solana and Ethereum differ in regards to composability and fragmentation

  • what BitClout has to do with Kyle’s Solana investment thesis

  • why Solana could be the basis for the next crypto bull run

  • why Kyle thinks the Ethereum merge as it completes transition to Ethereum 2.0 will not really affect Solana

  • how the competition between Solana and Ethereum could play out in the next 12 months

  • why Kyle is not overly concerned about Solana being more centralized than Ethereum

  • what the Solana versus Ethereum competition will look like going forward, and why Solana may have the upper hand

  • what Kyle learned from his investment in EOS

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 Jan. 18. Pre-order it today!

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