May 21, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

🎉Welcome to Unchained Daily 🎉

ICYMI, the Unchained Newsletter is shifting from a weekly recap to a daily blog. Each morning you will receive a few quick bullet points summarizing yesterday’s news, a couple of memes, a brief breakdown of a trending topic, and a few recommended reads.

For those of you who were big fans of the weekly recap, don’t worry — the weekly recap will still be available at the back half of the Unconfirmed pod on Friday!

Without further ado… here is the fifth edition of Unchained Daily.

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Pancake Bunny, a Binance Smart Chain protocol, lost $45 million in an exploit on Thursday

  • In an interview with CNBC, Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein, a private equity billionaire himself,  said that cryptocurrency is “here to stay”

  • Bitcoin hash rate fell almost 20% this week as miners in China’s Sichuan region face temporary power limitations

  • “Cryptocurrency” Google search volume is at an ATH

  • The US Federal Reserve plans to publish a paper on the potential issuance of a CBDC

  • Chainalysis Chief Economist Phillip Gradwell believes this week’s sell-off was retail-driven

  • Figure Technologies, a blockchain lending company, raised $200 million at a $3.2 billion valuation
  • An anonymous donor gave $5 million in BTC to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School

What Do You Meme?

Welcome to an Unchained Daily first: a homemade meme, straight off the editor’s desk(top).

Cryptocurrency meme.

What’s Poppin’?

Three regulatory headlines caught my eye yesterday:

  • Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown penned a letter to Michael Hsu, the acting head of the OCC, regarding his concern about the OCC previously granting national trust charters to Paxos, Anchorage, and Protego.
    The note asked Hsu to reassess the conditional national charters given to the three crypto firms, saying that:”A firm that cannot meet the rigorous requirements applicable to other banks should not be allowed to present itself to the public as a bank. Paxos, Protego, and Anchorage seek to broaden access to cryptocurrencies and other risky and unproven digital assets and emerging technologies to traditional bank customers.“

  • Gary Gensler, the new commissioner of the SEC, said on Thursday that the agency “should be ready to bring cases involving issues such as crypto.”
  • As referenced in the meme above, a US Department of the Treasury proposal is calling for businesses to report crypto transactions over $10,000 to the IRS, stating that while a “small portion of business income today, cryptocurrency transactions are likely to rise in importance in the next decade.” As part of the same proposal, the IRS will be given additional funding to address the crypto market.

Recommended Reads

  • As I tweeted –> “Anyone else read articles like this and wonder if Jack, Cathie, and Elon are working on a Bitcoin mining/renewable energy venture?”

  • Avanti Bank CEO Caitlin Long on why she thinks “‘responsible innovation’” in crypto is still possible in the US.

  • For the third recommendation, let’s test out a “Flashback Friday” theme, where I suggest an old article of mine. This week’s flashback is titled “How Will Bitcoin Technology Go Mainstream? An Analysis Of 5 Strategies” and was written back in January 2016 when BTC traded for around $350.

  • Paul Krugman on why “none of this matters very much. Because Bitcoin and its relatives haven’t managed to achieve any meaningful economic role, what happens to their value is basically irrelevant to those of us not playing the crypto game.”

On The Pod…

Mike Novogratz on the 5 Reasons the Crypto Markets Plummeted

 

Mike Novogratz, founder, CEO, and chairman of Galaxy Digital, digs into the drivers behind this week’s market selloff. Show highlights:

  • the five factors Mike believes led to this week’s dip

  • what Mike thinks about the environmental concerns surrounding Bitcoin

  • how Ethereum will perform in 2021

  • whether centralized blockchains will survive regulatory scrutiny

  • why Galaxy Digital made its $1 billion acquisition of BitGo

  • what sort of projects Galaxy Digital is mulling in the DeFi space

  • when Mike thinks a bitcoin ETF could be approved

  • Mike’s 2021 bitcoin price prediction

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