June 2, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

Solana suffered a “major outage” yesterday that halted block production on its mainnet.
Ethereum Foundation research found that liquid staking derivatives like Lido pose significant risks to Ethereum after its transition to PoS.
Binance is reviewing different ways to invest in Forbes after the media outlet scrapped its plans to go public.
Immutable (disclosure: a former sponsor) submitted a proposal to Apecoin DAO to have Otherside built on Immutable X.
FTX was the second-largest centralized exchange in May in terms of market share.
Research from the Federal Reserve shows that CBDCs may lead to central banks holding even more treasuries.
A fat-finger error led to a BAYC NFT selling for 10 ETH.
DeFi TVL in USD fell 40% in May.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

FTX and Goldman Sachs are in talks to integrate some parts of FTX’s derivatives business into Goldman.
South Korea is forming a Digital Assets Committee in response to Terra’s collapse.
Prada is dropping its first NFT today.
Only 4.9% of sales in El Salvador are conducted in BTC.

The $$$ Corner…

Binance Labs raised a $500 million fund to invest in web3.
InfStones, a blockchain infrastructure firm, raised $66 million in a funding round led by SoftBank.
Dework, a web3 networking platform, raised $5 million in a seed round.

📈Your Market Update

Red day for crypto!

BTC is down 6.62%: Trading at $29,672
ETH is down 7.63%: Trading at $1,801.52
BTC dominance: 46.1%
Crypto market: $1.2 trillion
Winner of the day (among the top 100): WAVES → up 7%

*Data as of 5:45 pm ET Tuesday 6/1/2022

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Former OpenSea Employee Charged With Wire Fraud and More

Former OpenSea product manager Nathaniel Chastain was arrested yesterday morning for allegedly engaging in insider trading during his time at the NFT marketplace.

According to a release from the Department of Justice, Chastain is being charged with wire fraud and money laundering in a scheme to commit insider trading in NFTs. The DOJ alleges that Chastain used confidential information about what NFTs would be featured on OpenSea’s homepage for personal financial gain across 45 trades. The DOJ says Chastain is being “charged in first ever digital asset insider trading scheme” in the US.

US Attorney Damian Williams made it clear that this could be the first of many digital-asset-related moves by US regulators. “NFTs might be new, but this type of criminal scheme is not… Today’s charges demonstrate the commitment of this Office to stamping out insider trading – whether it occurs on the stock market or the blockchain,” Williams said.

On that note, blockchain attorney Collins Belton believes that the DOJ’s move could have significant implications for NFT creators. “People should realize something doesn’t have to be a security to still be hit with fraud/manipulation based claims under commodities or FTC rules. This could be really telling for a lot of crypto practices by insiders and influencers,” he tweeted.

The news comes more than six months after Chastain resignedfrom OpenSea following several September tweet threads (hereand here) that unearthed a series of blockchain transactions revealing a tendency for Chastain-controlled wallets to front-run OpenSea homepage listings.

In the aftermath of Chastain’s resignation, OpenSea implemented a new set of policies outlining employee information use, including:

OpenSea team members may not buy or sell from collections or creators while we are featuring or promoting them (e.g. on our home page); and
OpenSea team members are prohibited from using confidential information to purchase or sell any NFTs, whether available on the OpenSea platform or not.

Chastain is being charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering, each carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

On The Pod…

How Osmosis Is Trying to Improve the Crypto User Experience

Sunny Aggarwal, co-founder of Osmosis Labs, talks about how Osmosis is being built, the innovations that are coming, the reasons to use app chains, and much more. Show highlights:

how Sunny got into crypto
how the DAO hack turned him off Ethereum at first
how the scaling issues with Ethereum got him interested in the Cosmos vision of app-chains
why he is interested in Proof of Stake
what the vision of Cosmos is
how Sunny compares the evolution of blockchains with human evolution
why he thinks that Cosmos integrates the best of Bitcoin and Ethereum networks
why he thinks that having more than one Proof of Work chain is fundamentally insecure
which three technologies are necessary for Cosmos to succeed
what IBC and the Cosmos SDK do
why Sunny decided to build Osmosis
how automated market makers are massively underexplored
why UX is such a priority for the Osmosis team
why Sunny does not want to list the OSMO token on other exchanges
why Osmosis has a curated dex as well as a permissionless one
how Osmosis governance works
how security is provided on Osmosis
what superfluid staking is
how CosmWasm helps Osmosis compete with centralized exchanges
how Osmosis is solving frontrunning with threshold encryption
why the Osmosis team chose Axelar for bridging
whether Yuga Labs could have used an app chain

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

DOJ Goes After NFT Insider Trading