July 2o, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • The President’s Working Group for Financial Markets expects to issue recommendations on stablecoin regulations in the coming months.

  • Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Cathie Wood will discuss Bitcoin at “The B Word” conference on July 21st.

  • SushiSwap came under fire for proposing a fundraising round that would offer institutional investors SUSHI at a deep discount.

  • Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped for the fourth consecutive time, reaching an 18 month low.

  • Binance completed its quarterly 20% BNB burn on Monday, destroying $600B worth of BNB tokens.

  • ARK Invest purchased $50M+ of Square stock after Jack Dorsey announced plans to create a new Bitcoin platform.

  • Iris, a bitcoin miner, is planning a $200M raise.

  • Polygon has launched an NFT and gaming division.
  • The New Jersey Attorney General ordered BlockFi to stop accepting new customers.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Grayscale, the world’s largest digital asset manager, is partnering with CoinDesk to create an institutional-grade DeFi index and fund. The new product will be Grayscale’s 15th investment vehicle. The fund will give investors exposure to various DeFi protocols through a single purchase, greatly simplifying the process of onboarding new entrants to the DeFi sector.

Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein is confident that DeFi protocols and tokens are here to stay. In an interview with CoinDesk’s First Mover, he said, “Based on the user adoption that we’re seeing around DeFi and DeFi protocols, we do think the future of this area is bright.”

Based on DeFi’s impressive performance over the past year, Sonnenshein is probably correct. For example, total value locked into protocols ballooned from just under $3 billion one year ago to over $54 billion today. The DeFi Pulse Index, a competitor to Grayscale’s DeFi index and fund, increased nearly 100% since last July.

As of July 1, 2021, the fund is heavily weighted towards Uniswap and includes ten tokens in total. Here is the fund breakdown, courtesy of Blockworks’s Jason Yanowitz:

 

According to the Grayscale press release, only “eligible individual and institutional accredited investors” will have access to the fund.

Recommended Reads

  • Packy McCormick with everything (!!) you need to know about Axie Infinity:

  • Nic Carter on free banking and stablecoins:

  • Here is a ~perfect~ thread for any friends you are trying to onboard to crypto: 

On The Pod…

How Ransomware Evolved Into a Big Business

Gurvais Grigg, Chainalysis public sector CTO, and Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis, review the ransomware landscape. Show Highlights:

  • their backgrounds and roles at Chainalysis

  • how a ransomware attack works

  • what types of businesses are usually targeted in ransomware attacks

  • why ransomware as a service (RAAS) is a booming business

  • why Kim and Gurvais believe the hacking group REvil is becoming more sophisticated

  • what characteristic of REvil hints that the group could be affiliated with Russia

  • how the RAAS business model works

  • how ransomware payments can be tracked

  • why ransomware reporting has a data problem

  • why Bitcoin is the preferred method of payment amongst ransomware attackers

  • what two factors makes BTC preferable to privacy coins

  • how ransomware groups teach victims to transfer BTC

  • how ransomware groups cash out of their BTC

  • how counter-terrorism tactics can help fight ransomware attacks

  • how the Department of Justice may have partially recovered part of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware payment

  • what tools and strategies governments can and will use to battle ransomware

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