March 9, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• The SEC is charging John and JonAntina Barksdale, who launched a project called Ormeus Coin, for allegedly defrauding investors out of $124 million.

• Evmos’s “Rektdrop” has been paused as the network undergoes an upgrade.

• BitDAO’s treasury is growing at a rate of $2 million per day and is currently the second-largest treasury on Ethereum.

• Ethereum gas fees are at a six month low.

• Brantly Millegan will remain a director at the ENS Foundation after a governance vote failed to remove him following a controversy surrounding tweets from 2016 where Brantly expressed views condemning homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, amongst other issues.

• Three men were charged with alleged investment fraud by the CFTC and alleged wire fraud and money laundering by the US Department of Justice yesterday regarding two crypto Ponzi schemes that left investors short $44 million in BTC.

• Bored Ape Yacht Club donated $1 million in ETH to Ukraine.

• Senator Elizabeth Warren is drafting a bill that would seek to make it easier to track transactions to private crypto wallets from exchanges.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Credit Suisse released a report expressing the belief that BTC will likely benefit from a “new monetary world order” based on commodity-backed currencies.

• The US Treasury Department is launching a campaign to educate the public about investing in crypto.

• Bank of Israel is exploring the idea of issuing a CBDC.

• Santander, one of the largest banks in Spain, is set to offerloans based on grain-based crypto tokens.

The $$$ Corner…

• The Avalanche Foundation announced its “Multiverse” initiative that will see $290 million in AVAX tokens go to wooing top projects to the Avalanche blockchain.

• Bain Capital, an investment firm with roughly $155 billion in assets under management, announced a $560 million fund focused on investing in crypto.

• Researchers at Stanford University raised $32 million to fund the building of Espresso, a privacy-focused L1.

• WalletConnect raised an $11 million Series A funding round.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

TradFi and DeFi Might Soon Be the Same Thing

While token prices are down nearly across the board year-to-date, the adoption of “crypto” by mainstream entities is still growing at a rapid pace. Let’s take a look at three examples from yesterday  alone:

1. Bain Capital, an investment firm with approximately $155 billion in assets under management, announced its first crypto-based fund, Bain Capital Crypto, yesterday. The fund will utilize $560 million to “support the renegades and pioneers building the next generation of the internet,” according to a release written by Stefan Cohen, a partner at Bain Capital Crypto. The news comes less than a month after Sequoia, an investment manager with roughly $80.7 billion in AUM, announced a similar $600 million crypto fund.

2. GoldenTree, a $47 billion asset manager, poached BlockTower Capital’s Avi Felman from the web3 world and is hiring him as its head of digital assets trading. According to Felman, GoldenTree, despite its traditional background, has been exploring crypto-native technology for a while now. “​​While their peers were working to arb CME futures, the chads at GT were diving into the heart of it: buying land in the metaverse, betting on EVM bridges, & punting OHM forks,” wrote Felman. “They realized that to win in crypto, you need to approach the market as a crypto native. Luckily the guys there truly love the space & don’t just view it as a place to extract value.”

3. Goldman Sachs has begun offering clients access to an ether fund issued by Galaxy Digital, according to an SEC filing on Tuesday. It appears that a total of 28 clients have purchased $50.5 million worth of ETH through the Galaxy fund. However, it is unclear how much of that volume came directly from Goldman – as the bank is but one of multiple feeders into the Galaxy investment vehicle.

Recommended Reads

1. The DeFi Edge on investing in a bear market:

2. Decentology’s Chase Chapman on why falling back to hierarchy in web3 is like texting a toxic ex:

3. 1kxnetwork’s Nichanan Kesonpat on the financialization of NFTs:

On The Pod…

How Ukraine Is Leveraging Crypto in Its Fight Against Russia

Tomicah Tillemann, the global chief policy officer of Katie Haun’s new firm, analyzes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and explains how crypto is being used in an unprecedented manner to render aid to civilians, move money across the world, and potentially document war crimes. Show highlights:

• Tomicah’s background, which includes stints working for the State Department and a16z

• recap of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

• what Tomicah thinks of the decision to boot certain Russian banks from SWIFT

• why Tomicah believes that it would be very difficult for Russia to use crypto at a large scale to evade sanctions

• why ruble/BTC volume is spiking

• how Ukraine’s usage of web3 tools could change humanitarian aid forever

• what lessons to take away from Ukraine’s almost-airdrop

• the four real-world crypto use cases governments should take notice of

Book Update

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