Gemini’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day

June 3, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

El Salvador is still not ready to release its much-anticipated bitcoin bond.
Staked ether has been trading at a discount in the wake of Terra’s collapse.
Velodrome, an AMM on Optimism, launched an airdrop yesterday.
On-chain metrics may be indicating a potential recovery for ETH.
Boba Network, an Ethereum layer 2 solution, has expandedto Fantom and Moonbeam.
Alchemy, a blockchain infrastructure firm, launched a set of Solana developer tools.
Rain Financial, a crypto exchange based in Bahrain, laid offdozens of employees.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

Chipotle is now accepting crypto in return for burritos.
Kanye West’s business filed trademarks for NFTs.
Binance is sponsoring The Weeknd’s upcoming music tour

The $$$ Corner…

Genesis, a liquidity provider, is contributing $75 million to Maple Finance, a DeFi platform on Solana.
Crypto venture capital funding fell 38% in May 2022 compared to April.

📈Your Market Update

Green day for crypto!

BTC is up 2.03%: Trading at $30,259
ETH is up 1.68%: Trading at $1,823
BTC dominance: 46.2%
Crypto market: $1.24 trillion
Winner of the day (among the top 100): ICP → up 24%

*Data as of 5:00 pm ET Tuesday 6/2/2022

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Winklevoss-Led Exchange Gemini Sued By CFTC

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is suing the crypto exchange Gemini for making false and misleading statements regarding a bitcoin futures contract product the exchange was pursuing in 2017.

The regulator is seeking disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, civil monetary penalties, registration and trading warnings, and an injunction against further Commodity Exchange Act violations. According to the CFTC, Gemini “certain statements and information conveyed or omitted by Gemini were false or misleading with respect to, among other things, facts relevant to understanding whether the proposed Bitcoin Futures Contract would be readily susceptible to manipulation.”

Based on a tweet thread from The Block’s Frank Chaparro, the crux of the issue is that Gemini “lied to regulators about giving market makers rebates, according to CFTC” – a tactic that Chaparro described as “[b]rutal.”

Notably, Gemini launched a BTC futures product that traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange in 2017, though Cboe was not mentioned in the CFTC’s press release.

The news comes on the same day that Gemini announced a 10% reduction in its workforce. In a blog post penned by Gemini founders (of Facebook lawsuit fame) Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the decision was painted as “difficult” but necessary for the coming “crypto winter.” There was no mention of the CFTC lawsuit in the blog.

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