July 20, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

• SEC Chair Gary Gensler told Bloomberg TV that he sees a lot of “noncompliance” in the crypto industry.
• The US Department of Justice has seized $500k in ransom payments and crypto from hackers backed by North Korea.
• A new ERC standard looks to lower costs for NFT creation.
• THORChain began deprecating ERC-20 and BEP-2 RUNE tokens in favor of a THORChain native token.
• sony.eth was purchased for $72,000 in ETH yesterday.
• Audius is now allowing users to tip creators in AUDIO tokens.
• Sales from the first week of GameStop’s NFT marketplace have already eclipsed the total volume of Coinbase’s NFT marketplace.
• Skybridge Capital halted redemptions from a fund exposed to FTX and other crypto investment vehicles.
• Metaverse company MetaMundo launched a 3D NFT marketplace yesterday.
• DeFi Saver launched automated trustless liquidation protection on Aave’s Optimism deployment.
• BitGo will support the NEAR Foundation via its qualified custody services.
• Crypto miners appeared to offload over $300 million in BTC in a single 24-hour period last week – the highest amount since January 2021.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• $13 trillion asset manager BNP Paribas is reportedly getting into crypto custody via a partnership with digital asset firm Metaco.
• Dubai believes its metaverse strategy will add $4 billion to its economy by 2027.
• The SEC wants to hire up to 125 more staffers to boost its crypto regulation efforts, among other things.

The $$$ Corner…

• Sam Bankman-Fried invested roughly $1 billion in the crypto industry over a two week period in June.
• Halborn, a blockchain security firm, raised $90 million in a Series A funding round.
• Zebedee, a Bitcoin gaming startup, raised $35 million in a Series B funding round.
• XLD Finance, a DeFi infrastructure firm, raised $13 million in a pre-Series A funding round.
• A proposal on Lido Finance would sell 2% of all LDO tokens to pay for company expenses over two years, with Dragonfly Capital offering to purchase $10 million (or 50%) of the tokens.
• An indirect ~17% stake of the crypto exchange Deribit worth up to $500 million may prove difficult to liquidate in the Three Arrows Capital bankruptcy.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

NFT Accounts on High Alert

High-profile NFT influencer @Zeneca_33 had his account hacked yesterday via a phishing attack linking to a fake airdrop of 333 “Zen Academy Founders Pass[es].”

Luckily the hack was quickly noticed, with Twitter stepping in by locking down Zeneca’s account and deleting the tweets that held links in them.

The news comes shortly on the heels of a high-profile warning from Yuga Labs, the team behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse. On Monday, they issued a statement about “a persistent threat group” supposedly targeting NFT groups. According to Yuga, the group “may soon be launching a coordinated attack” against multiple NFT communities using hacked social media accounts.

Zeneca was not the only NFT group to be hurt this week. On Sunday, Premint, an NFT registration platform, was also exploited by hackers for roughly $400,000. According to Decrypt, the hackers compromised the company’s website with a malicious pop-up button that prompted users to verify their wallet ownership when, in fact, they were transferring away high-profile NFTs like BAYC.

Recommended Reads

1) Coin Metrics on the Ethereum pre-sale

2) Joel John on a DeFi protocol with millions in volume – but no token

3) Adrian Hetman on the perils of cross-chain bridging

On The Pod…

Nelson Rauda, Salvadoran journalist for El Faro, comes to talk about the impact of Bitcoin in El Salvador, the needs of Salvadoran people, Bitcoin City and the Bitcoin Bond, and much more. Show highlights:

• Nelson’s story and how he began covering BTC
• what kind of politician and president Nayib Bukele was before BTC
• what the financial reality was for Salvadoran people before the implementation of BTC
• the reasons for the high rates of unbanked people in El Salvador
• how Bukele changed the monetary policy with what Rauda says was very little discussion
• why Rauda believes the BTC law is not meant for Salvadorans, but instead is a PR stunt
• how people reacted after the announcement of BTC as legal tender, and how it resembled the dollarization of the economy in 2001
• how Nelson did not even understand BTC at the moment of the announcement and how he says there was not an effort from the government to educate the population
• whether BTC was successful in attracting investments and tourism, and how there’s no hard data about it
• why Nelson believes Bukele was trying to hide the scandals when he adopted BTC
• whether BTC has been used as a PR stunt
• why bitcoiners are enthusiastic about an authoritarian government adopting BTC as legal tender
• how Bukele might be undermining his own authority by adopting BTC, a type of money that is not controlled by a state
• whether the Chivo wallet is a surveillance tool
• why Nelson believes BTC does not represent a solution for the needs of average Salvadoran people
• whether the $30 dollar initial gift to download the BTC wallet was seen as just another subsidy
• the status of Bitcoin City and how Nelson believes it represents the most spectacular PR stunt from Bukele’s administration
• how the expensive prices of electricity in El Salvador make the country not the best place for mining
• the significance of Bitcoin Beach
• what the BTC bond is, what Bukele tried to achieve with it, and why it has been postponed
• whether El Salvador will default on its debt and what the impact of the BTC price has on the national finances and on how Salvadorans perceive Bitcoin
• how Nelson believes people in El Salvador do not have political freedom and how it contradicts the narrative of financial freedom that BTC aims to provide
• what Nelson thinks about Bitcoin and whether governments should adopt it as legal tender

Book Update

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