March 4, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently investigating 50 crypto firms.

• An IRS official said to “expect more” John Doe summons’ to seek information from crypto exchanges.

• Terra’s Anchor Protocol token ANC is rallying.

• MetaMask and Infura are now blocking “certain areas” from using their services due to “legal compliance.”

• OpenSea users from Iran are claiming that the marketplace has closed their accounts without notice.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Lugano, a city in Switzerland, will essentially make bitcoin and USDT legal tender.

• Brazil selected nine firms to help it develop a CBDC.

The $$$ Corner…

• a16z announced a $70 million investment into staking protocol Lido Finance.

• Sherlock, a DeFi security firm, is set to raise $100 million in a token sale.

• ArDrive raised $17.2 million to make a decentralized alternative to Arweave’s gateway.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Ukraine Cancels Its Airdrop

Ukraine officially canceled plans to airdrop tokens to users who had previously donated to the official Ukrainian crypto addresses yesterday. The country, which is currently dealing with a devastating invasion from Russia, says it plans to issue NFTs instead (though it is unclear whether these will go to previous donors or be sold on the open market).

The news coincided with Ukraine officially topping $50 million in crypto donations across 105,000 addresses and multiple web3 sources, including UkraineDAO and Patreon.

According to a query on Dune Analytics, the Ukrainian government specifically received over $25 million in ETH – which is the most likely blockchain Ukraine would have airdropped on. Interestingly, over $15 million in ETH came after the March 2nd announcement of the airdrop in what appeared to be an influx of airdrop farmers (who are now quite disappointed).

While the official Ukraine airdrop was canceled, UkraineDAO, which helped raise $6.5 million in ETH via an NFT sale for the Ukrainian NGO group Come Back Alive, successfully airdropped its token, $LOVE, to every address that helped contribute to its raise. (According to Elliptic, at $6.5 million, the UkraineDAO Ukrainian Flag NFT sale is the 10th most expensive NFT sale ever.)

Additionally, a scam token, dubbed WORLD, made the rounds early Thursday morning and was picked up by several reputablenews outlets as the actual Ukraine airdrop, leading to hundreds of thousands in trading volume on Uniswap.

Recommended Reads

1. Nicholas Platias, a founder of Terra, on why Bitcoin was chosen to backstop UST:

2. BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes on crypto x war:

3. Paradigm’s Casey Caruso on investing in crypto

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