February 23, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• The former owner of a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT is suingOpenSea for $1 million after his ape was sold for .01 ETH due to a bug on the NFT marketplace.

• Bitcoin tied to the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” has been moved despite attempts by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to freeze the funds, with some of the BTC ending up at Coinbase and Crypto.com (which, disclosure, is a sponsor).

• Canadian regulators flagged tweets from Kraken and Coinbase CEOs urging customers to consider self-custodial wallets.

• Huobi has plans to return to the US market as an asset manager.

• Crypto lender Celsius appointed a new CFO after his predecessor’s arrest.

• The IMF warned that Nigeria’s CBDC could pose money laundering risks.

• DAO treasuries fell $3.1 billion over the last month.

• If you didn’t make it to EthDenver, here are eight things you missed.

• Tether cut down on commercial paper and cash holdings in favor of money market funds and treasury bills according to its latest reserves attestation.

• Coinbase is adding support for Ledger hardware wallets.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Tourism in El Salvador has increased 30% since its first BTC purchase.

• Lawmakers in Panama discussed two crypto-focused bills yesterday.

The $$$ Corner…

• Foxbit, a Brazilian crypto exchange, raised $21 million in a Series A.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

The 4th Largest Stablecoin Is a HODLer

Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), the nonprofit organization helping to develop UST, announced a $1 billion raise led by Jump Crypto, Three Arrows Capital, along with participation from others.

The $1 billion raise was created via a private token sale of LUNA, the native token of the Terra network. Buyers will be required to lock up their LUNA during a four-year vesting period. At current prices, LUNA is the 9th largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of just over $20 billion.

Luna Foundation Guard plans to use the new funds to purchase bitcoin to establish a BTC-denominated Forex Reserve for Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST. Pegged to the US dollar price, UST currently holds a market capitalization of $12 billion (or ~7% of the total stablecoin supply in crypto). The $1 billion Forex Reserve denominated in Bitcoin is designed to ensure that the price of UST stays pegged to the dollar – even in extreme market conditions where the price of LUNA, which helps maintain the UST peg via arbitrage, may fail to do so.

“One common criticism of algorithmic stablecoins is their reflexive nature and the hypothetical risk of a “bank run” scenario where demand to sell the stable outstrips supply in a way that causes compounding price decreases in both native tokens,” explained the team. “Although the widespread adoption of $UST as a consistently stable asset through market volatility should already refute this, a decentralized Reserve can provide an additional avenue to maintain the peg in contractionary cycles that reduces the reflexivity of the system.”

And, according to LFG, Bitcoin is an ideal asset to use for its UST Forex Reserve. “The $UST Forex Reserve is an LFG initiative to provide a further layer of support for the $UST peg using assets that are considered less correlated to the Terra ecosystem, like Bitcoin.”

In essence, the Forex Reserve is being put into place to help provide a second line of defense to UST’s peg to the dollar outside of LUNA.

Notably, this will not be the last time LFG raises funds for LUNA reserves. “LFG has plans to scale reserve to larger numbers,” wrote Terra founder Do Kwon on Twitter.

Recommended Reads

1. In the course of writing my book, my sources and I believe we uncovered the identity of Ethereum’s 2016 DAO hacker.:

2. Dr. Julian Hosp, who worked with Toby Hoenisch, the alleged DAO attacker, released additional facts on Toby’s involvement with the DAO:

3. Galois Capital on the state of the crypto market:

On The Pod…

Exclusive: Crypto’s Biggest Whodunnit: Who Was Behind the 2016 DAO Attack on Ethereum?

While researching for my book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, I found evidence that I believe resolves the biggest whodunnit in crypto: who hacked The DAO? This podcast is coming out in conjunction with an article in Forbes revealing the prime suspect’s identity.

Part 1: Who Attacked the DAO? Here’s the Evidence

To document the process of finding the alleged attacker, I wrote an article for Forbes, with which I opened the podcast. In it, I reveal

• who, evidence indicates, attacked the DAO

• how my sources and I uncovered this person’s identity

• how a previously undisclosed technical capability by Chainalysis helped my sources and I identify the alleged hacker

Part 2: Contextualizing the DAO Attack

Forbes’s Steven Ehrlich comes onto the pod to interview me about finding the DAO attacker. Topics

• what is The DAO, and why is it important?

• who are the key players in The DAO’s story

• how the attacker pulled off the hack

• what legal questions surrounded the hack

• why finding the attacker is important

• the legal implications of identifying the attacker

• what Laura’s interactions have been with the suspect

• what the future of DAOs may hold

Book Update

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