Did Binance Pull an FTX? 🥶

In today's edition: 🤜 Coinbase fights back, ⌛ Ledger delays its service, 🤖 Solana & ChatGPT, and more!

May 24, 2023

What’s Poppin’?

by Samyuktha Sriram

Binance customer funds flowed into an account at Silvergate Bank and were mixed with company revenues, according to an investigative report from Reuters.

Coinbase has challenged the SEC’s refusal to respond to its petition for crypto rulemaking, arguing that the mandamus is the “tailor-made remedy for the extraordinary facts presented here.”

by Juan Aranovich

In the latest episode of Unchained, Dan Berkovitz, a former CFTC commissioner, made a statement that appeared to be a contradiction. 

by Samyuktha Sriram

Ledger plans to delay releasing its private key recovery feature after it received widespread criticism from industry proponents.

The artificial intelligence implementation will allow users to interact with the Layer 1 network from ChatGPT.

On the Pod…

Show highlights:

  • how an asset can be both a commodity and a security

  • whether The Merge may have changed regulators’ views on the classification of ETH

  • what would happen if any regulator, be it the CFTC or SEC, determined that ETH is a security

  • how and whether DeFi applications should be regulated

  • the implications of the SEC’s proposal to change the definition of an exchange

  • how new technologies were integrated with the regulatory system in the past and how that differs from the current approach of the SEC

  • the problems of trying to regulate a technology that’s changing so fast

Daily Bits…✍️✍️✍️

  • 🗂️ As part of the investigation into Sam Bankman-Fried, federal prosecutors amassed over six million pages of evidence, a record amount for a white-collar securities fraud case.

  • 🇰🇵 The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned several cryptocurrency wallets supposedly linked to the North Korean government, claiming they contained Bitcoin, Ether, and stablecoins, and were hosted on Binance.

  • ⛏️ Upstream Data, a Canadian natural gas bitcoin miner, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against competitor Crusoe Energy, demanding cessation of the alleged intellectual property violation and damages.

  • 🇪🇺 Leaked documents suggest that the European Commission is planning to facilitate commercial banks in holding stablecoins and tokenized assets, moderating ongoing discussions in the European Parliament for stricter regulations and capital requirements for crypto holdings in banks.

  • 🇨🇳 Bitcoin and Tether are being used as payment for chemicals used in fentanyl production by Chinese businesses, as reported by blockchain analytics firm, Elliptic.

  • 💼💱 Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, transferred MakerDAO tokens worth $4.3 million to Binance, a move that often signals an impending sale.

  • 📈 The total supply of Tether's USDT stablecoin climbed to $83.5 billion, approaching its previous record of $84.1 billion set last year.

Today in Crypto Adoption...

  • 🌳 Cabin, a digital-native coliving initiative, announced its intention to create the first "network city," a worldwide association of self-governed neighborhoods open to "citizens" holding NFTs, aimed at making living more affordable and accessible.

  • ⛓️ After rolling out its alpha mainnet earlier this month, Vega Protocol, a Layer 1 blockchain focusing on derivatives trading, activated its inaugural on-chain markets.

The $$$ Corner…

  • 🔬 LabDAO, a project aiming at revolutionizing drug discovery with open-source methods, garnered $3.6 million in a funding round, and simultaneously introduced its PLEX software platform.

  • 💰 Multicoin Capital led a $2.3 million seed funding round for FastLane Labs, an entity providing maximal extractable value (MEV) protocol for the Polygon blockchain.

  • 🌎 Num Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, secured $1.5 million in a funding round and plans to introduce stablecoins linked to Latin American and Middle Eastern currencies.

On Unchained Premium 💎

In this Premium interview, Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize, shares his insights on the future of asset tokenization and its potential to broaden access to various asset classes.

Unchained Daily is brought to you by ICON.

Bringing next-gen interoperability to multiple cross-chain protocols.

What are ICON's BTP and xCall service?

What Do You Meme?

Guides 📖 🤓

The emergence of the meme economy has turned popular internet memes into tradable assets.

📈 Your Market Update 📉

  • BTC is down 2.1%, trading at $26,762

  • ETH is down 2.2%, trading at $1,815

  • BTC dominance: 44.4%

  • Crypto market cap: $1.17 trillion

*All data as of today, 6:50 am ET

Recommended Reads

⛓️ Join Unchained Premium to get access to:

  • 🎙️ Behind-the-scenes interviews, in which I talk with crypto experts and entrepreneurs to learn all about the latest developments in the industry.

  • 💬 A subscriber-only Telegram group, where you can talk with the other members of the Unchained community, build a network in crypto, and talk directly with me and the Unchained team!

  • 📰 Transcripts of all the shows, for subscribers only.

Safeguard your crypto accounts and communications with Proton Mail. Join 100M+ people who secure their emails with end-to-end encryption and advanced tracking and phishing protections.

If You Like What You Read: