📢 FTX and BlockFi's Bankruptcy Agent Compromised

In today's edition: 🎙️ New episode on Tornado Cash, 🤔 Base's 6-year plan, 📊 Friend.tech's MEV bot challenge, 🚨 Prime Trust's $8 million loss, and more!

August 25, 2023

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What’s Poppin’?

The platform disclosed that “non-sensitive” customer data of certain claimants had been compromised in a cybersecurity incident.

Coinbase’s Base and Optimism have agreed on a transaction fee split and token grants as part of their long-term collaboration.

An estimated 125 MEV bots sniped 21,000 profiles from the platform over the last two weeks.

The parent company of crypto custodian Prime Trust disclosed that its prior management lost millions of dollars’ worth of customer funds and Treasury funds investing in the UST stablecoin.

On the Pod…

On Wednesday, the U.S. Government indicted Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Roman Semenov for three counts of conspiracy involving a staggeringly large number: $1 billion in criminal proceeds. The U.S. Department of Justice attached North Korean hackers to a large portion of this sum, alleging that Tornado’s privacy tech enabled nefarious deeds.

Amanda Tuminelli, chief legal officer of the DeFi Education Fund, joins the show to assess whether the U.S. Government got it right or is merely misguided in its understanding of how blockchain technology works.

Should Tornado Cash devs be held to account for the criminal use of their software?

This week, Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak talks about the ambitious goals of Base, the new Optimism–based blockchain from the publicly traded crypto giant. With the viral success of Base-based Friend.Tech, Jesse discusses the Base team’s ambitious goals to onboard “a million builders, a billion users.” Is this the long-heralded path to scaling Ethereum?

Daily Bits…✍️✍️✍️

  • 🚨 Magnate Finance, a lending project on Ethereum Layer 2 network Base, seemingly executed a 'rug pull' exit scam, making off with an estimated $6.4 million.

  • 💰 ARK Invest and 21Shares jointly applied to launch two ETFs involving ether and bitcoin futures, focusing on cash-settled futures contracts rather than direct investment in the cryptocurrencies.

  • 🇨🇦 Coinbase is engaging with Canada's major banks to garner support for the crypto ecosystem, following the U.S.-based exchange's recent expansion into Canada amid domestic regulatory challenges.

  • 💳 Mastercard and Binance are ending their crypto card programs in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Bahrain on Sept. 22.

  • 🥞 PancakeSwap, the second-largest decentralized exchange protocol, expanded to the Consensys-powered Ethereum Layer 2 scaling network, Linea.

  • 🔄 Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch Network has gone live on Coinbase's Base network.

Today in Crypto Adoption...

  • 💵 Num Finance introduced nCOP, an overcollateralized stablecoin pegged to the Colombian Peso on Polygon, targeting tokenized remittances and enabling real-time settlements and efficient cash management at a 1:1 exchange ratio.

The $$$ Corner…

  • 💼 Vessel Capital, a web3 venture fund, unveiled a $55 million fund to invest in web3 infrastructure and applications, with potential for the capital pool to be increased over a five-year deployment period.

What Do You Meme?

Learn 🤓

Blockchain developers have long sought a solution to the confounding ‘oracle problem.’ Now functioning oracles abound—but how do they work?

📈 Your Market Update 📉

  • BTC is down 1.5%, trading at $26,077

  • ETH is down 1.1%, trading at $1,652

  • BTC dominance: 46.49%

  • Crypto market cap: $1.09 trillion

*All data as of today, 7:58 am ET

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