Gary, Won’t You Answer? 😓

In today's edition: 👴 SEC Chair is questioned in Congress, 🤔 could FTX reboot?, 💻 OGs are getting drained, and more!

April 19, 2023

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On the Pod…

What’s Poppin’?

by Samyuktha Sriram

U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry pressed SEC Chair Gary Gensler to give a definitive answer about his stance on Ethereum.

A San Francisco-based venture capital firm is reportedly looking to raise capital towards restarting bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.

The source of an exploit that has drained over 5,000 ETH from crypto wallets is still yet to be identified.

The pace of staked ETH withdrawals has slowed down for the first time since Shanghai was activated last week.

Daily Bits…✍️✍️✍️

  • A US judge denied Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon's request to block the SEC from accessing documents related to the company's activities in Singapore, allowing the agency to obtain records from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

  • Donald Trump announced the release of a second series of his NFT collection, Trump Digital Trading Cards, on his social network Truth Social.

  • The hacker who stole nearly $9 million from Safemoon's liquidity pool last month agreed to return 80% of the funds, totaling $7.1 million, while keeping 20% as a bug bounty.

  • Tech giant Intel ceased production of its bitcoin mining chip series, the Blockscale 1000 Series ASIC, as the company focuses on prioritizing investments in IDM 2.0.

  • Short-seller Spruce Point Capital Management warned that Nuvei's ties to the troubled FTX platform could result in a 35% to 50% long-term downside risk for the Canadian fintech firm's shares, following the announcement of Ryan Reynolds' investment in the company.

  • Rocket Pool introduced its Atlas upgrade, enabling node operators to access staking rewards instantly and reducing the barrier to creating an Ethereum validator by allowing the use of just eight ether and some RPL tokens to form a minipool.

  • A tweet from an engineer at Andreessen Horowitz's featuring an orange circle and the words "coming soon" prompted speculation of the firm launching its own Optimism-based layer 2 blockchain, causing the Optimism blockchain's native token, OP, to rally.

  • Zipmex, a crypto exchange facing financial difficulties, requested a two-month extension to its moratorium agreement from a Singapore court after a potential investor, reportedly Thai investment firm V Ventures, failed to make scheduled payments for a takeover deal.

  • Helium, a decentralized wireless project, started its migration to the Solana blockchain, aiming to improve speed and reduce operational costs.

Today in Crypto Adoption...

  • Starbucks launched "The Starbucks First Store Collection," its second NFT collection on the Polygon network, featuring art inspired by the company's first store.

The $$$ Corner…

  • Bitcoin financial services firm Unchained Capital raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from NYDIG, to expand its client base and product offerings.

What Do You Meme?

Learn 🤓

What Is Proto-Danksharding?

Proto-danksharding is a much-ballyhooed proposal for Ethereum that—the theory goes—will lay the groundwork for a speedier network.

📈 Your Market Update 📉

  • BTC is down 2.1%, trading at $29,277

  • ETH is down 6%, trading at $1,976

  • BTC dominance: 44.41%

  • Crypto market cap: $1.28 trillion

*All data as of today, 7 am ET

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