NYDFS to Paxos: ❌ BUSD

In today's edition: 💪 Coinbase is ready to fight for staking, 🤔 Genesis unveils plans, ❌ Paxos and BUSD, and more!

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On the Pod…

What’s Poppin’?

If it comes to it, Coinbase plans to go head on with the SEC in court to defend its crypto staking services.

Genesis has officially filed a restructuring plan, which involves selling itself off to help DCG make creditors fully or partially whole.

Venture capital giant a16z’s efforts to block Uniswap’s deployment on BNB using the Wormhole bridge proved unsuccessful.

Rep. Bill Huizenga has asked SEC Chair Gary Gensler to “come in and talk” to Congress about his interactions with executives from FTX.

On Unchained Premium

Unleashing the Potential of AI and Blockchain With Alethea’s Arif Khan

Laura talks with Arif Kahn, CEO and founder of Alethea AI, the company behind Character GPT, a generative AI system that can create interactive AI Characters from a description in natural language.

In Other News…✍️✍️✍️

  • Paxos, the issuer of the Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoin, will discontinue the minting of new tokens following orders from the New York Department of Financial Services.

  • The Ethereum development community set Feb. 28 as the target date to implement the Sepolia test network (testnet) through the Shanghai upgrade, which will enable the withdrawal of staked ether (ETH).

  • Payments giant PayPal has temporarily suspended its efforts toward launching its own stablecoin in the market after the probe on Paxos.

  • Crypto lending platform Nexo will discontinue its Earn Interest Product for all U.S. clients, including citizens and residents, effective April 1st.

  • A New York judge dismissed an effort by iFinex and its affiliated firms, comprising of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and stablecoin issuer Tether, to block CoinDesk's request for details regarding the financial reserves backing USDT.

  • Tether engaged the services of bond trading house Cantor Fitzgerald to oversee $39 billion of its $69 billion in assets backing the Tether stablecoin, which includes bonds, cash, and loans.

  • Surojit Chatterjee, former chief product officer of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN), has taken up a new position as an executive in residence at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

  • The finance minister of India, Nirmala Sitharaman said that the G20 is investigating the possibility of collaborating on cryptocurrency regulation.

Today in Crypto Adoption...

  • Reddit's Collectible Avatars project distributed millions of NFTs to users and is set to reach another milestone with its NFL partnership for free Super Bowl NFTs, with over 1.3 million avatars already minted.

  • The Centre Pompidou, a renowned art museum in Paris, is showcasing a new exhibition that delves into the relationship between art and blockchain technology, featuring NFT projects such as CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs, among works by a dozen digital artists.

The $$$ Corner…

  • C3, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, secured $6 million in a seed funding round led by Two Sigma Ventures.

What Do You Meme

📈 Your Market Update 📉

  • BTC is down .91%, trading at $21,641

  • ETH is down 2.03%, trading at $1,488

  • BTC dominance: 40.26%

  • Crypto market cap: $1.04 trillion

*All data as of today, 5 am ET

Recommended Reads

  1. Saneel Sreeni on the big picture of crypto:

  2. Rekt Fencer on RWA protocols:

  3. Ram Ahluwalia on the BUSD and Paxos situation: 

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