So It Was a Conspiracy Theory? 🥸

In today's edition: 🎙️ New episode with Jim Bianco, 🎈 Arbitrum's airdrop, 🙊 SBF was not wanted?, and more!

March 17, 2023

From our sponsor

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?

New Show Today!

Jim Bianco, president and macro strategist at Bianco Research, explains what’s causing the recent cascade of bank failures. Yield seekers taking their money elsewhere are putting banks under strain, he says. That said, the Signature Bank takeover by New York regulators is “a little fishy,” Bianco says. He adds that DeFi has been holding up strong, providing an “alternative to this unstable system that we have right now.”

What’s Poppin’?

The FDIC claims it did not stipulate crypto divestment as a requirement to acquire Signature, but not everyone is convinced.

Sam Bankman-Fried turned down a buyout from Alameda’s early management team after they demanded he step down as CEO.​​

Arbitrum will officially transition to “self-executing decentralized governance” with its ARB token airdrop next week.

The Euler Finance hacker has now sent the stolen crypto to a coin mixer, but also returned funds to a person claiming to be a victim of their actions.

📖 Unchained Guides

You probably know what Etherscan is, but you may not know how to use it. Let's take you under the hood to see how Ethereum works.

Want to Work With Unchained? 💻

We're looking for an engineer to help us build a dashboard to track metrics across various social platforms. If you have experience using the Twitter/YouTube/Facebook APIs and know how to make a user-friendly dashboard, please reach out to us! This is a short-term project, and the exact dates are flexible.

Daily Bits…✍️✍️✍️

  • Banking giant State Street has terminated its licensing agreement with crypto custody firm Copper, as both companies plan to independently develop their digital strategies.

  • A lawsuit claims social media influencers, including Erika Kullberg, Ben Armstrong, and Kevin Paffrath, promoted FTX without disclosing compensation.

  • Bankruptcy filings reveal that Genesis seeks a May 22 deadline for creditors to submit their claims and a June 27 auction date.

  • Following Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, NFT trading activity dropped significantly, with only 12,000 active traders on the day after the collapse and a 51% decline in trading volume since early March.

  • BlockSec, a smart contract audit firm, thwarted a hacker's attempt to steal 2,900 ether ($5 million) from NFT lending project Paraspace, by executing a white hat attack to secure the assets and notifying Paraspace of their return.

  • Marathon Digital reported a 58% decline in Q4 revenue to $28.4 million, with full-year revenue for 2022 dropping 26% to $117.8 million, as the company faced a net loss of $686.7 million due to impairment charges and declines in the carrying value of mining rigs and digital assets.

  • 21Shares, a Swiss crypto ETP provider, is closing six of its products due to low demand, despite experiencing its second-best January in terms of net new assets since its 2018 inception.

  • Worldcoin, the identity-centric crypto project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, partnered with contract manufacturer Jabil to scale up production of its eye-scanning orbs, enabling a monthly output of 400 orbs.

  • LinksDAO won the bid to acquire Spey Bay Golf Club in Scotland, funded through millions of dollars raised from selling NFT-based membership cards.

What Do You Meme?

📈 Your Market Update 📉

  • BTC is up 5.49%, trading at $26,379

  • ETH is up 3.89%, trading at $1,742

  • BTC dominance: 45.01%

  • Crypto market cap: $1.13 trillion

*All data as of today, 6 am ET

Recommended Reads

  1. CoinDesk: U.S. Banking Collapse Doesn't Necessarily Make Crypto Trustworthy 

  2. Arthur Hayes: Kaiseki

  3. Vitalik Buterin on choosing guardians:

⛓️ 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.

If You Like What You Read: