🧨 The Rollercoaster Weekend 🎢

In today's edition: 🎤 New episode of The Chopping Block with Arthur Hayes, 💣chaos everywhere: Signature, Silicon Valley, USDC, Coinbase, and more!

March 13, 2023

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On the Pod…

BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes, fresh out of home confinement after settling charges with the U.S. government, joins “The Chopping Block” with Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner, and Tarun Chitra.

The early crypto pioneer pulls no punches in his assessment of SBF, TradFi’s failings, and how crypto traders lost the plot in trusting CeFi middlemen.

Elliott Stein, senior litigation analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, shares his insights from a court hearing this week on the SEC’s rejection of Grayscale’s bid to convert GBTC into a spot bitcoin ETF. Stein says federal appellate court judges seemed skeptical of the SEC’s arguments for why bitcoin futures ETFs are OK while bitcoin spot ETFs aren’t. Who’s likely to win the case and what does it mean for the crypto industry as a whole?

What’s Poppin’?

U.S. regulators have shut down Signature Bank, saying that all depositors will have full access to their deposits.

Major crypto exchange Coinbase said it expects to recover the entirety of its $240 million cash balance at Signature.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said the firm plans to onboard a new transaction banking partner for USDC settlements potentially as soon as tomorrow.

DeFi giant MakerDAO will enact a series of changes to its protocol parameters on Monday to reinforce DAI’s peg.

The Fall of SVB: What Happened and How It Affects Crypto

Everyone’s talking about USDC now, but Tether kept the peg and is still the largest stablecoin in the industry.

In Other News…✍️✍️✍️

  • Regulators are in a rush to liquidate assets of the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank, with the aim of making uninsured deposits available for withdrawal today, potentially yielding between 30% to 50% of the total.

  • As per a bankruptcy document, BlockFi could be violating the United States bankruptcy law since it has $227 million worth of "unprotected" funds in Silicon Valley Bank.

  • Euler Finance, a DeFi lending protocol, suffered a $185 million exploit. 

  • Blockchain.com applied to dissolve its asset management subsidiary in the UK and remove it from the register, signaling the winding down of the division which was launched in April last year.

  • Brevan Howard, a large asset management firm with over $30 billion in assets, is acquiring control of the "Liquid Opportunities" hedge fund from crypto investment company Dragonfly.

  • In the event that a digital euro is classified as legal tender, merchants operating in the Eurozone may be required to accept it as a form of payment.

  • Binance announced plans to convert $1 billion worth of Binance USD (BUSD) into different tokens such as bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), and BNB coin (BNB).

What Do You Meme?

📈 Your Market Update 📉

  • BTC is up 8.41%, trading at $21,961

  • ETH is up 7.93%, trading at $1,560

  • BTC dominance: 41.03%

  • Crypto market cap: $1.03 trillion

*All data as of today, 6 am ET

Recommended Reads

  1. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine on Silicon Valley Bank 

  2. Atif Main on interest rate risk at the macro level:

  3. francesco on risks of centralized collateralization in decentralized stablecoins:

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