From the erratic ups and downs in bitcoin and ethereum value, to the explosion in initial coin offerings, and the unstoppable demand for mining-ready GPUs, cryptocurrency has become an inescapable story. It’s also become increasingly difficult to make sense of — as the industry expands, new currencies sprout up, and companies form overnight. Check here for the complete coverage of bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, monero, Venezuela’s petro, cryptocurrencies at large, and the ways that ICOs and the underlying blockchain technology are helping shape a burgeoning industry and giving life to a new wave of startups and entrepreneurs.
Seven years and millions of dollars later, the Australian Securities Exchange has decided to scrap its plans to rebuild its trading platform with a blockchain-based network.
During a meeting about the move, ASX project director Tim Whitely said the exchange “will need to use a more conventional technology” for its project instead.
Just in time for Bitcoin 2023, the WSJ took a look at the state of play of crypto in Miami. Here’s what it found:
An NFT conference had fewer participants, relocated to smaller space. “Most of crypto was a pyramid scheme.” The residences that marketed themselves as accepting crypto no longer accept crypto after the fall of FTX. MiamiCoin is in the shitter. Miami’s venture fundraising is about 25 percent of what it was in last year’s first quarter. “This is not a free-flowing funding environment as it was before.”
The venture capital firm was known for hyping its portfolio. But in the era of tech skepticism and rising interest rates, is it still ahead of the curve?
The new feature, which will start rolling out “over the coming weeks starting in May 2023,” will let you use Venmo to send crypto to others. You can already buy, store, and sell cryptocurrency in the app.
[PayPal Newsroom]
Celsius promised to unbank its users, and boy did it ever. The now-bankrupt crypto lender’s court proceedings — as well as those of Voyager — are a circus.
Alah Shehadeh, who invested $80,000 on the Voyager platform, was thrown out of a key hearing in March after repeatedly interrupting the judge, lawyers and witnesses. At one point he shouted, “You are a terrible judge. You are robbing us. This is a crime.”
[Bloomberg.com]
The fine folks at Protos had a little talk with Binance’s AI bot and... listen, parting chumps from their money is a novel way to monetize AI.
The US government’s criminal case against the former product leader of OpenSea, Nate Chastain, kicks off this week. Chastain is accused of buying up NFTs that he knew would be featured on OpenSea’s homepage, then selling them shortly thereafter as their value spiked.
The question isn’t so much whether Chastain did this, it’s whether doing this is illegal. As a former SEC enforcement lawyer told Reuters, “Is it insider trading of anything?”
When presented with a $100 million sponsorship deal for FTX, Swift was apparently one of the only celebrities who questioned whether it was selling unregistered securities.
That’s according to an interview The Block did with Adam Moskowitz, a lawyer who’s suing over a dozen celebrities, including Larry David and Tom Brady, for promoting the fallen exchange. He says Swift never ended up going through with the deal.
Bittrex, one of the exchanges to allow trading in Dennis Rodman’s Potcoin crypto, has been charged by the SEC with operating an unregistered national securities exchange.
Why does the SEC think Bittrex was knowingly trading securities? According to the complaint (PDF), former CEO William Shihara said so to other co-founders in a 2017 message:
the problem is that its going to be seen by the SEC as a security. im meeting with these guys face to face to get specifics on how much they want to raise, who they are raising it from, and what they expect the after market to be. its a big enough opportunity that we might want to roll the dice on the sec investigation
It also alleges Bittrex spent the last few years trying to erase old social media messages about token ownership, price predictions, and interest.
Fans don’t seem interested, but that isn’t stopping some notable brands.
David Marcus left Facebook in 2021 after the company failed to launch the cryptocurrency project he oversaw. Now he’s back with a startup called Lightspark that wants to make it easy for developers to facilitate payments through the Lighting Network, a layer-two protocol for enabling fast transactions with fractions of Bitcoins.
It’s interesting to see someone of Marcus’s stature (he was the president of PayPal before joining Facebook) launching a crypto company right now, especially one that is focused exclusively on Bitcoin. I’ll have more from my interview with him in Thursday’s edition of Command Line —you can subscribe at the link below to get it in your inbox — and a future episode of Decoder.
[The Verge]
Crypto exchange Gemini has failed to raise money, so the twin sea gods who founded the exchange have dipped into their store of shipwreck treasure to loan the company $100 million.
[Bloomberg.com]
Andy Baio discovered it’s there while trying to fix his printer. If you have a Mac, you can see for yourself. Open Terminal, then type (in a single line):
open /System/Library/Image Capture/
Devices/VirtualScanner.app/
Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
A few other people spotted this before Baio, but there’s no real explanation, he writes. If you’re the person responsible, please email me, you little scamp! I’d love to know how you managed to keep this secret so long.
Signature, Bank, closed by regulators almost a month ago, was an important ramp for controversial stablecoin firm Tether, Bloomberg reports. Its Signet payments platform was part of how Tether’s clientele could send dollars to Capital Union Bank.
The CTO of Tether said that the stablecoin “doesn’t have any exposure” to Signature, but the setup was still in place when Signature was shuttered.
[Bloomberg.com]
Last week, Elon Musk’s lawyers asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit that claims he’s “engaged in a Crypto Pyramid Scheme” around Dogecoin, citing his tweets as evidence, according to Reuters. Today, Twitter’s bird logo was swapped out for a doge one on the web.
This is absolutely going to end up in a court document, right?
There’s a new licensing framework there, and the US appears to be less crypto-friendly in 2023 than it was in 2021 or 2022.
There are still questions — how much registration will cost, among other things — but it sure seems like a lot of the crypto world is up for grabs right now.
Sure, maybe Elon Musk could take over FTX’s vacant office space in Miami, but the edit history on the mayor’s tweet exposes this one as a joke.
Another funny joke from Mayor Francis Suarez is the MiamiCoin cryptocurrency — when we checked in last year, it had lost 88 percent of its value and traded for $0.0044. Now things have gotten so bad that the OkCoin exchange has suspended trading there altogether.
Uncle Sam sold off $216 million this month. Four more sales coming this year!
Even worse than last year, writes Fais Khan. One thing that was boosting Coinbase’s returns? Luna, which oopsies doopsie, failed.
But surely Coinbase is more transparent now? Ahahaha, nope: “Coinbase didn’t like me poking around, so they stopped blogging about new coins... Their asset pages, which used to note if CV was involved, no longer appear to show any disclosure.” Stay safu out there!
[startupsandecon.substack.com]
After the rapid collapse of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature, the crypto world has needed to find new bankers. Regional bankers such as Fifth Third and Customers Bancorp are stepping up. Big banks like JP Morgan Chase can afford to be choosy:
Banks willing to service crypto firms have been inundated with applications during the past two weeks, crypto executives and bankers said. After the collapse of Signature, one crypto banker said he enabled his phone’s “do not disturb” mode to get some sleep. He received so many texts in rapid succession that the phone overrode the setting.
Folding Ideas, the folks behind the classic “Line Goes Up” video about NFTs (and generally just a very good YouTube channel), just put up a long and spicy take on the metaverse in general, Decentraland in particular, and especially the people who spend their time and energy promoting them both. It’s a long watch, but it’s a good one. It’ll make you feel things.
CTO Michael Kagen doesn’t mince words when it comes to crypto. The industry “bought a lot of [Nvidia’s hardware], and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society,” he tells The Guardian, “AI does.”
Big talk considering Nvidia was making millions selling cards to crypto miners not long ago.
That’s right, you can use them to serve complaints now. Congratulations to the lawyers!
They just didn’t want to listen:
Some of the warnings were serious: sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy, had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates, refused to implement standard business practices, and had been caught lying during his first months running Alameda, a crypto firm that was seeded by EA investors, staffed by EAs, and dedicating to making money that could be donated to EA causes.
