WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Dec 2

Welcome back to this week's edition of our WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter!

Happy December! We’ve almost made it through another year of crazy crypto happenings. These past two week were especially interesting. We didn’t write last week because we were already sending so many emails, so we’ll cover a little extra this week to get you all caught up.

Binance’s CZ Pleads Guilty

We’re sure you’ve heard by now that Binance was charged in the US in June for offering unregistered securities and commingling customer funds. The (ex)CEO, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, was named specifically. The Department of Justice also charged him with breaking US sanctions and encouraging money-laundering. Last week, CZ stepped down from his position as CEO as part of the consequences of pleading guilty. He needs to personally pay a $50M fine, and Binance will pay a $4.3B fine. Yes, you read that right, 4.3 BILLION. The outcome of this is uncertain. You can see an update on the other important court cases from 2023 here. And you can read the new CEO’s first blog post here.

Learn more here.

Blast Got Blasted

The new layer 2 (or perhaps multisig, depending who you ask) almost reached the same amount of total value locked (~$650M) as the entire Solana network (~$680M) this week. (Having said that, Solana is having a surge of activity too.) Despite this obviously huge interest, Blast is getting in a lot of trouble because it launched a one-way bridge without having many security assurances, doesn’t have a working product OR a testnet, and users have no way to withdraw their funds (and won’t for at least three months). People are attracted for the purportedly large staking rewards, including “Blast Points”, Lido ETH staking rewards, and MakerDAO stablecoin yields. To say this is risky is an understatement, so if you decide to invest, please remember to only invest what you can afford to lose. There is no guarantee that you will actually be able to gain access to all this, ever.

Learn more here.

Ethereum and Bitcoin are NEARly Beaten

…get it? Okay, let me help. The NEAR protocol, it’s own L1, has overtaken Bitcoin and Ethereum daily transaction volume (~1.7M) and active addresses (~830k). This is mostly due to two dApps: Kaikanow (a shopping app) and Sweatcoin (fitness, “walk-to-earn” app), that are taking off. The value of the $NEAR coin has notably NOT kept up with ETH or BTC though, only gaining 42% so far this year compared to 73% and 130% respectively. It’s pretty cool to see another L1 succeeding.

Learn more here.

Tokenized Assets are Getting Attention

If you’re interested in real-world assets being accessible via blockchain, you might want to look into the collab between the Web3 Foundation and Centrifuge on the Polkadot infrastructure. Specifically, they’re putting $1M into a pilot project of tokenizing US Treasury Bills. We’re not sure on the legality of all this, let alone the necessity of it, so definitely do your own research, but it’s interesting to see which blockchain ecosystem they are choosing for this purpose. Personally, I’d like to know why Polkadot, so if you are aware of their reasoning, please hit reply and let me know!

Learn more here.

Algorand Partners with United Nations Development Programme

The UNDP announced on Thursday that the Algorand Blockchain Academy will be used to teach 22,000 UN employees about using blockchain for sustainable development. This isn’t the first time the UN has utilized blockchain for this purpose. In 2017, they used Ethereum to transfer financial aid to 100 people in Pakistan, and in 10000 Syrian refugees in Jordan. While it utilized biometric scanning—something a lot of people dislike—it could be a way to bypass corruption; if money is sent to a government, there’s not a good way to know if it’s actually being used for the people. To use blockchain, it can go directly from the funder to the individual. They’ve also taken donations via blockchain, provided grants, and tracked the use of donor funds to make sure they’re going to the right places. Pretty cool, if you ask me, and while they do recognize some possible setbacks (regulation, possible tax evasion, etc), it’s an interesting development.

Learn more here.

Pass the Fork to Cosmos’ Co-Founder

41% of the Cosmos community thinks the increasing staking rewards and annual percentage yield (APY) are getting out of hand, so they want to cap the inflation at 10%. Jae Kwon, the founder of Cosmos, disagrees. The community has been split on this issue for years, so it isn’t super surprising. Kwon dubbed the proposed network “AtomOne”, and would airdrop new ATOM1 tokens to Cosmos stakers (though less for wallets that voted in favor of the inflation cap). The proposed fork would include most of the same infrastructure, just with “improved tokenomics.”

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore