WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Feb 22

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

Boatload of new ETF apps

XRP, HBAR, ADA, LTC, DOGE, DOT, and SOL have all filed for ETF approvals in the US. There’s no guarantee they will be approved, or that they will succeed even if they are approved, but that hasn’t stopped the value of those assets from sparking on the news. While their value has increased this week, they are still down significantly from their all time highs, and while they each have fairly dedicated communities, they haven’t seen much organic growth on their own in the past few years, so it’s unlikely that a lot of institutional adoption of these ETFs will occur in the immediate future.

Learn more here.

Is Argentina’s President a scammer?

President Javier Milei of Argentina is facing serious charges of fraud. Why? On Friday, Feb 14 he posted on X promoting the new LIBRA token with the promise of it solving Argentina’s poor economy. Within 40 minutes, the token gained $4.5B in market cap. Milei deleted the post as it appeared that insiders were selling off, causing 86% of traders to lose a combined $251M. Apparently, the token was created by Kelsier Ventures, which may have also been the creators of the MELANIA token. Meteora, the backers of M3M3, may also be involved in a variety of related memecoin hacks. Milei claims he was not aware of the problems, although his sister may have been involved. The whole scandal has brought the price of Solana and many other memecoins down too. Crypto is wild, folks, so please remember to only ever invest what you are willing to lose.

Learn more here.

Pi Network token woes

The Pi Network has been talking about releasing their token for years, and after many delays they actually released it on February 20. Coincidentally, we happened to release a video about the network this week and it looks like some of our hesitations unfortunately turned out to be true. The token was valued at $1.97 at launch and quickly lost 65% of its value, dropping to $0.64, as the long-time users cashed out. It has since recovered some, but the users are not happy and criticisms of the core team are abundant. Having said that, it is possible to buy the token on CEXes now, but not DEXes, so if you’re wanting to buy it, be careful and check their docs!

Learn more here.

SEC dismisses ‘dealer broker’ rule

The US SEC's dealer-broker rule requires firms that regularly trade securities for their own account to register as dealers. Last year, they attempted to apply it to crypto by arguing that some large-scale liquidity providers and DeFi participants function like traditional securities dealers, even if they operate in decentralized markets. A variety of lawsuits and appeals against the suggested change had slowed down the process, and this week the SEC itself decided not to continue trying to apply it to crypto.

Learn more here.

ByBit exchange experiences the largest crypto hack ever

ByBit, the second-largest centralized exchange by trading volume, was hacked this week for about $1.4B worth of staked $ETH, the largest loss in a crypto hack to date. The attacker created a fake version of Safe’s user interface (UI) to trick Bybit’s staff into approving a fraudulent transaction. This spoofed UI inserted malicious code that redirected the multi-signature transaction—meant to require multiple approvals for security—straight into the hacker’s wallet. The good news is that the exchange is able to pay back its users even if it doesn’t recover the stolen funds and the problem has been solved.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore