WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Jan 25

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

Silk Road founder released

Ross Ulbricht is a name a lot of people in crypto are familiar with. He’s hailed as one of the people who gave bitcoin a place to take off. He was serving life in prison for his role in the infamous Silk Road, one of the original darknet marketplaces. The specific charges included drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering. He already served almost ten years of that sentence when he was released this week on a full pardon granted by President Trump.

Learn more here.

Tornado Cash sanctions reversed

A contentious topic in the crypto and legal spheres has been the sanctioning of the crypto mixer Tornado Cash that limited US users from accessing it. The sanction brought up the issue of if it’s possible (or right) to sanction code; supposedly the restriction was due to North Korean hackers’ use of the platform to launder stolen money. Supporters of Tornado Cash argued that the code is open source so anyone can use it for whatever they want, and people using it for non-criminal purposes shouldn’t be limited just because of a few bad actors. One of the developers, Alexey Pertsev, was sentenced to over five years in prison for money laundering via the platform. With the sanctions lifted, there is hope that his charges will be reversed too as it brings into question whether a coder can be charged for how people use their code.

Learn more here.

Uniswap v4 launching

The popular defi platform is releasing its v4 updates by next week, which will increase transaction speed, lower gas fees, and be a generally easier user experience. On the developer side, the updates increase modularity with “hooks” (contracts that allow customization of liquidity pools), ”flash accounting” (how funds move in and out of liquidity pools), and “singleton” liquidity (having liquidity in a single smart contract rather than individual contracts). The upgrades have gone through multiple audits and security competitions, so it should be a smooth rollout.

Learn more here.

US SEC news

While the crypto space did not get as much attention this week from the new US president as it wanted, it did get two important pieces of news: a new task force has been created by the SEC that will focus specifically on making clear crypto regulations, and the IRS’ broker rule that extended the definition of a ‘broker’ to decentralized crypto exchanges has been challenged in Congress and they have until early March to reverse it.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore