WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - May 25

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

As we ramp up our channel again, we’d like your feedback. Hit reply and let us know what project you want to see explained!

US might get regulation clarity

An upcoming bill in the US, FIT21, will help define crypto and protect users by providing clearer guidelines than we have seen so far, particularly about securities vs. commodities and what “decentralization” means in a legal context. Whether or not you think crypto should be regulated, I think we can all agree that “regulation by enforcement” has not been a particularly good standard. The US House passed the bill but it’s now in the Senate for the second round of approval, which may be difficult.

Learn more here.

ETH ETFs approved

Everyone has been eagerly awaiting the news of the US government allowing spot ETH ETFs or not, and we got our answer this week - a resounding yes for 8 different ETFs. Spot ETFs track the price of the underlying asset rather than purchasing the asset itself. Trading isn’t available yet, but should be within the next few weeks.

Learn more here.

Early investing debate

A lot of folks ask us about how to find projects to invest early in. The simplest answer we can come up with is two parts: (1) mostly only insiders get this info - i.e. big VCs already active in angel investing, and (2) it’s extremely risky to invest early in projects since the vast majority fail, and there isn’t a source that can tell you which are better than others. It seems Cobie, Haseeb Qureshi, and Jack Inabinet at Bankless all thought it important to educate people about the private vs. public early access and why “low float/ high fdv” tokens so often fail. These are when few tokens are available for trading (low float) compared to its high fully diluted valuation (FDV), which is the total market value assuming all possible tokens are in circulation. Their analysis is too much to include here, but we definitely recommend reading each of them to both understand the ecosystem and learn some metrics to look for when DYORing.

MakerDAO announced two new stablecoins

Rune Christensen from MakerDAO just introduced two new stablecoins called NewStable and PureDAI. NewStable is designed to grow and generate yield, backed by real-world assets and can be frozen if needed. PureDAI, on the other hand, is all about being fully decentralized, backed only by ETH and staked ETH, with minimal governance. These new stablecoins aim to eventually replace DAI, balancing decentralization with growth and usability, but the tokenomics aren’t super clear, especially for PureDAI which sounds awfully like an algorithmic stablecoin.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore