WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Oct 21

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

Fun fact: a16z is a huge player in the crypto space. One of its founders, Marc Andreesen, published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" on Monday and it surprisingly mentioned crypto exactly zero times. What does that mean?

Spot Bitcoin ETF NOT approved

A single tweet made bitcoin raise 7% in less than an hour, but the gains were lost almost as quickly. Cointelegraph mistakenly tweeted that a bitcoin spot ETF was approved in the US, but it has not been approved and when people realized, a lot of trading positions were liquidated. Over $100m was lost, primarily from short sellers. Cointelegraph has since apologized, but lots of people suspect it was actually intentional and someone made a lot of money on this. People are also trying to gauge if this is how the market will react when/if the ETF is actually approved, but we want to caution you that past action does not guarantee future action, so be careful making any bets.

Learn more here.

Uniswap fees

Uniswap had always suggested there might be a fee at some point, and now seems to be that point. They will charge 0.15% on each transaction for certain crypto, including ETH and USDC amongst others, on their website and wallet. It’s important to note that this is Uniswap Labs’ fee, not the Uniswap Protocol fee. The protocol is governed by the DAO and so would be community driven. This has caused some controversy because the UNI token holders have been hoping for some fees to come their way, and this will not do that.

Learn more here.

SEC drops Ripple Labs case

After years in the making, and a partial court decision earlier this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US has dropped the case of unregistered securities sales against Ripple executives.

Learn more here.

SBF Trial

This was week three of six of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial. We won’t get into the details because we’re about as tired of this whole FTX saga as you are, but needless to say, it’s not looking so good for SBF.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore