WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Sept 23

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

UK passes bill to freeze assets faster

The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill is an attempt to contain and manage economic crime more efficiently. Part of the bill allows regulators to freeze crypto assets in a more timely fashion, in an attempt to stop users from moving assets offshore before the regulators can stop them. Before this bill, crypto assets could only be seized if there was an arrest or conviction, but now they can be seized before that. Of course, “significant links to criminality” need to be proven first, so we’re not really sure how much quicker this will be, or if it will truly affect crime or regular users.

Learn more here.

US to block CBDCs?

A bill has passed the House Financial Services Committee in the US government this week that will, if voted through the house, ban Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The bill calls CBDCs “financial surveillance tools” and will bar the Federal Reserve from issuing them. This does not affect private digital currencies, including stablecoins like USDT or USDC, only the ones issued by the Federal Central Bank. A lot of people were concerned about CBDCs and privacy, so this is a really interesting step in US law that may make the country more friendly towards crypto rather than centralized monetary structures.

Learn more here.

The latest Ethereum testnet failed to launch

Ethereum’s developers have had various testnets that they use to make sure future updates will work, before bringing those updates to the main blockchain. The latest testnet, called Holesky, had some issues that caused it to not launch. The developers plan to fix the issues, which they claim were in the “genesis files”, i.e. the base files of the network, and try again in two weeks.

Learn more here.

FTX sues SBF’s parents

In the latest twist of the FTX exchange’s drama, ex-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents have now been sued by the new owners of FTX in an attempt to get back some $26m of user funds. Apparently, his parents were paid this amount as well as received some property in Bermuda. It seems that his parents were as complicit in the crime as he was.

Learn more here.

Grab app launches wallet

The “super app” of Southeast Asia called Grab has launched a web3 wallet for users in Singapore. This is huge because Grab is similar to WeChat in China, and kind of the idea for the app Elon Musk wants Twitter to be. So, onboarding to crypto, and using it to pay for services like delivery, on-demand rides, and more, will unlock a huge part of the market. It’s important to note this is not a self-custody wallet, though, as users will not have their own private keys. The wallet uses Polygon’s tech, so that’s pretty bullish for the Polygon blockchain.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore

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