FTX updates
Financial Times interview here
SBF confirms that Alameda received special treatment
Estimates their liabilities to FTX at $10b
ABC News interview here
“I wasn't spending any time or effort trying to manage risk on FTX and that that was obviously a mistake”
Andrew Ross Sorkin interview here
[Disclosure: I personally haven’t listened to any of these interviews. The guy lied about user assets being fine. Now he’s going on some bizarre PR campaign. I’d be cautious with anything he says.]
Contagion updates
BlockFi has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection. 100,000 creditors and “a few billion” in liabilities. They have $355m stuck in FTX
Galaxy Digital to acquire GK8. Celsius purchased them for $115m last year before going bankrupt
Investors still scared about GBTC trust dissolving. If GBTC is liquidated, fund rules require that investors are returned cash, which technically means that Grayscale needs to sell 660,000 Bitcoin on the market.
Genesis owes $900 million to Gemini customers. Gemini is run by the Winklevoss twins. The Gemini Earn platform would lend out user funds to Genesis
NFT news
OpenSea has expanded to BNB Chain
Uniswap has gone live with their NFT marketplace aggregator
Telegram sells usernames worth $50 million on the Open Network blockchain. The @news handle was sold for $1.7m
Candy Digital laid off roughy half of their employees (after achieving unicorn status roughly a year ago)
10 Pudgy Penguins sold for $130k in a Sotheby’s auction
Aeria Canada Studio has partnered with Ready Games to move in-game assets to NFTs
Art Basel Miami Beach took place last week
Moonpay is releasing a Soulbound NFT loyalty program
Magic Eden will release code enforcing NFT royalties. They seem to change their mind on this every month
Opera will roll out an NFT creation tool in January
DeFi news
Aave paused lending markets for 17 illiquid tokens. Aave had $1.6m in bad debt as a result of a $CRV loan on their protocol
Compound capped lending for 10 illiquid tokens
Wrapped Ether is fine. During all the panic of last week, a joke spread on crypto twitter that WETH is not backed
DAI voted to increase the DSR (DAI Savings Rate) to 1%
Compound is looking to double the WETH supply cap on their Comet protocol
Trader Joe from Avalanche is deploying its trading protocol on Arbitrum
Other news
Ropsten will fully shut down in the second half of December, with Rinkeby to follow in the middle of next year
Magic Eden, Audius and Argent are partnering with Stripe for Crypto on-ramps. Blog post from Stripe here
Ankr and Helio Protocol lost a total of $20 million in two attacks. $3 million of the stolen money sent to Binance was seized. Two hacks:
Ankr has a liquid staking token called aBNBc that powers their staking of the BNB token. The smart contract was exploited and a trillion tokens were minted out of thin air
Due to the first exploit, the value of aBNBc declined by 99%. The attacker then purchased $2,900 worth of aBNBc and deposited it as collateral in the Helio stablecoin protocol. Helio had not updated the price of aBNBc, and the attacker was able to withdraw $15m of funds
Mexican-based exchange Bitso laid off dozens of employees. Exact numbers were not revealed, but rumors put it at ~100 employees out of ~500
Bitmex goes live with their Proof of Liabilities sytem. Read the blog post here. Snapshots will be taken every Tuesday and Thursday.
Kraken laid off a third of their workforce (1,100 employees out of roughly 3,300)
Apple disables version of Coinbase Wallet over NFT gas fees. Apple claims that they need to take 30% from the gas fees of transactions. Coinbase responded: “For anyone who understands how NFTs and blockchains work, this is clearly not possible.”
Kraken agreed to a $362,000 settlement for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran
Fidelity has gone live with their retail crypto trading service (1% fee on each trade)
Solana’s Phantom wallet is expanding to Ethereum and Polygon (wen StarkNet?)
BitDAO has launched an Ethereum Layer 2 network called Mantle. They have a $1.7b treasury to leverage
Zengo revealed that there are 35,000 transactions, totaling $27m, in the Polygon to Ethereum canonical bridge that are still unclaimed. There is a two step claims process, and users seem to have forgotten to finish the withdrawal with the second step
Red Cross to reveal prototype for blockchain-based aid distribution project. The tokens would be received through a crypto wallet application developed through a partnership with Partisia Blockchain. I had never previously heard about Partisia
Funding news
Institutional staking platform Kiln raised $17.6 million from ConsenSys, Kraken and others
Market Making firm Keyrock raised a $72 million Series B led by Ripple
Fleek closed a $25 million Series A led by Polychain Capital. They’re building a developer platform
Daylight raised $3 million in a seed round from Framework Ventures, Chapter One, 6th Man Ventures and OpenSea. They have an API that shows users any unclaimed airdrops and token-gated experiences
Ngrave is trying to raise $15m in a Series A at a $60m pre valuation. They are developing a hardware wallet
Brett Harrison, former CEO of FTX US, is trying to raise for him new startup, as reported by The Information