FTX Updates:
FTX claims that they’ve identified $5.5b of liquid assets. Statement from John Ray here. It’s broken up into $1.7b cash; $3.5b crypto assets; and $0.3b of equities.
Feds have officially seized $700m of assets from SBF, primarily Robinhood shares
John Ray said he is considering restarting the exchange. SBF responded in a tweet:
DCG/Genesis Updates:
Genesis (subsidiary of DCG) owes more than $3.6b to top 50 creditors
DCG is considering selling Coindesk
Cameron Winklevoss has threatened legal action against DCG if they don’t come to a reasonable solution for paying back Gemini users
Entities associated with Decentraland founders have been revealed as major creditors to Genesis. Separate to this, DCG were investors in Decentraland, and Grayscale (another subsidiary of DCG), set up a Decentraland trust
The founder and CTO of Luno, a trading platform, quietly departed in December. Luno was acquired by DCG in September 2020
General news:
Kyle and Su from 3AC are trying to raise $25m for a new crypto exchange. To make matters more interesting, they’re partnering with Mark Lamb and Sudhu Arumugam from CoinFlex (who lost $47m in a loan to Roger Ver). The plan is for GTX to use the Coinflex backend to build out a crypto exchange that will allow creditors to sell their bankruptcy claims. The name GTX is a play on FTX, and has been ridiculed.
Vauld, a crypto lending platform that paused withdrawals in July, has received an extension until February 28 to strike a deal to pay back creditors. This follows a tough month, where negotiations with Nexo to purchase Vauld fell through.
Consensys lays off 11% of staff.
The DoJ initiated enforcement against Bitzlato, a crypto exchange registered in Hong Kong. They claim the small exchange laundered $700m of illicit funds.
zkSync announced a partnership with Espresso Systems, with a vision to enable cryptographically private transactions on their network.
Coinbase leaves Japan, following Kraken
The Fantom Foundation announced an Ecosystem Fund, where 10% of network fees are allocated to funding projects
Nexo paid a $45m fine for failing to register their lending product with the SEC
The SEC officially charged Avraham Eisenberg $116m for the Mango Markets exploit (and also labeled $MNGO a security)
DeFi news:
MakerDAO is concerned with allowing Gemini’s USD stablecoin (GUSD) as collateral. This comes after concerns about Gemini’s bad debt with Genesis. Tyler Winklevoss participated in governance, trying to reassure the community that GUSD wouldn’t be impacted by any potential bankruptcies
National Australia Bank created a stablecoin called AUDN. The bank is aiming for transactions to go live in the middle of the year, starting with carbon credit trading and remittances
1inch is developing a hardware wallet
NFT news:
Rarible goes live with a new marketplace on Polygon
BAYC dropped a Sewer Pass collection, which picked up $1.3m in trading volume. Sewer Pass NFT holders can play a game called Dookey Dash, which lets you collect random items with different points. If you achieve a high score, you get a key that can unlock something secret later on.
Funding Updates:
Framework leads $15m round in Parfin. Parfin is trying to provide crypto infra, including custody, trading and tokenization, in Latin America. Parfin also has a permissioned fork of Ethereum for institutions to participate in DeFi.
Brett Harrison raises $5 million for DeFi company aimed at institutions. The main product is a connectivity layer that connects between custodians and DeFi apps. Announcement here.
HashKey closes a $500m fund (they’re investors in Aztec and dYdX)
Flashbots seeks up to $50 million at a billion-dollar valuation. Paradigm will lead, other investors will need to convince Flashbots to take their money
Ulvetanna raised $15 million in seed funding to build hardware for ZK proof generation. Paradigm co-led the round, and Jump Cryto participated. (This happened in June 2022, but was only announced now).
The Nil Foundation raised $22 million at a $220 million valuation. The round was led by Polychain and StarkWare also wrote a cheque. What are they up to? They are developing a protocol where developers can write their requirements for a proof that needs to be generated, and receive a quote from the open market.
Hyper Oracle raised a $3m pre-seed round to develop infra for ZK rollups, including indexing and automation tools. Sequoia China co-led.
Neopets Meta raises $4m in funding from Polygon Ventures, Blizzard Avalanche. The alpha has been live since August.
Candy Digital raised $38.5m at the start of this year, announced now.