FTX/Contagion Updates:
Prosecutors suggest that SBF was trying to influence witnesses via chats on encrypted messaging services. They want to further restrict his bail conditions
The US Trustee wants a third-party examiner to look into what happened at FTX. The bankruptcy lawyers claim that this could cost the estate $100m
The bankruptcy lawyers want to subpoena some of SBF’s family and friends. Names include his parents, brother, Caroline from Alameda, the other FTX cofounders, and the COO
The IRS and SEC are listed as Genesis creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings
Gemini lays off 10% of staff
A court filing reveals that had $800m in loans to Alameda, and $400m stuck on FTX. This is $200m more than what was previously known. Ouch!
Roger Ver refuses to pay $21m to Genesis for a trading loss, claiming that he is exempt from payment because they didn’t stay solvent!
DeFi News:
AAVE is launching V3 on Ethereum. V3 was already live on other EVM chains
Gains has hit $1.6b of trading volume on Arbitrum one month after launch, generating $1.1m in fees
DYdX pushes back the unlocking of 150m tokens ($280m) to December, instead of Feb 1. Tweet from the dYdX foundation here. This would have effectively doubled the circulating supply of $dYdX
MakerDAO approves proposal to deposit $100m USDC into Yearn
Lido proposal to support staked ETH withdrawals after Shanghai upgrade
Community expresses interest (80% say yes) in deploying Uniswap on BNB
Friktion, a DeFi project on Solana, is shutting down. It had processed $3b in trades, and had even opened a product for under-collateralized lending to institutions. Quite a fall from grace
SUSHI redirects trading fees from xSUSHI holders to the protocol. This is in line with what Uniswap currently does. Additionally, they announced plans to build a perps exchange on the Sei blockchain
NFT News:
NFT OG Kevin Rose was hacked after falling for a phishing attack and signing a transaction that listed over $1.1m worth of NFTs
Porsche had a failed NFT launch. Mint price of 7,500 NFTs was 0.911 ETH each. Once they saw the lack of demand, they halved the supply. Some users took advantage of EU consumer law to demand a refund, since it was within 14 days of purchase
Transaction volumes on Optimism are down ~70% after the conclusion of the Optimism Quest NFT program. 450k wallets minted 3.4m NFTs
NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain? The Ordinals Protocol is leveraging the OP_RETURN opcode on Bitcoin to enable NFT minting. The hash of the NFT is stored as bytecode in the OP_RETURN field. Some community members say that it’s a waste of block space. Others say, the protocol can be used however you want, as long as you stick to the rules
Justin Kan’s Fractal will move from Solana to Polygon
Co-founder of Yuga labs, Wylie Aronow, will take a leave of absence to attend to health issues
General News:
Shadow fork of the Shanghai upgrade ran smoothly last week, with a small issue on Geth clients that was quickly resolved
Chainway released a tool that allows Tornado Cash users to prove that their funds were deposited from wallets that have not been flagged for illicit activity, whilst still preserving privacy. They call it “Proof of Innocence”.
The Wormhole hacker (remember that $323m hack in Feb ‘22?) started to play around on-chain last week, buying staked ETH and borrowing against it for DAI. The Wormhole team responded with an on-chain message offering him a $10m bounty to return funds
TON (the blockchain designed by Telegram) wants to suspend 195 inactive addresses on the blockchain that hold 21.3% of the supply, which is $2.5b at current prices
Brevan Howard acquired Dragonfly’s liquid strategies team
The ENS DAO is transferring most of their ETH to an endowment fund
Crypto infrastructure firm QuickNode raised $60 million and reached an $800 million valuation.
Deribit is moving their headquarters from Panama to Dubai