BlockFi is the latest casualty in the FTX fallout and it seems they're going down swinging, suing SBF over Robinhood shares pledged as collateral under the terms of an agreement made on November 9. SBF owned a 7.6% stake in Robinhood.
We're also finding out interesting details, such as the unconfirmed claim that SBF had been listing his stake in Robinhood among his list of assets in his last-ditch efforts to raise money to attempt to save FTX. Appears that he also wasn't willing to go down without a fight.
SBF's Robinhood shares were worth about $600M when acquired in May, 2022 so BlockFi still has a long way to go if it wins with anywhere between $1B and $10B in assets and liabilities.
Who will be the next domino to fall?
Daily Bullets:
- BlockFi sues SBF over Robinhood shares he allegedly pledged as collateral
- Silvergate Capital has “minimal” exposure to lender BlockFi - less than $20M
- Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom is expanding to Ethereum and Polygon
- Binance Proof of Reserves with a 3rd party auditor resulting in large wallet movements
- Mastercard filed another crypto/web3 trademark application
- Fidelity started opening retail crypto trading accounts
- Kraken $362,000 settlement with the U.S. Treasury for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran
- The Reserve Bank of India to launch a retail CBDC pilot in December
- The National Bank of Ukraine draft concept for a CBDC digital hryvnia, or e-hryvnia
- Kaiko launches a product tracking market data for Aave, Compound and MakerDAO
- MakerDAO is voting to increase the amount of interest it pays on Dai deposits
- Compound will enforce loan limits on 10 crypto tokens to adjust the risk parameters
- Solana-based DEX Serum now defunct and replaced by a community fork called OpenBook
Now for a more expanded and detailed look at the day for those who prefer detail and sources:
Crypto News:
- Silvergate Capital has “minimal” exposure to lender BlockFi, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and that BlockFi deposits make up less than $20M of total deposits
- After filing for bankruptcy protection, crypto firm BlockFi sued Sam Bankman-Fried over Robinhood shares he allegedly pledged to the lender as collateral
- Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom is expanding to Ethereum and Polygon - competing with the market leader, MetaMask
- Mastercard filed another crypto/web3 trademark application covering: crypto transaction monitoring software, providing cryptocurrency info, risk assessment services
- Fidelity started opening retail crypto trading accounts after announcing a waiting list earlier this month
- Starlight, a Brevan Howard-backed web3 payments startup, launched corporate cards that aim to simplify expense payments for crypto businesses
- Paradigm is sponsoring Tom Meagher and Jake Moxey to focus full-time on wagmi, a powerful & ergonomic web3 frontend development library - vision is to build open-source libraries to accelerate web3 frontend development
- Fintech company Plum has rolled out crypto investing services to customers in France, Belgium, Spain and Ireland in partnership with Bitpanda
Economic/Government/Regulatory:
- Kraken agreed to a $362,000 settlement with the U.S. Treasury for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and will invest another $100,000 in compliance controls
- The Reserve Bank of India to launch a retail CBDC pilot in December. Each bank participating in the trial will test the CBDC among 10,000 to 50,000 users
- The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has introduced a draft concept for its central bank digital currency (CBDC) candidate digital hryvnia, or e-hryvnia
Exchange News:
- FTX Trading and 101 additional affiliated companies are resuming ordinary course payments of salaries to employees worldwide and ordinary course payments to certain non-U.S. contractors and service providers
- As part of the Proof of Reserves (PoR) process, Binance is working with a 3rd party auditor to provide proof of ownership and will result in some large transfers between Binance’s owned wallets
- NEXO releases proof of reserves showing no exposure to FTX
- Coinbase Wallet will stop supporting BCH, ETC, XLM and XRP, citing low usage
- Huobi partnered with Tron Network and DMC Labs to jointly launch the world's first national token DMC (Dominica Coin) under the authorization of the government of the Commonwealth of Dominica
- Ankex, a new hybrid crypto exchange incubated by DeFi infrastructure firm Qredo, has launch - aims to embody the benefits of both decentralized and centralized crypto exchanges
DeFi News:
- Crypto data firm Kaiko launches a product tracking market data for DeFi lending and borrowing protocols on Ethereum - Aave, Compound and MakerDAO
- MakerDAO is voting to increase the amount of interest it pays on Dai deposits - from the current yield rate of 0.01% to one of four rates — 1%, 0.75%, 0.5% and 0.25%
- Compound will enforce loan limits on 10 crypto tokens to adjust the risk parameters of Compound v2. Tokens include: WBTC, BAT, UNI, COMP, LINK, SUSHI, ZRX, AAVE, YFI, MKR
- Solana-based DEX Serum stated on Twitter it was now defunct and now replaced by a community fork called OpenBook
- Binance partnership with Injective allows Binance Custody clients to stake their $INJ tokens directly from their Qualified Wallet
NFT/Gaming/Metaverse News:
- Candy Digital, a sports and entertainment NFT startup founded in 2021 and backed by web3 leaders like Mike Novogratz, Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Rubin and reached a $1.5B valuation, laid off a large part of its staff
- Web3 gaming DAO, Game7, has launched a $100M grant program to enable game developers to build the tools needed to make Web3 gaming better and more accessible
- BNB Chain is officially live on OpenSea
- Sony’s latest invention for the metaverse, a wearable motion-tracking system called Mocopi - will cost about $358 and allow users to move as an avatar in real time
- Mobile game maker Aeria Canada Studio has partnered with Ready Games to migrate its most popular mobile titles to web3
Fundraises:
- Roboto Games, a new game studio aiming to bridge Web2 experience and accessible Web3 in-game elements, raised $15M in a Series A funding round led by a16z
- Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech offering an investment app that allows users to buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets, raised $8M in Series A investment led by Anthemis and Dragonfly
- Burn Ghost, a startup focused on casual games that reward NFT prizes to players, has raised $3.1M in funding led by Drive by DraftKings, Bitkraft Ventures. With Pillar VC participating
- Wanderers, the sci-fi media brand behind the Wanderers NFT collection, raises $2M Seed Round led by Animoca Brands and GameFi Ventures
Early Stage Projects:
- Aptos partnering with web3 fintech firm MoonPay through an integration with Petra, the crypto wallet built by Aptos Labs
- AdaSwap launch of DEX in mainnet
- ETH Liquid Staking Product qETH available on Tranchess
Data:
TL;DR: Looking at Nansen smart money holdings, over the past week the inflows have been light with the top flows being into Aave WBTC, MATIC and WETH. Outflows have been stronger and primarily out of USDC, BUSD and WBTC. Actions of smart money reflect that of the general market - low volume and ranging uninteresting movements.
- Nansen Smart Money Holdings Token Inflow and Outflows: Tracking what the whales are up to...
Weekly:
- Inflow (7D):
- Outflow (7D):
Research/Reads:
- Is CZ Too Powerful? - Binance's post-FTX market dominance is impressive -- and concerning - source
- WuBlockchain - Competition in the NFT market around royalties is heating up - source
- Web3 deserves better rewards - source
Crypto Twitterverse:
1/ Myself and @bax1337 spent this past weekend looking into the FTX attacker’s deposits to ChipMixer.
It appears they’ve likely been transferring a portion of the stolen FTX funds to OKX after withdrawing from CM
So far we’ve accounted for at least $4.1m (255 BTC) sent to OKX
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt)
Nov 29, 2022
1/n - Why @GMX_IO will fail
— degentrading (@hodlKRYPTONITE)
Nov 28, 2022
Lets debunk this $GMX FUD quickly:
1) Zero Slippage --> currently a non-issue for BTC and ETH given GMX's liquidity/OI caps vs CEXs
With Synthetics, zero slippage is being phased out and GMX's oracles will apply spreads from aggregators and orderbook depth of top exchanges. twitter.com/hodlKRYPTONITE…
— Flood Capital (@FloodCapital)
Nov 28, 2022
Check out whats on the docket for December in terms of macro economic announcements, conferences, and other crypto related events.
We're going to start doing this monthly and will provide a link to a pdf download starting in Jan.
— Alex (@unclesendit)
Nov 28, 2022
Crypto Security 101:
• VPN
• Brave Browser
• Burner Wallets
• Bookmark sites
• Proton for Email
• Use 2FA (Not SMS based)
• PW Manager (BitWarden)
• Don't tell ppl you're into Crypto
• Hardware Wallets (Ledger Nanos)And most importantly, ignore DMs from hot women
— Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ (@thedefiedge)
Nov 29, 2022
Did we miss anything or is there anything you want to discuss? We’d Love to hear your feedback and engage with the community! Feel free to leave a comment and let us know your thoughts on the Crypto market!
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