Issue #85

Regulation

1. More developments at Binance.US post-SEC enforcement action

-- CZ ordered to remain in the US until his sentencing by federal judge (eliminates flight risk)

-- CZ has stepped down as Chairman of Binance.US's board, transferring his voting rights to a proxy

-- A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Cristiano Ronaldo alleging he "promoted, assisted in, and/or actively participated" in the sale of unregistered securities with Binance

-- Additional charge by SEC: Binance.US allegedly had a backdoor to control user assets

2. Philippines looking to block Binance in the country because it is operating without a license

3. Crypto mixer Sinbad sanctioned by US Treasury

-- Allegedly facilitated transactions tied to North Korean Lazarus Group

-- Sinbad's website seized by the FBI

4. More financial institutions win digital asset licenses in Dubai

-- Nine Blocks becomes first crypto hedge fund to obtain a digital assets license in Dubai

-- Crypto exchange Fasset clinches digital asset license

5. Brazil to impose 15% tax on crypto earnings held on offshore exchanges

6. Crypto lender Voyager Digital to pay $1.65B in monetary relief to the FTC

-- As part of the settlement, Voyager can no longer market or provide products related to digital assets

-- Court also approved a plan allowing Voyager users to receive 35.72% of their claims from the lending firm

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Infrastructure

1. Movement Labs launches Move-based L2 for Ethereum to testnet

2. Founder of Cosmos proposes hard fork following a decision by the community to reduce ATOM's inflation rate

-- Governing body of Cosmos Hub has voted to reduce the maximum inflation rate of its native token, ATOM, from 14% to 10%, which will reduce the annualized staking yield from 19% to 13.4%

3. Animoca Brands becomes the largest validator on the TON blockchain

4. Solana MEV developer Jito launching governance token

-- 1B tokens being created and 10% of those tokens to be airdropped to the community

5. Chainlink updates staking mechanism (source)

-- Expanding pool size to 45M LINK tokens

-- Allows users to stake up to 15k LINK tokens

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Finance

1. Project Tourbillon, a joint project by central banks, explores payer anonymity with CBDCs

-- In this project design, only merchants' identities are disclosed to banks (to monitor tax evasion or illicit payments)

2. Santander Private Bank selects Taurus to implement a self-custody model for digital assets

-- Taurus has previously partnered with Deutsche Bank and raised $65 million in a Series B round led by Credit Suisse

3. SoFi transfers its crypto business to Blockchain(.com)

-- The move may possibly be tied to SoFi's decision to become a bank

-- Partnership equates to 100k+ users and $100M+ in revenue, according to Blockchain(.com)

4. Crypto trading platform Talos now sourcing liquidity from Uniswap

-- This is the first institutional-grade API integration for Uniswap Labs

5. Circle and SBI Holdings partner in Japan

-- Aim to jointly promote use of stablecoins

-- SBI Holdings to provide liquidity services for USDC

6. Standard Chartered becomes one of the first foreign banks to join China's digital yuan CBDC pilot program

7. Fireblocks releases Off Exchange

-- Goal: eliminate counter-party risk while trading on CEXs

-- Product: introduces Collateral Vault  Accounts (CVA), which are on-chain MPC wallets that programmatically lock and mirror assets to the connected exchange account

8. Seba Bank AG rebrands to Amina Bank AG

9. CF Benchmarks launches a staking index series for institutional clients

-- Registered with the European Union's Benchmark Regulation

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Consumer

1. Bankless HQ and BanklessDAO discuss divorce

-- Bankless DAO requested Arbitrum DAO for $1.8M to fund Arbitrum education initiatives, which did not sit well with many

-- In response, Bankless HQ wants to distance itself from the eponymous DAO

2. Vitalik Buterin proposes a new philosophy of techno-optimism called "d/acc"

-- The "d" stands for defensive, decentralized, democratic, and differential

-- Intended to serve as a counterbalance to effective accelerationism/Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto"  

3. Binance announces it will end support for its BUSD stablecoin on Dec. 15

-- Users will be able to redeem their BUSD until February 2024

-- Users can convert BUSD to FDUSD with zero fees

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Security

1. CertiK: November was the most damaging month for crypto theft and scams in 2023, with criminals walking away with $363M

-- Largest losses occurring on Poloniex and HTX/Heco Bridge

-- More funds lost in CeFi than DeFi

2. Hackers compromise the websites of DEXs Velodrome and Aerodrome

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Research

1. Emergent outcomes of the veToken model (source)

-- Background: the vote-escrowed token (veToken) model requires voters to escrow/lock tokens of value for an extended period in exchange for voting weight

-- Emergent outcomes: (1) bribes, (2) cost per vote depends on how the vote is acquired (e.g. locking, yield aggregators, bribery, etc.)

2. A study on NFT wash trading (source)

-- 30% of NFT volume and between 45-95% of traded value involve wash trading

3. A new blockchain interoperability protocol (source)

-- A cryptographic sortition mechanism is used to select nodes for each bridging job

-- To optimize for transmission latency, nodes only carry slices/segments of cross-chain messages

4. Routing in payment channel networks using distributed hash tables (source)

-- Average transaction success ratio of 98.74% and an average pathfinding time of 31.242 seconds

5. Secure and verifiable data collaboration with low cost zero-knowledge proofs (source)

-- Reducing the cost of zk-proof generation/verification and improving commitment scheme performance in the context of federated learning

6. Frontrunning attack detection for Ethereum (source)

7. IPv6 Bitcoin-certified addressees (source)

-- A technique to bind IPv6 addresses to hosts' public keys using the PoW generated by Bitcoin nodes