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In Cuba’s capital, Havana, a Bitcoin community has emerged from an economically antagonistic environment.

“Satoshi didn’t create Bitcoin for Cubans, but it really comes in handy for us,” Forte, co-founder of the aptly named local Bitcoin organization Cuba Bitcoin, tells Magazine.

Cubans are turning to Bitcoin because their money is increasingly worthless. Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Lebanon often compete for media coverage about runaway inflation levels, but the Cuban peso is not far behind.

The Cuban peso has devalued so much over the last few years that carrying bags of cash is increasingly common among the rich and the poor.
In practice, even if someone bought Bitcoin at the top of the 2021 bull run at $69,000, their money is worth much less in Cuban pesos. Whereas Bitcoin dropped 80% to its bear market low, it has since recovered 100%, and the peso has devalued by 90%.

The realization that someone should swap local currency for the Bitcoin top, knowing that it will crash and they’ll still retain more purchasing power, is one of the many financial wake-up calls received while working on Cointelegraph’s new documentary, The Truth Behind Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution. 

In 2021, I came across the article “Inside Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution” by Human Rights Foundation chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein, in which he explains how and why Cubans were utilizing Bitcoin’s stateless and low-fee properties to save money and escape financial oppression. 
In line with the Bitcoin mantra of Don’t trust, Verify, I went to see with my own eyes what Gladstein described.

Carving out a sustainable career as an independent musician is no easy feat. The competition is fierce, support can be hard to find, and earning a living without the financial help of a major record label is an uphill battle. Yet, for those who are able to build a loyal fanbase, the freedom of complete creative control can be liberating.

Technology has long proven to be a potential friend to those musicians willing to embrace it, and nonfungible tokens are the latest innovation that many tech-savvy artists have begun incorporating into their careers. But NFTs remain both controversial and experimental, especially among the mainstream, and music NFTs are still relatively niche.

One artist who has cracked the code to maintaining a successful career as an independent musician is American singer Vérité, who has racked up hundreds of millions of streams without the support of a record label since releasing her first single, “Strange Enough,” in 2014. 

After finding success and touring internationally, Vérité became one of the earliest musicians to experiment with NFTs in February 2021. Since then, she has built a strong Web3 community and had several successful high-profile drops, including releasing 1/1 NFTs, selling the master rights to her music, fractionalizing song royalties on the blockchain and giving NFTs to concert attendees. She has done all this while still retaining her dedicated non-Web3 fans, many of whom have little to no interest in crypto.

How does one walk this fine line and successfully integrate Web3 into their career without alienating their existing, perhaps skeptical, fans? Magazine sits down with Vérité to find out. 

J.W. Verret is a Harvard-educated attorney who teaches corporate finance and accounting at George Mason University. His work has increasingly intersected with the cryptocurrency sector in recent years, as his legion of Twitter followers — who know him as “BlockProf,” or the Blockchain Professor — are poignantly aware.

Aside from his work at GMU, Verret has become known as a vocal advocate for crypto as the top honcho at Crypto Freedom Lab, a think tank fighting devoted to preserving “freedom and privacy for crypto developers and users.” He also serves as a professional legal witness for defendants accused — wrongfully, Verret would argue — of evading financial-tracking laws. In between, he finds time to serve as a regular columnist for Cointelegraph.

I spent 15 years as a libertarian regulation/financial person, writing it, think-tanking it in Washington, D.C. For the first 10 years, I lost everything I fought for in the Dodd-Frank era.

The thing with crypto is that it’s been a freedom revolution in finance. It fixes, or aims to fix, problems in finance that government regulation only aims to fix. Regulation entrenches intermediaries where crypto fixes problems by eliminating the need for those intermediaries. And that was very interesting to me. 

It was a good experience. I replaced Hester Pierce when she became an SEC commissioner. I wrote a lot of dissents as a committee member, so I hope I did Hester proud, but I do not think they’ll invite me back in the future under the current chairman. It seems like he’s been trying to just destroy this industry. He could’ve reached out to the industry to try to make things work, but he has no interest in that, and he’s sued some of the best actors in crypto — Coinbase and Kraken — while ignoring the worst.

Investment firm Valkyrie will start offering exposure to Ether futures in the coming days. On Sept. 28, the firm told Cointelegraph that its Bitcoin Strategy ETF will allow investors access to Ether and Bitcoin futures “under one wrapper,” making it one of the first firms to do so amid several pending applications with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Starting Oct. 3, the fund’s name will be updated to the Valkyrie Bitcoin and Ether Strategy ETF. Asset manager VanEck also disclosed its upcoming Ethereum Strategy ETF, which will be listed on the Chicago Board Options Exchange in the coming days. Analysts suggested that a potential U.S. government shutdown might have accelerated the launch of Ether futures ETFs.

Former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried will spend at least 21 days in court as part of his criminal trial, which will begin in earnest on Oct. 4 and last until Nov. 9, according to a newly released trial calendar posted to the public court docket. The first official date of the Bankman-Fried trial is Oct. 4, where the participants will begin discussing seven fraud charges laid against SBF. There are two substantive charges where the prosecution must convince a jury that Bankman-Fried committed the crime. Five other “conspiracy” charges involve the prosecution convincing a jury that Bankman-Fried planned to commit the crimes. The former FTX CEO has been serving pre-trial detention at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center since Aug. 11. If considered guilty of fraud, Bankman-Fried is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison, legal specialists explained to Cointelegraph.

Co-founder of Three Arrows Capital (3AC) Su Zhu was detained at Changi Airport in Singapore while trying to leave. Teneo, the joint liquidator of the now-bankrupt hedge fund, told Cointelegraph that Zhu’s arrest followed a committal order from the Singapore Courts, which is a directive used to imprison someone for contempt of court. On Sept. 25, Teneo secured this committal order, alleging that Zhu didn’t comply with a court order. His arrest is part of an ongoing investigation to retrieve funds for 3AC’s creditors. The $10 billion hedge fund crashed in 2022 due to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. A similar committal order was granted against Kyle Davies, also co-founder of 3AC. His whereabouts remain unknown.

Binance has warned its European users to convert their euro (EUR) balances to Tether by Oct. 31 due to the loss of support from its banking partner, Paysafe. Paysafe ceased processing EUR deposits for Binance users on Sept. 25. While EUR withdrawals to bank accounts remain available, Paysafe users won’t be able to engage in EUR spot trading. Binance’s token swap feature, Binance Convert, will also restrict EUR transactions. Paysafe previously facilitated fiat deposits and withdrawals for Binance users in Europe, including via bank transfer in the European Union’s Single Euro Payments Area. The move is the latest to add to Binance’s regulatory and debanking woes in the West.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has again postponed its decision on several spot Bitcoin ETF applications, including those from BlackRock, Invesco, Bitwise and Valkyrie, ahead of a potential government shutdown. Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart anticipates similar delays for Fidelity, VanEck, and WisdomTree. These delays came two weeks before the applicants’ expected second deadline. Seyffart links the premature delays to an anticipated U.S. government shutdown on Oct. 1, which would impact financial regulators and federal agencies.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

An unnamed individual in China was fined 1.06 million Yuan ($144,907) for using a virtual private network (VPN) to access restricted websites as part of a remote work routine for a foreign employer. 

According to local mediareportsearlier this week, during his employment as a consultant between 2019 to 2022 the unnamed individual accessed GitHub to view source code, answered questions in customer support, held teleconferences via Zoom, and posted multiple threads on Twitter with the help of a VPN.

Based on a document issued by City of Chengde Police, the individual’s income earned with the aid of a VPN was deemed as “proceeds of crime.” The police issued a penalty of $144,097, equivalent to three years of the individual’s salary.

Chinese law prohibits the use of VPNs to bypass the country’s “Great Firewall” that blocks popular sites such as Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook. The ruling has spooked many in China’s IT and Web3 circles, who often rely on VPNs for similar remote-work tasks.

Back in our July edition, we announced Satlantis, an independent Minecraft server run by the game’s fans, enabled players to earn Bitcoin by completing in-game quests using play-to-earn functionalities. We noted Minecraft developer Mojang’s previous NFT ban and concluded, “Time will show how this integration fairs against the ban.”

Time has shown, as Microsoft subsidiary Mojang has asked Satlantis to remove the play-to-earn features, according to a Discord post by server founder David Dineno. The server accepted the request and removed the feature two days after the Discord post.

The Satlantis founder stood behind the play-to-earn model and expressed his annoyance with the situation, stating:

“The Game That Shares its Profits with Players’ works. And it works well. All of the time, money, and energy that we put into this game together will not be forsaken by a few dinosaurs at some conglomerate.”

Despite the setback, the Satlantis community can take solace in the fact that the team is actively exploring alternative platforms that “encourage innovation instead of stifling it.”

It’s been more than a decade since 850,000 BTC went missing from Mt. Gox, yet the collapse of the former exchange remains one of the most infamous black swan events of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

While creditors of the defunct exchange are edging closer to some form of restitution, Mt. Gox’s demise ended up playing an important role in the development of tools to identify, track and tackle the illicit movements of funds through the wider cryptocurrency industry.

The search for answers and funds played a key role in the birth of crypto’s best-known blockchain analytics and tracing firm, Chainalysis, explains co-founder Michael Gronager.

Close to a decade later, Chainalysis’ analytics tools are being used by myriad private and public enterprises and institutions. From data analytics to pure law enforcement use cases, the firm’s services continue to prove influential — and sometimes controversial — across the industry.

Gronager is a crypto OG, having previously co-founded cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. He got involved in blockchain analysis after Kraken went looking for a steady banking partner and met a wall of wariness over the lack of visibility in the cryptocurrency ecosystem along with KYC and money laundering concerns.

Tim Draper is a prominent venture capitalist, the founder of Draper University and the creator of the Meet The Drapers television series. He invested early in Tesla, SpaceX and Coinbase and has 254,000 followers on X.

“Let me get my second prediction to actually happen, and then we’ll move on to other predictions,” Tim Draper tells Hall of Flame, refusing to be drawn on price predictions for XRP and Ethereum.

This makes sense, given it’s been six years since he forecast that Bitcoin would reach $250,000 by 2022.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

Which is not to say it won’t happen eventually, as Draper has been pretty far-sighted in the past.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has failed to win immediate access to Binance.US’s software, with the judge saying he isn’t “inclined to allow the inspection at this time.” The hearing was held on Sept. 18 to discuss the SEC’s motion to compel Binance to hand over detailed information and make its executives more available for depositions. In a hearing, Judge Faruqui said that he wasn’t “inclined to allow the inspection at this time.” Alternatively, he proposed that the SEC should come up with more specific requests for discovery and speak with a broader range of witnesses. In another headline, Binance global and its CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao requested dismissal of the SEC’s lawsuit filed against them in June, claiming the regulator overstepped its authority in the case. 

Mt. Gox trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi has officially changed the deadline for paying back the exchange’s creditors from Oct. 31, 2023, to Oct. 31, 2024. Presently, the Mt. Gox estate holds some 142,000 Bitcoin (BTC), 143,000 Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and 69 billion Japanese yen. Mt. Gox was one of the earliest cryptocurrency exchanges, once facilitating more than 70% of all trades made within the blockchain ecosystem. Following a major hack in 2011, the site subsequently collapsed in 2014 due to alleged insolvency; the fallout affected about 24,000 creditors and resulted in the loss of 850,000 BTC.

Tether’s Treasury is set to provide a $1 billion near-term liquidity for the Tron network. The billionaire authorization was flagged by blockchain tracker WhaleAlert, which drew a quick-fire response from Tether chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino, who said that the USDT tokens would be used as inventory to “replenish” the Tron network. Authorizing USDT in the Tether Treasury allows the company to issue USDT instantaneously once customer funds are received to ensure that the issuer maintains 100% of its reserves. Ardoino added that the event was an authorization and not an actual issuance, with the allocated amount set to serve as inventory for upcoming issuance requests and chain swaps from the Tron network.

Debtors of FTX have launched legal action against the parents Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, alleging that they misappropriated millions of dollars through their involvement in the crypto exchange. The plaintiffs argued that Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried exploited their access and influence within the FTX empire to enrich themselves at the expense of the debtors in the FTX bankruptcy estate. The debtors alleged that SBF’s parents were “very much involved” in the FTX business from inception to collapse, contrary to what SBF has claimed. According to the complaint, Bankman and Fried extracted significant unearned rewards from their involvement in FTX Group, including a $10-million cash gift and a $16.4-million luxury property in the Bahamas.

Digital currency investment company Grayscale is the latest firm to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a new Ether (ETH) futures exchange-traded fund (ETF).

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Last week’s Token2049 conference in Singapore was a life-changing experience for some; for others the event did not meet expectations, but for a select group of individuals, the imminent prospect of being pursued by law enforcement meant they had to abandon their booths and flee the event.

On September 21, local news outletsreportedthat Hong Kong police had arrested 11 individuals linked to troubled cryptocurrency exchange JPEX on charges of fraud and operating an unlicensed virtual assets exchange. More than 2,000 users are estimated to have been affected by the scandal, with total funds of $1.3 billion Hong Kong dollars involved in the incident ($166 million). Police allege users’ assets have been embezzled by JPEX staff.

In a dramatic raid on September 13 — day one of the conference — Hong Kong police arrested key executives, leading its staff to abandon its corporate booth. The exchange subsequently applied for voluntary deregistration with the Australia Securities & Investment Commission, disclosing that its Australian entity had little assets left. After the news broke, JPEX reportedly raised its withdrawal fees to 999 USDT per transaction to prevent capital flight.

In anannouncementon September 20, JPEX said that 400 million Tether (USDT) worth of users’ deposits would be eligible for redemption. However, the catch is that the funds can only be redeemed starting in late 2025. The firm stated that due to the ongoing law enforcement investigation, its telecom service providers and asset custodians have frozen applicable services.

Generative artist William Mapan’s latest collection, “Distance,” sold out in less than 24 hours despite launching in the middle of a very weak NFT market.

From his early long-form generative series “Dragons” on the Tezos blockchain to the highly sought-after “Anticyclone” ArtBlocks collection that currently commands a 5 ETH floor, Mapan has a unique way of capturing the hearts and minds of collectors.

But many people in the public still don’t understand what generative art even is. Mapan has a unique way of explaining the often misunderstood genre by boiling it down to a piece of paper, a crayon and a die.

“It can be really hard to explain but usually the way I explain is to put away the code, put away the blockchain, put away everything. Just take a piece of paper, a crayon and dice. Imagine drawing two by two boxes on that paper, so four boxes total. You then throw the dice — if the roll shows up as a three or below, you draw a square; if the dice shows four or above, you draw a circle into one of the boxes.

“You just made an algorithm; you just made a set of rules and introduced some randomness in there. That’s basically what generative art is, you build a set of rules, an algorithm and then introduce randomness. Then you try to control that part of the space.

The launch of generative AI products over the past nine months has the world talking about how it will change the future. Many are frightened. Others are excited about the opportunity.

A report last month from Next Move Strategy Consulting predicts the AI industry will grow 20x in the next seven years, creating a $2 trillion business, up from its current value of $100 billion. It might sound like wild hype, but other analysts from McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock all map out a similar trajectory. AI is here to stay, and a lot of human lives will be upended. But it’s also the chance of a lifetime.

Frederik Pedersen, the co-founder of Danish AI company EasyTranslate and son of one of Denmark’s most famous men, is approaching the future head-on.

“I have been saying for a long time that translation is dead and AI has killed the industry as we know it, but that hasn’t gone down particularly well with my competitors. Now, however, those same people are listening and are realising that they may be too late if they want to transform their business.”

It’s not easy to be the child of a powerful person, as has been recently and brilliantly illustrated by the TV series Succession. If there’s a Logan Roy in the family, it’s difficult for the child to be their own person.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Token 2049, one of the largest crypto conferences of the year, attracted a record 10,000 attendees, 300 speakers and 5,000 companies during the two-day event in Singapore.

From Sept. 13–14, attendees entering the majestic Marina Bay Sands Convention Expo and Center were greeted by the energetic beats from the Polyhedra DJ, then to a hall of booths showcasing the latest innovation in the blockchain industry. Aside from the main show, over 400 side events took place this year.

Among the biggest announcements during the event, KXVC, a subsidiary of Kasikornbank, the largest bank in Thailand with 20 million customers, launched a $100 million fund dedicated to Web3, AI and deep tech firms based in Southeast Asia. KXVC wrote:

“For Web3, KXVC targets Web3 infrastructures, nodes validators, RPC providers, middlewares, modularity technologies, privacy, ZKP, wallets, alternative L1/L2s, shared securities, LsdFi and consumerization of NFTs.”

AI Eye has been out and about at Korean Blockchain Week and Token2049 in Singapore over the past fortnight, trying to find out how crypto project leaders plan to use AI.

Probably the most well-known is Maker founder Rune Christensen, who essentially plans to relaunch his decade-old project as a bunch of sub-DAOs employing AI governance.

“People misunderstand what we mean with AI governance, right? We’re not talking about AI running a DAO,” he says, adding the AI won’t be enforcing any rules. “The AI cannot do that because it’s unreliable.” Instead the project is working on using AI for coordination and communication — as an “Atlas” to the entire project, as they’re calling it.

“Having that sort of central repository of data just makes it actually realistic to have hundreds of thousands of people from different backgrounds and different levels of understanding  meaningfully collaborate and interact because they’ve got this shared language.”

Near founder Illia Polosukhin may be better known in AI circles as his project began life as an AI startup before pivoting to blockchain. Polosukhin was one of the authors of the seminal 2017 Transformer paper (“Attention Is All You Need”) that laid the groundwork for the explosion of generative AI like ChatGPT over the past year.

The Bitcoin miner who received 19.8 BTC in fees from blockchain infrastructure firm Paxos has returned the funds following Paxos’ claim that it made a mistake in paying over $500,000 in transfer fees. On Sept. 10, Paxos paid the six-figure fee to move $2,000, with the average network fee typically being around $2. The company later acknowledged the mistake, confirming the transfer came from its servers. Almost a day after Paxos’ claims, the Bitcoin miner who received the funds went on X (formerly Twitter) to express frustrations after agreeing to refund the amount to Paxos. The funds were returned on Sept. 15.

A bankruptcy court has approved the sale of FTX digital assets in weekly batches through an investment adviser and under preestablished guidelines. The sale does not include Bitcoin, Ether and “certain insider-affiliated tokens,” which can be sold through a separate decision by FTX after 10 days’ notice. FTX sales are not expected to have a heavy impact on markets. According to a recent shareholder update, the bankrupt exchange has $833 million worth of Bitcoin and Ether. A total of $3.4 billion is held in Digital Assets A — the top 10 assets the company holds — which include Solana, Bitcoin, Ether, Aptos and others.

Digital Currency Group has proposed a new agreement plan for the creditors of the now-bankrupt Genesis Global. The plan estimates unsecured creditors will receive “a 70–90% recovery with a meaningful portion of the recovery in digital currencies.” Additionally, the remuneration plan says the recovery of claims for Gemini Earn users would be projected at “approximately 95–110%” without any contribution from Gemini. According to the filing: “If Gemini were to agree to provide $100 million to Gemini Earn users under the Proposed Agreement, as it previously did, there would be little doubt Gemini Earn users would receive more than full recovery.”

Asset manager Franklin Templeton applied with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). According to the application, the fund would be structured as a trust. Coinbase would custody the BTC, and The Bank of New York Mellon would be the cash custodian and administrator. Franklin Templeton has $1.5 trillion in assets under management and joins a long list of asset managers waiting for regulatory approval. The SEC recently delayed decisions on spot ETF applications from WisdomTree, Valkyrie, Fidelity, VanEck, Bitwise and Invesco on Aug. 31.

The exodus of executives from crypto exchange Binance has reached the firm’s offshoot in the United States, as at least three top employees left Binance.US over the past few days. This week’s departures included the exchange’s CEO, Brian Shroder, alongside legal head Krishna Juvvadi and chief risk officer Sidney Majalya. The mass exit is believed to be tied to the ongoing U.S. investigation into Binance and Binance.US. The SEC sued Binance.US, Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao in June for allegedly engaging in unregistered securities operations and other improprieties. On Aug. 28, the agency requested to file sealed documents in the case, fueling concerns about a criminal probe by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Krafton, the company behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), is venturing into Web3 with Settlus, a Cosmos-based blockchain project specifically designed for the creator economy. Settlus aims to provide content creators with a payment platform that streamlines transparent settlement processes.

The South Korean gaming giant’s project was announced at the Korea Blockchain Week’s Circle Hacker House event, co-presented by Circle and AngelHack. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire highlighted PUBG’s large user base of 30 million monthly active users.

Cosmos’ software development kit will serve as the framework, and network gas fees will be payable using stablecoins.

A metaverse project by the name of Migaloo is also in the works. The project will center around user-generated content, allowing creators to automatically create nonfungible tokens of their digital content and earn royalties from platform sales.

Krafton previously announced a collaboration with Solana Labs in March 2022 to “support the design and marketing of blockchain-based games and services,” but no Web3 products have been released since. Settlus’ testnet is scheduled to launch in early 2024.

Ask 10 different people to define a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and you’ll likely get 10 different definitions. But there is at least one thing most agree on: DAO governance is a mess. At best, it’s an experiment in the works.

According to DeepDAO, DAOs today handle a whopping $17.2 billion in value. Yet many DAOs managing millions of dollars have proven hopeless at heeding even the most basic of lessons in business management 101. One does not have to look too far in the annals of crypto history to recall major DAO catastrophes.

Recall Wonderland DAO, an Olympus fork that birthed arguably one of the most notorious scandals in DAO history. At its peak, Wonderland enjoyed a near $2 billion in total value locked, which came to a skidding halt in January 2022 when its treasury manager — who went by the pseudonym 0xSifu — turned out to be none other than Michael Patryn, co-founder of the failed crypto exchange QuadrigaCX and a convicted criminal for financial fraud.

Or consider a more recent exploit with the Solana-based trading protocol Mango Markets. In October, attackers exploited the DAO’s loosely governed parameters to acquire a disproportionate chunk of the DAO’s MNGO tokens. In an absurd turn of events, the attacker proceeded to propose on governance forums an offer to return half their heist in exchange for the DAO not to prosecute him, then voted “Yes” on it with the stolen tokens. The vote eventually failed, but Mango still ended up paying off $47 million to the attacker.

Case studies of DAO failures are not exclusive to outrageous one-off spectacles like the ones above. Despite the Libertarian rhetoric of self-sovereignty and self-custody, dozens of DAOs that kept their monies on centralized exchanges also saw their treasuries implode during the carnage of 2022’s blow-ups like FTX.

Gracy Chen, managing director of global cryptocurrency exchange Bitget, advised her followers and friends not to scan their eyeballs in exchange for a few Worldcoin tokens.

“There’s a huge privacy concern,” she tells Magazine, adding that she isn’t optimistic about its price prospects given the anticipated influx of WLD tokens in the near future.

“There will be much more released in the upcoming year or two,” she explains.

Chen admits that her gig with Bitget is pretty cool, but it also means her American pals constantly bug her for favors.

“Since we stopped onboarding U.S. customers, I’ve had lots of friends who hold a U.S. passport ask if they can get a little back way to open an account.”

“I refuse a lot of requests like that. It is a red line that we just don’t cross,” Chen says. 

Kei Oda is the head of Japan and the Asia-Pacific region for Quantstamp, a Web3 security firm that audits smart contracts and develops blockchain security solutions.

Kei spent 16 years trading bonds at Goldman Sachs before stumbling into cryptocurrencies out of boredom. He tells Magazine he was induced by the ability to trade Bitcoin and other assets around the clock.

He has since fallen down the rabbit hole, even finding a job in the industry.

So, I was actually a bond trader for 16 years before joining crypto. 

You know, we used to talk about Bitcoin when I was still trading bonds. I didn’t really understand it or believe in it, to be honest, but when I left my job in 2016 and tried to get into the startup space, what dawned on me once I left was that, having been a trader, you do have a long-term focus, but you also are very, very short-term in terms of how you trade, what you do day to day, minute to minute, and what ended up happening was, I would get bored very easily.

A key talking point in the crypto community has been the ongoing exodus of executives from Binance amid growing regulatory troubles. Binance has seen the departure of 10 key executives from various departments in the first nine months of 2023. The latest to join the list is Helen Hai, executive vice president of Binance, who announced her resignation from her post on Sept. 6. On the same day, Gleb Kostarev, vice president of Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Australia and New Zealand at Binance, also announced his resignation, as did CIS general manager Vladimir Smerkis. Four top executives from Binance reportedly all left on the same day after Binance’s response to the United States Department of Justice investigation. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has hosed down recent rumors against his firm, assuring its balance sheet and employee retention remain robust despite the recent market uncertainty.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has approved Nasdaq’s request to operate its first AI-driven order type on Sept. 8. Called the dynamic midpoint extended life order (M-ELO), the new system expands on the M-ELO automated order type by making it “dynamic,” meaning it will use artificial intelligence to update and, essentially, recalibrate itself in real-time. The follow-on effect should be a significant acceleration of orders placed with the system. Nasdaq says the dynamic M-ELO demonstrated a “20.3% increase in fill rates and an 11.4% reduction in mark-outs” during its research and testing.

Former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried lost an initial appeal to be released again on bail prior to his criminal trial. His lawyers had petitioned the court for temporary release, claiming the current measures to allow SBF to prepare for his trial were inadequate due to limited internet access. An appeals court denied the motion on Sept. 6, maintaining SBF’s detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. The former FTX CEO had his bail revoked on Aug. 11, following allegations of witness intimidation for leaking, to The New York Times, personal notes and diary entries from former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison. SBF has roughly four weeks to prepare for his Oct. 3 trial.

ARK Invest and 21Shares requested the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to approve the listing of shares of a spot Ether ETF on the Cboe BZX Exchange. The investment vehicle, called the ARK 21Shares Ethereum ETF, will have crypto exchange Coinbase act as a custodian and will measure the performance of Ether based on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate. The proposal from ARK Invest and 21Shares is one of many spot crypto ETFs that will be reviewed by the SEC in the coming months. The U.S. regulator has been delaying decisions on crypto investments products lately, especially concerning Bitcoin spot ETF proposals.

Grayscale has told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it has no legal reasoning left to block the conversion of its flagship Bitcoin fund to a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF). The company’s lawyers sent a letter to the SEC requesting the pair meet to discuss the next steps following the regulator’s court loss regarding the conversion of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) on Aug. 29. Grayscale added that it believes the SEC should conclude there are “no grounds” for treating the GBTC differently from Bitcoin futures ETFs whose filings “the Commission has previously approved.” According to Grayscale, its fund conversion application has been pending for nearly three times longer than the length of time stipulated by the SEC’s rules.