🤔 Biden's Crypto Politics: A Complex Game?
In today’s edition: 🪂 Justin Sun involved in multiple airdrops, 🧩 LayerZero's challenging airdrop, 💰 $20M exploit, 🚨 Betrayal within Cypher Protocol, and more!
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Union is the first sovereign interoperability layer pioneering trustless bridging between appchains, L1s, and L2s without depending on trusted third parties, oracles, multi-signatures, or MPC. Looking to future-proof blockchain bridging, it is the only protocol that fully addresses the sovereign bridging trilemma, unlocking a horizontally-scaled future.
Erik Voorhees, a crypto OG, has launched Venice, a private, uncensorable, open-source competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, powered by a decentralized crypto network.
In the episode, Erik and Venice’s COO Teana Baker-Taylor delve into the problems with censorship and data in current AI agents, including how they create honeypots of information about users’ search history for hackers, or that they can be absurdly politically correct, such as refusing to create images of Caucasian people. As they point out, there’s also the risk that the companies managing them could be censoring the models to please the Chinese government, in order to access the market in that country. They talk about their plan for Venice to gain market share, considering that DuckDuckGo, a privacy-preserving competitor to Google, has a much smaller market share. And they explain why they intend for Venice to eventually use the compute of Morpheus, or other decentralized crypto-powered compute networks.
They also critique the SEC’s current regulatory approach to crypto, calling it “a joke.” Additionally, they explore the concept of AI agents using cryptocurrencies as their primary currency.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or watch it on YouTube.
Opinion: What President Biden’s Crypto Politics Might Really Be About
by David Z. Morris
The Administration’s anti-crypto policies risk alienating voters of both parties. But the bigger, albeit also potentially misguided, picture may be about preserving America’s global economic power.
What’s Poppin’?
by Sam Sriram, Sage Young and Juan Aranovich
Tron’s Justin Sun Has Become Quite the Airdrop Farmer of Late
Sun has received airdrop allocations from crypto projects such as EigenLayer and EtherFi, and is also earning points from his deposits into Swell and Puffer Finance.
8 Reasons Why LayerZero’s Upcoming Airdrop Could Be the Most Complex Ever
How will LayerZero manage its airdrop amid falling crypto prices, millions of users, and several stakeholders?
$20 Million Exploited From Sonne Finance on Optimism
Sonne Finance has paused all markets on Optimism after an attacker exploited a common vulnerability in forks of Compound Finance, draining an estimated $20 million from the protocol’s smart contracts.
Cypher Protocol Insider Steals From Exploit Redemption Contract
A pseudonymous core contributor to the Cypher Protocol who stayed on to rebuild the project after a $1 million exploit in August has admitted to stealing and gambling some of the protocol funds that were recovered.
Daily Bits… ✍️✍️✍️
💰 The state of Wisconsin invested nearly $100 million in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, purchasing 94,562 shares in the first quarter of the year.
🚔 Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to over five years in prison by a Dutch court for laundering $2.2 billion in illicit assets.
🔒 Crypto investment firm BlockTower Capital’s main hedge fund was partially drained by fraudsters, leaving an undisclosed amount of funds missing and prompting the firm to hire blockchain forensics experts to investigate.
🗽 Former FTX executive Ryan Salame’s attorneys are requesting an 18-month prison sentence, highlighting his cooperation with authorities and his minimal involvement in the core fraud at FTX.
🛡️ Lido co-founders and Paradigm are secretly backing a new project called Symbiotic, aiming to compete with EigenLayer in the growing "restaking" sector within DeFi.
📉 High transaction fees and excitement around Runes have caused a temporary decrease in active Bitcoin addresses, with the 7-day moving average falling below 700,000 before partially rebounding.
🪙 DeFi lending platform Liquity unveiled plans for an upgraded protocol, Liquity V2, featuring a new stablecoin called BOLD, which allows borrowers to set their own interest rates and uses liquid-staking tokens of ether as collateral.
Today in Crypto Adoption...
🏦 Deutsche Bank partnered with the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian to test asset tokenization, focusing on developing an interoperable blockchain platform for tokenized and digital funds.
☁️ TRON DAO announced that Google Cloud is now a Super Representative candidate on the TRON blockchain, enhancing TRON's data accessibility and analytics through Google Cloud’s solutions.
The $$$ Corner…
🔮 Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market platform, secured $45 million in a Series B funding round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Vitalik Buterin, bringing its total funding to over $70 million.
💰 Solana-based decentralized exchange Zeta Markets raised $5 million in a funding round led by Electric Capital, with plans to launch its token, airdrop, and Solana Layer 2 rollup.
🧩 Zero-knowledge project Hylé secured $2.6 million in funding led by Framework Ventures, aiming to strengthen its ZKP verification network for scalability and privacy.
What Do You Meme?
📈 Your Market Update 📉
BTC is up 1.1%, trading at $62,373
ETH is down .4%, trading at $2,894
BTC dominance: 51.46%
Crypto market cap: $2.4T
*All data as of today, 07:45 am ET. Source: CoinGecko
Recommended Reads
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The Biden administration's anti-crypto policies may indeed be a strategic move to maintain America's global economic dominance, despite potentially alienating voters. However, these actions risk pushing crypto innovation and custody services offshore, potentially making the market less safe and more volatile. My other fear is that, less and less Americans will become Crypto millionaires while the numbers outside of the US will be astronomical