How Much Power Does a16z Have? 🤌
In today's edition: 🎤 New episode of The Chopping Block, 🦄 Uniswap's governance drama, 🏦 FTX's request, and more!
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New TCB Pod!
The Chopping Block: Why Canto, Up Nearly 500% This Month, Has Its Haters
Welcome to “The Chopping Block!” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news. This week, they cover:
why Bitcoin maximalists are mad about Bitcoin NFTs
why Robert thinks Bitcoin is not a good blockchain on which to build things
why Canto, a layer 1 blockchain, surged in price and activity and why Haseeb is anti-Canto
how Ethereum will have multi-dimensional fee structures
wha the role of applications in generalized blockchains should be and why they shouldn't be enforced at the base layer
the accusations against the LayerZero team and their response
the battle to provide the bridging services to Uniswap
What’s Poppin’?
Does a16z Control Uniswap?
by Samyuktha Sriram
Venture Capital giant a16z used its entire voting weight to stop a proposal to use the Wormhole bridge to deploy Uniswap on the BNB chain. Since the majority of community votes had signaled support for the proposal, market participants are now questioning if Uniswap’s governance is truly decentralized.
Huobi Lists FTX User Debt Tokens
Crypto exchange Huobi listed FTX User Debt or “FUD,” a derivative token that represents 2% of the crypto exchange’s debt, on Sunday. The token is issued by DebtDAO, offering creditors priority in asserting their claims on FTX debt.
The early bird issuance phase will sell the debt at a discount and initial issuance has been set to 20 million FUD tokens.
According to wassielawyer, the idea is a complete breach of securities violations. “This is such a terrible idea on so many levels. Also - not all debt claims are equal and fungible,” he said.
FTX Wants Politicians to Return Money by the End of February
FTX debtors sent confidential messages to politicians who received money from the crypto exchange, asking them to return any financial contributions by the end of February. In a statement released on Friday, the FTX debtors said they reserve the right to claw back these funds in a bankruptcy court should they not be returned voluntarily.
A report from CoinDesk last month estimates that more than one in three of the 535 members of Congress received money from FTX executives.
Visa Tests USDC Settlement on Ethereum
Payments giant Visa is testing how to accept settlement payments from issuers in USDC on Ethereum, according to statements made by the firm’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, at StarkWare Sessions 2023.
“That's been one of the areas where we want to build muscle memory. The same way that we can convert between dollars in euros on a cross-border transaction, we should be able to convert between digital tokenized dollars and traditional dollars,” said Sheffield.
In December, Visa published a paper exploring auto payments for self-custodial wallets on Ethereum – something that would be enabled by Account Abstraction, which allows user accounts to function like smart contracts with pre-scheduled execution.
Crypto.com Users Complain of Being Locked Out of Accounts
A number of users of crypto exchange Crypto.com (disclosure: a sponsor of Unchained) have reported being locked out of their accounts on the platform. One user with the Twitter handle “chasebeats_” said he was unable to access his funds for two months and had not received a reply from the exchange despite sending multiple emails.
The problems started last month after some users received an email from the exchange informing them that Single European Payments Area (SEPA) transfers were being “migrated to a new provider” and Euro-denominated deposits and withdrawals were temporarily suspended.
Google Invested $300M in AI Startup With Ties to SBF
Google has invested $300 million in an artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, that was previously funded by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. In a previous funding round, Anthropic reported raising $580 million in a Series B investment round that was led by Bankman-Fried.
Some users on Twitter are nowspeculating that FTX’s stake in the firm could be as high as $1.1 billion, which could potentially be clawed back to pay off some of the debt the bankrupt crypto exchange owes to creditors.
In Other News…✍️✍️✍️
U.S. Trustee Andrew Vara opposed subpoenas aimed at Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, and his associates, including former senior staff and family members.
MakerDAO is proposing to join the fight against climate change by committing 20,000 MKR tokens, worth around $14 million, to fund sustainability campaigns through 2040 as part of its governance constitution.
A seven-member committee was appointed in the U.S. bankruptcy case of Genesis Global to represent unsecured creditors in court proceedings.
StarkWare, developer of Ethereum scaling solutions StarkEx and StarkNet, announced plans to open source its STARK Prover software.
Pantera Capital's co-CIO Joey Krug left the VC as part of a reorganization in the company's leadership.
Protocol Labs cut 21% of its workforce citing a challenging economic environment and tougher crypto market.
The Chinese government ordered the removal of Nostr’s Damus, a decentralized Twitter alternative on the country's version of Apple's App Store, due to an alleged violation of national speech laws.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is preparing for a big year of cryptocurrency enforcement actions, according to its Chairman Rostin Behnam.
The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on February 14th to examine the dangers in the digital asset market and the need for financial system safeguards.
The U.K. Court of Appeal ruled that a case by Tulip Trading (owned by Craig Wright) against 16 Bitcoin developers will go to trial in London and the developers are alleged to owe "fiduciary duties" and "duties in tort
Billionaire investor Tim Draper was met with a cold reception from the governor of Sri Lanka's central bank while trying to promote Bitcoin as a tool against corruption.
Today in Crypto Adoption...
NounsDAO is collaborating with Titan Comics and ComicsDAO to create a comic book series, "Nouns: Nowntown", which will be minted as NFTs in April.
The $$$ Corner…
EigenLayer, an upcoming Ethereum restaking protocol, aims to raise $50 million in a Series A funding round with a $250 million post-money equity valuation and a $500 million token or fully diluted valuation.
What Do You Meme
📈 Your Market Update 📉
BTC is down 2.23%, trading at $22,856
ETH is down 2.07%, trading at $1,632
BTC dominance: 40.18%
Crypto market cap: $1.1 trillion
*All data as of today, 5 am ET
Recommended Reads
Steakhouse Financial on the MakerDAO 2022 Annual Report:
wassielawyer on why GTX could be another disaster in the making:
Blockchain Association’s Letter of Opposition to New Jersey’s anti-crypto bill - SB 1756:
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