Sunday Review 15/09/2024

Hello Observers, has September got you soul searching already?

End of summer, back to school, new podcast and TV show seasons - September is a month off in-betweens and this year even more so.

With the U.S. elections about to happen and the choice being between two radically different candidates, the lingering regrets of these past four years are clashing and mixing with thrill and fear for what is to come.

This year, crypto has become an important topic of the presidential campaign.

Blockchain industry insiders have spent a record $119 million in donations to the U.S. two main political parties, with the main goal of getting adequate regulation approved.

The industry's feverish support is on point, given the growth in interest in blockchain-powered solutions in business, finance, and politics.

Crypto betting platform continues to grow despite the muddy legal grounds of the event prediction market in the U.S.. While the platform is geo-blocked in the country, users continue to make bets on it and TV stations to read into its data during primetime.

Crypto Markets

The Durov Saga

In the first interview following his arrest, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov said the charges against him are misguided, as old laws can’t rule over our new hyper-technological age:

“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach."

🍭 Crypto Highs And Fun Times

• In the crowded yield coin market, Ondo Finance has managed to make a mark with its USDY becoming the leading permissionless stablecoin. Not only that, but the protocol also announced last week to have reached a $600 million TVL. Its strategy of offering institutional-grade investor protections while harnessing the composability of DeFi is working rather well.
• Arch Network has announced its plan to bring dApps and smart contracts to the Bitcoin blockchain. This isn’t the first time a plan like this has been put in motion, but it is a novelty that by using Arch’s parallel chain, users don’t need to transfer BTC to a different layer.
• PayPal has taken a new step with its crypto journey. The payment giant and its U.S. subsidiary Venmo have integrated Ethereum Name Service (ENS) into their platforms, allowing users to make simple crypto transactions.

😈 Crypto Naughty And Sloppy

• Genuine Labs is a group of developers with genuine good intentions: keep the LUNC token project, now rebranded Terra Classic, afloat. Recently, they managed to push an upgrade to streamline the transaction process. Despite GL's attempts to sail forward and away from the mess created by the fall of Du Kwon’s empire, it hasn’t been able to solve an essential success element: management.
• Over the last two weeks, the $REEF token surged by 140%. While this seems really good news for the Reef Chain, it happened following the token's delisting on Binance and with no major development recently registered. Is it magic, good fortune, or a scam pump?
• Despite the push for cashless gambling in Singapore, cryptocurrencies will remain excluded from casino activities. The country’s authorities consider crypto to be a vehicle for money laundering and, like Brazil and Australia did earlier this year, they have put a ban on the digital assets being used in all the two casinos of its territory.

Tweet Of The Week

The buzz around the U.S. election is not going away anytime soon, but while so many crypto insiders are openly advocating for one of the candidates—with a higher tendency to support Donald Trump— Ari Paul, founder of BlockTower Capital, wrote a post explaining that if crypto is that dependent on politicians, it isn’t crypto at all.

Paul concludes his long post saying, “instead of “saving ourselves”, more and more of the industry seems to be focused on getting the right politicians to protect us instead of figuring out how make this stuff work without the protection.”

And This Week's Lucky Number Is… One 💸 billion dollars 💸

Sky, former MakerDAO, is looking for a business partner to whom it will trust $1 billion of its funds to invest in tokenized assets. Several contenders, such as Superstate, BlackRock, Securitize, and Ondo Finance, are trying to get the juicy deal.

Being safe, big and popular alone won’t do as the DAO behind stablecoin DAI wants to guarantee that this deal also promotes Web3 innovation and financial inclusion in DeFi. 🧚🏾‍♂️