Weekly Update: 27 July 2023
1) Avalanche Foundation allocates $50M investment to on-chain asset token purchases [Cointelegraph]
– The initiative, “Avalanche Vista”, will consider investing in any asset that can be tokenized, including equity, credit, real estate, commodities, as well as those that are blockchain-native.
2) Binance CEO plans motion to dismiss CFTC complaint lawsuit [Cointelegraph]
– The lawsuit filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) alleges that Binance conducted illegal futures trading in the U.S. and failed to implement necessary anti-money laundering procedures.
3) Bipartisan bill would give US Treasury authority over DeFi [Decrypt]
– The legislation aims to reign in “criminals, drug traffickers, and hostile state actors such as North Korea,” who’ve used decentralized finance for nefarious purposes.
4) Coinbase to wind down Coinbase Borrow lending program over coming months [Coindesk]
– Coinbase Borrow, a program that allowed customers to receive fiat loans of up to $1 million against as much as 30% of their bitcoin (BTC) holdings, will be shutting down over the coming months.
5) Era Lend on zkSync exploited for $3.4M in reentrancy attack [Cointelegraph]
– Lending app Era Lend on zkSync has been exploited for $3.4 million worth of crypto through a “read-only reentrancy attack”. Era Lend runs on the zkSync network, a zero-knowledge proof Ethereum layer-2 rollup.
6) European Union stablecoin issuers with bank assets will get extra regulation, banking authority says [Coindesk]
– The European Banking Authority (EBA) draft document suggests that such issuers should be subject to the same regulations as credit institutions, including capital requirements and a supervisory review process.
7) Ethereum’s Buterin expresses concerns over Sam Altman’s Worldcoin [Coindesk]
– Buterin highlights four major concerns with Worldcoin’s user authentication system, called “Proof-of-Personhood” (PoP), including potential issues with privacy, accessibility, centralization, and security.
8) Japan signals more Web3 promotion policies are to come [Coindesk]
– Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that the country’s annual broad policy outline includes measures to improve the environment for utilizing Web3 tokens and revitalizing the content industry.
9) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vows to back US dollar with Bitcoin if elected president [Cointelegraph]
– RFK Jr. says he would use Bitcoin to stabilize the U.S. dollar, as well as make Bitcoin profits exempt from capital gains tax.
10) Uniswap founder Hayden Adams suffers Twitter breach [The Block]
– A suspect tweet sent from Adams’ account had called on UniswapX users to check if they were eligible for gifted $UNI tokens by going to a scam site hosted in Russia.
