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Our stuff
Quadrigorous investigation. Tim Copeland pestered Jesse Powell, founder of the Kraken exchange, to go through why, exactly, Powell has put out a $100,000 “bounty” for evidence involving the ongoing QuadrigaCX confusion/conspiracy/misfortune. Powell duly gives Tim five compelling reasons why we should all still be suspicious of the exchange’s collapse. (Which, for the three among you who have forgotten, involved the supposed death of the man solely responsible for $190 million worth of customers’ cryptoassets.) Read it, help solve the puzzle and win Powell's money here.
Dash for the exits: Guillermo G interviews Dash's now ex-biz dev executive about today's lay offs. The crypto was once the fifth largest by market cap. But like everyone else in the cryptosphere, the company has been forced to throw some of its employees into the wilderness, to survive nuclear winter. The ex biz dev guy, has no regrets or hard feelings. (I would, tbh.) Read it here.
Ethereum retrenches. Adriana H today collared Ethereum 2.0 researcher Ben Edgington for an update on Ethereum’s second-innings game plan. According to Edgington, ETH 2.0 will variously: dethrone the computationally intensive Proof of Work consensus algorithm, reupholster much of Ethereum’s creaking infrastructure and …. well click here to find out.
Benstronaut. Today we dispatched the brave Ben M to space, where he commingled with beautiful aliens and consumed asteroid on toast for breakfast. JK! Nudge, nudge! Winky-winky, eh? In reality, Ben simply pinged a message to space, via a new Lightning Network-integrated site called Spacebit.live, and dutifully reported back to Houston with his cosmic experience. Make sense of the above words here.
Other stuff
Unsetld. Here’s a sad crypto tale. Selt, a UK-based crypto startup that received the go-ahead from several major regulators, has brought on administrators to help sell off its less lucrative, non-blockchain enterprises—leaving it as a pure blockchain-development firm. According to FT Alphaville, the firm lacked sufficient “regulatory capital” to continue these secondary businesses; a “central securities depository” and a “record-keeping platform for European funds.”
“So they're selling off the bit where they, uh, do things?” sneered internationally reviled blockchain hater and one-time Decrypt contributor David Gerard in the comments underneath the FT’s piece. But ignore the hateful Gerard—it’s sad news. Indeed, so fraught was the company in its initial press release that Coindesk briefly misreported it as having filed for “bankruptcy.” (Setl’s fault, not Coindesk’s.)
BNB goes it alone. Speaking of Coindesk, [Ed. Which you do daily, eh, Munster?] today its usually fairly dreary technical analysis veered dramatically into the interesting: Binance’s native token, BNB, has apparently split from its price correlation with Bitcoin. The token, which can be used for a suite of dubious perks on the exchange, has spiked 140 percent this year, while others have pathetically dragged. Coindesk supplies no reason for this price deviation—but rest be assured, we at Debrief have our own suspicions.
BritBlock. European exchange e-Toro has finally launched in the US, meaning American investors will now also get to suffer the endlessly unfunny Twitter musings of Mati Greenspan, the exchange’s senior market analyst. More pertinently, they will also have the chance to avail themselves of one of e-Toro’s most celebrated functions: the ability to “copy” better traders’ trades and win (or lose!) big off the genius of others.
Written by Ben M, who is a moribund figure, short and very fat, with dirt-encrusted, probing fingers, grey bulbous features, and empty black eyes, which, on the frequent occasions he allows them to leer at yours, convey a shallowness and despair that you fully expect, in light of the sneering, loathsome cadence and tone of his speech. Send your guesses as to which classic New Yorker article this is partially plagiarized from at ben@decryptmedia.com