The event week kicked off and we started with 3 this past week beginning in Melbourne for our monthly Aus DeFi event there. Thanks again to Sensand and crew for supporting us and to the wonderful audience in Melbourne who posed some amazing questions. They are off to a flying start down there with 2 events and 70+ people at each.
Then it was back to Sydney for the Manly Art Gallery and Museum and their Creative Open (for the Northern Beaches Council). This was the first time we did an event inside of an actual art gallery and it’s certainly not going to be the last.
Then we flew to Brisbane the next day to continue our pathway towards pushing for diversity in this space with the Female Leaders in Web3 event. Led by Liya Dashkina and Matt Hooper, it was another amazing event.
We also had a great event in Perth with chapter lead, Kat Dunn bringing some great people together.
To think, we started off with hardly knowing anyone in this space to now being able to connect interstate and we see more next week with our first networking event in Adelaide on the 24th (thanks to Simon and Jason for leading the charge there). We’re also part of the 7th Annual Fintech Awards on the 25th where our group is endorsing one of the awards which you can see here
Also on the 25th, it’s another event this time at Immutable which I get to moderate a panel on The Merge with Immutable CTO, Alex Connolly. More details on that here - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/state-of-play-tickets-389767102897
Here’s some photos of the events from folks on Twitter
and we’ll share more videos as we get them published on our YouTube as well.
NEWS
To the news and we saw interesting things happening in Canada with restriction on the amount of crypto people can own
It continues the path of restrictions on economic freedoms that crypto has been built to address. One of those is the ability to have privacy and be able to obfuscate transactions, not just for money laundering, but for legitimate purposes too. If anyone argues against that then ask them to show every transaction they’ve made or their internet browsing history. We have privacy for good reasons too.
On that note, there was also news out of Holland that the Tornado Cash developer they arrested would be charged if it can be proven he built a tool to purposely money launder. This is arguable when you consider the analysis by Chainalysis which showed that around +60% of usage of Tornado Cash was legitimate purposes.
More here - https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/tornado-cash-ofac-designation-sanctions/
This sits under the umbrella of crypto crime overall which was only 0.15% of total crypto market activity compared with 2-5% of traditional finance being related to money laundering (according to the United Nations).
We also saw continued staff cuts with crypto lender, Hodlnaut, reducing staff by 80%. This hasn’t just been in crypto though. As we showed a few weeks ago, it was also other tech firms too with Shopify, Ola, Robinhood, Invitae and others cutting around 1,000 staff each. https://decrypt.co/107797/crypto-lender-hodlnaut-announces-police-inquiry-80-staff-cut
Finally, it was also great to see community member Cam Crossley give his opinions on this article in The Defiant - https://thedefiant.io/dev-pinpoints-exact-minute-merge-goes-live
DATA
Wait, but number go up? So this week, we saw a bit of a flash crash with the price of BTC dropping over a few days
Top 10 prices looked like this sea of red
Also, looking at the DeFi space thanks to https://defillama.com/ and we can see MakerDAO still at the top of the pile