Chain Reaction - 20th March 2023
Chainalysis, Fireblocks, Melbourne trips and more
Another week full of meetups first up with the Chainalysis Discovery Crypto Day in Sydney where there were presentations on the latest insights from the crypto analytics firm and where Mark from NotCentralised (and Aus DeFi President) presented real-world blockchain updates with projects they’re working on.
Then on Wednesday, it was off to Melbourne to see our southern crew have their first in-person meetup for the year. This feature our friends and new sponsors at Fireblocks as well as Emina from Clayton Utz and Olga from B.gain.
The community events double up on Wednesday as Newcastle had their first ever event and led by Jake Denny of Mycelium and Clint Bruin from Lyqyd/Digital Mutual, we had some great discussions amongst the locals. Sign up for more events we’ll be doing over there on the Newcastle meetup page - https://www.meetup.com/blockchain-newcastle/
Finally, we rounded out the week on Thursday with another Chainalysis Discover day in Melbourne this time.
We also got to see members of the Web3 Innovation Centre in Stone & Chalk (Ben from Collective Shift and Samira from Elbaite) catch up with founder, Mark in the Melbourne offices
Finally, we were able to get our Token Mapping response out for Aus DeFi. We were granted an extra 2 weeks upon request and the responses painted a mosaic of views from the community where most folks agreed that we need some sort of regulation, but just differed in the approaches to getting there.
You can read both responses online too.
Aus DeFi - https://www.defi.org.au/post/response-token-mapping-consultation-paper
NotCentralised - https://medium.com/notcentralised/token-mapping-a-notcentralised-response-531128c910df
Next week, we’re back in Sydney for the Aus DeFi Association monthly meetup and we hope to see you there! Link is here if you’ve missed it - https://www.meetup.com/australian-defi-association/events/292122778/
NEWS
Started off the week with some positive news in that HSBC has swooped in to purchase the UK arm of troubled SVB (Silicon Valley Bank). https://au.news.yahoo.com/hsbc-buy-uk-arm-silicon-070821158.html
Signature bank also ended up collapsing but the state regulator with the deposits guaranteed now. Good news as it means all depositors will be made whole, similar to what happened to SVB. The shareholders won’t be protected from this though, only debtholders. Where to next for crypto startups is the question. https://www.theblock.co/post/219119/state-regulator-takes-control-of-signature-bank-federal-regulators-guarantee-deposits
With that announcement, it makes 3 major on/off-ramps to the crypto space that have been removed from circulation so it’s definitely a hit to the markets. Yet, we saw BTC pump in price as that news happened. Perhaps, these centralised finance issues made the decentralised investment options even more attractive.
Visual Capitalist always does well with visual explainers (hence their name) and they’ve not let us down with this current crisis showing a timeline of events from the past week https://www.visualcapitalist.com/timeline-shocking-collapse-of-silicon-valley-bank/
Over in local news we saw our friends at NAB and Fireblocks are in the news with the announcement of this cross-border payment facility using their stablecoin and the Ethereum network https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/nab-s-stablecoin-the-audn-deployed-for-instant-cross-border-payments-20230313-p5crjt
We also saw David Lavecky of CANVAS in the news talking with ausbiz about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout - you can watch that here https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davidlavecky_siliconvalleybank-insolvency-startupecosystem-activity-7040860378049773568-RUgV/
Additionally, Nick Bishop, of NotCentralised, provided some commentary to The Defiant as daily layer 2 transactions soared to new record highs https://thedefiant.io/ethereum-l2-txs-surpass-mainnet
Something really interesting this week was the level of innovation coming out of the NFT space with this video highlighting some of the new changes announced at ETH Denver last week. This includes being able to have a NFT which can pass through different games and appear differently in each game. Check it out here:
Euler Finance was in the news as it offered a $1m reward for information that helps find the culprit of a $200m hack it had suffered. It also sent the hacker an on-chain message which basically offers the hacker to keep $20m (10%) and it would consider the matter closed. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/03/15/euler-finance-to-offer-1m-reward-as-it-reels-from-nearly-200m-exploit/
We’ll leave you with these 2 videos first up on Coinbase and their CEO BRian Armstrong with the folks at Bankless looking at their outlook of crypto in the wake of the banking collapses
And speaking of the collapses, this is a great explainer on what happened and the way that traditional banking works, which is a great breakdown given that many in crypto may not understand how the traditional model works. This is thanks to their awesome guest, Ram Ahluwalia - check it out
That’s it for this week, let’s see what exciting news we get over the next 7 days!
ABOUT AUS DEFI ASSOCIATION
The Australian DeFi Association (Aus DeFi) is a non-profit community organization dedicated to increasing education and awareness of blockchain technology, specifically decentralized finance (DeFi) and web3-based projects. Their goal is to empower the Australian community with the knowledge and tools to participate in the decentralized economy, and to promote the adoption and growth of blockchain technology in Australia. They strive to provide a more grassroots approach to promoting blockchain technology compared to other industry-focused organizations in Australia, and to provide a platform for community members to learn about and engage with this emerging technology.
You can watch our recorded meetups and interviews here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ausdefiassociation3956/videos
