What a week! We Celebrated our 1-year anniversary on Wednesday and we put out this message on Twitter
We also had a set of videos from our chapter leads here
Then it was off to celebrate with Binance Australia team and their Xmas get together.
Later this week we get our Xmas cheer on as we host the annual Cryptomas party in Sydney with Blockchain Professionals, Booky Poobah’s, Metaverse Sydney (with sponsors Algorand Foundation, Independent Reserve, Laneway Education, Smart Token Labs and my group NotCentralised). Tickets available here but get in quick - https://events.humanitix.com/it-s-cryptomas-time
Finally, there’s going to be another big announcement coming later this week so keep an eye out for that too. It’s all to do with working better together and it’s an important step towards seeing web3 go more mainstream. Stay tuned!
News
It's wacky to see that SBF was able to speak at a conference as he did for this New York Times Dealbook conference, but this is a crazy year so nothing should surprise us anymore. Full video here
The AFR take on it is here and sums up nicely what I feel from this, lack of hubris and send awareness and continuing to not see this as fraud but as bad risk management
https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/why-we-should-be-thankful-for-sam-bankman-fried-20221201-p5c2wt
Must be media week for him because he was also on with Coffeezilla (the famed YouTube scam hunter) talking the same story of it not being his fault
And also on the famed Mario Nawfal's Twitter Spaces
It's ironic because Nawfal shot to fame (even further than he was already) by hosting marathon Twitter Spaces in the wake of the FTX collapse and we now see the subject of those talks now a guest on the show. It was great when he was finally on but complaints were aplenty afterward as many other speakers argued over not being given much opportunity despite SBFs limited time on the show. Overall, it was nothing new compared to other appearances as SBF continued to deny fraud or show much of any sympathy for what’s happened.
On the same show we actually heard some Australian accents in there too as Nugenesis CEO Hussein Faraj came on to talk about the investigation they launched into FTX accusing them of market manipulation for their product launch. Drama continues.
Also, on Sunday we saw the Alex Damsker Space that went through more details of the FTX saga in terms of contagion and next steps.
There was this piece from @bitcoin which showed what FTX contagion looks like
If these groups had seen that Sequoia’s liability to FTX was only in tokens, it would have been a very different story for many other groups that jumped in. Pension funds (superannuation in Australia) and hedge funds relying on reputation alone are adding to the contagion. Let’s see how contained it is.
Back to other news and locally, we had community member Steph Bazley (Airtree) present the new Digital Assets report to the Tech Council of Australia. More details on her LinkedIn post here https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7003220807535525888-bxnl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Also we saw the announcement about Blockchain Australia's new directors
Binance CEO, CZ, shared his thoughts on what 6 things centralised exchanges should do to look healthy to customers - https://bsc.news/post/binance-ceo-cz-shares-6-commitments-for-healthy-exchanges
Highlighting that TradFi and DeFi have similar issues was this piece from chapter lead Nick Bishop https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicholas-bishop-cfa-94760173_blackstone-limits-withdrawals-at-125bn-property-activity-7004193323389190144-cEPa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android
In terms of real world use cases there was this piece on LinkedIn showing how ENS domains can be used to open AirBnb’s. Real-life gated community anyone?
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7003008169572536320/
Telegram are getting into crypto wallets (and DEXs too) https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/30/telegram-ceo-durov-plans-to-build-crypto-wallets-decentralized-exchange/
Mine Digital collapse looks like it was trading whilst insolvent before it collapsed in September according to this latest article from the AFR - https://www.afr.com/technology/more-bad-news-for-crypto-investors-caught-in-mine-digital-collapse-20221128-p5c1r2
BlockFi, as expected has failed for bankruptcy
More on Barry Silbert of DCF / Grayscale here
An interesting piece from the team at Bankless interviewing well-known author/blogger, Tim Ferris and learning more about his new NFT project -
Data
An interesting data point to highlight this week is that of Layer 2 adoption. As indicated by this L2 gas tracker, we can see that 2 usage is on the rise. These protocols are transaction aggregators and make gas costs low for end users as they roll them up into single transactions. Very important for high volume transactions and seeing blockchains solve real-world problems. Charts available https://dune.com/absinthan/l2-gas-consumption-by-funnyking