Scenius Sync (Issue #57)

Ripple's Major (Partial) Victory versus SEC, Mashinsky Bail Set at $40m, Binance Layoffs, Gnosis Integrates Visa, & UniswapX

Scenius: The intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. The communal form of the concept of genius.

Welcome to The Scenius Sync.

Our mission with this concise publication is twofold:

1. Share the essential stories driving the crypto industry and markets.

2. Highlight innovative applications and mainstream adoption of crypto and blockchain technology.

If you find this newsletter valuable, please subscribe and share The Scenius Sync with your network 💪

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Essential News 🗞

1. Ripple, Crypto Industry Score Partial Win in SEC Court Fight Over XRP

   • Ripple scored a partial victory in its fight with the U.S. SEC in a court ruling that brought a modicum of regulatory clarity for the cryptocurrency industry. The sale of Ripple’s XRP tokens on exchanges and through algorithms did not constitute investment contracts, the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York ruled Thursday. But the institutional sale of the tokens did violate federal securities laws, the court said.

   • Kraken, Crypto.com join Coinbase in Relisting XRP After Court Ruling

   • Gensler responds to Ripple decision, says he's disappointed over treatment of retail investors

2. Ex-Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky's Bail Set at $40M, Travel Restricted

   • Bail for Alexander Mashinsky, founder and former chief executive of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius, has been set at $40 million by a U.S. District Judge after he was arrested Thursday on charges of fraud. Mashinsky pleaded not guilty to seven counts, relating to misleading investors and manipulating the price of his CEL token.

3. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: Crypto Will 'Transcend Any One Currency'

   • BlackRock boss Larry Fink has upped his bullish stance on cryptocurrency as an investment, today saying that “it’s going to transcend any one currency.”

     The CEO of the world’s largest asset manager said in a Friday interview with CNBC that although he couldn’t talk about Bitcoin specifically as BlackRock had filed an application with the U.S. SEC for a spot market Bitcoin ETF, crypto “has a differentiating value versus other asset classes.”

4. Binance Lays Off Over 1,000 Employees

   • Binance, the giant crypto exchange, is cutting a big chunk of its workforce during a federal crackdown in the U.S. Over 1,000 people have been fired in recent weeks, according to a person familiar with the moves. The exercise, which is continuing, could result in Binance losing more than a third of its staff. 

5. Multichain ceases operations as CEO's sister is detained in China while holding $220 million of funds

   • Cross-chain project Multichain has confirmed, after weeks of rumors, that its CEO Zhaojun was detained by Chinese police and is still under custody.

     The project said that Chinese police took his computers, phones, hardware wallets, and mnemonic phrases. While the project is protected by multi-party computation, the servers running this were controlled by Zhaojun's personal cloud server account. As a result, when he was detained, those who would normally sign such transactions had their access revoked — hence why the project was unable to initially fix its technical issues. The project noted that all operational funds and investor funds were under Zhaojun's control and are now with the Chinese police.

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Innovation & Adoption 💡📈

1. Gnosis Lets Crypto Users Make Everyday Purchases From Wallets With Visa

   • Gnosis, a sidechain to Ethereum, says a pair of new product offerings could let consumers with crypto wallets pay for online purchases using stablecoins and Visa’s payment system. Gnosis announced Monday it is releasing Gnosis Pay and Gnosis Card, the first decentralized payment network integrating with a traditional payment processor and the first Visa-certified consumer debit card directly connected to an on-chain self-custodial wallet, according to a Gnosis press release.

   • For more information, here’s a link to the announcement on Twitter.

2. Hayden Adams unveils UniswapX protocol to aggregate DEX liquidity

   • Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has introduced a new open-source protocol named UniswapX that will aggregate liquidity across decentralized exchange pools. The protocol, released today by Uniswap, will enable users to find optimum prices for their trades by pooling its liquidity sources, according to an official blog post. This aggregator service has been launched as an opt-in beta feature on Uniswap Labs' front-end platform on Ethereum. To learn more, here is the official blog post.

3. Aave Protocol activates GHO stablecoin on the Ethereum mainnet

   • Lending protocol Aave has ventured into the realm of decentralized digital dollars by activating its decentralized GHO stablecoin on the Ethereum mainnet.  The decisive move is a result of executing the approved governance vote put forth by Aave’s DAO earlier this week. The GHO stablecoin, which was initially released on the Goerli testnet back in February 2023, will be available for users on the Aave version 3 on Ethereum.

   • Decrypt reported that GHO hit $2.5M market cap after just 2 days.

4. Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes Launches His Own NFT Platform

   • Set to debut its first collectibles in September, Museum of Mahomes will serve up digital collectibles as NFTs, some of which will be tied to real-world perks like game-worn items, physical trading cards, autographed jerseys and footballs, and more.

5. GBTC volumes surge to yearly high

   • Daily volume for Grayscale's GBTC has been on a tear in the wake of a flurry of new spot exchange traded fund filings, hitting the highest level of the year on July 13. As per The Block's data dashboard, daily volumes for Grayscale's largest fund product topped $183 million on July 13. Grayscale, which is in the process of suing the SEC to upgrade GBTC into a proper spot bitcoin ETF, has seen the product's discount to net-asset-value shrink since BlackRock's surprise announcement that it would file for a spot bitcoin ETF on June 15. Across the crypto asset management space, issuers are racing to bring a product to market, kicking off a broader increase in inflows across existing products. The Block's data dashboard shows the discount has tightened from -44% on June 13 to -28% on July 10.