Another week, another giant shocker in regulatory news: this week the CFTC went after Binance, hard. The agency accused the largest crypto exchange in the world of multiple trading derivatives violations, inadequately supervising activity on its exchange, knowingly evading or helping U.S. clients evade regulators, and trading against its own customers. And yet! Bitcoin didn’t blink. Might that be… a good sign? Or have crypto HODLers simply seen so much bad news in the past year that they now shrug it off? Also: Today is the day Elon Musk will supposedly remove your legacy blue check. Or is it an April Fools Joke? Read on for other chatter, talking points, and good reads.
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Opening Day marks a fresh start for Major League Baseball teams, but there’s one surprising thing from last season the Washington Nationals haven’t changed: there’s still Terra branding all over Nationals Park, as fans discovered as the D.C. team lost its home opener Thursday.
The Nationals signed a five-year, $40 million sponsorship deal with the Terra DAO in early 2022, but after Terra’s UST and LUNA tokens epically collapsed last May, you would’ve expected the team to scrap the branding. Nope: there’s still a large Terra sign in the outfield, logos on the seats behind home plate, digital banners, and even a Terra-branded club at the stadium.
The team didn’t respond when Decrypt reached out. It’s especially jarring to see just one week after Terra founder Do Kwon was arrested in Montenegro after months on the lam.
💰 Coin of the Moment
XRP is one of this week’s biggest winners, up 26% over the past seven days (per CoinGecko) to a price of about $0.54. What’s driving the rally? Gary DeWaal, senior counsel at New York’s Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, told Decrypt the XRP spike is “based on hope.”
DeWaal thinks XRP investors are growing increasingly confident that creator Ripple Labs will come out victorious in the SEC’s long-running suit against the company. The SEC’s growing crackdown may spook some crypto advocates, but the so-called “XRP Army” of investors believes that Ripple has put up a strong defense.
Move over, DeFi—ReFi is coming? Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki has stepped away from DeFi grant-giving machine Gitcoin as it fully decentralizes and is now focused on regenerative finance (huh?) and ReFi incubator Supermodular. He aims to “regenerate the regenerators.” He explains it all to Dan Roberts and Liam Kelly, and also talks DAO structure, crypto factions, NFT use cases, his book “Greenpilled,” and much more.
Rotten Tomatoes founder Patrick Lee, who has led companies at the intersection of technology and entertainment from Web1 to Web3, spoke to Decrypt’s Sander Lutz at Outer Edge LA about the current state of decentralized gaming, film and television.
