This week was dominated by two things. At the wider crypto level, the continued attempt of a crackdown by the SEC on US-based crypto-related firms. At the Hive level, the (on-time!) release of what was for a long time referred to as Project Blank, the new open alpha UI from Leofinance.
Week in the Cryptocurrency World
January was an exceptional month in crypto. It was the best growth percent-wise since 2013 for bitcoin. Robinhood crypto trading activity also seems to recover. They almost doubled in January 2023 compared to December 2022.
When a platform like Robinhood experiences increased trading activity for crypto, for me that means the interest in the earning potential of crypto raises, not necessarily the interest in crypto. Plus, I hope I'm not wrong (I never had an account at Robinhood) in my impression that the most sought-after products of Robinhood are high-leveraged, which in the crypto space is more than gambling, it's almost guaranteed loss (at some point).
We already had rumors about the crackdown on crypto for enough time. Maybe they found a great opportunity to start their actions after what happened with UST and FTX last year.
What is clear is that during the last two weeks, we had two consecutive actions by the SEC. One targeted Kraken, a US-based centralized exchange, and its crypto-staking service. They settled, and Kraken was forced to stop this service and pay a fine of 30m USD.
This week was the turn of Paxos, which, among other things, is the issuer of Binance USD (BUSD). They also hold the reserves in USD to match the BUSD issued (or they should).
The accusation against Paxos in relation to BUSD was that they are issuing undeclared securities, but many question the basis of this accusation since the Howey test refers to "investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others" which is not the case with a stablecoin.
Nonetheless, pending the outcome of a lawsuit (or settlement), Paxos is forbidden to issue more BUSD. This is not a problem for existing BUSD holders at this time, but it practically blocks BUSD from growing further until a resolution is reached. In my opinion, if they won't reach a settlement, BUSD is dead. Binance may leave it to die naturally while they find one or more alternatives. They made it clear the issue is between Paxos and the SEC and they want no involvement in that.
Week on Hive
Leofinance - New UI
Right on time, on February 14th, the open alpha version of the new UI from Leofinance was released.
This is the original announcement.
I wrote not one, but two posts about the new UI this week, and everything I wrote there still stands, so I am not going to repeat them here.
In a sentence though, it is a much-improved interface compared to the interim experiment that was (and still is) #threads. Its release is in stages, so rollouts will keep coming.
LikeTu at Crypto Maniacs
The man behind LikeTu, @elmerlin, was invited to the Crypto Maniacs this week](@jongolson/zuebzkqo).
Someone who has been involved in crypto since 2011 has seen many things and has a lot to share. Although I haven't used the Instagram-like app LikeTu yet, I found the podcast interesting. Thought I should include it here.
Muterra Update
The Muterra game came out with an update this week. I haven't looked at the updates in-game, but looks like they are making progress in allowing players to use their tamers in-game.
3Speak: "Introducing the Acela Core - Upgrading Existing Web2 Apps into True Web3 Dapps"
In this update, the 3Speak team describes at high-level the components that make up a video platform.
Rising Star - Raves Getting Closer
The Rising Star team published an update this week in which they talk about their progress with raves mostly. They also released two cards related to Raves.