BlockFi Down and Sues SBF for Robinhood Shares

Daily Bullets: Tuesday, November 29th

Nov 29, 2022

BlockFi is the latest casualty in the FTX fallout and it seems they're going down swinging, suing SBF over Robinhood shares pledged as collateral under the terms of an agreement made on November 9. SBF owned a 7.6% stake in Robinhood.
We're also finding out interesting details, such as the unconfirmed claim that SBF had been listing his stake in Robinhood among his list of assets in his last-ditch efforts to raise money to attempt to save FTX. Appears that he also wasn't willing to go down without a fight.
SBF's Robinhood shares were worth about $600M when acquired in May, 2022 so BlockFi still has a long way to go if it wins with anywhere between $1B and $10B in assets and liabilities.
Who will be the next domino to fall?

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Crypto News:

Silvergate Capital has “minimal” exposure to lender BlockFi, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and that BlockFi deposits make up less than $20M of total deposits

After filing for bankruptcy protection, crypto firm BlockFi sued Sam Bankman-Fried over Robinhood shares he allegedly pledged to the lender as collateral

Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom is expanding to Ethereum and Polygon - competing with the market leader, MetaMask

Mastercard filed another crypto/web3 trademark application covering: crypto transaction monitoring software, providing cryptocurrency info, risk assessment services

Fidelity started opening retail crypto trading accounts after announcing a waiting list earlier this month

Starlight, a Brevan Howard-backed web3 payments startup, launched corporate cards that aim to simplify expense payments for crypto businesses

Paradigm is sponsoring Tom Meagher and Jake Moxey to focus full-time on wagmi, a powerful & ergonomic web3 frontend development library - vision is to build open-source libraries to accelerate web3 frontend development

Fintech company Plum has rolled out crypto investing services to customers in France, Belgium, Spain and Ireland in partnership with Bitpanda

Economic/Government/Regulatory:

Kraken agreed to a $362,000 settlement with the U.S. Treasury for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and will invest another $100,000 in compliance controls

The Reserve Bank of India to launch a retail CBDC pilot in December. Each bank participating in the trial will test the CBDC among 10,000 to 50,000 users

The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has introduced a draft concept for its central bank digital currency (CBDC) candidate digital hryvnia, or e-hryvnia

Exchange News:

FTX Trading and 101 additional affiliated companies are resuming ordinary course payments of salaries to employees worldwide and ordinary course payments to certain non-U.S. contractors and service providers

As part of the Proof of Reserves (PoR) process, Binance is working with a 3rd party auditor to provide proof of ownership and will result in some large transfers between Binance’s owned wallets

NEXO releases proof of reserves showing no exposure to FTX

Coinbase Wallet will stop supporting BCH, ETC, XLM and XRP, citing low usage

Huobi partnered with Tron Network and DMC Labs to jointly launch the world's first national token DMC (Dominica Coin) under the authorization of the government of the Commonwealth of Dominica

Ankex, a new hybrid crypto exchange incubated by DeFi infrastructure firm Qredo, has launch - aims to embody the benefits of both decentralized and centralized crypto exchanges

DeFi News:

Crypto data firm Kaiko launches a product tracking market data for DeFi lending and borrowing protocols on Ethereum - Aave, Compound and MakerDAO

MakerDAO is voting to increase the amount of interest it pays on Dai deposits - from the current yield rate of 0.01% to one of four rates — 1%, 0.75%, 0.5% and 0.25%

Compound will enforce loan limits on 10 crypto tokens to adjust the risk parameters of Compound v2. Tokens include: WBTC, BAT, UNI, COMP, LINK, SUSHI, ZRX, AAVE, YFI, MKR

Solana-based DEX Serum stated on Twitter it was now defunct and now replaced by a community fork called OpenBook

Binance partnership with Injective allows Binance Custody clients to stake their $INJ tokens directly from their Qualified Wallet

NFT/Gaming/Metaverse News:

Candy Digital, a sports and entertainment NFT startup founded in 2021 and backed by web3 leaders like Mike Novogratz, Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Rubin and reached a $1.5B valuation, laid off a large part of its staff

Web3 gaming DAO, Game7, has launched a $100M grant program to enable game developers to build the tools needed to make Web3 gaming better and more accessible

BNB Chain is officially live on OpenSea

Sony’s latest invention for the metaverse, a wearable motion-tracking system called Mocopi - will cost about $358 and allow users to move as an avatar in real time
Mobile game maker Aeria Canada Studio has partnered with Ready Games to migrate its most popular mobile titles to web3

Fundraises:

Roboto Games, a new game studio aiming to bridge Web2 experience and accessible Web3 in-game elements, raised $15M in a Series A funding round led by a16z
Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech offering an investment app that allows users to buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets, raised $8M in Series A investment led by Anthemis and Dragonfly

Burn Ghost, a startup focused on casual games that reward NFT prizes to players, has raised $3.1M in funding led by Drive by DraftKings, Bitkraft Ventures. With Pillar VC participating

Wanderers, the sci-fi media brand behind the Wanderers NFT collection, raises $2M Seed Round led by Animoca Brands and GameFi Ventures

Early Stage Projects:

Aptos partnering with web3 fintech firm MoonPay through an integration with Petra, the crypto wallet built by Aptos Labs

AdaSwap launch of DEX in mainnet

ETH Liquid Staking Product qETH available on Tranchess

What’s your take on today’s news? Anything interesting that you have to say about these stories? Did we miss anything that should’ve been included?

Data:

TL;DR: Looking at Nansen smart money holdings, over the past week the inflows have been light with the top flows being into Aave WBTC, MATIC and WETH. Outflows have been stronger and primarily out of USDC, BUSD and WBTC. Actions of smart money reflect that of the general market - low volume and ranging uninteresting movements.

Nansen Smart Money Holdings Token Inflow and Outflows: Tracking what the whales are up to...

Weekly:

- Inflow (7D):

- Outflow (7D):

Research/Reads:

Is CZ Too Powerful? - Binance's post-FTX market dominance is impressive -- and concerning - source

WuBlockchain - Competition in the NFT market around royalties is heating up - source

Web3 deserves better rewards - source

Have you seen our institutional-quality research?

M6 Research

Crypto Twitterverse:

ZachXBT @zachxbt

1/ Myself and @bax1337 spent this past weekend looking into the FTX attacker’s deposits to ChipMixer. It appears they’ve likely been transferring a portion of the stolen FTX funds to OKX after withdrawing from CM So far we’ve accounted for at least $4.1m (255 BTC) sent to OKX

degentrading @hodlKRYPTONITE

1/n - Why @GMX_IO will fail

Flood Capital @FloodCapital

Lets debunk this $GMX FUD quickly: 1) Zero Slippage --> currently a non-issue for BTC and ETH given GMX's liquidity/OI caps vs CEXs With Synthetics, zero slippage is being phased out and GMX's oracles will apply spreads from aggregators and orderbook depth of top exchanges.