October 20, 2022

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

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Hello and welcome to The Node. This is Daniel Kuhn and Xinyi Luo, here to take you through the latest in crypto news and why it matters. In today's newsletter:

Top Shelf: Binance is the second-largest voting entity on Uniswap, Mango Markets will start refunding users following its $114 million exploit and developers are excluded from CFTC broker label in proposed draft rules.
The Takeaway: D.K. wrote about Aptos, the new layer 1 blockchain that people are seemingly rooting to fail, and why venture capitalists thought it was a good buy.

– D.K.

Today's must-reads

Top Shelf

Binance Becomes Second-Largest Voting Entity on Uniswap DAO: Binance, the world's largest centralized crypto exchange by volume, is now the second-most powerful voter in Uniswap's governing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Uniswap's founder accused Binance of amassing UNI tokens – governance votes, in other words – that "technically" belong to Binance users.
Binance denied allegations of misusing its UNI holder's voting power, and said it has not and will never vote on any Uniswap governance proposal.

Mango Markets Will Soon Start Refunding Users for $114M Exploit: Mango Markets, the decentralized exchange that suffered a $114 million exploit earlier this month, will soon start refunding users. Exploiter Avraham Eisenberg returned $67 million to the Solana-based exchange a few days ago, after draining the marketplace by manipulating the price of its native token MNGO last week.

"The program for depositors to recover funds is in audit and should be ready to go by tomorrow morning. Much thanks to all the Mango contributors working tirelessly to make this happen," Mango Labs co-founder Daffy Durairaj said in a tweet.

Hodlonaut Wins Defamation Suit Against Self-Proclaimed 'Satoshi' Craig Wright: Magnus Granath, aka "Hodlonaut," won a lawsuit against self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright on Thursday, a Norwegian judge ruled. Granath sued Wright in Norway to preempt a separate U.K. defamation suit for calling Wright a "fraud" and a "scammer" in 2019.

"The result was as expected," Granath, who won on grounds of free expression, told CoinDesk. Wright's lawyers presented evidence that was "not suitable to change [the court's] prevailing opinion that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto," the judge wrote.
Wright, who is appealing the decision, has also been ordered to pay Granath's legal fees in the amount of NOK 4,053,750 (approximately $383,000).

– D.K. and Xinyi Luo

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Putting the news into perspective

The Takeaway

(Stefan Steinbauer/Unsplash, modified by CoinDesk)

In Defense of Aptos, Crypto's Punchline

This Week D.K. writes about the messy launch of much-hyped Layer 1 blockchain Aptos, and why venture capitalists thought it was a good buy. "These systems are so primitive, and we're learning so much in real time about how to make them faster and perform better," Dragonfly Capital's Haseeb Qureshi said in an interview. Read the article here.

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Overheard on CoinDesk TV...

Sound Bites

"We're going to see the regulators step in even if crypto doesn't want it too."

– Former FBI Special Agent Chris Tarbell, on the $114 million Mango Market exploit, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover"

The news in a sentence

Headlines

Voyager Customers Could Recover 72% of Funds if FTX Bankruptcy Sale Is Approved | Fidelity Adds Institutional ETH Trading | Finance Can Never be Fully Decentralized, Says UK Central Banker | South Africa Classifies Crypto Assets as 'Financial Products' | Polymarket Takes Bets on Whether Russia Will Use Nuke by 2023 | Bernstein Brokerage Says Institutional Adoption Happening in Crypto Winter | CFTC Draft Excludes Coders From Counting as Digital Commodity Brokers |

What others are writing

Off-Chain Signals

Sam Bankman-Fried draws fire from DeFi proponents after regulation proposal (The Block)
US Accounts For 37% of All DeFi Volume—More Than Any Other Region (Decrypt)
Customers battle to regain billions in bitcoin the DOJ recovered in its largest seizure of stolen crypto (CNBC)
The New Cyberpunk – an Urbit culture explainer (Justin Murphy/Other Life)
Outside Devcon Colombians Search For Pragmatic Ways to Use Crypto (The Defiant)