Blockchain Confidential - 11 March 2022

Biden's executive order, Batman NFT's and State Street comes in big

The Week

One of the most significant technological migrations afoot is Ethereum’s move to Proof-of-Stake, and it passed a milestone with 10M Ether locked in the Ethereum 2.0 staking contract. Polygon got this week’s dunce cap with a multi-hour outage after a software upgrade. FTX US is looking to get a license to clear margined derivatives trades from the CFTC; the regulator is now soliciting public comment.

In TradFi, the big news of the week was custodial banking giant State Street joining up with Copper to offer crypto custody. GSR, a major market making firm, will be feeding data & analytics to smart contracts via Chainlink’s network. And DC Comics has you covered for your Batman NFT.

The Good Read

This week’s Good Read is, naturally, the full text of Biden’s executive order on crypto. The money quote is this one: “My administration places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.“

Regulator Radar

The Biden administration released its long-anticipated executive order on crypto, which you can read in full above. Off the back of ongoing concerns about crypto as a vector for sanctions evasion Senator Warren is drafting a bill calling for exchanges and money transmitters to beef up reporting on transactions in self-hosted digital wallets. Senator Wyden took the other side, saying he’s on the side of the innovators. Another week, another round of SEC ETF rejections: this time NYDIG and Global X had their Bitcoin spot ETF applications rejected. No pony for you.

FinCEN raised its own concerns about crypto sanctions evasion, and the EU clarified that crypto is in scope as ‘transferrable securities’ in its sanctions rules. The central bank of the Philippines announced its CBDC pilot, while the Jamaican central bank promised to airdrop $16 of its CBDC to the first 100,000 wallets. The UK FCA ordered crypto ATM operators to shut down, as none of them had been approved. And the Bank of Israel issued draft guidelines on crypto KYC/AML compliance.

At the Office

For the first time this week we got a secure API gateway and backend running in the cloud, so our prototype is now available 24x7 rather than running on a desktop. DevSecOps handed off the first cut of the SerenityClient Python API to the Research team along with reference data and price timeseries, and it’s now available in the cloud via our hosted JupyterLab installation. We also released the first version of our general digital asset data catalog in the cloud and started working to get our data pipelines deployed in the cloud too so data can update continuously; the real time market data plant will be stood up after that. We continued our outreach to prospective clients and design partners, with more lined up next week, and Bob and Jia Yng worked together to create our first product factsheet for clients. Tanya, our UX designer, is getting settled in and working with Barry on improving Serenity’s design; our offshore development team is complete now that she has joined.