Sunday Review 03/09/2023

Burning Man, the annual arts and culture festival held in the dusty Nevada desert (and much championed by Crypto Bros) has been turned into a mud bath this year due to heavy rains over the past few days. Also accused of not living up to its promise this week is Burger King, which is being sued for allegedly making its Whopper look bigger on menus than in reality.

As long-standing members of the crypto community, we at Observers have seen countless projects hyped that eventually underwhelm, implode, exit scam, or otherwise fail to live up to expectations. And of course, many that have come from nowhere to fundamentally improve multiple aspects of life and business.

So, who has been badly letting us down and who has exceeded all expectations this week? Read on to find out...

Certainly on the up is El Salvador. The first country to officially accept bitcoin as legal tender has now attracted a strategic partner in Google Cloud, which will set up an office and operations there. Potentially letting people down, however, are the Chinese police, who have allegedly taken control of the missing $1.5 billion from Multichain with no plans to return it to investors.

Perhaps an unlikely champion of Crypto Bros this week has been the U.S. Court of Appeal, which confirmed what many have known for some time, that the SEC is 'arbitrary and capricious'. There was also something about the regulator being wrong to reject Grayscale's application for a spot bitcoin ETF, but the name-calling was far more gratifying.

Meme-coin degenerates were sold down the river by the team behind the Pepe token, which dumped 16 trillion of them onto the market and tanked the price in the process. The one remaining co-founder claimed his fellow team members had set him up, but crypto Twitter (crypto X just doesn't sit right) wasn't entirely convinced.

Stablecoin issuer Tether tried to put the disappointment of being unable to find U.S. banking partners behind it, by adding a third Bahamas-based institution, Britannia Bank & Trust, for dollar transaction processing. Meanwhile, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani seems to have put his country's disappointing negative former stance on crypto behind him, in a speech to investors embracing CBDCs and blockchain technology.

Both Oman and Hong Kong seem to be going above and beyond in their embrace of crypto and its technology. Oman has invested $1.1 billion dollars into Bitcoin mining operations of late, and Hong Kong has published its 12-month roadmap to become king of the FinTech hubs.

Finally, we at Observers are expanding our regular news content to include deep-dives into a number of aspects of the crypto industry. We kicked off this week with the first part of our look into the new-found popularity of staking services entering the market.

And with that, we're off to sit in a wet sandpit with a disappointingly small burger.