There were concerns raised with the regulators of the Peruvian film industry this week, as Paddington in Peru announced that it would be filming scenes in Colombia, due to unnecessary bureaucracy in the popular imaginary bear's actual country of origin.
And while we're on unnecessary bureaucracy from regulators, we might as well visit the U.S. SEC, which took a step further to being ejected from the crypto party it is so desperately trying to crash this week, as it was refused in its motion for appeal in the long-standing court action against Ripple.
Not content with that, the regulator also went after Prager Metis, the ex-auditing company of the ex-second biggest crypto exchange, FTX. The charges were not crypto (or FTX) related, but we wonder if the SEC would have been quite so tenacious if not for the crypto connection.
Sticking with FTX, or at least its ex-CEO SBF, you might have heard a little something regarding his long-awaited trial starting this week. We rounded up all the gossip coming into the former crypto king's day (or rather month) in court, and then followed up with a round-up of the mud-slinging so far.
While we wait (and wait) for the SEC to finally approve the first bitcoin spot ETF, apparently the regulator rushed through a whole bunch of Ethereum futures ETFs just to clear its pending tray in case the U.S. government actually shut down as it was threatening to. Nobody seemed particularly bothered though, and the first day's trading volumes were underwhelming, to say the least.
Ethereum developers did manage to successfully launch the Holesky testnet, however, primarily to provide more virtual ether to those developing aspects of the network's staking and infrastructure elements.
Cryptocurrency exchange, Crypto.com teamed up with major payments player, PayPal, to become a preferred platform for its PYUSD stablecoin. While on the more decentralized side of the finance sphere, Aave updated its governance protocol to V3, in an attempt to get more users to take part.
It wouldn't be a Sunday Review without something to say about Binance, and this week we looked at the weird looking buy-out of the exchange's Russian business to comply with U.S. sanctions. The purchaser was reportedly a local crpyto exchange, which had only existed for a day before to deal took place, but it's definitely nothing to do with CZ, and nothing to see here anyway, so please move along.
Swiss banking giant UBS continued its descent into the dark world of crypto by launching the live pilot of a variable capital company digitized fund on the blockchain. And Web3 social network app Friend.tech was accused of trying to hobble its competition, by taking advantage of a non-profitable exploit to spend $5 million draining a $1 million smart contract, the contract wasn't drained, the exploit was fixed, and the whole debacle was a bit awkward to Observe.
