Sunday Review 11/06/2023

This week, Apple unveiled its first new product since the Apple Watch in 2014, and proudly gave the world its most expensive pair of snow goggles. At $3499, the price is unaffordable to all but the most crypto of Bros, so if you want to maximize your chances of getting some, you could do worse than read up on the week's developments in crypto-land.

The big story this week has involved the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, who within 24 hours slapped lawsuits on two of the world's biggest crypto exchanges. Binance, or the .US version at least, was the first to feel the regulator's wrath, when it sued the exchange (and CEO CZ) for several complaince infringements. Allegedly Binance had moved $70 billion of its own money around, so should have all assets seized, the SEC later claimed.

Less than a day later, the SEC was hitting Coinbase with its compliance stick. Coinbase faced a similar (if perhaps slightly less questionable) set of accusations regarding its operations in the U.S. The action put a rocket under the 'Stand With Crypto' movement, which Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong launched with his public support in March.

In what could turn out to be very bad news for the SEC, the infamous Hinman Speech and surrounding discussion is set to be unsealed on Tuesday. Wouldn't it be great to see Gensler get his comeuppance, so we can call an end to all of this nonsense.

Fellow U.S. regulators, the CFTC, were far more crypto positive this week, approving Cboe Digital to start a regulated Margin Futures product. Elsewhere, UK authorities introduced new advertizing regulations for crypto, Brazil awarded a payments institution license to its leading crypto exchange, and the crypto debanking issue appears to be more of an... er, issue, in majority-English-speaking countries, for some reason.

Gala games got a roasting for its token upgrade this week, which, let's say, wasn't as smoothly implemented as it could have been. Stablecoin issuer, Circle, moved some of its reserves back into U.S. treasury bills, and major crypto exchange OKX announced $10 billion in reserves using zero-knowledge proof.

Finally, Ledger and Trezor both managed to misstep in the hardware wallet marketing arena, and Atomic wallet was hacked, leaving users $35 million out of pocket.