Sunday Review 02/07/2023

The prize for pea-brained narcissistic philistine of the week must surely go to the tourist caught on video carving his name into the Colosseum in Rome, who had nothing to offer but a grin when challenged over his actions. Italian authorities soon identified the culprit, who faces up to 5 years in jail or a fine of up to €15,000 (or around 0.536BTC) for defacing the nearly 2,000-year-old monument.

So, while you catch up on the crypto-industry news making headlines this week, we definitely won't be inscribing ‘Observers 23’ on a Bitcoin ordinal from the Genesis block... Probably.

First up, DeFi, with several major developments this week aiming to improve the world of decentralized finance:

Not purely DeFi, although certainly utilized by a large number of DeFi projects, Polygon has been gradually revealing its plans to become the all-conquering value layer of the internet, with a transition to version 2.0.

Yearn.finance launched a new feature called Yield+, which enables users to simultaneously earn yield and margin trade with the same asset. Composable Finance expanded its blockchain interoperability protocol so that it can now bridge chains and parachains across Polkadot, Kusama and Cosmos.

And three established DeFi players, Curve, Aave and SORA, each announced their own new decentralized stablecoin. Synthetic algorithm-based stablecoins had somewhat fallen out of favor following the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and its UST stablecoin... speaking of which...

After having also been badly burned by the Terra fiasco, South Korean authorities have been strengthening their crypto regulation, this week passing the first of a series of new laws to regulate the industry.

Staying in East Asia, the Hong Kong regulator's demand that crypto tokens must be included in at least two indices to be retail-tradable was fairly easily sidestepped through the creation of a new crypto index.

And in Europe, the EU Commission realized that it hadn't actually ever defined the legal tender status of euro cash, so rapidly did so before the digital euro threatened it with obsolescence.

A long-running U.S. study showed that crypto adoption in the country has grown significantly over the past 5 years, but is still being held back by a lack of knowledge. Meanwhile, a study ranking the best and worst countries for crypto taxation put the U.S. somewhere mid-table, although as we pointed out, taxes aren't the only reason to avoid a place.

Not when you have a litigation-happy SEC, whose latest antics have caused certain exchanges to delist tokens based on the regulator's assertions that they are ‘securities’, and may have played a part in Citibank reportedly reviewing its partnership with Metaco, after the custodian was bought out by Ripple.

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs released the follow-up to its Dookey Dash Web3 game, although some suggest that the expansion is diluting the rarity and demand for the original collection.

Lastly, CACEIS Bank, the asset servicing arm of Santander and Crédit Agricole, made a fairly spurious claim to be the first French crypto custodian to register as a VASP.