Stacked Insights Newsletter, 07.27.21 What's going on at Bi | Stacked

Stacked Insights Newsletter, 07.27.21

What's going on at Binance?
Senate banking committee bashes Bitcoin
The big crypto exchange you haven't heard of

Is CZ getting ready to leave Binance?

There's been a crazy amount of changes happening at Binance — and almost ALL of them are because of regulations.

Regulators in several European countries, the UK, Canada, and Japan have all brought the hammer down on Binance exchange in recent weeks.

Why? Because Binance is a massive global crypto exchange they have no control over. To bring Binance to heel, they've ordered Binance to stop serving residents in their respective countries, amongst other measures.

In response, CZ, the controversial-yet-beloved Binance CEO, is making big changes at the world's largest digital asset exchange, including:

Making Binance a fully regulated financial institution
Potentially stepping down as Binance boss
Reducing max leverage to 20x & removing tokenized stocks

Another of the early changes felt by millions of users is the new daily withdrawal limit for unverified users. It's now down from 2 BTC/day to a tiny 0.06 BTC/day.

Senate Banking Committee's crypto hearing takeaways

So...you probably didn't have much faith that a boomer senator roundtable on crypto would have a positive outcome. Which is good, because you were right.

Today, the Senate Banking Committee headed by Sen. Sherrod Brown made a great many assertions about Bitcoin & crypto at large, including these classics:

"There’s nothing democratic or transparent about a shady diffuse network of online funny money."
"Crypto puts the system at the whims of some shadowy faceless group of super coders and miners."
"Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for? Nothing."

Suffice to say, the Senate Banking Committee has quite a bit of crypto research to do. But jokes aside, these people hold vast amounts of power over the regulations soon to affect digital assets — especially stablecoins.

The fear-mongering surrounding crypto is reminiscent of FUD campaigns from bygone eras, replete with overtones of reefer madness-esque ignorance about the basics of how Bitcoin works.

Thankfully, these were only hearings and give crypto allies like Hester Pierce and Sen. Jon Tester time to outline counterpoints behind closed doors and at later meetings.

Today's Senate Banking Committee hearing is a reminder that the long-dreaded era of crypto regulations is upon us. But as exchanges like Coinbase, FTX, Binance, and Uniswap all get their ducks in a row, we have full faith the transition to a regulated industry will be seamless and drama-free.

Bullish: the biggest crypto exchange you haven't heard of

The crypto space has seen traditional finance enter in droves as legacy institutions place long term bets on digital assets.

So it's no wonder that after Coinbase's $100B valuation and both FTX + Kraken valued at $20B, a cadre of deep-pocketed players wants in on the crypto exchange action.

Enter Bullish, a new $9B crypto exchange headed by former NYSE president Thomas Farley. Bullish is in test pilot phase but is expected to roll out a public version of its exchange product this year.

In early screencaps of the Bullish UI, it looks in line with what we've come to expect from Coinbase, Binance, and the like. Bullish isn't reinventing the wheel here.

However, where the exchange differs is its AMM offering. The Bullish AMM will incentivize liquidity providers to bring assets onto the exchange — though details on how those incentives will work are scant.

Its hybrid central order book + deep liquidity via AMM model is certainly unlike anything else currently on the market. And given it's backers include Block.one and Peter Thiel, we're not the only ones curious about how Bullish will play out upon public launch.