2022 Week 25 - DeFi Digest
Hey all ??
News has come thick and fast over the last week so we’re back earlier on a Monday. From now on our newsletter will come out regularly on Monday night (South Korea time) on both LinkedIn and our Substack.
Over the last week, Solana has unveiled its fully web3 native mobile phone called the Saga, which they hope to release in 2023. In other news, layer1 blockchain Harmony One has suffered a multichain bridge hack for US$100m. More stablecoin news with Tether to be introducing their Great British Pound Tether in July.
In Bitcoin news: Binance’s CZ believes that the ATH won’t be beaten for up to 2 years. To many, this is great news that allows many to become ‘whole-coiners’. Yet China has chimed in again and believes that BTC is doomed and headed for zero.
Goldman Sachs is rumored to be purchasing debt from Celsius as competitor Nexo gets advice from Citibank about M&A. In our Korea corner, Klaytn partners with Open Sea to spur growth in Asia, KB (Kookmin Bank) invests big in blockchain and Korea Blockchain Week will be held in person for the first time since 2019.?
This newsletter is a summary of a number of largely unrelated news pieces from the crypto-verse that might be crypto/DeFi/NFTs/VCs/Macro but touch upon DeFi. It is aimed at people who want to stay abreast of some of the news but are not following along too closely. It is put together by Bisonai - a DeFi company in Seoul that bridges together AI + Blockchain.
If you’d like to get in touch, ping us at?[email protected]. ???Previous newsletters can be found?here.
[tl;dr]
“What does it look like with 1 billion people using [crypto]? What do you imagine? It's in this device—the device you use every day,” he said, holding up the Solana Saga prototype. “That has to be your hardware wallet. That's just something that we always felt.”
Specifications that we know about the Android handset so far will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, a 6.67” OLED display, 12GB RAM, and 512GB of internal storage. Jason Keats, co-founder and CEO of OSOM stated at the event - “The world needs novel hardware to embrace the future that is web3, and building out an ecosystem that looks to the future without being burdened by past legacy ecosystems is hugely exciting for us.”
Notably, this is not the first time that mobile and blockchain have come together with Samsung announcing a partnership with Klaytn with the Galaxy Note10 in 2019, as well as Taiwanese company HTC announcing the Exodus S1 in 2020.
The Saga is available for preorder with a $100 deposit on their website.
2. Hackers steal US$100m from Harmony crypto bridge Horizon
In the latest DeFi hack, hackers have reportedly stolen US$100 million in a blockchain bridge attack. Details of the attack are few at the moment, however, Harmony has isolated an individual account it believes to be the culprit.
“We have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds,” the Harmony said in a tweet late Wednesday.
Currently, the blockchain space is populated by Ethereum and several other layer1 and layer2 blockchains and bridges play an important role in the DeFi space allowing users to transfer assets from one blockchain to another.
This isn’t the first bridge hack and surely won’t be the last as many factors make transferring from one chain to another complicated and prone to bugs and potential hacks. As if he was aware of the impending hacks, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin warned about the security of cross-chain bridges in January 2022, after THORchain and Poly Network bridges were hacked in 2021. Since his comments, Solana’s Wormhole was hacked for US$320 in February 2022 and Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge was hacked in March 2022 for US$552m - allegedly tied to North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group.
According to CTV News, Elliptic, which tracks publicly visible blockchain data, said the hackers stole a number of different cryptocurrencies from Harmony, including Ether, Tether, and USD Coin, which they later swapped for Ether using so-called decentralized exchanges.
In response, Harmony put up a US$1m bounty for the return of the funds and has stated that they will not file criminal charges - however, critics believe that at 1% of the total in stolen funds, it isn’t enough to entice the criminals to return the money.
3. Tether announces British Pound Sterling pegged stablecoin - GBPT
According to a press statement on the Tether website on 22 June, the British Virgin Islands-based company announced that it will introduce GBP? in July 2022. Tether is the largest stablecoin provider by market capitalization, with their USD? token currently #3 after Bitcoin and Ethereum. Just like the recently announced Euro Coin by competitor Circle - GBP? will be first launched on the Ethereum blockchain and is likely to be deployed on other blockchains in the future.
According to the official press statement:
“We believe that the United Kingdom is the next frontier for blockchain innovation and the wider implementation of cryptocurrency for financial markets. We hope to help lead this innovation by providing cryptocurrency users worldwide with access to a GBP-denominated stablecoin issued by the largest stablecoin issuer,” said Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Tether. “Tether is ready and willing to work with UK regulators to make this goal a reality and looks forward to the continued adoption of Tether stablecoins”.
The token will join four other fiat-currency pegged tokens Tether has in the market: the U.S. dollar-pegged USD?, the Euro-pegged EUR?, the offshore Chinese Yuan-pegged CNH?, as well as the recently launched MXN?, the Mexican Peso-pegged stablecoin.
The news comes as the ‘bear market' appears to have set in and investors are looking to protect their wealth with stablecoins. Although Terra’s UST took the lion's share of bad news with their crash, Tether has also been losing market share. According to Fortune on 15 June 2022, investors pulled out about $1.6 billion in 48 hours from Tether's dollar-pegged USDT stablecoin, reducing its circulating supply to $70.8 billion, as stablecoin companies continue to compete for market share.
4. Bitcoin news roundup - CZ believes ATH won’t be topped for 2 years, China believes it is going to zero and many more ‘whole-coiners’ are minted in the downturn.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Changpeng Zhao said it may take a while for BTC to recover after plunging to $20,000 in recent months. CZ has also suggested that some crypto enthusiasts have lost a sense of perspective and have forgotten how far the market has come since 2018.
“20k we think is very low today. But you know, in 2018, 2019, if you told people bitcoin will be 20k in 2022, they would be very happy. In 2018/19, bitcoin was $3,000, $6,000.”
Famously, the Binance CEO sold his house and bought Bitcoin in 2014 and is known as the richest crypto millionaire with his fortune reportedly topping US$96 billion, according to Bloomberg in January this year. Going from zero to almost US$100 billion in under 5 years is surely a record of sorts!
However, The Chinese government has capitalized on the violent downturn in the crypto market by warning crypto investors that Bitcoin (BTC) prices are “heading to zero”, according to the South China Morning Post. The SCMP reported the article from a CCP-run paper named the Economic Daily, which stated that:
“In the future, once investors’ confidence collapses or when sovereign countries declare Bitcoin illegal, it will return to its original value, which is utterly worthless.”
The article is a fresh warning which reflects Beijing’s firm stance against all cryptocurrency activities that the government has outlawed, as the global market saw popular digital tokens lose more than half their value.
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However, many investors do not seem to be deterred as those who believe in the technology are ‘stacking sats’, as they say. Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor has stated in the last week that this is ‘absolutely a buying opportunity, as the king of crypto is at a 70% discount from its all time highs.
Accordingly, many have also seen this to be an opportunity and many investors have been accumulating at an exponential pace over the past several weeks.
According to Glassnode research, the number of Bitcoin wallet addresses that contained one BTC token or more increased by over 13,000. The total number of ‘wholecoiners’ rose to almost 800,000.
5. Goldman Sachs is looking to raise $2 billion from investors to buy Celsius debts - insiders
According to Coindesk, insiders at Goldman Sachs are looking to raise US$2 billion to acquire debts of embattled crypto lender Celsius, after they halted withdrawal from their service on 13 June 2022. The proposed deal would allow investors to buy up Celsius’ assets at potentially big discounts in the event of a bankruptcy filing.
As there is no official statement from either Goldman Sachs or Celsius, we can only assume that deals might be happening behind closed doors as the lender works with restructuring advisory firm Alvarez & Marsal and banking institution Citibank to advise on possible solutions.
Korea Corner
6. South Korea's Klaytn partners with US's Opensea to spur growth in Asia
South Korean Klaytn Foundation has just announced at the NFT.NYC event in New York City that they will be partnering with US-based NFT marketplace Opensea to build the Asian NFT ecosystem.
The move is in line with Klaytn and Krust’s goals to expand internationally in the next few years. David Shin, head of Klaytn Global Adoption recently said in an article in Forbes that:
“We have built tremendous momentum over the past three months and are well-positioned to ride the metaverse wave in 2022. Strategic partnerships in Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, theU.S. and Singapore are core components of our international expansion.”
So it is no surprise that the deal has taken place, which ought to enable further expansion of the chain within Asia and the US. In a statement the partnership, reportedly is the first-of-its-kind dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of NFTs in Asia.
“We’re excited to partner with Opensea on this critical step toward our vision of building a blockchain for the metaverse, GameFi and the creator economy,” said David Shin, head of global adoption at Klaytn Foundation. “Through these partnership initiatives, our goal is to draw out innovative use cases and support the growth of the Klaytn ecosystem in Asia.”
7. Korea’s Kookmin Bank tops the number of investments in crypto and blockchain for Banks in a global report
On the back of news from February 2022 that KB Bank was to launch the first crypto investment fund in South Korea. In launching the investment fund in February, KB is responding to a market becoming increasingly open-minded to investments in cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Now the number one bank in Korea by value has recently topped a report by Blockdata which states that KB Financial Group beats out other top contending banks for a number of investments in the crypto space with a total of 8 companies invested. However, Blockdata says that they are not sure how much money is invested by each bank.
“In most cases, we cannot determine how much money these banks have invested, as they participate in funding rounds with multiple or many other investors.”
In South Korea, KB Investment and Hana Ventures have made investments into blockchain-enabled marketplaces for spot asset investment such as Buysell Standards, also known as PIECE, which divides ownership of assets into pieces that multiple investors can and do buy jointly. KB Investment has also made multiple investments into Streami, the company behind crypto-exchange GOPAX.
This bodes well with the opinion that banks are well on their way to leading crypto to mainstream adoption and these actions demonstrated by banks illustrate they no longer see crypto as a threat. Accordingly, various banks around the world have already started incorporating blockchain and crypto solutions in their traditional banking portfolio as an integrated or add-on option. In line with that, Kookmin Bank is leading the charge here in South Korea and shows that they are committed to supporting the industry and are not just a fly-by-night player.
8. Korea Blockchain Week will be held in August 2022 - the first live event since 2019
Korea Blockchain Week 2022 (KBW2022) is holding its first live event since the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 in Seoul from August 7-14, 2022, according to Crypto Potato.
Featuring a who’s who of crypto, there are over 80+ speakers confirmed, which include Anatoly Yakovenko, founder of Solana; Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon; Yat Siu from Animoca Brands; Kevin Seqniqi from Ava Labs; Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen; Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR; Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable X; Jason Choi, founder of Blockcrunch as well as many other representatives from leading games, companies and venture funds. The full, updated list can be found at Korea Blockchain Week.
“We’re very excited to hold the first live Korea Blockchain Week ever since the pandemic struck,” said Edward Hong, Head of Platform at Hashed. “This year, KBW offers the perfect mix between business and exchange of ideas, followed by excellent opportunities for networking.
Well, that about wraps up this week! If you’d like to get in touch, email us at [email protected]. ??
Previous newsletters can be found here. Until next time, have a great week ahead!
About Bisonai
Bisonai Technology Group focuses on solving hard technical problems using Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. We believe in a future of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and we work on services that bring all benefits of DeFi closer to our lives.
About Kayne
Kayne is DeFi Analyst working for?Bisonai, a DeFi Tech company in Seoul, South Korea. He has a prior background in law and education in Australia and Japan before he was lured into the exciting world of crypto. Recognising that South Korea had emerged as an exciting, crypto-friendly base, he relocated to Seoul. He has a passion for investing and technology, loves to dig into the latest Blockchain and DeFi developments and enjoys keeping an eye on the latest trends in the crypto-verse.
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