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As long as he keeps following the “one over nine” rule, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will ruin crypto summer.

The crypto exchange still remains the world’s largest by a significant proportion.

The card giant is launching what it calls a Multi-Token Network (MTN), which will begin by testing tokenized bank deposits and move onto experiments using stablecoins and CBDCs.

Binance co-founder Yi He, in a recent series of interviews with Bloomberg, dismissed any likening of her relationship with Binance CEO and co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao to a past romantic connection between disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and his ex-colleague Caroline Ellison.

“There is a significant distinction here: Caroline was an employee, whereas I am a partner,” Yi He told Bloomberg in a report published Wednesday. “The relationship between co-founders requires much more than what a dating relationship does. A co-founder relationship is about comradeship, a dating relationship is about chemistry. The former is based on shared beliefs and goes beyond gender, the latter is based on physical attraction and selfish desires.”

Bankman-Fried and Ellison were reportedly occasionally in a romantic relationship, which was widely discussed after FTX filed for bankruptcy last November.

Yi He and Zhao have been business and life partners and have children together. She called Zhao a “comrade-in-arms,” comparing the relationship to that of a college roommate. 

As for curiosity and speculation about Yi He’s relationship with Zhao, she described it as similar to the way fans wish for a romantic relationship between two people, either on-screen or in real life, known as “shipping” in slang. She also drew a parallel with Amazon when Jeff Bezos’s former wife, MacKenzie Scott, contributed in the early years of the company’s founding.

Binance co-founders and their relationship

Yi He and Zhao have known each other at least since their OKCoin days. In 2014, Yi He hired Zhao as chief technology officer of OKCoin and brought him into the crypto exchange business, she told Bloomberg. In 2017, when Binance was founded, Zhao asked her to be a consultant for the company, and later, she went on to become his co-founder. Zhao’s “bringing me to Binance is based on the achievements I had already established,” Yi He said.

Yi He also briefly addressed what Binance would look like if they were ever to depart the company, adding that they both have backup executives in training that she didn’t name.

“I think we’ll be fine. We’re not single points of failure,” she said. Richard Teng, Binance’s head of regional markets outside the U.S., is reportedly seen as the most likely successor to Zhao.

Binance is currently embroiled in a legal battle with regulators in the U.S., with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission both suing the exchange and Zhao for allegedly violating federal laws. According to Yi He, Binance is willing to adapt to the evolving regulatory landscape.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Investment adviser Superstate Inc. filed a prospectus this week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a tokenized municipal bond fund they say could eventually compete with stablecoins. 

The fund, called the Superstate Short-Term Government Bond Fund, will allow shareholders to hold a record of their ownership on the Ethereum blockchain, which they can then either custody on their own or hold with with digital asset custodians, the firm said. 

“Our vision is to create an SEC registered investment product that over time, competes with stablecoins to become the reserve asset & settlement choice of crypto,” the investment adviser said in a statement to The Block. 

The fund is “an ultra-short duration government securities fund,” according to the prospectus, which includes U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. government agency securities, repurchase agreements collateralized by securities issued by the U.S. government or U.S. government agencies, and other U.S. government securities.

Blockchain technology

“The Fund will not directly or indirectly invest in any assets that rely on blockchain technology, such as cryptocurrencies,” Superstate said. 

Superstate Inc. CEO Robert Leshner founded Compound Labs’ major lending protocol and was the CEO of Compound Labs, an open source software development company building products for DeFi. Compound Treasury, part of Compound Labs, used to allow institutional clients access to high yield fixed interest, but was closed earlier this year. 

The fund is similar to Franklin Templeton’s OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, which was first launched in 2021 to become the first U.S.-registered mutual fund that uses a public blockchain to process transactions and record share ownership.

WisdomTree has also gotten in on tying municipal governments to crypto. The asset manager launched its WisdomTree Short-Term Treasury Digital Fund in 2022, which invests in short-term US treasury obligations. 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The first sale on July 26 will honor generative art pioneer Vera Molnar, who is considered to be the first woman in digital art.

The European Central Bank plans to make a decision on the creation of a digital euro by the end of October, ECB President Christine Lagarde said on Wednesday.

But in the next breath, Lagarde told a public central bank forum hosted by the ECB in Sintra, Portugal that widespread adoption of a digital euro is not on the near-term horizon, if it happens. The ECB president described her central bank’s stance on the CBDC as “accelerated” but cautioned that “we have not decided for sure.”

After an ECB governing council meeting at the end of October, “there will be another phase of piloting, experimenting, fine tuning because if and when we go, as will be decided by the governing council at large, we want to get it right.

The ECB president focused her CBDC remarks on preserving the value of the euro. 

“You’ve got to be ready. You want to keep the sovereignty of your currency,” said Lagarde.

The EU adopted a broad legislative framework for digital assets, a law called Markets in Crypto-Assets, earlier this year, but is only at the beginning of a lengthy rulemaking process for that law. Policymakers have stated part of the impetus for that law was the Libra/Diem stablecoin project, backed in part by Facebook.

Preserving the value of the euro

LaGarde characterized the project as reacting to what European citizens want, and preserving the value of the euro, which plays a central part in the transnational governing body. The U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, and the UK’s central bank, the Bank of England, have also examined possible adoption of central bank-issued digital currencies. But Fed leaders have cautioned that a decision on a digital dollar is years away from happening, while acknowledging concerns that a CBDC could pose risks to privacy and the financial sector, including in congressional testimony by Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week.

During the same panel where Lagarde made her remarks, BoE Governor Andrew Bailey said that wholesale digital money, transfers made between financial institutions using digital currency, “could be a complete revolution in infrastructure, financial markets, and trade finance.”

The New York Fed, one of the central bank’s regional branches, has also experimented with wholesale payments between financial institutions using digital currencies on private blockchains. The Fed also plans to launch its real-time payments network, which uses more traditional payment rails than digital currencies or blockchains, in July.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

By making their code open source and easy to replicate, projects including Arbitrum, Optimism and zkSync are making it easier for copycat blockchains to steal away their users – in pursuit of broader ecosystems of related networks.

The Cboe BZX Exchange on Wednesday amended a 19b-4 filing for the proposed ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF to include a feature similar to one used for a spot bitcoin fund planned by BlackRock.

Specifically, the revised filing includes a surveillance sharing agreement to deter fraud and market manipulation.

“The Exchange is proposing to take additional steps to those described above to supplement its ability to obtain information that would be helpful in detecting, investigating, and deterring fraud and market manipulation in the Commodity-Based Trust Shares,” Cboe BZX said in the updated filing.

The exchange said it expects to enter into a surveillance-sharing agreement
with an operator of a U.S.-based spot trading platform for bitcoin.

“The Spot BTC SSA is expected to be a bilateral surveillance-sharing agreement between the Exchange and the US BTC Spot Market Platform that is intended to supplement the Exchange’s market surveillance program,” it said. “The Spot BTC SSA is expected to have the hallmarks of a surveillance-sharing agreement between two members of the ISG, which would give the Exchange supplemental access to data regarding spot Bitcoin trades on the US BTC Spot Market Platform, if the Exchange determines it is necessary as part of its surveillance program for the Commodity-Based Trust Shares.”

Amended filing for spot bitcoin ETF

The original 19b-4, filed in April, didn’t mention the SSA. BlackRock’s planned spot bitcoin ETF was different from previous attempts to gain approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission precisely because it featured the SSA with bitcoin spot market, CF Benchmarks CEO Sui Chung previously told The Block. 

The amended filing could potentially put ARK in competition with BlackRock to gain the first approval of a spot bitcoin ETF, as the original filing for the fund came months ahead of BlackRock’s. The SEC has never approved of one before, citing concerns of fraud and manipulation over the years. 

Cboe filings earlier this month for spot funds from WisdomTree Bitcoin Trust, VanEck Bitcoin Trust and Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF all make use of the SSA feature. 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The trust’s trading volume increased to $45 million in June.