FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

The Santo Spirits Club loyalty program will reward members with tiered perks, including an opportunity to win a virtual tequila tasting with Hagar and Fieri, as well as autographed guitars.

A number of SEC officials deliberated about how clear the famous speech actually was about ETH’s status.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) wants to stretch how it identifies exchanges it needs to regulate, and the agency’s inbox is jammed with crypto industry letters accusing it of reaching well beyond its legal powers and potentially forcing rules on services the platforms need, such as electric companies.

Uniswap Labs released draft code for V4, a brand new version of the protocol with architecture that will allow for much more customization.

The new design will be more efficient, with initial results suggesting it will reduce the cost of creating pools by 99%. It will also let developers choose their own tradeoffs, allowing them to build minimalistic pools that are cheaper to use. But the biggest change is that it creates a much broader playing ground for developers to build their own pools with their rules — potentially leading to much more experimentation.

“As technology and markets evolve, so must the Uniswap Protocol,” Uniswap Labs CEO Hayden Adams said in a blog post. “That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce our vision for Uniswap v4, which we believe will open up a world of possibilities for how liquidity is created and how tokens are traded onchain.”

Uniswap V4 is an “entirely new protocol,” Uniswap Labs smart contract engineer Sara Reynolds said in an interview. But developers will still be able to choose which one they want to use, as it will coexist alongside V3, which is immutably written to the Ethereum blockchain.

The code has been open sourced and will be audited and tested in public over the next few months before an eventual release under a Business Source License 1.1, which will transition to a GPL license. The exchange will be governed by the Uniswap community, made up of those who hold UNI tokens. Uniswap Labs also released a draft technical whitepaper alongside the code for V4.

“I think the biggest change with V3 was with regards to capital efficiency,” said Reynolds. “I think with V4, we expand this and bring this idea of expressiveness to a whole new level by introducing what we’re calling hooks.”

Two key changes

The new version will bring two main benefits: customization through the use of “hooks” and efficiency through a new architecture with a single smart contract.

First, Uniswap V4 comes with creator customization through plugins that are called hooks. These can be set up to work just how V3 works, or developers can use them to add new functionality. This is where greater customization can be applied to pools, with developers able to set dynamic fees and add functions like on-chain limit orders. 

“I think there’s a lot of things that we haven’t considered and haven’t thought of yet, and I’m excited to see how the community takes that and runs with it,” said Reynolds.

Uniswap Labs has even been experimenting with building a hook that supports the ability to act as a time-weighted average market maker (TWAMM) to spread out orders over a period of time. In this case, the blockchain transaction fee would be paid once to create the order but it wouldn’t have to be paid by the originator each time a trade is made. Other ideas include a hook that distributes profits created by maximal extractable value back to those providing liquidity to the pool.

“But really, the sky’s the limit. Because each pool is now defined by more than just the tokens and fee tier, we’ll see pools of all colors, shapes, and sizes,” said Adams. He noted that V4 will also bring back support for native ether, rather than just wrapped ether.

Second, the new architecture puts all Uniswap pools in a single smart contract, rather than deploying a smart contract for every new pool (which is how Uniswap V3 works). This means token swaps no longer have to transfer tokens between different smart contracts, resulting in cheaper token swaps. Plus this is why new pools are far cheaper to create.

“We believe the combination of hooks and singleton architecture creates an incredibly powerful platform — fast, safe pool customization and efficient routing across many pools,” said Adams.

Bringing in flash accounting

The new version of Uniswap will also introduce a flash accounting system. 

Under V3, when you make a swap, the protocol might route the trade through a number of different pools. At each point, the protocol would transfer the tokens in and out of pools when making swaps along the way.

Under the new design, all the pools will be within one contract. Therefore the protocol only needs to transfer the net balances back to the user. This saves on blockchain transaction fees and opens up more flexibility. 

“It’s essentially just a new cool way of doing balance accounting and it ensures that the pool’s balance is safe and the user’s balance is safe,” said Reynolds.

Uniswap Labs is hoping to make use of Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1153, which is currently being considered for the Cancun hard fork. If this is enabled, it will result in simpler smart contract designs and reduce transaction fees even further.

© 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 biggest decentralized crypto exchange is opening its development process to the public for the first time as the SEC cracks down on its centralized competitors.

NFT marketplace Blur is set to unlock approximately 196 million BLUR tokens tomorrow — equivalent to around 6.5% of the total supply and an approximate 40% increase in the circulating supply. 

The unlock includes various allocations, with over 115.6 million BLUR tokens allocated to past and future core contributors, 75.4 million tokens allocated to investors and 4.9 million tokens allocated to advisors, according to Token Unlocks. 

The Block reported in February that Blur closed a new funding round, securing between $15 million to $30 million at a valuation of $1 billion. Blur raised funds in March 2022, with Paradigm, eGirl Capital, 0xMaki and LedgerStatus participating in its $11 million seed round. 

Many within the crypto community have been speculating on the potential impact the unlock may have on the market, with BLUR down 1.4% over the last 24 hours amid pre-emptive whale activity.

Blur whale positioning

Looking at how whales and “smart money” are positioning for the unlock, “0x06cD” has been actively involved in the BLUR market, according to Lookonchain, having withdrawn a total of 10.5 million BLUR tokens ($3.36 million) from OKX since April 4. They hold 13.5 million BLUR tokens — making them the 8th largest holder.

Recent transactions and trades by other individuals have also drawn attention. Oilysirs.eth purchased 100,000 BLUR tokens for 20 ETH ($35,000) two days ago. This individual had previously made a substantial profit of 455 ETH ($792,000) from BLUR trades.

Meanwhile, address “0xfcef” removed 1.9 million BLUR tokens from liquidity yesterday, selling them at $0.31. The current price of BLUR tokens is $0.32. Notably, this address had received BLUR tokens from address “0x8129,” which has a track record of making profits by buying at low prices and selling at higher prices.

Blur isn’t the only project set for unlocks this week. 187.5 million BIT ($80.6M), 37.5 million LOOKS ($2M), 15.6 million APE ($35.6M) and 18 million IMX ($11.4M) are set to release over the next few days.

© 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 news on consumer prices comes one day ahead of the results of the Fed’s latest monetary policy meeting.

Hinman suggested in his 2018 speech that bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) were not securities, in his view.

The latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for June 13, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.

Documents have been released related to William Hinman, the former director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s Division of Corporation Finance from 2017 to 2020, in connection with the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple Labs.

The documents show the Trading and Markets Department’s comments on the draft version of Hinman’s 2018 speech, which suggested that bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) were not securities, in his view.

Prior to making the speech, Hinman said in an email to multiple SEC employees that the speech suggests “we do not need to see a need to regulate Ether, as it is currently offered, as a security.”

SEC took on Ripple Labs

In December 2020, the SEC initiated a high-profile lawsuit against Ripple Labs, alleging that the company raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered digital asset securities offering with its cryptocurrency, XRP. William Hinman later emerged as a key figure in this lawsuit. The documents were released per the order of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

This statement had been frequently cited by Ripple Labs throughout the ongoing legal proceedings. Ripple argued that Hinman’s remarks, particularly regarding the status of ETH, contradict the SEC’s claim that XRP is a security.

Ripple has been seeking these documents since late 2021. Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO and a key defendant in the case, said — ahead of the release of the documents — that the wait would be worth it.

“Wish I could go in depth now, but we’ve waited this long (18+ months), I don’t want to overstep… suffice it to say,’ Brad Garlinghouse tweeted in response to a post by crypto YouTuber Jungle Inc. “Stuart Alderoty [chief legal officer at Ripple] and I believe the documents were well worth the wait,” he added.

Potential impact on crypto classification

The public release of the Hinman documents may ignite a significant debate about the classification of cryptocurrencies as securities, especially during these challenging times for the industry. Recently, the SEC filed lawsuits against crypto exchanges Coinbase and Binance, accusing them of selling unregistered securities. In the legal complaint against Coinbase, the SEC listed at least 13 crypto assets that the agency claimed Coinbase made available to customers, including solana (SOL) and cardano (ADA).

Today will be a momentous day for legal issues in the crypto space, according to Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer. Besides the release of the Hinman documents, there are two other significant developments: a federal court hearing on the SEC’s motion to seize Binance’s assets in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and the SEC’s expected response to a rulemaking petition from Coinbase. Submitted in April, the petition argues that the current regulations are ill-suited for the crypto sector. The response is anticipated in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

© 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.