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The Australian bank announced on Thursday that will decline “certain payments” to crypto exchanges or hold them for a period of 24 hours.

Two senate democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, allege in a letter that the platform may have lied about Binance.US being an independent entity.

Binance’s lawyers reiterated in new filings that United States Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler should remove himself from the agency’s case against him because he once tried to land a job at the under fire exchange. 

The firm raised the concerns in a letter dated June 4, 2023 — that the SEC filed in its supporting documents — claiming it had highlighted them in February. 

“As we conveyed nearly four months ago, Mr. Gensler should have been recused from any consideration in this matter based on this history and the prospect that Mr. Gensler may be a material fact witness,” the exchange’s lawyers wrote.

Binance claimed that Gensler once offered to serve as an advisor to the exchange prior to his government appointment. He also had lunch with Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao in Japan in March 2019 where they discussed BNB, the cryptocurrency associated with the exchange, and the idea of launching a US off shot for the exchange.

The exchange said that Gensler remained in contact with Zhao, who believed he was an informal advisor to the exchange.

Later, Zhao was interviewed for Gensler’s MIT cryptocurrency course. The exchange added that prior to Gensler’s 2019 appearance in front of the House Financial Services Committee, he sent Zhao an advanced copy of his testimony.

For these reasons, the exchange has argued the chairman should recuse himself. The exchange claims the SEC has not yet addressed these confirms. 

Gensler has previously testified that he does not serve as an advisor to any crypto exchange.

© 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 latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for June 8, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.

The governance proposal for the crvUSD minting was passed early on Thursday.

Taiko Labs, a crypto startup focused on scaling the Ethereum blockchain, raised $22 million across two seed rounds.

The first was a $10 million raise led by Sequoia China that closed in the third quarter of 2022, and the second was a recent $12 million round led by Generative Ventures, co-founder Daniel Wang said in an interview.

Other investors in the two rounds included IOSG Ventures, GSR and GGV Capital, and angel investors such as Patricio Worthalter, founder of POAP, and Tim Beiko and Anthony Sassano of the Ethereum Foundation. Taiko did not disclose a valuation.

Taiko is building a scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain — one it’s crafting to emulate Ethereum as closely as possible in design and ideology, according to an announcement. It describes its product as a Type 1 zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine. Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin previously wrote in a blog post that Type 1 zkEVMs are “what we ultimately need make the Ethereum layer 1 itself more scalable.”

“Our design decisions are to stick to the EVM spec and indeed the Ethereum spec as closely as possible, one because we love Ethereum and we want to extend it… and also because we find it affords the best properties,” said Matthew Finestone, a Taiko Labs co-founder.

The company released the latest version of its testnet earlier this week, which it hailed as “the next step on the road to a decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent ZK-EVM.”

From Loopring to Taiko

Wang and Finestone previously worked together at Loopring Foundation, a trading and payment protocol built on zk-rollup technology. Wang was its founder and CEO from July 2017 until November 2021, while Finestone spent three years with the project as its head of business.

Wang, who spent four years at Google earlier in his career, said that, after Loopring, he hoped to build a decentralized social network but ran into a problem. “There’s no way I can deploy my social network because the infrastructure is not there. There’s no way it will be scaled,” he explained. Thus, the idea for Taiko was born.

“We want to bring blockchain technology closer to improving the life quality of everyone around the world,” Wang said. “We are still very far away from being ready to change everybody’s life.”

Wang added that Taiko’s first two rounds of financing will secure the successful launch of its mainnet but that the project will likely raise more capital, in part to set up an ecosystem investment fund for luring dApps and developers to the ecosystem.

In structure, too, Taiko will look to follow Ethereum’s lead. “We are going to quickly convert the organization into a non-profit one. Ideally we’ll operate very similarly to the Ethereum Foundation,” Wang said.

© 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 10 artists, including Deafbeef, Casey Reas and Harm van den Dorpel, will advise the platform’s artist residency program.

Circle — the company behind stablecoin USDC — has hired Heath Tarbert, the former chairman of the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission, as its new chief legal officer, the company announced Thursday. 

Tarbert, who left the CFTC after an 18-month tenure with the financial regulator, joined Circle from market-making firm Citadel Securities, where he also held the top legal role. According to a press release, Tarbert is replacing Flavia Naves, who left Circle earlier this year.

“The opportunity to welcome Heath’s expertise and leadership to our executive team is an extraordinary step in Circle’s growth as a global company,” commented Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s co-founder and CEO. “As we continue building a bridge between traditional finance and Web3, Heath’s perspective, legal acumen and global regulatory experience will help us advance the utility value of USDC worldwide.”

The hire comes as Circle ramps up its policy efforts in Washington to build support for the technology among lawmakers. Recently, Allaire appeared on the cover of Forbes with the caption “please regulate us.”

Tarbert’s move also comes at an increasingly difficult time for the cryptocurrency space, which is under pressure from a more hostile U.S. regulator environment in the wake of the meltdown of crypto exchange FTX. Earlier this week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance and Coinbase. The latter exchange launched USDC with Circle in 2018.

© 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.

Implied volatility metrics show no signs of panic after the SEC’s filed lawsuits against the two cryptocurrency exchanges.

Decentralized exchange Curve Finance added support for wrapped staked ether (wstETH) as collateral for minting and borrowing its decentralized stablecoin crvUSD.

The vote to introduce this collateral passed on June 8 and was enacted on-chain. It passed with 100% of votes in support and met a sizeable 84.5% quorum.

What this means is that the exchange’s users can put up their wstETH as collateral and mint a portion of that value in the exchange’s native crvUSD stablecoin. The user has to pay a 6% borrow rate, at current values. If the value of the collateral drops, it will get gradually liquidated in order to keep the position afloat.

There is currently a 150 million crvUSD debt ceiling, equivalent to $150 million, which means only this much crvUSD can be minted using wstETH as collateral.

The platform also supports staked frax ether (sfrxETH) as collateral. This is the staked version of Frax Finance’s token that’s loosely pegged to the value of ether.

Both of these markets only exist on the beta version of Curve. The developers at Curve Finance first deployed crvUSD on the Ethereum mainnet last month.

© 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.