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The trading platform also reported holding around $11.5 billion worth of crypto in assets under custody, an increase of 36% compared to the figure of $8.4 billion for Q4 2022.

Noah Perlman has one of the toughest jobs in crypto.

As the recently appointed chief compliance officer at Binance, Perlman sees his role as putting the world’s largest crypto exchange “beyond reproach” as it battles to restore its reputation with regulators.

That reputation has been hit by a series of run-ins with authorities worldwide, including getting banned from opening a division in the UK in 2021 and, more recently, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission lawsuit that accused Binance of operating in the U.S. illegally.

“The challenge is when you have these legacy issues, those mistakes can look like it’s still part of a pattern and practice from the old thing,” Perlman said in an interview in London this week. “It’s just hyper-important for us to be above and beyond reproach going forward — so that we can put those legacy items behind us.”

An alumnus of both Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley and crypto exchange Gemini, Perlman started at Binance about three months ago and reports directly to CEO Changpeng Zhao. He’s based in the U.S., but insists he has nothing at all to do with Binance US, the exchange’s American unit. His remit covers the rest of the world, outside the U.S.

He agreed to come aboard after CZ, as Zhao is often known, convinced him that Binance has “turned the corner” on compliance. According to Perlman, those words have also been matched with action. The company has grown its compliance team to about 750 people and added items new tools for checking clients’ identities as they’re onboarded.

Binance’s compliance challenges

Perlman likens the challenge of regulatory compliance to adjusting a dial to find an “equilibrium.”

“You can turn the dial one way or another. I want to protect Binance from bad actors. Easy to do: just turn the dial all the way, then we’ve got no users. And so how to calibrate that is a challenge.”

To reassure regulators that Binance’s culture has indeed changed, Perlman says it’s important to “overcommunicate” with them and ensure all decisions are clearly documented.

Binance’s Chief Strategy Officer Patrick Hillmann, who sat in on the interview, doubled down on the idea that Binance needs to overcommunicate to reassure both regulators and users. He added that the company is also trying to give more information when technical faults halt trading, for example.

The information vacuum

“We’ve gotten the leadership team in the mindset — on the tech side too — that you have to go above and beyond,” Hillmann said. “Just tell them what is the issue, even if it’s stupid, if it’s embarrassing, it’s better to be out there and to explain this to people and make them understand.”

When Binance leaves a “vacuum of information out there” it can “fill with speculation,” he added.

Perlman expressed optimism that, while financial regulators are currently on the warpath following November’s collapse of Binance rival FTX, their concerns will wane in time.

“Regulators are burned by something that’s happened in the industry and so they’re going to naturally calibrate tighter. And then it’ll subside — and that’s the equilibrium,” Perlman said. “We’re right now in a sort of post-FTX world where I can understand the focus being like, ‘we don’t trust you.’”

Working at Binance

Binance has had a wild ride since its inception in 2017, with its share of trading volume peaking at 62% in February — up from 20% five years earlier.

While Hillmann is keen to stress the exchange’s breakneck growth from a 30-person startup to its current headcount of more than 8,000, that growth has created some disgruntled employees along the way.

Binance’s rating on the company review site Glassdoor sits at 3.2 stars, compared with 3.7 stars for Coinbase and 3.4 stars for Gemini. Kraken, another crypto exchange, boasts 4.4 stars, although its listing comes with a warning that “this employer has taken legal action against reviewers.”

Common complaints about Binance on Glassdoor concern its long hours, “toxic” culture and a perceived necessity to speak Chinese to get ahead. On the other hand, its high pay is almost universally praised.

Asked about how he’s found Binance’s culture since joining, Perlman’s only comment is that “I’ve never seen a company so user-focused.”

Hillmann gave an example to illustrate that commitment to users, enthusing that all members of the executive team — including CZ — have to spend time every month answering customer support tickets.

Stronger compliance measures, of course, create pain for users, although Perlman is excited to make the process as slick as possible as Binance grows. “Can we make what is arguably a friction — maybe an unpleasant experience because we need [to ask about] your source of wealth — can we make that better?”

© 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 tokenization of music and the ability to create unique digital content means that music albums can now be viewed as an asset class, providing a new investment opportunity for clients of financial advisors.

Montenegrin authorities arrested the Terra founder in March for allegedly attempting to travel with fake documents.

Episode 46 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Christiana Sciaudone, and World of Women COO Shannon Snow.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Please send feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblock.co.

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Launched in July 2021, World of Women (‘WoW’) began its journey as a distinctive collection of 10,000 generative portraits that aimed to carve out a community in the web3 environment with a focus on equality, representation, and inclusivity. WoW has attracted high-profile support from celebrities, including Reese Witherspoon and Eva Longoria.

While WoW originated as an NFT collection, it is evolving into a global branded business, including plans to release a custom WoW Monopoly board. It’s also selling fashion goods via a collaboration with Nicole Richie’s House of Harlow. 

In this episode, World of Women COO Shannon Snow delves into her role trying to drive the brand’s growth IRL amid the crypto downturn.

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This episode is brought to you by our sponsor CleanSpark.

About CleanSpark

CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) is America’s Bitcoin Miner™. Visit cleanspark.com/theblock to learn more about the CleanSpark way.

© 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.

Using bitcoin on other networks previously required users to rely on centralized bridges, which increased risks for token holders.

Sam Altman’s crypto project Worldcoin, which launched its World App earlier this week, is set to migrate the app from Polygon to Optimism’s ecosystem.

The Worldcoin Foundation (Worldcoin’s initial steward) and Tools for Humanity (Worldcoin’s lead software contributor) announced today a partnership with Optimism Collective. As part of the collaboration, World App will migrate to Optimism’s OP Mainnet from Polygon. The World ID protocol will also be available on OP Mainnet.

“With more than 1.6 million sign-ups in beta and 500,000+ monthly active World App users, the deployments on OP Mainnet will expand access and help Worldcoin reach a values-aligned ecosystem of developers and users,” the Worldcoin Foundation and Tools for Humanity said in the announcement.

Worldcoin’s commitment to Optimism’s ecosystem

Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, co-founded Worldcoin in 2020 with the aim of allowing people to prove their humanity online. Its eyeball-scanning orbs have attracted controversy — in addition to millions of dollars in venture capital funding. 

Worldcoin said its alignment with the Optimism ecosystem goes back to December 2020, when it started with work on Hubble, an optimistic rollup originally started by the Privacy and Scaling Explorations team at the Ethereum Foundation. The World App beta was initially launched using Hubble. Then it moved to Polygon’s proof of stake network as “Optimism and Arbitrum were too expensive given the project’s scale.”

World App gives users a way to manage their World ID, a tool for proving personhood online, alongside a range of cryptocurrencies — including bitcoin, ether, dai, USDC and Worldcoin’s own forthcoming token. When the app was unveiled earlier this week, Worldcoin said the full version would run on an Ethereum rollup without disclosing which.

“We’re incredibly excited to see partners like Worldcoin choosing OP Mainnet as their new home, and joining us in building out the Superchain,” Ben Jones, director at the Optimism Foundation, said in a statement. “Today, we’re feeling very optimistic about the future of decentralized governance and identity.”

Optimism’s Superchain vision

Optimism’s Superchain is a proposed network of Layer 2s that share security and communication layers and the common OP Stack, according to its website.

Worldcoin began collaborating with Optimism nearly a year ago through joint contributions to EIP-4844, an Ethereum improvement proposal that aims to improve the scalability of Ethereum beyond what’s available with Layer 2 networks. Worldcoin said EIP-4844 would reduce Layer 2 fees by a factor of 10.

“EIP-4844 is now expected to be included in the next hard fork of Ethereum. Its potential to accelerate adoption in the Optimism ecosystem could also enable a significant boost in World App transactions across Ethereum L2s with the World App wallet’s migration to OP Mainnet,” Worldcoin said.

Coinbase also recently started contributing to Optimism’s Superchain vision via its Layer 2 network called Base. Once launched, Optimism’s Superchain would merge the Optimism Mainnet and other chains into a single unified network of OP Chains (i.e., chains within the Superchain) and mark a significant step towards bringing scalable and decentralized computing to the world, according to Optimism’s website.

© 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 funding round was led by Blockchange Ventures and included participation from firms such as Rubik Ventures, Node Capital and FalconX.

The company, which is U.S.-qualified through its entity Aegis Trust, is offering six months of free end-to-end custody services for women-led projects to help boost gender parity in crypto.

Daniel Alegre, CEO of Yuga Labs — the company that created the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BYAC) — personally bought a piece from his firm’s own NFT collection. BAYC is the largest blockchain collectible by market capitalization, nearing $800 million.

For a sum of 50 ether (ETH), or approximately $90,000, Alegre secured ownership of his Bored Ape — number 3575 — which is distinguished by its unique portrayal of a chimpanzee wearing sunglasses and a Sea Captain’s hat. The floor price to buy a Bored Ape NFT is currently 43 ETH ($77,500), according to CoinGecko. 

The art for each token is a unique combination of different traits, and holders are given creative and commercial rights to their ape images. 

Alegre made the purchase yesterday on Blur’s NFT trading platform. He previously funded his Ethereum address with ether from a Coinbase account, as on-chain data from Etherscan shows.

He later publicized his new NFT acquisition on Twitter, affectionately introducing it to his children with the caption, “To my kids: meet a new member of the family. Proud to Ape into BAYC #3575.”

Alegre has adopted the avatar from his recently acquired NFT as his Twitter profile picture, a move that seems to reflect his active engagement with the NFT community and his commitment to the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) culture.

In December, Yuga Labs hired Alegre — the former president of gaming firm Activision Blizzard — to the role of CEO. He now oversees Yuga’s portfolio of intellectual property, encompassing the Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks NFT, and the Otherside metaverse platform. His tenure as CEO officially began on April 1.

Last year, Yuga Labs closed a $450 million funding round from Andreessen Horowitz at a $4 billion valuation.

© 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.