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Episode 39 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Stephanie Murray, and SkyBridge founder and managing partner Anthony Scaramucci.

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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Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, an alternative asset manager with more than $2.2 billion in AUM, including $800 million in digital asset-related investments.

In this episode, Scaramucci explains how Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden positioned her as “de facto president for financial services and banking,” and why he believes her “sidekick,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler, is an “ambitious, single-minded politician, not focused on serving the people.”

SkyBridge and FTX

FTX took a 30% stake in SkyBridge just two months before the exchange declared bankruptcy. Scaramucci has expressed interest in repurchasing FTX’s stake in SkyBridge, as well as skepticism regarding the possibility of an FTX reboot later this year.

During this episode, Chaparro, Murray and Scaramucci also discuss:

• Regulation outside the U.S.
• Crypto’s bipartisan support
• The global decline of the U.S. dollar

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This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Circle and CleanSpark.

About Circle

Circle is a global financial technology company helping money move at internet speed. Our mission is to raise global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. Visit circle.com/Scoop to learn more.

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.

Terra Classic (LUNC), the renamed native token of the Terra blockchain that dramatically imploded last year, is not a security, a Korean court has ruled.

“It is difficult to see LUNC as a financial investment product regulated by The Capital Markets Act,” the Seoul Southern District Court ruled again on Feb. 16, according to a report from local news outlet Ilyo Shinmun today. The court had earlier ruled it on Nov. 15, but both rulings have been only revealed today by the news outlet.

The latest ruling is the first time the court has categorically expressed LUNC is not a security as opposed to its previous expressions, such as “there is room for dispute in terms of the law” and “it is questionable whether the Capital Market Act can be applied,” per the report.

Terra asset seizure 

Given the latest ruling, South Korean prosecutors cannot seize Terraform Labs co-founder Shin Hyun-Seung’s (aka Daniel Shin’s) assets as the court rejected their request, according to the report.

In November, prosecutors reportedly requested to seize more than $100 million worth of assets belonging to Shin for his role in the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. The court has now rejected the request for confiscation reportedly because the assets must be returned to victims of the Terra collapse and not to the national treasury.

Still, prosecutors have now requested the Supreme Court of Korea for a judgment, first on March 20 and then on Apr. 14, but the court has yet to announce its decision.

Terra collapse 

The Terra ecosystem — comprising LUNC (then known as LUNA) and the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin imploded last May as UST lost its 1:1 peg against the U.S. dollar, wiping out around $40 billion in investor wealth. The Terra collapse also pushed several crypto firms toward insolvency, including Three Arrows Capital and Vauld.

The Korean court’s judgment that LUNC is not a security is different from that of U.S. regulators. Earlier this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Terraform Labs, the company behind the failed Terra tokens, and its co-founder, Do Kwon. The SEC at the time called LUNC a crypto asset security.

Separately, lawyers for Kwon have requested a U.S. court to dismiss charges brought against him by the SEC partly for lack of jurisdiction, court filings from Friday show. Kwon was recently arrested in Montenegro for attempting to travel with falsified documents and last week was officially charged with a fake passport charge in Montenegro.

© 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 startup offers multi-chain structured financial products with plans for a buy-side altcoin options market.

The latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for April 24, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.

The SEC cannot regulate digital assets involved in the case as the UST stablecoin is a currency, not a security, lawyers for the disgraced crypto executive said.

As the losses mount for Tiger Global Management, the once-voracious tech investor is now getting bruised by bets on blue-chip crypto businesses.

Tiger recently informed investors that its $12.7 billion venture fund, which it launched late in 2021, had produced a paper loss of 20%, net of management fees, as of December last year, according to a report from The Information citing private documents.

Half a dozen major crypto startups contributed to the loss. An investment in Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, which collapsed in November, was entirely wiped out, while Tiger also marked down investments in NFT marketplace OpenSea, Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs, payments firm MoonPay, decentralized wireless network startup Helium and Sam Altman’s eyeball scanning protocol Worldcoin, according to the report.

Tiger had invested $126.8 million in OpenSea — an investment now worth just $30.2 million, according to The Information.

That chimes with wider reporting that shares in prized crypto companies are available on secondary market platforms at steep discounts. On March 8, The Block reported that some OpenSea shares were trading at a 51% discount on Birel.io, a secondary marketplace.

After emerging as one of the tech sector’s biggest investors, Tiger has suffered a period of sustained losses. In November 2022, its flagship hedge fund reported losses of 54.7% for the year. Later, in March, The Wall Street Journal reported that Tiger had marked down the value of its private funds by an average of 33% in 2022.

Tiger’s venture fund has to date invested more than $11 billion, according to The Information report. Close to a quarter of that cash has been plowed into a category of companies described as enterprise software as a service, with fintech and crypto being Tiger’s second and third biggest investment categories, respectively.

In total, Tiger has backed around 250 startups through the venture fund, of which more than 170 were worth less in December last year than when the firm first invested — suggesting crypto price tags are falling at least somewhat in line with the wider tech startup space.

Tiger did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

© 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.

Futures traders holding long positions suffered massive losses last week. Falling crypto prices led to $650 million in longs being liquidated since April 17.

Bitcoin, and the broader crypto market, fell consistently throughout the week after a sharp sell-off on Tuesday. As a result, long positions across derivatives exchanges saw the largest liquidations so far this year. The liquidations continued to cascade through to Sunday. 

About $650 million in longs were liquidated, according to data from The Block. Most of the volume was on Binance and OKX, with $234 million and $197 million in long liquidations since Monday. 

Bitcoin was trading at around $27,300, down 9.2% over the past week, according to CoinGecko data. The broader crypto market fell in tandem with the leading cryptocurrency by market cap. Ether slipped 12.9%, Ripple’s XRP was down 11.7%, and Polygon’s MATIC plunged 17%. Nascent portfolio strategist Matt Klein said the sell-side pressure was down to waning exuberance.

Bitcoin price sell-off

Crypto prices began to dip on Tuesday. The decline has been linked to a lack of liquidity and a large sell order on Binance by Noelle Acheson, the former head of market insights at Genesis Trading, who now writes the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter on Substack.  

“The correlation between bitcoin and ether returns has been falling since mid-to-late March, which may be relevant for quantitative strategies that rely on cross-hedging,” Coinbase noted Friday. Funds can also use ether to hedge against less liquid altcoins. 

The exchange’s research team compared the trend to a similar one in September, following The Merge — when Ethereum upgraded to become a proof-of-stake blockchain. 

“Following the Merge, a decrease in the observed correlation coefficient between ether and bitcoin returns (from 0.95 to 0.75) lasted for around 47 to 50 days. Comparatively, the current period of attenuation has lasted for around 30 days, and we think it could continue for another two weeks given that the initial phase of ETH withdrawals is still ongoing,” the report read.

‘A new Wall Street on the blockchain’

Bernstein analysts said the strong price action in bitcoin this year, up 67% year-to-date, seems to have “limited broad investor conviction on the fundamentals behind the price action.” Each new crypto cycle is driven by a “fundamental innovation,” they wrote in a note on Monday.

“We believe the 2023 cycle (and onwards) will be about building scalable decentralised financial infrastructure, building a prototype of a new ‘Wall Street’ on the blockchain, and seeing the first wave of mainstream institutional participation,” Bernstein argues, adding that the market still “offers an attractive window to participate in this new cycle.”

The skeptics will argue this is “all a giant circular loop driven by retail speculation,” the bank’s note read, adding that some speculation is “bootstrapping real infrastructure creation.”

© 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 country’s central bank wants people to be able to exchange Zimbabwe dollars for the gold-backed token so they can hedge against the currency’s volatility.

The cost of insuring against a potential U.S. government default in the next 12 months soared to record highs last week.

EU countries are making the transition to a tough new crypto regime set by Brussels.