GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and let's warm up.
⭐️Today's selection:
- 😱Binance FUD Continues
- ✋Democrats To Return SBF's Donations
- 💸Venture Mondays
- 👌Selected Meme of The Day
- 📰Bite-Sized News
BINANCE FUD CONTINUES
Despite CZ's attempts at communicating tranquillity and composure, the crypto sphere is being rattled by waves of panic, and uncertainty around Binance.
But it's not only Binance that's been going through rough days.
Gemini, for example, was down for several hours last Friday. Due to technical work, as it was explained later. At least that's what they've said.
OKX, another example, suspended their operations for over 9 hours this Sunday. One more reason for people to start sweating.
But Binance is a bigger fish. And crypto Twitter is full of warnings and outcries about Binance heading towards an iceberg.
But, simultaneously, there are others who just shrug their shoulders and utter three letters:FUD. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.
These binanceheads feel confident. According to them, all the panic has no ground to it, it's just overreacting. Well, what is going on?
Just as the weekend began, the wave of withdrawals began rocking Binance. You see, the audit firm, that was working on Binance, Mazars... Suddenly backtracked.
They announced that they're cutting all their involvement with crypto companies. They even deleted their website so they could get the hell away from the whole thing.
People took it as an omen. For example, after a long period of inactivity, two major ETH holders sold 23k ETH. Coincidence?
Binance native BNB token plunged to its lowest price since July, which was just a bit over $221.
People went for the withdrawal button. And, in the course of the last week alone, Binance has processed over $14 billion in withdrawals! That's massive.
And all this is taking place despite the fact that it's publicly known (and easily verifiable online) that there're over $54 Billion in Binance's reserves.
The reason for it is that after the FTX's downward spiral, everyone got way more paranoid. And more critical, cautious and attentive.
No one wants the FTX situation to repeat, so Binance must withstand the ongoing scrutiny wave. Yet, it looks like they're doing alright.
Like, just yesterday, Binance purchased Tokocrypto (Indonesian crypto exchange). That doesn't look vulnerable, and doomed.
And what's more. It's just been announced that Binance.US agreed to assets of Voyager Digital( the bankrupt crypto lender) for $1.002 billion.
Even though Binance.US operates separately from Binance, yet it's safe to see this as a move on behalf of Binance.
Let's hope we're not wrong about thinking that Binance is showing symptoms of being healthy.
TL;DR: Centralized Crypto Exchanges are going through tough times. Binance, the largest of them, has experienced massive user withdrawals, and saw their token temporarily plunge, but it looks like they're not holding strong.
DEMOCRATS TO RETURN SBF'S DONATIONS
Apparently, the Democrats have realized it. Receiving funds in dirty money... Is not good. Who knew?! But, putting all irony aside, that's the right move.
So here's what happened. Three Democratic Party committees have pledged to return donations received from Sam Bankman-Fried. These committees are:
The Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).
The total amount, according to reporters' calculations, is nearly $2 million.
It's already a widely known fact that SBF was a generous political donor.
As it has been revealed, he supported Democrats openly, while he was more discrete in supporting Republicans.
SBF explained that media has a 'democrat bias', therefore there's no need to be vocal about your Republican ties. A master (manipulator) at work.
So far, Republicans have been silent on whether they will return the money they received from the former head of FTX.
These political involvements were a fertile ground for many questions to be raised. Investigations have already begun.
So now prosecutors will be scrutinizing the relationship between the FTX founder and the politicians. Pretty sure things can get real nasty, real quick. We'll see!
TL;DR: Three Democratic Party committees have announced that they're about to return donations received by Sam Bankman-Fried. The sum is nearly $2M.
VENTURE MONDAYS
It's that day of the week when we take a magnifying glass and take a look at the last week's winners.
Non-blockchain decentralized network Nillion raised $20M in a funding round led by Distributed Global.
Nillion provides a service that allows nodes in a decentralized network to work in a unique, non-blockchain, way.
It's a novel method of decentralizing data transfers and storage through mathematic applications — everything in the name of scalability.
Privacy-focused Aztec Network raised $100M in a Series B funding round led by a16z crypto, with participation from A Capital, King River, Variant, SV Angel, and others.
They use data compression techniques that are called zero-knowledge rollups.
By doing so, this startup aims to allow Ethereum applications to offer users improved privacy and lower costs on transactions.
With Aztec's revamped zk.money DeFi aggregator, DeFi apps like Lido and Curve can be used privately.
"Imagine if everyone could see all of your credit card transactions–that's Ethereum today," commented Jon Wu, the Head of Growth at Aztec. So they wanna change it.
Web3 infrastructure company Blocknative raised $15M in a Series A-1 funding round led by Blockchain Capital, Foundry Group, Rho, IOSG Ventures, Robot Ventures, and others.
Blocknative builds infrastructure to monitor and manage the complexity of the mempool.
But... what's a mempool? No, it's not a 'meme + pool'. It's 'memory + pool'. It's a cryptocurrency node's mechanism for storing information on unconfirmed transactions.
It acts as a sort of waiting room for transactions that have not yet been included in a block.
SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY
