Crypto News Roundup: Politics, Bitcoin Trades, Job Openings, and Money Laundering

Playing Politics

When the predictions-betting site Polymarket raised $70 million in fresh funding in May, CEO Shayne Coplan tweeted that it was “most gratifying” seeing “widespread adoption” of the platform as an “alternative news source.” It was exactly the sort of deflection-flex one might expect from a startup executive enjoying his liquidity moment. Just over the past couple weeks, blockchain bettors have used the platform (built atop the Polygon blockchain) to:

• Wager on President Joe Biden’s chances of winning reelection.
• Gamble on Vice President Kamala Harris’s odds of replacing him as the Democratic nominee.
• Handicap Biden’s performance during a press conference and ABC TV interview.
• Bid up former President Donald Trump’s likelihood of victory following an attempted assassination.
• Assess the appeal of his vice president pick, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio).

A new breed of crypto degenerates have popped up on the social-media site X, posting their winning betting slips, with one lucky soul claiming to have netted more than $400,000 on a single punt. It should be noted that none of this Polymarket gambling is legal in the U.S., since the project was barred in 2022 from doing business in the country under a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that also came with a $1.4 million fine. Even so, there’s some speculation that prediction markets might get increasingly cited by news outlets whose political coverage previously relied on polls or pundits. To underscore the point, Axios broke the story this week that Polymarket had hired the widely followed statistician and journalist Nate Silver as an adviser. Silver told the publication in an interview that he expected “more of the investor class to leverage prediction markets to assess the risk of politics on their businesses.” Anyone care to bet?

Scoop

Richard Kim, founder of crypto casino Zero Edge, who previously had served as an executive at Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy as well as the Wall Street banks JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, has acknowledged losing at least $3.67 million of the company’s funds on bitcoin trades that went sour as the cryptocurrency’s price tumbled in June.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York Job Opening

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York posted a job opening for a “digital assets market specialist,” at a mid-senior level with a pay range of $136,800 to $230,000 a year. Desired attributes include “familiarity with datasets relevant for digital asset markets” and “ability to convey complex subject matter to senior audiences.”

Larry Fink’s Endorsement of Bitcoin

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, said on CNBC that bitcoin is a “legitimate financial instrument” for “when you believe that countries are debasing their currency by excess deficits.” The comment was seen by commentators as a remarkable endorsement of the largest cryptocurrency, giving “boomer advisors comfort and cover to make the allocation.”

Money Laundering Involving Cryptocurrency

The Cambodian currency exchange and payments company Huione Pay received over $150,000 worth of crypto associated with the North Korean hacking outfit Lazarus, Reuters reported. According to two blockchain analysts, the wallet was “used by Lazarus hackers to deposit funds stolen from three crypto companies in June and July last year, mostly via phishing attacks.” Huione Pay’s board said it did not know it had “received funds indirectly” from the hacks.

Craig Wright’s Bitcoin Claim

Australian computer scientist and one-time Satoshi Nakamoto claimant Craig Wright has been forced to update his personal website with a legal notice declaring that he is not the inventor of Bitcoin, and that he is “not the author of the Bitcoin white paper.”

Protocol Village Top Picks

• Chromia’s architecture: Blockchain ecosystem that aims to avoid network congestion partly by giving every decentralized app (dapp) its own cluster of nodes and computational resources, has gone live on mainnet.
• Polygon Labs: The main developer firm behind the layer-2 blockchain Polygon, released the latest version of its zero-knowledge proving system, “Plonky3” – designed to be more flexible than the previous model.
• Waves blockchain ecosystem founder Sasha Ivanov has launched a fully functional testnet for Units.network, an innovative ecosystem of interoperable blockchains built atop the Waves platform.
• Pyth, a blockchain oracle protocol, has officially launched its newest product, Express Relay, on mainnet, introducing a novel decentralized solution to the long-standing problem of MEV in processing liquidations and market-efficiency enhancing transactions in DeFi.
• Ava Protocol, recently renamed from OAK Network, has launched its mainnet on Ethereum as an EigenLayer AVS for smart contract automation, enhancing Web3 transaction efficiency, privacy, and composability.

CarnationFM: A Decentralized Radio

A group of programmers have devised a means of embedding a hidden encrypted message of up to 250 kilobytes a minute into music files broadcast through Swarm, a decentralized data storage solution operating on the Ethereum blockchain. The project, known as CarnationFM, won the Best Social Impact award at the EthBerlin conference in May.

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