Two people with direct knowledge of the deal between FTX and BlockFi have revealed details of what BlockFi must do to earn the full $240 million purchase price that was widely reported. The minimum price of the deal is $15 million. FTX will pay an additional $25 million if BlockFi receives an important regulatory clearance by the end of the year. The company will pay another $100 million if BlockFi's client assets reach at least $10 billion, and an amount equal to 25% of BlockFi's annual operating income up to $100 million at the time of the deal. FTX can not exercise its purchase option before October 2023 and BlockFi can buy back the option at any time.
Tether has released its latest quarterly attestation report. Its holdings of commercial paper fell by 58% from the previous quarter while reverse repurchase agreements rose to $3 billion from $105 million. USDT's market cap is down 19% from a peak of $83 billion in May 2022. Tether's attestation report emphasizes that its assets exceed its liabilities.
Trader Joe has launched its V2 iteration, which introduces a Liquidity Book design to improve capital efficiency. Liquidity Book separates liquidity pools into price bins, which gives traders better prices and enables advanced and novel strategies for liquidity providers. The system increases the risk of impermanent loss. More details about Trader Joe's recent update are available in the article.
Telegram may soon offer a marketplace to auction usernames and group and channel links. The platform would allow username holders to transfer them to other parties in protected deals. Ownership will be secured on the blockchain through NFT-like smart contracts.
Slashing is a built-in mechanism in Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake consensus where a large portion of a validator's stake can get automatically destroyed if the community determines that they are attacking the network. This is a heavy deterrence against censorship for validators. A pro-censorship network would not work as there are too many DeFi apps that will each have to choose a chain to support, and there will be a lot of disagreement on what should be censored. A pro-censorship chain would need developer support, and Ethereum's core developers are against censorship.
This article introduces Aave's new stablecoin, GHO. GHO is a decentralized, over-collateralized stablecoin that is pegged to USD. Making a native stablecoin makes a lot of sense for the protocol. While the stablecoin is decentralized, it has weak censorship resistance because of its collateral composition. It is possible that Aave may change the asset GHO is pegged to in the future.
Uniswap blocked 253 addresses linked to Tornado Cash or stolen funds. The blocked addresses are unable to use Uniswap's website but they can still use its smart contracts. Some of the wallets were only connected to a bad wallet and may not have been used for nefarious activities. 30 wallets were Ethereum Name Service domain names. Uniswap is working with TRM Labs to trace wallet activity.
Do Kwon has revealed new details about Terra's collapse in his first interview since the event. He hinted that a leak in the company was partly to blame for the UST death spiral. The timing of the withdrawal of UST liquidity from the stablecoin's main Curve pool, which made it easier for the attacker to push UST off its peg, was only known by Terra employees. He denied that the Luna Foundation Guard's funds were used to cash out whales. More details from the interview are available in the article.
Virgil Griffith, a prominent person in the Ethereum community who was arrested at the end of 2019 for violating laws related to money laundering using cryptocurrency and sanctions related to North Korea, has been in solitary confinement for nearly three months.