Binance Vs. The World.

GM, GM. Bean Boy’s 14th edition is here already. Get your seatbelts on, this one’s going to take you for a ride. From Binance and CZ on the crosshairs of the CTFC, secret messages from our Ethereum lord, Vitalik Buterin, and Disney scrapping their metaverse division, we got everything covered top to bottom. Let’s see what’s in the pod for today.

How we looking today?

I think Bean Boy’s trading account went up 20% from the pump and round tripped back down -20% from the dump. Can devs do something ???

CZ BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Yesterday, The United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC), that was a mouthful, filed suit against Binance and the CEO, CZ (Changpeng Zhao) for trading violations. You guys think it’s possible to get one month free of ‘black swan’ kinda events ? Now, the CTFC has got a handful of violations committed by Binance but Bean Boy will give you the TLDR run down from the 74 page suit 🤝.

To start off, the usual these days, CTFC claimed that Binance.com allowed US residents to transact in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin which are deemed ‘commodities’ when it should be restricted 🥱. Where it gets interesting is that allegedly, CZ told his US employees to spoof their location by using VPNs so they wouldn’t be in any crosshairs of US regulators. Here are some internal chat logs CTFC managed to grab off CZ. ‘The purpose of that policy was to “keep countries clean [of violations of law]” by “not landing .com anywhere. This is the main reason .com does not land anywhere.”’

Moving on, CTFC threw another punch at Binance stating that they didn’t register their futures options with the regulator, which lead to breaches in the Commodities Exchange Act and CFTC rules, encompassing the compulsory establishment of Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer (AML/KYC) measures. They’re really trying to suffocate CZ, aren’t they?

Another shady thing the CFTC is catching CZ out for is the fact that Binance traded on their own platform through 300 different accounts. Now we all know that CZ and some Binance employees has direct access to user’s trading data, such as, stop loss and liquidation levels which is how exchanges make the most amount of revenue through fees. If CZ was trading through 300 accounts with, god knows how much equity, he could definitely have been liquidation and stop hunting his own users! No wonder I kept getting liquidated, definitely not because of my 100x leverage. We’ve all heard talks of people joking and trolling that exchanges were trading against us, but someone finally called them out on it! They weren’t crazy after all…

In regards to the CTFC’s claim of Binance not implementing KYC or AML processes properly, and having a poor anti-evasion program, here’s some interesting chat logs they seemed to fish out from Binance employees. One employee by the name Lim, acknowledged that some customers “are here for crime.” With another employee responding to the comment “we see the bad, but we close 2 eyes.” Definitely some shady sh*t going on here…

Hmm, it feels like this saga is far from over…

VITALIK DID WHAT ???

During a real-time broadcasted event to commemorate the moment of the launch of Polygon’s zkEVM, Vitalik sent a transaction on the polygon chain with a encoded message in hexadecimal format. BTW, zkEVM stands for zero-knowledge rollups which increases the efficiency and scalability of the Ethereum Blockchain.

“A few million constraints for an individual, boundless scalability for humanity.”

Hmm 🤔, is this Vitalik’s way of rizzing up everyone ? On a serious note, the message is translatable stating that, the Ethereum ecosystem will allow individuals to overcome countless limitations by allowing it to be scaled endlessly. However, Bean Boy also had another thought where the encrypted message sounds a lot like Neil Armstrong’s "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," quote. Does this mean Ethereum being scaled = moon ? We can only hope it does…

THE METAVERSE IS BEING FORGOTTEN

First, it’s Meta scrapping their NFT plans, and now Disney is laying off their entire Metaverse team of 50 people. As part of an ongoing process to cut costs by CEO Bob Iger, 7,000 poor souls will be laid off sooner or later.

The Metaverse team first came on board in mid-2022, with plans of releasing all sorts of NFT’s and Metaverse related products on the Polygon chain. Yes the chain that Vitalik sent that weird message on. This was probably around the time where there was still activity and ‘hype’ within NFT’s, it’s quieter than the bottom of the ocean at the moment, which is probably the reason for the team. Evidently, with such little volume and activity nowadays I can see why Disney disbanded the team. They might’ve been able to get their piece of the pie through NFT collections and products if they came into the scene a bit earlier. Hopefully, the prices of NFT’s with supposed connections with Disney hasn’t suffered too much 😂.

PEAS IN THE POD

• Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy repays Silvergate loan and buys 6.5K BTC. Holy, is Saylor’s holding finnallyy in the green ???

• SBF banned from using online messengers under new bail agreement. This is only the beginning, GL in jail.

• Do Kwon registered a company in Serbia for $1 amid Interpol red notice: Report. I have to hand it to him, he really isn’t a quitter.

HOW YOU BEAN - A READERS CONFESSION

Found a 10 ETH Tornado Cash note I deposited around a year ago. I’m not sure if I should withdraw it and try to exchange it on a centralised exchange and send it to a different wallet without it being flagged by the feds. Should I just sell the note at a discount ? It’s a good problem to be thinking about that’s for sure.

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PEE-PEA OF THE DAY

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.