🙈 Inflation Is ~Not~ Transitory 🙊

June 4, 2022

|In Weekend Recap

|By Osprey Team

On Tuesday, US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, admitted she was wrong when she called inflation transitory.

Yellen spoke with CNBC’s Becky Quick sharing,

The Fed has a dual mandate and it is maximum employment and price stability. I think that’s the way it’s phrased in the law, but we are at full employment. We have a very strong labor market. That’s been achieved, but inflation is way too high, and it’s really a big burden on American households. And so maintaining full employment while bringing inflation down, that’s the president’s priority and I believe that’s consistent with how the Fed sees its programs.

Here’s CNBC with the full story.

🛑 Coinbase Hiring Update

On Thursday, Coinbase shared a hiring update.

The company writes,

In response to the current market conditions and ongoing business prioritization efforts, we will extend our hiring pause for both new and backfill roles for the foreseeable future and rescind a number of accepted offers.

The rescinding offers component to this statement has caused quite a bit of consternation across the mediasphere.

Read the blog post here.

🇯🇵 Crypto in Japan

On Friday, Japan’s parliament passed a bill clarifying the legal status of stablecoins.

The new law states that stablecoins must be linked to the yen or another legal tender and guarantee holders the right to redeem at face value.

Bloomberg reports,

The legal definition effectively means stablecoins can only be issued by licensed banks, registered money transfer agents and trust companies. The legislation doesn’t address existing asset-backed stablecoins from overseas issuers like Tether, or their algorithmic counterparts.

Earlier this week, FTX renamed its recent acquisition of Japanese licensed crypto exchange, Quoine Corp. to FTX Japan further establishing the company as a global brand.

SBF, CEO of FTX shared,

Japan is a highly regulated market with a potential market size of almost $1 trillion when it comes to cryptocurrency trading. With the launch of FTX Japan, we will be able to bring additional products to this market, such as our perpetuals and spot crypto trading.

Read the press release here.

🐞 Solana Blocked By A Bug

Solana was down for 4 hours on Wednesday citing a bug blocking consensus.

Solana Status tweeted,

Earlier today a bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block, which prevented the network from advancing.

Here’s Decrypt with details.

🌯 Chipotle Accepts Crypto

Chipotle now accepts crypto at its ~3,000 US locations.

The burrito builder is not shy to experiment with new tech. Last April, the company created its own metaverse experience within Robolox.

We love to see it.

🟡 Big Week for Binance

On Wednesday, Binance Labs, the investment arm of Binance, closed a $500M fund for blockchain, web3, and value-building technologies.

The company will make investments at three-stages —

Incubation
Early-Stage Venture
Late-Stage Growth

Changpeng Zhao, Binance Founder and CEO, shared,

In a Web3 environment, the connection between values, people, and economies is essential, and if these three elements come together to build an ecosystem, that will accelerate the mass adoption of the blockchain technology and crypto. The goal of the newly closed investment fund is to discover and support projects and founders with the potential to build and to lead Web3 across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, Metaverse, social, and more.

Read the official post here.

On Thursday, the company announced that it partnered with The Weeknd for the first Crypto Powered World Tour.

On Friday, The Block reported that Binance Labs lost two top executives, Bill Qian (head of Binance Labs) and Nicole Zhang (Binance Labs Executive Director).

Here’s The Block with more.

⛓ Kanye Goes On Chain

In February, Kanye denounced NFTs.

But this week, West’s Yeezus fashion brand filed for 17 trademark applications, mentioning “blockchain-based non-fungible collectibles, assets, currencies and tokens” as well as “online retail store services featuring downloadable movies, videos, television, music, entertainment, and digital art.”

Here’s the Block with more.

🚨 OpenSea Insider Indicted

Nathaniel Chastain was indicted by a grand jury on wire fraud and money laundering charges.

OpenSea’s former head of product was arrested Wednesday morning in New York and will appear in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Read the press release from the Department of Justice here and here’s the original scoop from last September.

🎧 Listen to This

Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon joined Bankless talking all things web3.

Here are a few money timestamps —

(34:07) Internet History Rhymes
(59:24) The Web3 Solution
(1:11:50) Art and the Internet

For those in need of a summer read,

Check out John Naisbitt’s 1982 classic — Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives.

It’s a great and relevant-as-ever read. Check out some of these chapter titles:

CH 1: Industrial Society —> Information Society
CH 3: National Economy —> World Economy
CH 5: Centralization —> Decentralization
CH 7: Representative Democracy —> Participatory Democracy
CH 8: Hierarchies —> Networking
etc.

Naisbitt’s futurism game was elite.