Welcome again to Chain Reaction.
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It’s week two of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial and I’m scripting this dwell from exterior the Southern District of New York courthouse the place the case is happening. (Tip: If you need to get into the primary courtroom to sit down behind SBF and pay attention in, you need to line up earlier than 6 am otherwise you’ll be despatched to the overflow room.)
Tuesday was a slower day stuffed with technical particulars, however that modified on Wednesday and Thursday when Caroline Ellison, ex-CEO of Alameda Research, took the stand to testify.
Here’s a refresher on what you’ll have missed final week. (TC+)
Alameda is a giant participant within the trial as it’s the crypto hedge fund sister firm of FTX. Bankman-Fried began Alameda again in 2017, two years earlier than launching FTX. And in 2021, Ellison took over as co-CEO with Sam Trabucco as Bankman-Fried needed to step away for optics, however nonetheless managed the agency internally, she testified.
Ellison was the fifth witness for the prosecution and claimed that Bankman-Fried directed her to commit fraud and cash laundering crimes. Ellison added that whereas she ran Alameda, she took a number of billion {dollars} from clients to put money into different initiatives and repay money owed to lenders via an “essentially unlimited line of credit.” More particulars beneath.
For the newest updates verify right here.
The SBF Trial
- Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison explains how FTX hid losses, sandbagged lenders (TC+)
- Alameda Research allegedly paid Chinese officers round $150M to regain $1B value of change accounts
- SBF began a $2 billion enterprise fund utilizing Alameda loans
- Crypto is about rather a lot more than a former golden boy turned villain (TC+)
- ‘Marked to zero’: Paradigm testimony at SBF trial factors to investor fraud
- Alameda had a $65B line of credit score and ‘unlimited withdrawals’
The newest pod
For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Grace Torrellas, Polygon Labs’ VP of product and zkEVM product lead and co-founder and government director of Blockchain for Humanity, at Ztoog’s Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco.
Blockchain for Humanity goals to make use of Bitcoin and blockchain expertise to assist social impression initiatives.
Separately, Polygon Labs is concentrated on the Ethereum blockchain via its personal scaling protocols to make the web3 ecosystem more “affordable, secure and sustainable.” The chain additionally goals to develop the zero-knowledge Ethereum digital machine (zkEVM) house.
Breaking it down for you: zkEVM is simply fancy jargon for scalable good contracts which can be suitable with Ethereum and helps a sort of computation recognized as “zero-knowledge proofs,” which confirm every transaction.
Polygon Labs has more than 2.9 billion complete transactions since inception in 2017. The Polygon community works with web3 organizations like Aave, Uniswap and OpenSea, as nicely as large title manufacturers like Disney and Starbucks.
We talked about her work at each Polygon and Blockchain for Humanity and how humanitarian work could be superior within the web3 house.
We additionally mentioned:
- Scaling companies with blockchain tech
- “Aha” moments in web3
- Opportunities in social impression
- Polygon’s ecosystem progress
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Follow the cash
- Blockchain gaming platform Game of Silks raises $5 million
- Crypto-focused buying and selling and lending platform Membrane Labs raises $20 million
- On-chain information analytics agency Parsec raised $4 million
- Creator economy-focused RepubliK raised $6 million at a $75 million valuation
- Untangled Finance, a tokenized real-world asset platform, raised $13.5 million
This record was compiled with data from Messari as nicely as Ztoog’s personal reporting.
What else we’re writing
Want to department out from the world of web3? Here are some articles on Ztoog that caught our consideration this week.
- Yepic fail: This startup promised to not make deepfakes with out consent, however did anyway
- Fearing AI, fan fiction writers lock their accounts
- More cash received’t repair your failing startup — right here’s the best way to get traders to again a pivot (TC+)
- Investors recommend funds put together for the fallout of the Fearless Fund lawsuit, not fear about it (TC+)
- Indian startups weren’t spared within the world enterprise slowdown of Q3 (TC+)
Follow me on Twitter @Jacqmelinek for breaking crypto information, memes and more.