Bitcoin to $250k by 2025?

Plus the SDNY brings charges against a DeFi hacker

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
July 12, 2023

The Breakdown First Five - Wednesday July 12, 2023

Welcome back to The Breakdown First Five — the 5 most interesting and/or important stories in bitcoin, crypto, and markets to start your day.

/imagine prompt defi hacker in a guy fawkes mask

5. LBRY Final

The Judge has issued final orders in the LBRY token case. Big remaining issue was whether secondary market token sales are violations of securities laws, impacting Ripple, Coinbase and Binance lawsuits. Judge punted the decision stating “I take no position”. The LBRY foundation has wound down after being crippled with SEC fines but the blockchain lives on, if users want it to.

4. Silk Road adviser jailed

Variety Jones, the second in command at dark-web drug market Silk Road has been jailed for 20 years. The 62 year old Canadian national assisted Ross Ulbricht with technical issues and was called “clear-eyed and intentional” by the Judge. Prosecutors pushed for two decades of hard time for Jones who had a “belief that drugs should be legal”. The bizarre sentencing hearing featured Jones saying “This is probably the last time you see me before I get killed.”

3. Draper: BTC $250k, but later

Billionaire VC Tim Draper is sticking to his call of Bitcoin to $250,000; but pushing out his timeline to 2025. He initially had his sights set on this target by June this year, but wasn’t “expecting the U.S. bureaucracy to be this aggressive”. Despite the SEC’s rampage, Draper can’t wait to operate all in Bitcoin with automated accounting and auditing, simplifying his business. “It's all honest and it's all straight."

2. Blackrock Surveillance Agreement

Terms of the information sharing agreement underlying the Blackrock ETF application have been leaked to Coindesk and they are hefty. Unlike typical surveillance sharing agreements, which allow market data to be pushed to regulators, this agreement allows regulators to pull suspicious market data. This would give regulators the ability to seek customer identity surrounding suspicious trades, rather than relying only on Coinbase to report.

1. Law is Law

The DOJ SDNY brings charges against a DeFi hacker, declaring this the first criminal case regarding smart contract exploits. Hacker made off with $9m before returning $7.5m to developers and claiming a white hat bounty. Feds didn’t care, charged anyway. Hacker googled “Can I cross border with Crypto”, “How to stop federal government seizing assets” and “Buying citizenship” shortly after the crime.

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Thanks for reading -NLW