SEC Takes the Fight Back to Ripple

Plus Coinbase officially launches Base L2

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
August 10, 2023

The Breakdown First Five - Thursday, August 10 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.

5. First Day of On Chain Summer

Coinbase’s official launch of Base went off with no major problems. The Ethereum layer-2 is now the first blockchain launched by a private company. Coinbase is celebrating with free NFT mints and major brand collaborations. Degens are celebrating by purchasing memecoins. Base is launching as the 5th largest Ethereum L2 with over $139M in TVL. Will this be a turning point for the onchain future of finance?

4. Britcoin Moves to Design Phase

The Bank of England has set up an advisory group to design a British CBDC. The group will include input from the Treasury as well as experts across finance, economics and business. The BoE said they wanted to “generate expert academic input and promote interdisciplinary discussions on a range of topics related to retail CBDC". The design phase of the CBDC project is expected to run for two years alongside continued experimentation.

3. Fireblocks Finds Zero-Day

Custody firm Fireblocks have disclosed a zero-day vulnerability that could have had industry shaking results. The exploit would have allowed hackers to drain funds across millions of retail and institutional customers. Coinbase, ZenGo, and Binance have all worked with Fireblocks to implement the required fixes. They said the chances that black hats could have discovered the exploit first were “very, very, very low”.

2. Maxine Waters Concerned

Maxine Waters said she was “deeply concerned” that Paypal had decided to launch its stablecoin while there are still no Federal regulations in place. Waters has been the lead Democrat in charge of putting Federal stablecoin regulations in place for over 15 months. Paypal decided to launch under the New York state regulatory framework which has the notable advantage of actually existing.

1. SEC Will Appeal Ripple

The SEC has filed for permission to appeal the Ripple decision. The appeal will need to be approved by the original Court before going ahead. An appeal would deal with whether XRP tokens are securities and whether particular classes of sales are considered the sale of securities. Separately, the remaining parts of the case will go to trial in Q2 of next year. That trial will mainly determine whether Ripple executives aided the company in breaching securities law.

Thanks for reading -NLW