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What Singapore's New President Thinks of Crypto

Plus another executive departure at Finance

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Nathaniel Whittemore
September 05, 2023

The Breakdown First Five - Tuesday September 5 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. Stake Hacked

Crypto casino Stake has been hacked for $41.3M across Ethereum, Polygon and BSC. The exploit appears to have targeted hot wallets and involved a “private key leak.” Transactions were halted shortly afterwards and the company has significant reserves in cold storage. The Australian online casino is widely promoted by Twitch streamers and did $2.6B in revenues last year. The Lazarus group is suspected due to the highly organized operation.

4. Another Binance Exec Departs

Binance’s Head of Product, Mayur Kamat has resigned, making him the sixth senior executive to part ways with the embattled exchange this year. Kamat was at the firm for just 18 months. Binance confirmed the departure and thanked Kamat for guiding Binance through “some of our most explosive growth”. Similar to other high profile resignations, Kamat cited “personal reasons.”

3. Metaverse Tax Havens

A Harvard legal expert warned that a failure to tax the metaverse would create a tax haven. Christine Kim wrote that income and wealth should be subject to immediate taxation and the online domain could serve as “a laboratory for experimenting with cutting-edge policy.” She explained that governments could “record all digital activity and track individual wealth” online and tax unrealized gains instantly. Kim probably hasn’t seen NFT charts recently.

2. Self Limited Stakers

Four major Ethereum staking services have agreed to self-limit themselves to 22% of the network. The move comes as Lido approaches 33% of network dominance raising concerns of centralization. Of the four services committed to self-limiting, none have more than a 9% share of the network, leading some to suggest this was an empty gesture. Others noted a lack of meaningful theoretical attacks that could be pulled off by Lido as a decentralized service.

1. Former MAS Chair Elected President

The former chair of Singapore’s Central Bank has been elected president. Tharman Shanmugaratnam won the election with more than 70% of the vote. In 2021 the former MAS chair called crypto "purely speculative" and “slightly crazy” although that didn’t stop the industry gaining a foothold in the city-state during his tenure. The Singapore President has a mostly ceremonial role which is largely restricted to diplomatic functions.

Thanks for reading -NLW