🐻 More FUD: Coinbase, SushiSwap, Tron

Hey crypto nerds, the clown show continues this week. After the whole mess with Silicon Valley Bank that was sparked by the rapidly rising interest rates, the Feds announced yesterday that they would be adding another 25 basis points to the interest rates. Nice.

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In this issue:

📣The big story of the week. Coinbase, SushiSwap and Tron all get served with lawsuits.

🚀Some other bullish news. Reddit is building an NFT marketplace, Do Kwon gets arrested, Coinbase expands to Brazil and Sony patented an NFT platform for PlayStation. 

📣The big story of the week

Coinbase, SushiSwap & Tron all get served with lawsuits

The attack on crypto is here folks. Last week we talked about Operation Choke Point 2.0, a scheme by the government to take down the crypto industry by threatening banks. The first phase from that playbook has been executed, which was shutting down the two major crypto banks, Signature and Silvergate Bank.

Now the second phase has been initiated, which is pressuring every other bank to cut their relationships with crypto platforms.

Let’s see some examples here.

Yet, Bitcoin continues to hold strong.

The squeeze from banks isn’t the only attack on crypto, though. This week, we saw a number of lawsuits issued to major crypto platforms, including Coinbase, Sushiswap and Tron. It’s all just untimely coincidence, right?

The SEC goes after Coinbases’ staking product

Let’s start with Coinbase. A month ago, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Kraken for not registering its staking-as-a-service program. They ended up paying a $30 million fine to settle the lawsuit.

But the SEC wasn’t going to just stop there of course. Their appetite is way too big to be satisfied by just Kraken, so now they’re going after an even bigger exchange - Coinbase.

Earlier this week, the SEC issued a Wells Notice to Coinbase for its staking product. Now, Coinbase is one of the biggest crypto exchanges that is known to always play by the rules. Love them or hate them for being centralized, the matter of fact is that despite meeting with the SEC over 30 times in the past year and always trying their best to be on the good side of regulators, none of it matters.

Regulators will make up any excuses to stifle the crypto industry, even if it means backtracking on their words or coming up with random rules. This is probably the best explanation of what is going on.

So what now? It seems like Coinbase is ready to go to war with the SEC, but it’ll be a tough road ahead.

“Decentralized” exchange SushiSwap gets hit with a subpoena

While centralized crypto exchanges are getting exiled, decentralized exchanges are also somehow getting attacked by the SEC.

Both Sushiswap and its CEO, Jared Gray have been hit with a subpoena, assuming over the native token, $SUSHI. To help shore up the hefty legal costs, Jared wrote a proposal in the governance forum to sell $3 million of their DAO treasury assets to fund the cost of legal defences.

It seems like most of the votes are in favor of it. But a question that many of us have is how can the SEC give a subpoena to a supposedly “decentralized” exchange? Shouldn’t decentralized mean no CEO?

Aside from that, Sushiswap has previously been rumored to be tied to Sam Bankman-Fried, likely the biggest known crook in the crypto industry. Whether these rumors are true, we don’t know, but something sure smells fishy.

Tron and celebrity affiliates get slapped by the SEC

Lastly, we have Tron founder Justin Sun accused of selling unregistered securities, fraud and market manipulation.

But not only is Justin Sun getting picked on, but 8 big celebrities are also in the hot seat for promoting the tokens TRX and BTT without disclosing getting paid for it. The list of celebrities include: Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, Lil Yachty, Ne-Yo, Akon.

What’s our take on all this?

It’s quite clear to us that there is a coordinated effort to take down the crypto industry. The government and regulators will always find a way to make things harder for us, whether it’s blocking on-ramps or stifling innovation. We’re just going to have to keep fighting, building and hodling.

Let’s spread the BitSignal!

🚀Some other bullish news

🚀 Reddit is building an NFT marketplace. After the success of their digital collectible avatars, Reddit is going full steam ahead to create a marketplace for their users to buy and sell NFTs. We’re excited to see them continue to spearhead web3 adoption!

🚨 Do Kwon has finally been detained and arrested in Montenegro. The Terraform Labs co-founder and CEO has been wanted for the investigation of the TerraUSD collapse for months. He has been charged by the SEC and was even on the global Interpol red notice. Could justice finally be served?

🌎 Coinbase is expanding to Brazil. They have integrated the Brazilian government’s payment system, Pix to start allowing payments from Brazilian customers. It’s great news for the expansion of crypto adoption, which is why the Coinbase stock ($COIN) rose 12% following the announcement.

🎮 Sony reveals a new patent that will allow PlayStation gamers to trade NFTs across platforms. We’ve said it here before that gaming could be our path toward taking crypto mainstream. As more big gaming companies come out with their web3 initiatives, we could be seeing a big revival for NFTs soon!

🐻