The Breakdown First Five - Monday May 15, 2023

5. 13 cents on the Dollar

Four years after its founder Gerald Cotten died under questionable circumstances, the Quadriga CX bankrupt estate is ready to begin distributing. Creditors reward for the long wait? 13 cents on the dollar for valid claims with assets marked to April 2019 prices and paid in cash. That’s about $650 per Bitcoin lost. Ouch.

4. Bakkt Mass Delists tokens

Bakkt, the institutional Crypto platform that everyone forgot about, delisted 23 assets citing regulatory uncertainty. Struggling to find a product-market fit, the ICE-backed exchange has pivoted to business-to-business payments and clearly doesn’t want the SEC to come a-knockin’. Dogecoin still cool tho.

3. Steady Lads, Deploying More Bail Money

One year out from Luna’s no good, very bad day, Do Kwon has been bailed in Montenegro. The disgraced Terraform Labs founder and his fellow exec Han Chang-joon posted €400,000 bail and agreed to be confined to a Montenegrin apartment for the next month. Locked in an apartment for a month with no one to talk to but Do Kwon…

2. All Payments aren’t Final

Ethereum failed to reach finality not once but twice leading into the weekend, causing validator clients to scramble, patching everything they could get their hands on. Transactions still worked but a lack of finality caused security concerns. Developers still don’t really know what went wrong but the problem hasn’t recurred over the weekend.

1. Oh, Canada

Binance is out of Canada. The world’s largest exchange has pulled the plug instead of getting in line with severely restricting new regulations. Coinbase, Kraken and Crypto.com are sticking around to try to make it work, but with no derivatives, limited stablecoins and a $30,000 annual buying limit for everything but the oldest commodity tokens, will the business case still make sense north of the border?

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Thanks for reading -NLW