The Breakdown First Five - Monday July 3, 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. Gensler Resigns?

No, we couldn’t be that lucky. Rumors circulated on Sunday that Gary Gensler will resign following an internal investigation. After scrambling to fact check on a holiday weekend, Fox business journalist Eleanor Terret obtained a one word answer from the SEC - “Nope”. The rumor was spread by Whalechart and cited anonymous sources.

4. Vitalik not staking

During a Bankless roundtable, Vitalik explained that he’s only staking a small portion of his ETH. He cited concerns around secured key management, claiming that multi-sig staking is needed for safety but it “gets complicated”. Some are freaking out at the idea that Vitalik is concerned about the security of the protocol, but would you put a fortune at risk? The big take-away seems to be that there’s no such thing as risk-free yield in Crypto.

3. Kraken orders to turn over user data

Kraken has lost in its attempt to fight an IRS subpoena for massive amounts of user data. The exchange will be forced to hand over the personal information of anyone that traded more than $20,000 in a year prior to 2020. The tax agency has been taking a dragnet approach to hunting down Crypto traders for years and the requests are only getting more broad.

2. Bittrex asking the Major Question

Bittrex has joined Coinbase in fighting it out with the SEC. Rather than roll over and settle the case, Bittrex has filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that tokens aren’t securities and the SEC has no jurisdiction. The filing makes the same ‘major questions doctrine’ argument as Coinbase’s filing from mid-June. The recently formulated legal theory could see the cases escalated to the Supreme Court.

1. ETF filings inadequate

The Wall Street Journal rocked the industry on Friday with reporting that the SEC viewed recent Bitcoin ETF filings as inadequate. Bitcoin dumped more than 3% on the news. Digging below the headline, the defect was simple to repair. Most applications have now been amended to name Coinbase as their surveillance sharing partner and are back on track.

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Thanks for reading -NLW