The Breakdown First Five - Friday Monday July 31 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. Warren AML Bill reintroduced

Senator Warren’s Crypto Anti-Money Laundering bill is back and this time it has some serious support. The bill is being reintroduced with three heavy hitting bipartisan sponsors and the backing of Banking industry lobbyists. The bill would force KYC onto wallet providers, miners and validators as well as prohibiting privacy tools.

4. Bitcoin has Kenergy

During her press tour, Barbie star Margot Robbie complained about the film’s producers being massive Kens by incessantly talking about Bitcoin. Opinions were mixed about what to make of the Bitcoiner stereotype, but what’s clear is that Bitcoin now has a firm place of cultural relevance.

3. Ethereum at 8

Ethereum celebrated its 8th birthday on Sunday. 8 years of building, tinkering and refining have taken the Crypto space to where it is today. It’s hard to believe that in just a few short years the Ethereum ecosystem has grown from Crypto Kitties and the DAO hack to hundreds of billions of dollars in DeFi TVL. Hopefully nothing bad happened on-chain to take the shine off of this milestone… Oh…

2. Curve Exploit

On Sunday multiple Curve pools were exploited for over $47m in ETH and CRV tokens. The bug related to vulnerabilities in the way older versions of the Vyper compiler implemented re-entrancy protection. ELI5? Software is hard and that goes double for smart contracts. White hack hackers participated in draining vulnerable pools, so have mitigated some of the damage. The attack reiterates the question of whether complex permissionless DeFi can be done safely.

1. The Coinbase Ultimatum

The SEC asked Coinbase to halt trading in all cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin prior to suing the exchange last month according to Financial Times reporting. CEO Brian Armstrong said Coinbase pushed the regulator for an explanation, they said “we’re not going to explain it to you, you need to delist every asset other than bitcoin”. SEC claims its enforcement division did not make formal requests for delistings. Coinbase claims the move violated due process rights.

Thanks for reading -NLW