The Breakdown First Five - Wednesday August 23 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. Sam Pleads Not Guilty Again

Sam Bankman-Fried has once again pleaded not guilty to fraud and money laundering on a superseding indictment. Tuesday’s hearing was the first time Sam was sighted in the tan jumpsuit of the Brooklyn MDC since being jailed. His lawyers complained he is subsisting on “bread and water” due to “following his principles” of veganism. He is also not being provided Adderall and running low on EMSAM according to lawyers.

4. BNB Hits a New Low

Binance’s native token hit a fresh low on Tuesday as the embattled exchange fought off FUD from multiple angles. BNB hit $204 before rebounding back to $215 overnight. The Wall Street Journal has also laid out how Binance are facilitating crypto payments for Russian clients, but stopped short of outright calling the conduct sanctions evasion. A large BNB DeFi liquidation sits somewhere below $210, so holding the line has big implications for BNB.

3. Australian CBDC “Years Away”

The Reserve Bank of Australia has said that any decision on a CBDC is “likely to be some years away.” After a 12 month pilot, the central bank found that there was a need for more research around the legal, regulatory, technical and operational issues. They found the CBDC had some merit for tokenization and complex transactions. Challenges around privacy and data sharing design are still difficult to address across a single platform.

2. Maple Finance Replenished

Maple Finance has received a shot in the arm with $5M in new funding led by Blocktower and Tioga Capital. The lending protocol took on $54M in impaired loans during last year’s crypto collapse and pulled their services from Solana. The new funding will be used to expand into Asia and support new products including a cash management offering that invests in short term US Treasuries. The protocol will also relaunch on Solana.

1. OpenSea Product Manager Gets 3 Months

A former OpenSea Product Manager has been sentenced to 3 months behind bars for insider trading. The case was called the “first ever digital asset insider trading scheme”. Nathaniel Chastain was accused of trading NFTs ahead of their appearance on the OpenSea homepage. The scheme pulled in less than $50,000 across dozens of trades. He received a $50,000 fine in addition to the prison sentence.

Thanks for reading -NLW