The Breakdown First Five - Monday September 11, 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. FCA Extends Advertising Deadline

The UK regulator has given crypto firms an additional time to come into compliance with strict new advertising regulations. From October, crypto advertising will need to be fair and honest. Tougher restrictions including a money-back cooling off period have been pushed back, potentially until January. The regulations are sweeping, capturing offshore firms who advertise to UK users. Penalties can include criminal penalties and uncapped fines.

4. SEC Appealing

The SEC have made another filing in their attempt to certify the Ripple decision for appeal. The process kicked off last month but Ripple has firmly argued that an appeal is unwarranted. In their latest filing, the SEC noted that the decision is acknowledged to have “industry-wide significance” and should be subject to appellate scrutiny. The SEC also contended that moving to appeal straight away would save the court from wasting resources.

3. Ripple Buying Trust

Ripple has acquired Fortress Trust. The crypto custodian which rose from the ashes of the Prime Trust collapse has been acquired in a cash and equity deal of undisclosed size. This is the second major acquisition for Ripple after the $250M Metaco deal in May. Ripple has now acquired 30 state money transmitter licenses, a NY state bitlicense and registration with Singapore’s MAS. It’s not clear what Ripple are building, but it will be highly regulated.

2. Infura Decentralizing

Consensys backed crypto infrastructure firm Infura are decentralizing. Best known for operating the major Ethereum RPC node, the firm is moving to a federated model to spread risk among multiple geographically diverse providers. The end goal is to make base level Ethereum infrastructure as neutral as TCP/IP. The federated model is set to begin with select trusted partners by the end of the year before dispersing more generally.

1. Vitalik Gon’ Fishin’

Vitalik posted a curious tweet over the weekend, offering a free NFT to promote proto-danksharding. Turns out an attacker had seized control over his account for a high profile wallet draining attack. Over $700,000 in crypto assets were drained from users signing the poisoned transaction, including some rare Cryptopunks. This attack seemed calibrated to trick crypto veterans and fooled some high profile industry members.

Thanks for reading -NLW