Hugenormous News In Crypto Today

Quick update here on the Three Arrows Capital/Celsius/Voyager debacle:

Su Zhu, one of the hedge funds co-founders, tweeted for the first time since June. 

Sadly, our good faith to cooperate with the Liquidators was met with baiting. Hope that they did exercise good faith wrt the StarkWare token warrants. pic.twitter.com/CF73xI8r6n

— 朱溯 🐂 (@zhusu) July 12, 2022

In Monday’s Litepaper, we discussed the U.S. Bankruptcy Court (Southern District of New York) gave the go-ahead to issue subpoenas to Three Arrows Capital. No doubt the tweet by Su ‘I ran away but not really’ Zhu is in response to claims that he has not been communicating in good faith. 

In response to Voyager aggressively pursuing repayment, their crypto token ($VGX.X) has skyrocketed over 400% in just the past two days. Clearly, people are hopeful that the company may collect assets from Three Arrows Capital.

As always, the Litepaper will keep you updated as more details develop. 

If you were looking for blockchain and cryptocurrency adoption in the traditional media and business space – well, here’s a big one for you:

https://twitter.com/Fwiz/status/1547254135367405568?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1547254135367405568%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.ethereumworldnews.com%2Fdisney-chooses-polygon-matic-in-its-accelerator-program-focusing-on-nfts-ai-ar%2F

The CEO of Polygon ($MATIC.X) announced a hugenormous big deal between MATIC and Disney ($DIS).

The program focuses on identifying companies that show “… constant drive to pursue new ideas is why we launched the Disney Accelerator program. Our goal is to empower growing companies who are creating new concepts for groundbreaking products and services. Recognizing that they have the potential not only to change the media landscape but to change our world.” – Bob Chapek, CEO, The Walt Disney Company

The Disney Accelerator program provides mentoring and co-working space at Disney’s creative campus in Los Angeles and investment capital. It sounds too good to be true, right?

What does Disney get out of this? Maybe they’ll receive partial ownership of what these companies develop? Their FAQ page states otherwise, saying, “IP developed by companies in the program is retained by those companies.” However, there’s likely a longer-term angle for Disney that the public doesn’t see yet.

How is MATIC responding to the news? When the news dropped around noon EST, MATIC increased by a whopping <insert sarcasm>  2%. If you want some evidence of the lack of participation in the cryptocurrency market, this kind of FOMO news without an immediate response should be all the evidence you need. 

However, at the time of pushing out today’s Litepaper, MATIC is now bouncing between gains of 6 to 8%. 

Ripple’s ($XRP.X) ongoing lawsuit with the SEC is one of the longest-lasting thorns in the side of the cryptocurrency market in crypto history. Without diving into a ton of detail — something we’ll be doing very soon — at the heart of this lawsuit is whether cryptocurrencies like XRP are considered a commodity or a security. 

The SEC believes that Ripple and its officers sold XRP to fund the company and to enrich themselves at the expense of retail traders who didn’t have access or weren’t privy to the same information as Ripple. So the SEC is essentially saying, in the nicest way possible, that Ripple didn’t disclose the hundreds of millions of dollars of XRP Ripple’s officers were dumping on the open market from their own pockets.

The entire history of this legal drama, which started in 2018 (technically in 2020 with the SEC), is too broad to summarize effectively. But what happened today was one of the most positive developments for not just Ripple but the entire crypto space. 

In this case, the biggest back and forth of the past year is Ripple’s demand that the speech from a former SEC Director, William Hinman, be produced. Hinman commented at a Yahoo Market Summit in 2018 that Ethereum (ETH.X) is not a security. Meaning XRP and other cryptocurrencies likely would fall into the commodity category.

The SEC’s argument has essentially been, ’um, that is bad for our case, mkay judge?’ So the SEC doesn’t want Hinman’s comments to be part of the case. 

Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn’s comments are awesome:

“The hypocrisy in arguing to the Court, on the one hand, that the Speech is not relevant to the market’s understanding of how or whether the SEC will regulate cryptocurrency, and on the other hand, that Hinman sought and obtained legal advice from SEC counsel in drafting his Speech, suggests that the SEC is adopting its litigation positions to further its desired goal, and not out of a faithful allegiance to the law.”

In other words, she called out the SEC for wanting to win its case versus following the law. 

If XRP is not a security, that would likely eliminate a lot of the FUD surrounding crypto and bring about a resolution that market participants have been waiting over two years to be complete. Until then, the Litepaper will keep you updated as these events unfold.