10 most important Headlines in Crypto of July Review

[ Didier Borel] Welcome to The Swiss Road To crypto monthly review for the month of July, where we discuss the main headlines in crypto and discuss their significance. To do this I am joined as usual by Mauro Cappiello, founder, and CEO of big blockchain Innovation Group, and by Alex Poltorak, founder and co CEO of Alsenet.

[ Mauro Cappiello] Good afternoon Didier

[ Alex Poltorak] Hey Didier.

[ Didier Borel] Okay, so let's review some headlines. I’ve categorized the headlines according to different themes. The first theme I've selected was the headlines relating to regulation. So New York City will become a Bitcoin center says Mayoral lead, Eric Adams. EU wants to ban anonymous crypto wallets by 2024. Gensler says stock tokens and security pegged stable coins need to report to the SEC, and the UK moves to implement the FTAFS crypto travel rule with public consultation. What would you like to react to their gentlemen?

[Alex Poltorak] Oh, well, me personally on the crypto wallet, anonymous crypto wallet bands, which sounds a little bit ridiculous. So first of all, I think it's a lot of misinterpretation of what the regulators are trying to do. But first, let's start with anonymity. What anonymous mean in this context. For example, any banking network is a batch and not visible for any outside observer. Any blockchain is auditable, and all the transactions are there to be observable and verifiable by anyone. There are some blockchains like Zcash for Monero. That allows some more privacy potentially, but if you want to disclose to a financial intermediary, whatever you want to disclose, you can, as always, with a bank or with any of these privacy, cryptocurrencies, like Minero and z cash. So the fact that they are trying to push financial intermediaries to deanonymize their client, to know their client, to have KYC in place, is quite normal I believe, for financial intermediaries. The banning anonymous crypto, I don't even understand what it means. And I think it's further. I don't think the regulator is going in this direction in any way.

[Mauro Cappiello] Yeah, I think, you know, obviously, Alex is absolutely right. I think there's no better place to monitor transactions that are taking place forever immutable, right, than what we have on the blockchain. Because in every bank, who holds records and general Ledger's could obviously, you know, change them, adapt them, whatever else, nobody will notice. But you know, it wouldn't be noticed publicly so to say. So I think that probably agree with that. It's more going off to the intermediaries as financial intermediaries so that they disclose it. I think they already came back with some comments that they are not, don't want to address private wallets with that. They already mentioned that somewhere. They corrected this or clarified that.

The other point I wanted to make is obviously New York City. You know, I've been in New York for seven years. So, I know a lot of its exchanges, and many things started in New York, right, and they kicked them all out. And still, you know, a lot of the, you know, the people which were focusing on blockchain and cryptocurrency, they hold all these events, yearly events and, consensus. So they were all there. And you know, the first one was 1000 people or less, it ended up with I think, 10,000 people or something like that. So I think they, you know, at some point, they saw that they were actually missing out the city, right, if they don't continue to provide, you know, facilities or support for these for this industry. So I'm not surprised they want to do that. And I'm sure they're now I think some of them some of the providers now got licenses in New York State too if I'm not mistaken. So, I'm not surprised about that. And then the other one, which is always interesting is Gensler right. I think he has a point there right is that you know I was reading or listening to a video from the lady, I forgot her name. She's also the SEC, which clearly said, you know, we are we want to do blockchain, we want to do central bank digital currency. And this guy seems to be actually more positive and more knowledgeable of About blockchain, but he kind of has a point that clearly if you have asset-backed stable coins, you know, the underlying, are obviously regulated. Right. So, you know, you probably need to kind of disclose what you're doing there and whatnot. And He kind of looks at, it looks at these stable coin as I think he calls it synthetic instruments, you know, which is really a derivative for where, you know, in the US you have the CFTC right, which, which regulates all of that and so I'm also not surprised about that and I think he has a point there Now, why is this going to go well, you know, is it going to kind of hinder and stop the whole thing? Hopefully not right but yeah, maybe it's going to change the direction for some of the stable coins or what they want to you know, what they should use as assets to back their coins.

[ Didier Borel] Yeah, you make me laugh when you say synthetic instrument because I could say the dollar is a synthetic instrument of gold and it's not even related to gold anymore, but originally it was. But yeah, Gensler I mean, maybe the bit, you know, the crypto lovers think Gensler loves, likes, understands Bitcoin, and likes Bitcoin. So that means no regulation, but his idea is no regulation at all. And of course, the most important thing is to ban anonymous wallets, I think, like Bolto, and I would, I mean, that makes us laugh for two reasons. One is, if you remember, recently, the miner marathon, wanted to only mine OFAC compliant blocks. And then they quickly realized that the community would not accept it. And so they would be so fucked. And so they quickly backtracked on that, then number two, of course, the main thing that really makes us laugh is that you know, I think we're all going to a world where everybody will be a noncustodial wallet. They will be managing, they'll be having their own keys, they'll be managing their own money, they'll probably be making payments, peer to peer, probably over lightning. And so basically, you can't regulate that any more than you can regulate people paying for cash in the street. So this whole idea of you're going to monitor people every time they buy a hamburger through crypto, really makes me laugh.

[ Mauro Cappiello] Yeah Didier. Yes. and no, you know. I'm a little bit not scared of them. But I do think we can probably. What we don't know yet is all these people who are researching and analyzing each of these blockchains. And start, you know, tracking what is happening. And I do think that probably somewhat somehow, you can then probably easily start linking, you know, who's buying or selling in this in this currency, and you can probably potentially somewhat forensic style or whatever you want to call it, you know, map that back. So I'm not sure that we, you know, we're going to get away with being anonymous. You know, I think there will be different layers of intelligence, probably analyzing that and figuring it out.

[ Alex Poltorak ] Yeah, for sure, but it's a matter of cost like your neighbor wouldn't try to deanonymize you on Monero, because it would cost him too much. But you probably have seen the announcement of the small bug that was discovered in Monero. And there is a way to track some of the decoy transactions. So yeah, and now it's there forever in the blockchain transaction history. And now people can start to try to make some sense out of this transaction history. It's not like binary, full privacy, full security, or none. I think we will be traveling from one to the other. And on the fat and crypto travel rule. I think this is where the biggest misinterpretation of anonymous crypto wallet bans comes from. From this application of the travel rule. Now the financial intermediaries have when you are transacting have to pass your KYC and AML information from one to the other. But these only concerns costed wallets that are transacting on behalf of the client. If you're using a self-hosted wallet, you don't need to do any of that, you just need to make proof of ownership on your wallet. So this is also interesting.

[ Didier Borel ] Moving on to two other headlines relating to crypto. One is well BlockFi the company in New York seems to have a lot of the regular coming down on them. So BlockFi faces crackdown by a third US state,

[ Alex Poltorak] Not surprising at all

[ Didier Borel ] Texas regulators allege those days a BlockFi interest account product is a security under state rules. And the other thing I found also interesting, but we too are a little bit further ahead of them. America’s first legal Dao distributed autonomous organization approved in Wyoming. Of course, Wyoming is one of the most advanced states and crypto regulations. So Wyoming the first state to grant a charter to a crypto bank has approved legal status for a decentralized autonomous organization. Any Go ahead, fellows? Tell me what you think.

[ Alex Poltorak] I'm laughing a little bit. Sorry. So there is a very interesting talk between, like a panel between Gavin Wood and Vlad on the Daos. And Gavin is talking about these Daos as a kind of super-advanced CRM for companies. And Vlad is talking about Daos as a way to handle public goods. I'm obviously more on the Vlad side. And I think this is where we have the value in this Dao. It's a kind of international water, where you can handle these public goods that do not belong or are not controlled by any jurisdiction. And Gavin is more for applying these tools to legal entities to simplify their way of working. And honestly, I believe that this will get out of the blockchain space to some distributed databases with cryptographic proofs and append-only databases. So for now, it's overhyped, but I think that these kinds of use usage will create the blockchain.

[ Mauro Cappiello ] Yeah, quick, on BlockFi. Alex, you probably know, too, but if you do some lending, any kind of lending in Switzerland, you have to have a bank license to do that. So yeah, I'm not surprised about that, honestly. But I do think they, you know, great product, and I do hope they can sort it out. Right. And don't get smashed by this. Because I think this is really an I think, you know, obviously, you mentioned that to me first time, right BlockFi. Since then, it's probably more than a year now. And I'm kind of using it. So I think it's a great service. So we should, many others have followed that.

[ Alex Poltorak ] It's a great product, but honestly, you choose to use it because it's in a good jurisdiction. In some, whatever country with bad jurisdiction, you wouldn't use it. And the reason you use because you believe that this jurisdiction is providing you some guarantees. And they're just doing their job. They're saying you have risk involved. So you should have some obligations

[ Mauro Cappiello ] Yes. Investor Protection.

[ Didier Borel ] There's no doubt because yes, people might know I have some money, getting interested in BlockFi. And I've shown that tomorrow. But there is no doubt that they're basically CFI, which I find probably even more secure than DFI, but it's well regulated. And they give you just as good yield, as DFI. So, Alex, you have a good point. Yes, of course, you go to them, because you trust the US regulatory regime. But before I put any money there, I did, I studied them. And I looked at their risk, how they manage risk, and so on. And basically, the people they have is risk managers or people who used to work in Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, and so on. So basically, they're basically just reproducing exactly what banks do. But with crypto, so the only real main difference you have either via bank is that if they go bust, your money is not guaranteed. But of course, there's a tremendous tremendous arbitrage between getting 8% or seven and a half 8% on your dollars if it's in the form of a stable coin at BlockFi or taking your dollars and leaving them at Deutsche Bank or UBS and getting zero so almost zero so that's a huge arbitrage that with time will reduce.

Okay, moving on to well, another sort of regulation and hot area Binance. so there's Binance in the world and Binance Europe and then there's by Nance USA, the UK financial regulator bars crypto exchange Binance markets Binance is not allowed to be operating in the UK watchdog warns. Binance dropped by European payment processor clear junction. And also on Friday, Japan's financial regulator warned Binance is operating in that country without permission by Nance Financial Services Agency, on the other hand, delivered its second warning to the exchange. So why I point this out is that if you look at Binance is a big player So considering how Binance owns 20% share of the crypto market, it is a reasonable concern to consider the extent to which the potential disruption to their operations could affect the market and apparently Binance has over 550,000 Bitcoin in their vaults, of course, that belongs to many clients. So if anything happens to them or either there's a hack which could happen, which has happened in the past, in fact already with them, or there's a regular regulatory crackdown, it could have a big effect on Bitcoin, the price. And finally, one of the things I've headline I found out, which I thought was also very, very surprised with Binance recently limited the leverage level to 20 times instead of 100 times and ceased margin trading on various fiat currencies, such as the Euro, the Australian dollar and the British pound. So even though leverage is decreasing in the crypto space, it still shows how big it really is. And of course, Binance is originally Chinese and they make their money from trading. And, you know, a lot of traders like the more or less gamble, and to gamble, you make more money with a hell of a lot of leverage. But of course, that brings tremendous price volatility and tremendous danger. So, gentlemen, tell me what you think of Binance.

[ Mauro Cappiello ] I'm a little bit surprised. So he's coming out of Bloomberg, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's coming out of Bloomberg. He, you know, he knows, probably has regulations is not something. I'm a bit surprised that he, maybe he's just testing the water, right, and say, Look, I'll do as I go as far as I can. And if they stopped me, I stopped. Maybe that is his approach. But I can see that in many places this has now. You know, people are now a little bit concerned, right? That, as you say, it's almost like, this is big to be too big to fail scenario home Australia, kind of go in, suddenly, somebody can come with that this is a systematic risk. But you know, obviously, we're not regulated in that sense. But I'm a little bit surprised that they have kind of so many places, you know, if it's one place, it's one thing, but in the UK, in Japan, you know, I'm sure the US is not going to treat them. Look at them quite hard. And the last thing, which is also interesting, you said Binance is no longer offering to trade off stock tokens, meaning that I think Beatrix, which is doing that right now will need to stop that too. Right? They offering Tesla they're offering Apple shares and all as a derivative product.

[ Alex Poltorak ] I also think that they're kind of testing the boundaries to see until when they will be left doing their thing and when the regulators will start to poke them and to say, this is not allowed. So yeah, I think it's the testing phase. Now Binance is one of the most resilient companies, they're present in many jurisdictions and they're playing of course on this I tried Biance recently, again, and for crypto to crypto, there is no KYC involved, and the only limitations they have based on the Vidro for something like two BTC per day. So yeah, it can be used and probably is used as a washing machine for money laundering. So I guess it doesn't make the regulators very happy.

[ Didier Borel ] Okay, just to confirm I have a few more headlines on Binance and it sort of confirms what you were just saying, Mauro. But not now my headlines are concerning Binance, USA, Binance, USA. CZ chopping Felder, the CEO says that Binance US is eyeing an IPO that the by Nance seeks a new IPO, new CEO because CZ is going to pull back. We know that as well that the CEO of Binance USA is Brian Brooks and Brian Brooks was formerly the chief legal officer of Coinbase. And he used to be head of the OCC, which regulates banks in the USA. And another headline early in 2021 Binance had commissioned Rick McDowell MacDonald, previous executive secretary of the Financial Action Task Force, money laundering and terrorism, financing watchdog proceeding head of Canadian delegation to fat, anyway, the moves taken by Binance demonstrate the exchange’s determination towards consolidating its compliance efforts and adapting to the changing regulatory landscape. I would basically say that confirms what you suggested in my role, obviously, they're probably looking for an IPO because they want to get rich. They're gonna try to comply and always sort of as little as possible. Yeah, I'll probably do an IPO to get some money

[ Mauro Cappiello ] With this size. And as Alex said, because it is so significant than the industry. I could see some people kind of reacting to that and say, Hey, guys, you know, yeah, it's great to grow, but take your own responsibility, right.

[ Alex Poltorak ] We already had some moments when the community acted and told them that what you're doing here is not good. For example, The fees for the listing at some point it got totally crazy with Binance, and finally, they abandoned the fee for listing they are now speaking about the nations. So people can have an impact here.

[ Mauro Cappiello ] Another example is one of my projects that wants to get listed Binance, right? As you can already see, so they give the requirements and you know, now they're kind of scrambling to get an auditor, it may kind of cost a million to do an audit right? So to be listed Binance, it's kind of like a little bit of becomes a little bit of monopolistic behavior.

[ Didier Borel ] Oh yeah. And I always get a kick out of the fact that you know, DFI DFI, but by Nance smart chain has a lot of activity on it. And by Nance smart chain is by no means decentralized. It's a completely centralized finance run while on an Etherium on an Etherium clone, which is called Binance merge chain, but people want it because they people want to get rich quick, and it ends up being CFI with no doubt in my mind. Okay, moving on to some headlines relating to crypto adoption to Germany to allow institutional funds to hold up to 20%. In crypto, India, India, where households own more than 25,000 tons of gold. investments in crypto grew from about 200 billion to nearly 40 billion in the past year. According to chain analysis. Visa more than $1 billion spent using crypto link cards in 2021, which I find quite big visa has revealed that over $1 billion in cryptocurrency was spent using its cards. In the first half of 2021. The company has teamed up with more than 50 cryptocurrency-related companies, including exchanges ft x Coinbase, to allow its clients to convert and pay with digital assets, over 70 million merchants across the world. Amazon is looking to hire a digital currency lead. But then Amazon came out and said they have no plans to accept Bitcoin payments. And finally, just missing the point. But there was a lot of speculation, of course about Amazon and what they're really trying to do. And then find the last headline is Amazon. Elon Musk says that SpaceX holds Bitcoin. So we knew that Tesla did now we know it's normal.

[ Alex Poltorak ] He just bought more after creating things.

[ Mauro Cappiello ] I'm impressed. Yeah. What was it that I'm not surprised? Totally. But I'm impressed that the spending on the card is so huge. Remember, I think the last two years and all the results are Moscato, you know, against holding back, and then now they're full they're basically fully in the embedded in the industry. Right, which is, I think it's good. It speaks for itself that they have seen, I guess they see the value of digital currency quicker than the banks to themselves. Right. So I guess they have seen the potential they have seen the leverage for themselves, which I think is good. I'm surprised about the size, which really will probably produce many, many more downstream banking services, right. You know, cashback,

[ Alex Poltorak ] Seriously 1 billion looks like a lot. But for visas, it's nothing. And I'm really interested to see what will be the volumes with a strike in Salvador right? To just to compare ease. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. That's a good that's a good point. Yeah. I think they're losing ground and they start to see it. I think they don't want to miss a trade.

[ Mauro Cappiello ] But do you think so Visa and MasterCard will basically be obsolete?

[ Alex Poltorak ] Well, in places like Salvador and countries like that, who depend too much on the US dollar, and who may be switching, to Bitcoin, I don't see any, any use for a visa or a Master card in there, it will be straight.

[ Monero Cappiello ] For me, it's a transitional right. I think I think you've made a good point. In countries where they adopted native cryptocurrency whatever it is, right? Whatever it is, it's obviously going to have a peer-to-peer transfer and all of that, so you don't need a visa anymore. You know, obviously, if visa comes out with some more ideas, maybe yes, but I think in all other countries, but also which are established countries, I think this is growing. You know, everybody's trying to provide

[ Alex Poltorak ] I mean, it's very, it's very simple visa is taken from one to 5% depending on your business. Lightning network is taking a few satoshis people will pick the right trace to

[ Monero Cappiello ] I guess we need to Few years to get these adoptions of the countries to use a native digital currency. Yeah. Maybe quickly on Amazon, Amazon, I guess, the higher-end digital currency lead. They're saying, you know, they don't want to accept Bitcoin, but they could accept any other cryptocurrency or their own right

[ Didier Borel ] Absolutely. Stable coin giveaway point.

[ Alex Poltorak ] Yeah, exactly just loyalty points or anything like that loyalty points that are just called the token now. There is no, no, absolutely no reason to create a token or create the currency for that it was already working very well with their web servers. I mean, you have points in their database, you don't need anything else. Any way to spend them. You go back to Amazon.

[ Didier Borel ] Absolutely. Some general crypto news for people who don't know that was a hack and treasure. If some people were invited when they logged on to the travel website to do an upgrade on their dresser which turned out to be a hack and then they were invited to leave type in their 24 seed words directly onto a website and then those people even got called by apparent employees that theoretically address her who called them back and told them to enter their password on a website. So that hack went around I don't know how far I'd got some other headlines. JACK Dorsey announces Bitcoin focused business division square E Why don't get meaning Ernst and Young releases zero knowledge layer to tackle increasing Etherium costs the Ethereum upgrade AIP in theory Etherium improvement proposal 1559 will boost demand for ether from the institutional cohort and finally two other headlines, but it'll give you a lot to chew on Bitcoin network undergoes large difficulty dropped by nearly 28%. That was more than the beginning of the month as miners moved up China and s&p Dow Jones launches five more crypto indexes. So there's probably a lot for you to react to there. What do you want to do? Alex, you want to start?

[ Alex Poltorak ] I'll start with resources so yeah, attacks are getting more sophisticated. There there is this one on tracer with fake three or more. ledger got attacked with fake even fake Ledger with modified hardware in fear more. People should be really careful when operating this stuff like upgrading hardware wallets or software for cryptocurrency, you should always check in the source from where you're downloading. And there is also something called the hash of the firmware and the PGP signature cryptographic signature from the developer. So one should always check those before upgrading or installing any software filmer. And I know it's kind of difficult, but it's the only way it's the best way. And the only way we have so far is to track these things and to verify to make sure that you're not uploading something else to your treasure. So learn to verify PGP keys.

Make them crumbly to talk about tip 1559 or zero-knowledge proof that by you, which one? Which one was it the GPA 1559?

[ Didier Borel ] The one that's basically, you include a base minimum fee, and you're pretty sure to get involved in the next block and then that fee gets burnt, it will boost demand from institutional core cohort.

[ Alex Poltorak ] Honestly, I don't see any change coming with this AP area, maybe fees will be fees will get slightly better. But I don't see any other changes. I don't see how Etherium is becoming more deflationary with these, it stays exactly the same. The monetary policies, the exact same thing, it's still inflationary, and you're just burning some fees. And my expectation is that the market will also react to this and that fee will not get much lower, thanks to this. That's my expectation, but we'll see.

[ Monero Cappiello ] You know, obviously, there's a problem. I can see that when you have the projects I'm doing with financial intermediaries, surprisingly, they are moving. They're one of the Ethereum rights and they are actually you know, the permission blockchains are less relevant as dates seem to be at the beginning. So but I can tell you, you know, a lot of security token offerings and other things will happen on etherium. And it is an issue if issue a smart contract costs you 100 box.

[ Didier Borel ] Okay, gentlemen, some. Thank you for those comments. Some headlines now I picked up on general company news. So jack Dorsey squares committed to building a Bitcoin hardware wallet. US officials investigating tether executives for bank fraud. Bitcoin is more energy-friendly than the US grid says coin shares fidelity digital to expand it staff by 70% on strong crypto demand Goldman Sachs files with sec to create a DFI and blockchain ETF Finally, Goldman Sachs says that nearly half of rich family offices clients want to get involved in crypto, probably the demand goes up and down as price goes up and down. And we'll see how much of it is people who really understand why they should be involved. And then there we go together and then square. I don't know if you have any comments on

[ Alex Poltorak ] I read some posts by jack Dorsey on Twitter. And it's really, it looks really good because they are asking the community for feedback. They clearly state that they want to do it in the right way. Open-source software. So yeah, it looks really nice. And apparently, they want to contribute with a hardware wallet. very user-friendly hardware wallet,

[ Didier Borel ] Moving on to some headlines relating to staking and then we're going to talk about DFI so cracking the clients aren't $100 million in staking rewards in the first half of 2021 Sigmon Bank, which for people who don't know is a Swiss bank, that's crypto specialize. So Sigmund Sigmund bank in Zurich now offers etherium 2.0 staking service, and few headlines on stable coins and CBDC Central Bank digital currencies. Stable coin issuers circle to go public in $4.5 billion spec deal. Yellen to convene us regulators to discuss stable coins. Of course, central banks are always behind the game. So Jerome Powell’s CBDC report coming in early September. But, you know, we all know that I don't think central banks are fast Movers. But anyway,

[ Alex Poltorak ] Just on Goldman Sachs and DFI, it seems that they really love recursive Ponzi schemes. They want to be part of it. So I find it really funny. They first say that Bitcoin is a fraud, and then they're like, oh, let's do this recursive Ponzi thing.

[ Didier Borel ] Yeah. Okay, for me, staking is just leading back to banks. In other words, who's going to end up most people are going to end up putting their coins into an exchange or custodial solution, the exchange will therefore because today most people's crypto, they will stake their crypto, and they'll give the crypto owner some part of it and the exchange will make most of it. And in the end, it resembles completely just putting your fiat money into a bank, having the bank lend it to other people getting some interest on it and the bank makes things most of the interest. So it's, it's really this path straight down to centralized finance.

[ Alex Poltorak ] I'm even more concerned about staking on it. So not specifically theorem. Not specifically. We've signum. So signum sees that their yield is up to 7% per year currently, I haven't checked, what is the yield on Etherium to when you stake on your own, it would be interesting to compare but then the important thing for me to understand is that Etherium two has for now absolutely no usage, it's still under development only the first phase zero is done. And two other phases have still to be done to be able to use this if two-dot o, for now, the new tokens that the 7% that you get are being issued by miners. Okay. So you're using miners who are securing currently securing the network and you're distributing this new eath to people who are staking so basically the only thing that it does for now because it's not you To secure the network right now, so the only thing that it does is to remove liquidity. So I'm personally extremely, extremely scared because it's an unsustainable way. And also this liquidity will get unlocked at some point. So, yeah, I'm, I try to stay far away from the speaking stuff, and we'll see how it goes.

[ Didier Borel ] Okay, so institutional demand relating to DFI ave to launch institutional defy platform. Within weeks uni swap growth pushes defy to 3 billion total users greyscale unveils DFI fund linked to new coin base index. And then here we get what is, in my opinion, the most important headline of the whole month, which Alex pointed out to me that I hadn't picked up on my own, which is uni swap de Lis 100 tokens from an interface, including options and indexes, these changes pertain to the interface@app.uniswap.org the protocol remains entirely autonomous, immutable and permissionless. So here, we're getting to the real heart of what is DFI and whether d DFI is decentralized. So first of all, Alex, maybe would you like to tell us what is app.uniswap.org? And how do most people access it?

[ Alex Poltorak ] Well, so this is this is a very, very interesting story that will hopefully help people to understand the boundaries of decentralization. So what happened is that last week, I believe it was uni swap published on their website, that now the list of 100 talking is blacklisted and removed from being able to trade I wouldn't say on uni swap, but on the uni's web interface hosted by the uni swap labs. So you asked about the Unix pub, that exchange, it's a website.

[ Didier Borel ] Therefore, it's centralized. So, therefore, you can take it down, it's not decentralized at all, if it's a website,

[ Alex Poltorak ] It's running on a web server, they use IPFs. behind it, that still you enter through a DNS domain name. And this domain name can be shut down by the regulator. And so before it happens, uni swap kind of regulated themselves by adding this blacklist. So the only way to trade these tokens now would be to self cost, a full node, and to self cost, this same interface, but without the blacklist. And obviously,

[ Didier Borel ] Sorry, just to cut you off, for people who don't understand if you, therefore, want to access uni swap, but in a really decentralized way, you have to be hosting your own full node on etherium. Otherwise, you're gonna have if you're not doing that, you're necessarily going to their app.uniswap.org, which is in fact a centralized website. So I claim that I don't know less than 5% of people who use defy,

[ Mauro Cappiello ] Oh, currently, it's way less than 1%.

[ Didier Borel ] Yeah, run their own aetherium full node. And then so 99% goes through centralized, meaning it's not decentralized, okay, sorry, go ahead. So, so they sell, they sell sort of center themselves, before the regulator can hit them over the head, and said, there are 100 tokens that you can no longer trade through app.uniswap.org. However, if you're still if you're running your own node.

[ Alex Poltorak ] Also, if you trade yourself, it's fine. If you host the interface that does not have the blacklist, and you offer this interface to the public, and you get to get known, then the regulator will come to you and ask you to shut down this domain name. So you will only be able to use it on your own in your closed circle with your family and friends but not really offered that publicly

[ Didier Borel ] And finally, just some headlines relating to fundraising in the crypto field of general Sushi for up to the proposal to give VC discounts, draws controversy. Tara attracts $150 million for the DFI ecosystem fund and that the crypto exchange FTX value that 18 billion in funding round. And here are some examples of how much the valuations are on some of these differ on some of these projects and who is investing in them. So FTX raised 900 billion million at an $18 billion valuation, OPEC raised 100 million at 1.5. million dollar evaluation. Red Zedd runs creator raised 20 billion. And the investors in these projects are people who have money or have an experience like Andreessen Horowitz, Paradine, SoftBank, and Sequoia Capital. So basically, it shows that there's a lot of money and some smart money involved in, in these mostly in crypto in general. Any comments there? Gentlemen?

[ Mauro Cappiello] I think this is kind of a starting point. We also heard about Deutsche bank investing in crypto finance in Switzerland right, taking more than 50% stake. so I think we're probably going to see now a wave of either, you know, people investing directly into I call that market infrastructure but also probably other financial intermediaries which have been watching who have done now their due diligence in terms of who's out there what service they provide to start buying stakes or acquiring companies. So we're going to see a wave of that.

[ Didier Borel ] Okay, Alex any comments?

[Alex Poltorak] No not really. FTX I’m not surprised. Maybe I’m a bit surprised about the valuation of OpenSea. But yeah who knows.

[ Didier Borel ] All right gentlemen, that was an interesting review of the month's headlines and we'll meet again next week thank you very much.

There are no advertisements on this podcast but if you would like to be able to contribute directly to content creators and thus reduce the importance of centralized platforms and the importance of advertising, the lightning network enables this. The lightning network enables you to stream money by the second for less than one cent no fiat system could ever compete with

Lightning network in order to do this you need to download a podcast player that allows for payments with Lightning network. Currently, i'm aware of two the breeze wallet which is a lightning wallet and a podcast player and the fountain app, which is a podcast player that allows streaming of sats as you do this little by little you will become comfortable with lightning and

you will see how easy it is to use. Then little by little you will see that it is the most underappreciated asset in crypto today that probably has the greatest potential to change how we make payments. You can also contribute directly to this podcast by visiting the website the swiss road to crypto.com and contributing there or contributing through one of the two podcast players I mentioned above and streaming.

If you'd like to get in contact with me you can visit the website of the podcast the website is the swissroad2crypto.com and sign up for the newsletter and send me an email there. If you would like to help other people find this podcast please leave a review on apple podcasts. You can do that even if you don't have an iPhone go to google type the swiss road to crypto scroll down to the bottom of the page and leave a review or give it a five-star rating if you so choose. That helps other people find the podcast as well. I would also like to thank my producer Mikhail Juno who helps me tremendously in producing and editing this podcast