⁉️ Binance vs Department of Justice

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and let's start this week.

⭐️Today’s selection:

• ❗Binance Vs Justice Dept

• 🛑Binance Blocks Suspicious Actions

• 💸Venture Monday

• 👌Selected Meme of The Day

• 📰Bite-Sized News

BINANCE VS JUSTICE DEPARTMENT DRAMA

Now there's some fresh tea brewing up in the crypto sphere.

This new conflict is supposed to be between Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, and... Department of Justice.

You see, Reuters, the news agency, has stirred up some spiciness.

In an article titled 'Exclusive-U.S. Justice Dept is split over charging Binance as crypto world falters - sources', they claimed that Binance is actually in deep trouble.

Apparently, the exchange has successfully avoided responsibility for their not-so-legal actions.

It's alleged, that Binance execs have been possibly been involved in money laundering schemes, sanctions violations, and even submitting fake 'proof of reserves'.

Now that is of course... a powerful source of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). And such announcements come... One day before the next (and this year's last) FED's meeting.

The Crypto sphere sees this as an 'attack on crypto'. Nevertheless, this piece of news affected BNB (Binance Coin) for a while).

It's slowly recovering, but after the news broke out, its price fell from $268 to $259.

The FUD is being dispersed by Binance themselves. They tweeted that:

'Reuters has it wrong again. Now they're attacking our incredible law enforcement team. A team that we're incredibly proud of - they've made crypto more secure for all of us.'

We'll see where this goes. The waves have calmed down. But you can never know.

TL;DR: Reuters posted an article about Binance potentially having a lot of legal trouble for their alleged 'money laundering' and other illegal activities. It caused BNB Coin's price to fall for a while.

BINANCE BLOCKS SUSPICIOUS ACTIONS

Okay, blocking the Reuters-FUD was not the only thing that Binance did.

On Sunday, unusual activity was spotted on Binance. The exchange reacted quickly by freezing withdrawals for those who were involved in it.

Over the weekend, cryptocurrency exchange Binance noticed abnormal price movements on some trading pairs.

These pairs included: Sun Token (SUN), Ardor (ARDR), Osmosis (OSMO), FUNToken (FUN) and Golem (GLM).

Exchange officials suspected a hacking attack and launched an investigation to "narrow down the suspect accounts".

And... After inspecting the situation and reducing the risk of a potentially ongoing hack... They sighed in relief. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

CZ later reported that the price movement "seems to be normal market behaviour", as Binance's investigation found no possibility of a hack.

So... there are two sides to this coin. One is that Binance are super alert and they're always on the watch for potential hacks.

The other side is... That it's a centralized exchange. And as you can see... It's not difficult for them to simply press a button and freeze someone's withdrawals.

That's not very 'cryptoish'.

TL;DR: Over the weekend, Binance intervened and stopped some suspicious traders from participating in a potential 'hack'. Eventually, they found out that nothing was wrong.

VENTURE MONDAY

It's Monday. Let's talk last week's winners.

NFT-based decentralized video platform, Shibuya, announced it has raised a $6.9 million funding round led by venture capital firms a16z Crypto and Variant.

The round, which also attracted celebrity investors like Paris Hilton and Kevin Durant, values the company at $50 million.

We can describe Shibuya, which launched in February, as a cross between Netflix and Kickstarter.

They’re going to initially focus on animated films, but there is, of course, a blockchain twist to the project.

Namely, while the film is free to watch, fans will have an option of purchasing tokens that will give them a say in its development and outcome.

They can use the tokens to vote between two possible paths of the story. Even more of the utility will appear later.

Panoptic, a Uniswap-based decentralized finance protocol for trading perpetual options, raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round.

The funding round was led by Gumi Cryptos Capital, with participation from Uniswap Labs Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Jane Street and Avalanche Foundation's Blizzard.

DeFi derivatives protocol Perennial raised $12M in a seed funding round led by Polychain Capital and Variant, with participation from Archetype, Coinbase Ventures, Scalar Capital, Robot Ventures, A Capital and others.

Defi derivatives protocols are an instrument for the 'elbows deep' crypto people. Underlying assets, their 'derivative value', and bets on their value changes... These are platforms for this.

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• Bankman-Fried May Receive a Subpoena if He Refuses to Testify Before US Congress. The word ‘may’ makes all the difference though.

• FTX Reportedly Sought to Sign $100M Sponsorship Deal with Taylor Swift. Taylor successfully shook it off.

• Judge Dismisses EMax Lawsuit Against Kim Kardashian and Other Celebrities. One case a year is enough for Kim.