Welcome again to Chain Reaction.
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It’s week two of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial and I’m penning this reside from exterior the Southern District of New York courthouse the place the case is happening. (Tip: If you need to get into the primary courtroom to take a seat behind SBF and hear in, it’s important to line up earlier than 6 am otherwise you’ll be despatched to the overflow room.)
Tuesday was a slower day full of technical particulars, however that modified on Wednesday and Thursday when Caroline Ellison, ex-CEO of Alameda Research, took the stand to testify.
Here’s a refresher on what you could have missed final week. (TC+)
Alameda is a giant participant within the trial because it’s the crypto hedge fund sister firm of FTX. Bankman-Fried began Alameda again in 2017, two years earlier than launching FTX. And in 2021, Ellison took over as co-CEO with Sam Trabucco as Bankman-Fried needed to step away for optics, however nonetheless managed the agency internally, she testified.
Ellison was the fifth witness for the prosecution and claimed that Bankman-Fried directed her to commit fraud and cash laundering crimes. Ellison added that whereas she ran Alameda, she took a number of billion {dollars} from clients to put money into different tasks and repay money owed to lenders via an “essentially unlimited line of credit.” More particulars beneath.
For the newest updates verify right here.
The SBF Trial
- Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison explains how FTX hid losses, sandbagged lenders (TC+)
- Alameda Research allegedly paid Chinese officers round $150M to regain $1B price of alternate accounts
- SBF began a $2 billion enterprise fund utilizing Alameda loans
- Crypto is about much more than a former golden boy turned villain (TC+)
- ‘Marked to zero’: Paradigm testimony at SBF trial factors to investor fraud
- Alameda had a $65B line of credit score and ‘unlimited withdrawals’
The newest pod
For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Grace Torrellas, Polygon Labs’ VP of product and zkEVM product lead and co-founder and govt director of Blockchain for Humanity, at TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco.
Blockchain for Humanity goals to make use of Bitcoin and blockchain know-how to assist social influence tasks.
Separately, Polygon Labs is targeted on the Ethereum blockchain via its personal scaling protocols to make the web3 ecosystem extra “affordable, secure and sustainable.” The chain additionally goals to develop the zero-knowledge Ethereum digital machine (zkEVM) house.
Breaking it down for you: zkEVM is simply fancy jargon for scalable good contracts which can be appropriate with Ethereum and helps a sort of computation generally known as “zero-knowledge proofs,” which confirm every transaction.
Polygon Labs has greater than 2.9 billion whole transactions since inception in 2017. The Polygon community works with web3 organizations like Aave, Uniswap and OpenSea, in addition to massive title manufacturers like Disney and Starbucks.
We talked about her work at each Polygon and Blockchain for Humanity and the way humanitarian work might be superior within the web3 house.
We additionally mentioned:
- Scaling companies with blockchain tech
- “Aha” moments in web3
- Opportunities in social influence
- Polygon’s ecosystem development
Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite pod platform to maintain up with the newest episodes, and please go away us a overview for those who like what you hear!
Follow the cash
- Blockchain gaming platform Game of Silks raises $5 million
- Crypto-focused buying and selling and lending platform Membrane Labs raises $20 million
- On-chain knowledge analytics agency Parsec raised $4 million
- Creator economy-focused RepubliK raised $6 million at a $75 million valuation
- Untangled Finance, a tokenized real-world asset platform, raised $13.5 million
This checklist was compiled with info from Messari in addition to TechCrunch’s personal reporting.
What else we’re writing
Want to department out from the world of web3? Here are some articles on TechCrunch that caught our consideration this week.
- Yepic fail: This startup promised to not make deepfakes with out consent, however did anyway
- Fearing AI, fan fiction writers lock their accounts
- More cash received’t repair your failing startup — right here’s methods to get buyers to again a pivot (TC+)
- Investors recommend funds put together for the fallout of the Fearless Fund lawsuit, not fear about it (TC+)
- Indian startups weren’t spared within the international enterprise slowdown of Q3 (TC+)
Follow me on Twitter @Jacqmelinek for breaking crypto information, memes and extra.
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