Episode 207: Libra Faces Opposition, Coinbase and more rate cryptos, and yet another huge scam.

This week the team talks about cryptocurrency news regarding Libra, scams and more.  

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• Rapid Fire
  • IKEA just allowed an invoice to be paid via the Ethereum blockchain (This was a stablecoin of some kind)
  • BlockOne was fined 24M by the SEC.
  • Siacoin only had to pay 225k
  • CEO of Beaxy Exchange disappears, looks like they're insolvent.

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• (Crypto Exchanges Creating a Token Rating System)
  • Coinbase Blog - "Introducing the Crypto Rating Council"
    • Create system that rates tokens on how close they are to a security
    • "Although the U.S SEC has issued helpful guidance...
      • Analysis requires fact-intensive analysis by knowledgeable experts
      • Analysis is difficult, expensive, and will lead to judgement calls & disagreements
    • So Coinbase brought together industry leaders, securities law experts to create
      • "a scalable, points-based rating system centered around a set of several dozen, yes / no factual questions."
      • Question derived directly from SEC guidance and case law
      • They say they focused on "objective, repeatable, fact-driven questions"
    • Council Members
      • Anchorage
        • Part of the Libra association
        • Basically a crypto vault were transactions are validated by Quorum
        • No usernames/passwords/phonenumbers nothing a hacker could use or get
        • "clients whitelist devices held by their employees, who use the Anchorage app to submit transactions. You’d propose selling $10 million worth of Bitcoin or transferring it to someone else as payment, and a minimum of two-thirds of your designated co-workers would need to concur to form a quorum that approves the transfer."
        • Also uses behavioral analysis, biometric signals, network signals. Its human AI mix
      • Bittrex
      • Circle
      • Coinbase
      • DRW Cumberland
      • Genesis
      • Grayscale Investments
      • Kraken
    • Scores range between 1 and 5 (5 being most like a security)
    • Expected to change over time, and open to feedback
    • Crypto Rating Council
      • Bitcoin - 1.0
        • Absence of a marketed token sale & marketing efforts
        • decentralized development and usage
        • Anonymity of the Project Team
        • Litecoin, Monero
      • Ethereum - 2.0
        • Current functionality of the platform
        • Absence of investment-like language or marketing
        • Decentralized development and usage
        • Zcash
      • EOS - 3.75
        • Absence of investment-like language or marketing
        • Current functionality of the platform
        • Raised funds in excess of what would reasonably be necessary for development of the platform
        • Decentraland, Hedera Hashgraph, Loom Network, Stellar, Tezos
      • XRP - 4.0
        • Usage of securities-like language
        • Sale of tokens or token interests prior to the existence of token utility
        • Marketing of the token suggesting an opportunity to earn profits
        • Decentralized development and usage
        • CEO of Ripple has said its pretty clear XRP is not a security

• Ohio is no longer accepting BitPay

• (Libra Update, Thing Looking....Not Great)
  • We know there's been tons of official opposition
    • Federal Reserve, Treasury Department
    • House and Senate banking Committes, EU antitrust officials,
    • Indian and Chinese officials, and French straight out said they'd stop it
  • WSJ Report Tuesday that
    • Visa, Mastercard, and “other financial partners that signed on to help build and maintain the Libra payments network” are now reconsidering whether they should remain involved.
    • Apparently FB been asking them to help and show support, and they are declining
    • "Their reluctance has Facebook scrambling to keep Libra on track."
  • Prior August reporting said Libra partners were wary that pushing Libra would "attract broader regulatory scrutiny of their activities"
    • Lo and behold, DOJ requested Visa, Mastercard, Stripe & PayPal to provide a "complete overview of their money-laundering compliance programs and how Libra will fit into them.”
  • Here's the rub
    • None of the 28 association members have committed beyond nonbinding letters
    • The $10 million that FB asked for each member for development? No one has paid it
  • Multiple flanks
    • FB facing heat from DOJ opening an antitrust investgation. Also the FTC and multiple states, like multiple
      • Led by NY AG, but Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, NC, Ohio, Tennessee, and DC involved
    • Federal investigation getting cooperation from Snapchat
      • Legal team for years kept a dossier of "ways that the company felt FB was trying to thwart competition"
      • The tile of the documents....Project Voldemort
        • Allege things like Instagram effectively barred users from linking to their Snapchat profiles in their bios.
        • Also that Snapchat content was prevented from trending on the platform
        • Supressed search results of snap-related searches
    • But apparently FTC has contacted "dozens of tech executives and app developers”
    • Investigators also looking into Onavo
      • VPN FB bought in 2013
      • Later pressured into shutting it down amid reports it was sucking up lots of data about user app usage
      • Its apparently this data that clued them in on WhatsApp posing a potential threat, and pushing them to buy it
      • They were also using Onavo to monitor how people used Snapchat, how many snaps a day they sent

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THAT'S A SCAM

• Fair Win Story
  • What is fair win? Well shit I might as well let them tell you word for word - Blockchain + gambling, blockchain + game, establish industry standard interface, 70% income anti-subsidy investor players.
  • So this is being listed as a $150M Ponzi Scheme. Posted about on medium by Philippe Castonguay
  • First red flag - the team consisted of a famous piano player (Dang Thai Son) and an instagram influencer's (Jessica Vu) pictures.
  • Dude found typos and bugs all over the contract.
  • He also found that the contract had been drained for 2600 ETH once on 7/27 with an old exploit.
  • He then finds an exploit where you can essentially swap out an invite code and steal ETH from depositors to the contract.
  • They got a group together to decide what to do and exposed the scam last week.
  • And of course as soon as they announced the problem, team drained the accounts.