Daily Digest 11/15

Insight on the biggest stories of the day.

ast Wednesday the Minister of State Mudrick Soraga announced that Zanzibar would be exploring ways to adopt cryptocurrencies. They are planning to conduct meetings with banks and ministries to discuss policies and see if the move would be viable for the semi-autonomous territory.
Soraga had also met with local cryptocurrency enthusiasts who ensured him that it would be a good move to adopt crypto as an official transaction method. “We need to start drawing lessons from other countries on how this technology works. For cryptocurrency to be effective, we will need policies for cryptocurrency,” said Abdulmajid Nsekela, chairman of the Tanzania Bankers Association.
Many South American countries and African countries are exploring the benefits of adding cryptocurrency as an official payment method with El Salvador being the biggest example since they were the first ones to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender.
It is also rumored that in early November Charles Hoskinson and IOHK had a secret meeting in with officials in Zanzibar as Hoskinson has he believes that more countries will follow the El Salvador method. Hoskinson also has strong connections with Africa as they are one of the key strategic areas for IOHK launching many blockchain based initiatives across Africa.

Metaverses have been the talk of the town over the past month since the announcement made by Facebook that they would be changing their name to META. NFTs and the metaverse will tend to go hand in hand and now Animoca brands will be collaborating with Korean record label, Cube Entertainment, to build a K-pop metaverse.
The partnership will include Animoca creating multimedia NFTs of the actors and musicians that are currently on the Cube roster. These NFTs will consist of images and portraits as well as including full length albums. Cube currently manages about 50 K-pop artists including BtoB and Pentagon.
Animoca is quickly becoming a big name in the NFT space as they were also early investors in Dapper Labs and secured a global licensing agreement with Formula 1 for its NFT game F1 Delta Time. They also own a ton of virtual land in its subsidiary The Sandbox.

Marathon Digital is one of the biggest Bitcoin mining companies that is listed on the stock market but is down around 17% today as they have been ordered by the SEC to produce documents for its Montana facility. This news also caused other mining related companies, like Hut 8 and Riot, to also see a bit of a dip in price.
This notice from the SEC is simply in regards to possible violations of securities laws and is not an indictment on the company as of right now. An SEC filing from October 2020 that reportedly showed that the company had distributed 6 million shares of restricted common stock.
Marathon said that they are going to be cooperating with the SC for the entirety of the investigation but declined to comment on any other details of the subpoena. It is also interesting that this comes after news from earlier in the day that MARA was planning to buy even more BTC and the stock price had just reached a 6 year high on November 3.

Many Decentralized exchanges have been popping up over the past year as Defi really started to take off in terms of volume, users, and every other aspect. While it is good to see people building it will be hard to take away from Uniswaps market share.
While Uniswap may be unusable for the non crypto rich at the moment it is still the best and most liquid DEX on the market. The biggest factor with any of these dapps is trust by the users as many of them have experienced a loss of funds when messing around with wannabe DEX’s.
Outside of Uniswap there are still good options like 1inch, Bancor, and Curv the issue though is that they may not offer the same range of assets that Uniswap has nor do they have the name recognition. If ETH can solve their gas fee crisis then it will give these alternative and well built projects a chance to claim some of that Uniswap market share if the barrier for entry for defi decreases.

SEC Subpoena’s Bitcoin Mining Company