Unchained - Juno Holders Want to Confiscate a Whale’s Tokens. Here’s Why. - Ep.334

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Andy Beal, head of ecosystem development at Forta and author of the 30,000 Feet newsletter, discusses the dramatic governance proposal on Juno Network, a Cosmos-based project, where Juno holders are voting to confiscate millions of dollars in tokens from a whale who allegedly gamed the Juno airdrop. Show topics: how the Juno airdrop worked  how the whale was able to amass more JUNO tokens than the team wanted why the Juno Network community feels threatened by an entity holding so many JUNO tokens what the whale did to invoke the ire of the Juno Network community the community’s vote on whether to confiscate up to 98.5% of the whale’s tokens what three courses of action the community is considering to confiscate the whale’s JUNO what Andy’s biggest takeaways are from the dramatic governance moment Come to an Event on Laura's Book Tour! https://www.laurashin.com/book/#tour-dates   Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021     Coinchange: https://coinchange.io    OnJuno: https://onjuno.com/    Episode Links   Andy Beal https://twitter.com/ajbeal  Andy's newsletter: https://30000feet.substack.com   Juno Network drama Andy’s write-up https://30000feet.substack.com/p/issue-60-juno-whale?s=r  Decrypt coverage https://decrypt.co/95435/juno-network-dao-proposal-16-voted-to-revoke-tokens-from-whale Coindesk coverage https://www.coindesk.com/video/recent-videos/why-junos-vote-to-confiscate-a-whales-funds-is-a-watershed-for-blockchain-governance/ https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/03/16/junos-proposal-16-vote-is-a-watershed-for-blockchain-governance-for-better-or-worse/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, all, I just wanted to keep you posted on the upcoming events in my book tour, which you can also find at laurashin.com on the book page at laurashin.com slash book slash hashtag tour-hyphen dates. First, on March 26th, Friday, I'll be at the Harvard campus at HPS Aldrich 011 from 4 p.m. until 5 p.m. Eastern. I'll be interviewed about my book by N.F. Castle's Michelle Choi and will also be doing a signing. This event, unfortunately, is not open. to the public. However, we do have a few tickets available, so feel free to send an email to hello at Unchainedpodcast.com to request a ticket. Next, on Wednesday, March 30th, I'll be speaking remotely with six senses about the Cryptopians at 2 p.m. Eastern. Be sure to save your spot, space is limited, and the link to sign up is on laura shinn.com slash book slash hashtag tour hyphen dates. On Tuesday, April 5th, I will be doing a reading and signing hosted by the city of Miami Beach and Future Perfect Ventures at Skyyard from 6 to 8 p.m.

Jalak Jobamputra, CEO of Future Perfect Ventures, will be interviewing me. You need to RSVP by April 1st to Diana Fontani at Miami BeachFL.gov. You can again get all this info and the email address at laura shinn.com, navigate to the book page, and click on the tour link. On Saturday, April 9th, I will be on a panel at the Annapolis Book Festival at 11 a.m. On Tuesday, April 12th, I will be at Startup Grind's Global Event in Redwood City, which is focused this year on Web 3. The time is TBD. And then, sometime between May 4th to 7th, I will be in conversation with author Jimmy Soni at the PBS Seattle Crosscut Festival, which takes place from May 4th to 7th, details on my specific event, TBD.

And finally, I will be at the Ozzo Freedom Forum, which takes place from May 23rd to May 25th. Details again, TBD. And now, on to the show. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-term.

time. This is the March 25th, 22 episode of Unchained. With the Crypto.com app, you can buy, earn, and spend crypto in one place. Download and get $25 with the code Laura. Link in the description. Point change is the easiest way to earn passive income using crypto. You can safely deposit cash or cryptocurrencies to earn up to 20% annual yield. There is no lending or market risk, just simple, high return yield farming. an account today at try defy.cc slash unc and receive 40 USDC. That's trydefi.c slash unc. If you're frustrated that your bank account is in crypto-friendly, it's time to make a change. On Juno is a powerful new checking account that lets you buy, spend, and earn in crypto. It's free to

open an account and even comes with a metal card. Download the On Juno app today. Today's guest is Andy Beale, head of ecosystem development at Florida, and author of The 30,000 Feet Newsletter. Welcome, Andy. Hey, Laura. Thanks for having me. Everyone's been a buzz about the drama with a smart contract blockchain in Cosmos called Juno, which launched in October. And this saga involves a big whale in that ecosystem. Tell us what happened in the beginning. It all started with Juno's AirDrop. Give us the context of what happened at that time. Yeah, so the background for the story actually started in the

fall of last year. So Juno, like a lot of new projects in the Cosmos ecosystem, announced a what they call a stake drop, which is where they air drop tokens to existing wallets that are staking atoms. And it also applied to it also applied to wallets that were providing liquidity into osmosis too. but wallets that have a, you know, some sort of locked stake in the, in the ecosystem that Juno's building on top of. And this was a very, it was a very generous air drop. It was a one for one. So if you had 10,000 atoms staked in your wallet, you would get 10,000 Juno air dropped to you. And the team, very sort of wisely imposed a whale cap of 50,000. So even if you have 100,000 atoms staked in your wallet, you were only going to get 50,000 Juno. That was the absolute maximum per person,

per entity, because they wanted to ensure a healthy distribution of the token, which is a pretty reasonable concern for any core team to have when they're thinking about token distribution and launch. Now, the snapshot for that was taken back in February of last year. So, you know, seven months before the AirDrop actually happened in October, the Juno team took a snapshot of of all the wallets that were currently staking atoms and providing liquidity into into osmosis. And so you had to have your atom stake as of February. Shortly after the air drop, the Juno Corps team and the community saw a group of wallets, 52 in total, I believe, consolidate air dropped Juno tokens into one address. And the majority of these 52 wallets had

received the maximum 50,000 Juno. So they had received up to the whale cap. And in total, this consolidated wallet had two and a half million Juno, an order of magnitude, you know, above what was what the team intended to give to any single individual or entity. And so they realized that, you know, there was a massive whale now in their ecosystem that, that controlled a large portion of the token supply. And so two issues off the bat, right? One, it violates the spirit of the air drop because they had very explicitly imposed a cap. And the cap was known. It also poses some real risks to the network, especially if this whale doesn't have the best interest of the network at heart, right? They control a significant amount of token supply that impacts their voting power.

They also control a lot of liquidity. They can delegate. their stake and centralize the network. So there's a lot of, you know, very reasonable concerns that the, the, the, the, Juno core team and community were immediately, immediately worried about. So in October, when they realized this, the community reacted pretty quickly and within a matter of days had put together a governance proposal. And this was, this is proposal number four, but we can call it, you know, the first proposal for, you know, for purposes of this discussion. And that proposal was seeking to confiscate

90% of these whales tokens and then send them to a community pool. And this was, you know, this was the community's attempt to sort of, you know, get back to neutral. That's such an unusual step. Was that controversial at all? Or was the consensus just that what this whale had done was so egregious and had basically cheated and flouted the rules that that was what they had to do? Or kind of kind of what was the talk at that time about that potential decision? So based on the community discussion on the forums and, you know, over other social media channels, it seemed like the, just the existence of the whale and, you know, any single person or entity having that significant stake in the network is just this, it poses this existential

threat, right? There's always this thing behind your, behind your shoulder, right, that could start to impact things, liquidity, voting, centralization, et cetera. And so I think the community just wanted to deal with this. Otherwise, you know, it's a risk that that's always out there that you're always worrying about. Yeah, like a ticking time bomb type thing. Exactly. Exactly. And you also have to think about, you know, do we need to continuously sort of appease this whale to make sure that they're happy and they don't do anything to negatively impact the network too, right? So maybe you start to, you know, cater your decision-making as a community to make this one large token holder happy, right? Which you don't want.

So the first time the Juno community tried to resolve this, the whale issue, they wanted to confiscate or reclaim 90% of the tokens. And they were going to put those into a community fund. And the discussion around this was, you know, did the whale intentionally game theirdrop? That was one consideration. And then there was part of the community that, you know, irrespective of whether they intentionally did it or not, right, it violated the spirit of theirdrop. And, you know, they essentially came into an amount of tokens

that they should never have come into, right? Once this proposal was posted, the whale actually reached out to the Juno team and explained their position. And so at the time, what the community learned was, that the whale was actually not an individual, it was a fund or a platform that was holding Adams and now Juno on behalf of their clients or users. They had distributed all the tokens across these 52 wallets, largely for security purposes. And so, you know, if you were confiscating funds,

you weren't actually just confiscating the whales funds. You were actually confiscating their users slash clients funds. And they also tried to assuage the, you know, the concerns of the community at the time by letting everyone know that, you know, they had no intention of threatening, you know, centralization. And they had the best interest of the network at heart. And, you know, in October, I think those, the arguments that the whale was putting forth, I think the community was buying.

And so for a period of time, they were comfortable with the fact that the whale was a, was going to be a positive impact on the, you know, on the Juno ecosystem and was going to throw their weight around like they could. And a couple of weeks ago, the situation changed. So what happened that then prompted the community to kind of revisit this idea of taking the whale's tokens? Fast forward, six months from October to March now, 2022. And up until this point, the whale has been, has followed through on their promise to the community to respect decentralization, and largely be sort of a passive sort of member of the community. In March, though, the behavior starts to change, and the

community sees that the whale is now starting to sell on a daily basis their staking rewards. Now, for any other person, you know, this doesn't raise a red flag, but because the whale is earning such a large percentage of the daily staking rewards. I think their rewards were half a million dollars a day for a relatively new project like Juno that doesn't have, you know, deep liquidity across the ecosystem. This is a lot of sell pressure on the market. And, you know, the community would have liked to see that the whale continue to restake their their assets, right? That would be a great signal that they were, you know, invested in the long-term success of Juno as opposed to just short-term, short-term gains, right?

So in a moment, we're going to talk about what the community decided to do at this point in time. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Join over 10 million people using crypto.com. The easiest place to buy, earn, and spend over 150 cryptocurrencies. Spend your crypto anywhere using the crypto.com visa card. Get up to 8% cash back instantly. plus 100% rebates for your Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions. Download the crypto.com app now and get $25 with the code Laura.

Link in the description. It's time to bring Wall Street to Main Street. Coin change is democratizing access to wealth management with low-risk, high-return, passive income through defy. It's simple. Just deposit your crypto into a coin-change high-yield account. to earn more over time. Your yield is paid out daily and can be withdrawn any time.

Coin changes yield farming doesn't utilize lending or other risky strategies. No minimums, no obligations, just high yield. It's time for a change. Create an account today at tri-defy.c-unc to receive 40 USDC. That's try defy.c slash unc. Back to my conversation with Andy. So we're in this situation where suddenly the community realizes, okay, the impact of this wheel is a negative one. So what do they decide to do at that point?

So the community quickly mobilizes and all the fears from October come back. And they decide to kind of revisit the proposal for, this is now called, call Prop 16. So if you're looking for this in the forums or online for more information, Juno Prop 16 is proposed. And similar terms to the original proposal, except this time, they want to not confiscate 90%. They want to confiscate all the whales assets except for 50,000. So they want to leave the whale with the original 50K whale cap. This is now 98.5% of the whales assets. And the interesting thing about this, too, is that from October to March, the price of Juno has gone from, you know, say, an average of $7 to $10, up to $40 to $45, right? So the Wales financial stake in the network is now roughly $140 million.

So a significant amount of money now. You know, this obviously raises the stakes of the community's decision here. And also for those listening to it, it raises some really interesting questions, right? The first one is just, why can't the whale sell immediately if they know that the community is going to vote to confiscate their funds? And the answer to that one is that they are currently staking their assets. And there's a 28-day unbonding period in Juneau. And so, or an unstaking period. And so they are locked up for four weeks.

And so that's the window of opportunity that the, tuna community has to issue a proposal, vote on it, and then remediate the situation. So there's a shock-clock component here, which is somewhat unique to these situations. The other interesting question is, can't the whale throw their voting weight around to influence the vote here and get the outcome that they want? Yes, but they don't control enough to push through a vote, or in this case, to vote down this proposal by themselves. And then the third question is, practically, how does a community seize tokens from, you know,

an individual wallet? You know, the obvious way to do it is with a hard fork, and we can get into that a little bit later when we talk about what the community is doing to actually affect this change. After five days of, you know, pretty contentious discussion on forums, Prop 16 is approved by the Juno community.

And it, interestingly, I think this is something that I'd love to talk with you about, Laura. Prop 16 was just a text proposal. So it was a, it was a, the community was sort of agreeing to a concept about what to do. But it wasn't, it wasn't a software proposal that could be immediately implemented. So now that the text proposal is approved, Now the community needs to decide how do we actually affect this change that the community voted yes for? And it's opened the door to a bunch of other discussions and alternative proposals. So, but is a hard fork one of them?

And well, why don't you give us a quick overview of what those options would be? So there's three sort of implementation proposals right now. One is very much in line with sort of the original intention of. of Prop 16. So they want to immediately undelegate and unstake the whales assets, and then they would burn them. They would send them to an address with a contract address of zero and burn them. So the tokens would be effectively out of circulation.

The second proposal, which is actually was put together by the core team at Juno, is a slight deviation from that plan, which would actually put the whale's assets into an escrow account that both the whale and the community would control. So you can think about this like a multi-sig. And the funds would sit in that escrow account until all parties could agree on what to do with those assets. So this is sort of a, it's a plan to delay the decision about what to do with the assets. Do we give them back to the community? Do we burn them? But, But we want to take them out of the hands of the whale in the meantime, put them in a, you know, a neutral escrow account. The third proposal is actually from the whale themselves.

And they actually proposed an amended version of the core teams that I just went through that had the escrow component. Because they want to maintain the right to vote in the meantime. So while the assets, while they're confiscated assets, sit in an escrow account, they want to maintain the ability to vote. And the reason they're asking for that, right, is so that it puts pressure on the community to actually push for a resolution rather than just locking up the funds in escrow in perpetuity and just sitting on their hands and not doing anything, right? Which is effectively the same thing as burning the tokens, right?

Right. So at the moment, where is the community leaning? And also, I realized we didn't really go into who this whale is. So can you also give that context? Without sharing any names, I think the whale has shared their name online. They claim to be an exchange or a platform that holds assets for their users, though. And if my memory serves me correctly, they claim to have over 30,000 users. And so that's another interesting element to this.

You know, you have to ask yourself the question, are you confiscating an entity's assets, or are you confiscating, you know, assets that are collectively owned by 30,000 people, some of which just may be ordinary retail traders who are expecting these Juno tokens, right? And really haven't been involved in the process, weren't responsible for gaming theirdrop, weren't responsible for how, you know, the original Adams were delegated, delegated across wallets, right? So you don't want to, you don't want to unintentionally harm them either. And why wouldn't you just name them if they've named themselves online?

I don't understand. That's public information so we can freely discuss it here. Are you saying that there's a question about whether or not that's accurate or what's your concern? No, no, no. I'll be honest. I can look it up. I don't have the name memorized. Yeah, that's all.

That's all. Okay, it's CCN. Yep. Okay, got it. But then, so at the moment, which way are people leaning out of the three options? So there seems to be a lot of support behind the core team's proposal, which is a, you know, it has both validator support, core dev support and, you know, support from the community. This is the escrow account proposal. And I think there's acknowledgement that, you know, this Prop 16 was done pretty hastily. There was obviously, you know, a lot of, urgency here. And so I don't think anyone, you know, is, is angry that it moved as fast as it did. But at the same time, this is a sensitive issue. And you want to, you want to come to a sort of thoughtful, you know, resolution. And so if the escrow account model gives the community and the whale more time to, you know, come to a, come to consensus, then there's a, there's a large part of the juna community that is supportive of that. They are not supportive of giving the whale the right to continue voting.

their stake while it's in escrow, right? Because they still can control decisions. And then you have your purists of the Juno community that want to respect sort of the letter of the law that was stated in Prop 16, which is we're going to confiscate and burn these assets. And we only want to consider remediation plans that confiscate and burn these assets. So not in favor of the escrow account. My prediction is that the escrow account model will get approved, but we don't have a formal proposal submitted for a vote just yet. And so what are your big takeaways for blockchains facing similar issues in the future? You know, what do you think Juno could have done differently with its air drop? Like, how do you think this whale CCN could have handled the situation better?

What are your thoughts on all that? It's a good lesson for teams that are considering air drops and mechanisms for that. You know, the original sort of justification for the whale distributing their assets across different wallets is a reasonable one and one that you see a lot of larger platforms take. So, you know, to the extent that this really is an exchange or a custodian or some other, you know,

trading platform that does have, 30,000 users and are holding assets for them. Expecting those types of investors to pool all their assets into a single wallet, obviously isn't reasonable. So there's always going to be the possibility, right, that there's a single entity that controls multiple addresses. What you can do, and this might not be the most popular approach, but you can impose more strict KYC processes as part of the claiming

process of the stake drop. So when you're proving who you are and that you have control of the of the wallets, you know, Juno could have asked the entity that controls the wallet for more information about themselves, right? And that way you could

start to piece together, okay, this particular entity controls 52 wallets that amount to, you know, two and a half million cosmos in this, or atoms in this case, right? That's one way to do it, right? You can impose some other

impose some other requirements in the in the claiming slash KYC process you know you can also think about you know just your your caps this was a very generous air drop one to one and you know you can you can obviously play with that amount lowered if you wanted to right to ensure you know that's that's a that's a that's a fail safe way of doing it right I expect a lot of teams particularly in the cosmos ecosystem that are very regularly doing these state drop type of air drops we'll experiment with different mechanics, both on the distribution side and then on the claiming process side and the KYC side to try and prevent this. I think it's also interesting to point out too, and this is another topic we can chat about,

this whale was not the only entity that received more than 50,000. They just happened to be the largest recipient of Juno. and by a long shot, right? So they attracted the majority of the scrutiny, but I think there was roughly a dozen addresses that received more than the amount for different reasons. And so there is a question, you know, should corrective action here just be taken against the whale

or should we also apply that treatment, you know, evenly across these other 10 or 12 addresses that received more than their, you know, more than their fair share. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like this idea about cheating in blockchains is one that needs to be addressed because clearly if people are, you know, violating the law in these communities, I mean, that was one thing when somebody asked me what I thought of this. Obviously, it seems like a very extreme idea to take. such a huge percentage of tokens from somebody. And yet at the same time, well, you know, if you flout the rules, then like, what are you going to expect? So, well, this has been such a fascinating conversation.

I mean, it just raises so many questions. And I think it's something that a lot of Dow's in the future are going to have to grapple with. So I really appreciate that you explained all the ins and outs. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Laura. I appreciate it. Don't forget. Next up is the weekly news recap.

Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break. There's been a lot of buzz around getting paid in crypto, and it's easy with On Juno, the all-in-one crypto and banking app. You can set up a direct deposit and earn a portion of your paycheck in crypto. You get 10% back when you spend USDC with the On Juno card, as well as a 4% yield on your USDC. Not to mention, you can buy crypto with zero fees. All of this from an FDIC insured checking account. On Juno integrates directly with your direct deposit system, has no transaction fees, and is already being used by employees of some of the biggest tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. It's free to open an account, and today you can get $50 added to your

first direct deposit using code Laura. Download the On Juno app today. That's OnJUNO, and use code Laura for $50. Thanks for tuning in to this week's news recap. Yuga Labs' Metaverse plans involve A16Z. Coming off a busy week that included the purchase of Cryptopunks and Meepitt's commercial rights, along with the arrival of ApeCoyne, board ape yacht club creator Yuga Labs kept the good times rolling with the announcement of a $450 million raise led by A16Z. The funding round values the firm at $4 billion, which is, interestingly, less than one-third

of the current value of Apecoin, the cryptocurrency with a $12 billion market cap that will act as the main currency for Bored Ape Yaw Club, of which Yuga Labs owns 8%. Yuga Labs will be using the influx of cash to build out its metiverse, dubbed OtherSide. Yuga dropped a trailer for OtherSide over the weekend via Twitter, revealing that the project will launch in April. The trailer follows the journey of a bored ape after it chugs a potion labeled, Don't Drink Me, and takes a psychedelic adventure across a dystopian metaverse landscape. Notably, the video includes references to a few other popular NFT projects, including Mutant Apiopoeck Yacht Club, Cool Cats, Cryptopunks, Cryptoads, Mebitts, Nouns, and World of Women.

As an aside related to Yucalybs, Cryptopoteo calculated how much an original board ape yacht club member would have made by holding a single NFT from Mint until now. In total, an OGBAYC buyer spent 0.08 ETH in 2021. Since then, original Minters received a mutant ape yacht club NFT, a board ape kennel club NFT, and rights to the ape air drop, which, all told, as if to something close to $477,000, from an initial $500 investment. El Salvador's Bitcoin bond put on hold. El Salvador's $1 Bitcoin bond offering is delayed,

as Alejandro Zelaya, El Salvador's finance minister, told Reuters on Tuesday. Zelaya cited unfavorable conditions like Ukraine's defense against the Russian invasion and Bitcoin's volatility as reasons for El Salvador pushing the launch date back. The bond was initially planned to go out between March 15th and 20th.

Zelaya says El Salvador is still looking to launch before September 2022. However, Adam Cochran, partner of Sin and Payne Ventures, was unconvinced that El Salvador's decision to postpone its bond was due to market conditions. El Salvador postponing their Bitcoin bond due to unfavorable market conditions is hilarious. If you actually believed in an asset and can drum up demand for your bond, a down market is ideal to sell it. Pretty clear, no one wanted this instrument, he'd say. tweeted. Once, or if issued El Salvador, which made Bitcoin legal tender and holds the crypto

asset in its treasury, plans to use $500 million to purchase more Bitcoin, with the other $500 million going towards the construction of energy and mining infrastructure. The news comes during the same week as a bill looking to mitigate the risk of El Salvador's Bitcoin adoption passed out of a Senate committee. Dubbed the accountability for cryptocurrency in El Salvador Act, the legislation would monitor remittances from El Salvador. President Naib Buckelly expressed disdain, tweeting, Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that the U.S. government would be afraid of what we are doing here. Goldman Sachs puts digital assets center stage.

Goldman Sachs made its first ever over-the-counter crypto transaction this week via Galaxy Digital. The traditional finance behemoth executed a Bitcoin non-deliverable option, says Galaxy, claiming that Goldman's trade is the first OTC crypto transaction by a major bank in the U.S. coinciding with Goldman's trade was a change to the front page of its website, Goldman Sachs.com. On Wednesday, Goldman featured digitalization as the key trend on its main website, touting research and insights from cryptocurrencies to the metaverse. On the topic of traditional finances adoption of crypto, CoinDesk reported this week, that the world's largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio's Bridgewater, is preparing to back its first

crypto fund. While CoinDesk reports that Bridgewater will not be investing directly in crypto assets itself, the $150 billion asset manager has plans to back an external vehicle. Ray Dalio himself disclosed a Bitcoin position back in May 2022. Additionally, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink revealed in a Thursday shareholder letter that the $9.6 trillion dollar asset manager is studying digital currencies after seeing increasing interest from clients. L1s are going after Bitcoin. Bitcoin is suddenly all the rage in defy. Luna Foundation Guard, a developer supporting Terra's main stable coin, UST, revealed that it has

already amassed a $3 billion treasury that it will soon use to purchase Bitcoin. LFG plans to use the purchased BTC as a 4X reserve mechanism to help keep UST's pit, at $1 in any market condition. According to Terraform Lab CEO Doquan, LFG plans to up its Forex reserve to $10 billion by the time it is done, which would cover two-thirds of UST's market cap. LFG's actual plan to back U.S.T with Bitcoin remained a mystery until Wednesday when Jump Trading's crypto arm published a proposal on Tara's governance forum, outlining a Bitcoin reserve pool that illustrates how LFG will help keep UST's price pegged to the

On the other hand, at the Avalanche Summit in Barcelona, Ava Labs, the firm developing Avalanche's blockchain, announced two significant updates. First, it will be launching a wallet called Core. Secondly, the firm will add Bitcoin bridging functionality to Avalanche. The beta launch of GameStop's NFT marketplace was weird. GameStop launched the beta version of its marketplace this week on top of loop ring, so in confusion among anyone who has been keeping up with the gaming company's foray into crypto. According to Loopring, the new GameStop NFT marketplace is built atop the second layer of Ethereum, specifically Loop Ring L2.

This is a bit surprising because in Q4, 2021, GameStop announced a partnership with Ethereum scaling solution immutable, disclosure of former sponsor of my show, to support the development of an NFT platform in a deal that included millions in IMX tokens. GameStop and LoopRink's announcement prompted a response from Immutable, claiming that this was the plan all along. LRC integrating was not a surprise, and we welcome them, explained Immutable on Twitter. The GameStop marketplace will ultimately be an aggregator with Immutable as its preferred partner. Not surprisingly, LoopRing's native token LRC shot up 27% on the day of the announcement. Immutable's token dropped half a percent.

Cachio lost millions. On Wednesday, Cashio Dollar. an algorithmic stablecoin project built on Solana, was exploited for $27 million. On Twitter, Cassio described the bug as an infinite mint glitch. According to Paradigm Researcher Sam Sun, because Cascio didn't establish a route of trust

for all the accounts it used, an attacker was able to steal approximately $50 million by forging a chain of fake accounts. The result of the hack decimated the project, with total value locked in the protocol crashing from $30 million to roughly $500,000, according to data from DeFi Lama, and the price of a single cash dropped from $1 to far below a penny. The DOJ is going after Frosties.

The U.S. Department of Justice is charging two individuals with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering related to an NFT project called Frosties. It is the first such action against an NFT project by a U.S. regulator. According to the DOJ, the two Frosts, founders allegedly abandoned the Frosty's NFT project within hours after selling out of Frosty's NFTs, deactivated the Frosty's website, and transferred approximately $1.1 million in cryptocurrency proceeds from the scheme to various cryptocurrency wallets under their control in multiple transactions designed to obfuscate the original source of funds.

Time for FunBits! Greg types his way to a Tesla. If you are a crypto-Twitter native, you probably follow the main. meme account at Greg 166-76935420. In a very humorous exchange with FTCS founder and CEO Sam Bingman-Fried, it appears Greg won himself a free Tesla after cheekily asking SBF for a free Tesla if Greg could type more than 100 words per minute. If you want a smile or a laugh, you should definitely check out the video Greg posted to show

off his accomplishment. It's a riot. Thanks so much for joining us today. to learn more about Andy and the Juno Whale Saga, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Youne, Daniel Nuss, Mark Murdoch, Shashonk, and CLK transcription. Thanks for listening.