Talking points
🏦 Bankless Binance
🎮 Polygon level up
🍣 Sushi served
🏦 Bankless Binance
Binance.US has been facing challenges in finding a new bank partner to act as a fiat on-ramp and off-ramp for its clients in the US.
It seems that the recent collapse of Silvergate and Signature Bank has left Binance.US without banking services, forcing the exchange to rely on middleman banks to store funds on its behalf. Obviously, this is not ideal at all and, combined with regulatory crackdowns on banks with crypto clients, has created significant problems for the exchange.
This may not seem like a major problem but Binance.US needs a bank to directly hold its client's US dollars, so the longer without a bank partnership, the longer customers are without complete deposit options. There has been recent attempts to establish direct banking relationships with banks but so far no luck for Binance.US.
Binance.US is currently holding customer funds via financial technology firm Prime Trust, which confirmed that all funds received from clients are stored through its banking partners. Despite these challenges, Binance.US is working towards a more stable fiat platform via internal system upgrades, which sounds positive!
Despite Binance.US having these troubles, they are not alone as Crypto firms in the United Kingdom are also grappling with banks that are moving away from accepting clients from the crypto sector, which seems odd considering the United Kingdom are looking to become an established base for the crypto world 🤔
Binance Holdings and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, most commonly known as ‘CZ’ were also sued by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) last month for alleged trading violations with the investigation originally beginning in 2021.
It is clear that banks are not keen to continue providing for crypto services as done so previously, and with so much uncertainty ahead still and economic disturbances, perhaps it is not completely unjust.
Either way, it is just another barrier to overcome and the resilience will be in full force from the crypto community 💪
🎮 Polygon level up
The gaming world seems to be heating up again with summer slowly approaching, as Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Polygon has become the second-largest gaming network by unique active wallets (UAWs).
The surge in user activity on Polygon saw 138,081 UAWs engaging with games on the network in March, marking a huge 53% increase from February.
According to a "Blockchain Games Report" by DappRadar, the increase was driven in part by Hunters On-Chain, a Web3 adaptation of the mobile game Hunt Royale, developed by BoomLand. In the past 30 days alone, the game has seen a staggering 17,000% UAW increase, with an all-time high UAW count of around 55,300 on March 9. Hunters On-Chain is a free-to-play role-playing game that integrates non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and has a similar look and style to Minecraft.
However, Polygon's success in the gaming world isn't just down to Hunters On-Chain. They have had a plethora of recent partnerships with big names such as Warner Music, Starbucks, Adidas, Reddit, and Adobe to develop and host NFT projects.
Additionally, Polygon Labs, the team behind the network, recently launched Polygon’s open-source Ethereum Virtual Machine equivalent zero-knowledge roll-up, which is expected to unlock a much higher performance while also reducing gas fees to conduct transactions on the network.
Polygon's success in the gaming world is a positive sign for the network, and crypto overall as times are still uncertain, so any kind of positivity is definitely welcomed.
Could this be the start of a gaming resurgence across the blockchain? 🕹️
🍣 Sushi served
The DeFi protocol SushiSwap suffered an exploit on Sunday morning, according to a tweet from the platform's developers.
The exploit involved the "RouterProcessor2" contract, which is responsible for routing trades on the exchange. Security firm PeckShield flagged the issue, with it being estimated that over $3.3 million had been lost due to an "approve-related bug. This was later confirmed by the SushiSwap developers.
According to reports the loss came from a single user, which we will not name, but they a well-known trader in the Crypto Twitter community. However, it was also reported that only certain users who approved SushiSwap contracts within a certain period of time were vulnerable to this exploit.
SushiSwap's head developer, Jared Grey, was extremely active on social media urging users to revoke permissions for all contracts on the platform as a security measure (With thanks from PeckShield) and that the team is currently working with security firms to mitigate the issue.
SushiSwap were on the case quickly, but sadly exploits happen so fast that it is almost impossible to catch them before the damage is done. However, credit to the team for finding solutions and recovering the funds back as soon as possible while also eliminating the exploited contract.
It seems we are seeing an exploit every single week recently, super scary times for sure, which is a good reminder to stay extra vigilant and increase your due diligence where possible.
