Mediaboss Marketing

In every single corner of the crypto landscape, one name pops up: Binance.

Run by Changpeng CZ Zhao, the worlds largest crypto exchange is a dominant force in everything from Bitcoin trading and digital art to venture capital. With its power and influence only increasing after the collapse last year of Sam Bankman-Frieds FTX empire, the inconvenient truth is that Binance has a grip on the $1.1 trillion industry that has few parallels in traditional finance. Thats despite all the decentralization talk from cryptos true believers.

So the news Monday that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance and Chief Executive Officer Zhao for allegedly evading federal laws and operating an illegal digital-asset exchange threatens to send shock waves across the world of virtual currencies. Bitcoin fell as much as 4.5% after the lawsuit was filed.

Its a big deal for both Binance and Zhao, who famously became cryptos singular titan after contributing to the demise of FTX. The CFTC is seeking permanent trading and registration bans in the enforcement action it filed as well as unspecified penalties and restitution. Its one of several U.S. authorities including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice that have been investigating Binances activities.

For all the excitement that accompanied the arrest of former wunderkind Bankman-Fried, Zhaos sway over the industry is far larger meaning the fallout may be that much wider. The company is the biggest target by far in a U.S. regulatory crackdown that has engulfed other big players, from U.S. exchange Coinbase Global Inc. to entrepreneur Justin Sun and fallen algorithmic stablecoin king Do Kwon.

After Zhao co-founded the exchange in 2017 and embarked on an acquisition spree, Binance has morphed into a brokerage, digital wallet, venture fund, custody service, data provider, digital-art marketplace and token issuer all in one.

So far this month, the exchange has accounted for about 70% of all trading volumes across the spot market, compared with just 6% for Coinbase Global Inc., according to digital-asset data provider Kaiko. Its the kind of market heft that dwarfs the role of Apple Inc. or Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. in the smartphone market, for example.

In a popular product known as perpetual futures, Binance controlled a record 62% of global volumes in 2022, a CoinGecko report shows. In the U.S., where Binance started a separate platform in 2019, its accounted for a more modest share of spot trading at nearly 7% over the past year, Kaiko data show.

The move will reverberate across an industry that boomed outside regulated finance in a decade of low interest rates before Ponzi schemes, exchange mishaps and more helped snuff out speculative euphoria.

For critics, the charges will look like delayed justice for a firm that has for years refused to name a corporate parent or even its headquarters, amid allegations of corporate mismanagement.

Diehard believers will either cling to the bull case that a new era of regulatory action will legitimize the industry or will argue crypto needs to go back to the fringes to live up to its libertarian vision.

Some crypto fans may well shrug off the charges, yet Binances many ties to traditional finance may now be at risk. Institutions that have flirted with crypto will have to weigh new charges against the liquidity offered by the worlds largest exchange. The CFTC complaint noted that Binance had courted U.S. institutions and directed VIP clients to open Binance accounts via shell companies.

Binances ties with traditional banking channels have also recently frayed after Signature Bank, which had been supporting its dollar transactions, went under and Paysafe, which did the same for trades in the British pound, stopped the service due to regulatory risks.

Large reach

Born in China, Zhao moved to Vancouver when he was 12 and became a Canadian citizen. With a computer science degree from McGill University, he began a career building trading systems, including a stint at Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.

In 2013, Zhao was running his own software company in Shanghai when he discovered Bitcoin over a poker game with the co-founder of BTC China, Bobby Lee, and tech investor Ron Cao. After working at Blockchain.info and OKCoin, he started Binance.

His expertise and the lack of material crypto regulation have helped make Binance a global giant. In decentralized finance a corner of crypto where trading runs on software rather than any corporate platform Binance also has its BNB Chain, a network whose independence has always been in question. Its own token BNB is the fourth-largest in the world, with a total value of roughly $62 billion, CoinGecko data show.

As the exchange drew more retail traders, a host of regulators have issued loud warnings, including from Malta, Japan and the UK. Binance has subsequently sought to strike a more conciliatory tone. It expanded its compliance team, registered with regulators in some jurisdictions and admitted to past gaps in compliance.

Binance Holdings Ltd., a Cayman Islands entity, owns the exchanges trademarks and is generally presumed to be the main entity. It was named in the CFTC suit, along with two Binance firms in Ireland and former chief compliance officer Samuel Lim.

In jurisdictions where owners have to be disclosed, the exchanges local entities are typically owned by CZ alone. Unlike FTX, it is not clear whether there are any external investors in Binance. The seed round for its U.S. arm raised money from Circle Ventures, VanEck and RRE Ventures.

(With assistance from Dave Liedtka.)

___

2023 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Continued here:

Binance isn't FTX. It's much bigger and more systemically important ... - Victoria Advocate

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster)

Just as DAOs find more traction in the industry, so too have a series of different tools to measure how decentralized autonomous organizations stack up alongside one another.

Now the question emerges: What makes one DAO better than another?

Sure, you can use the size of their treasury as a metric, but its also important that an autonomous organization is also decentralized, something one may crudely measure by determining the number of token holders.

Then theres voter apathy and the myriad ways one measures how active those token holders actually are.

Even the number of token holders is a splotchy metric. Wallet addresses dont equal the number of users one for one; oftentimes one user can have multiple wallets, each of which may be holding tokens for the same project.

If one person, with 150 different wallets, holds 60% of a tokens supply across all those wallets, is a project really decentralized?

Its sort of like measuring the quality of various democracies around the world; its super messy and theres clearly no one right answer.

Some DAOs maximize for decentralization, trustlessness and transparency. Others will focus on efficiency, with a focus on a sufficient decentralization to avoid capture or control, Snapshots head of growth Nathan van der Heyden told Decrypt. Worst than that, some start off as the first, and then become the second, and vice-versa.

To make clearer how difficult it is to rank DAOs, let's look at a few examples.

According to OpenOrgs, Uniswap currently has a treasury of $2.5 billion. Much farther down the list is Decentraland, with a treasury of $88,666. If we flip over to DeepDAO, a convenient data dashboard for DAO data, Uniswaps community has posted just 124 proposals. Conversely, Decentralands community has made roughly 2,000 different governance proposals.

A high number of proposals certainly seems like evidence that a community is highly-active in stewarding the projects direction. But if those proposals fall outside the scope of what a DAO can actually do to influence a project, then it doesnt really matter.

The Web2 equivalent would be something like spam mail; just because youre firing off emails doesnt mean you're actually being productive.

Finally, beyond measuring how active or large a DAO is, one need also be mindful of whether the communitys votes are actually being effectuated.

Last Summer, for example, TribeDAO took some flak on crypto Twitter after it announced it would be doing a revote on a very sensitive subject after its community had already voiced their wishes. This is a surefire route to kill voter enthusiasm.

Arbitrums newly-formed DAO has thus implemented self-executing votes, which means that as soon as a change is voted on, it will be pushed directly on-chain.

Ultimately, its quite the spectrum. DAOs come in all shapes and sizes, some optimizing for one metric while others optimize for another.

And some projects may only care about one thing.

For some DAOs, the price of the token can be a good representation of how well theyre achieving their mission, Snapshots van der Heyden told Decrypt.

Decrypting DeFi is our DeFi newsletter, led by this essay. Subscribers to our emails get to read the essay before it goes on the site. Subscribehere.

Stay on top of crypto news, get daily updates in your inbox.

Read more:

All Centralized Firms Are AlikeBut Every DAO Is Decentralized in Its Own Way - Decrypt

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Welcome to the HBR Video Quick Take. Im Todd Pruzan, senior editor for Research and Special Projects at Harvard Business Review. A decentralized clinical trial, or DCT, is a method of conducting clinical trials in which part or all of the trial happens outside a traditional physical clinic or trial site.

This removes barriers to participation, enabling more patients to participate in research. And it enhances the overall trial experience for everyone. Anthony Costello is CEO of Patient Cloud at Dassault Systemes.

In this role, he leads the development of Medidatas patient-facing activities and solutions, including decentralized trials, technology, and strategy, and Patient Cloud, Dassault Systemes Product Apps, MyMedidata Patient Portal, Disease Registries and Recruitment, Telehealth and Virtual Visits, and Sensor Cloud and Biomarker Discovery. Hes here today to talk to us about the rising adoption rate of DCTs and how these solutions affect research. Anthony, thank you for joining us.

Anthony Costello, Medidata

Thanks so much for having me, Todd.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Anthony, what do decentralized trials and the use of new technology mean for patients, for pharmaceutical companies, for doctors?

Anthony Costello, Medidata

Were in such an interesting time in the history of clinical trials and research. If you think about the way trials have been done traditionally, theyre very heavily centralized, meaning patients travel to a research center, often many times per month for months and months during a clinical trial. So what we mean when we say trials are now being decentralized is that the research is moving outside these central research sites and more into the patients real lives.

And the reason this is so important for the industry is if you think about the way research gets done and then new drugs get commercialized into the market, patients use these products in their real lives, in the real world, obviously, not in a method thats centralized around a research center, but in their day-to-day lives. So were trying to move the industry and the research part of discovery into the real world where these drugs will actually be used after theyre commercialized.

So its a critical moment for the way research gets done, the pace of research, the ease of research for patients, the quality and quantity of data that were capturingall things that are much easier to get or to achieve in a decentralized model.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

OK, so pharmaceutical companies, what do they need to be thinking about when theyre considering a DCT model for research?

Anthony Costello, Medidata

This has been the real challenge for our industry. We have a conservative pharmaceutical research industry very largely based on regulation, paper processes, paper data capture, paper consent signatures, and so on. And a lot of what weve done over the past few years, as an industry, is weve begun to embrace and leverage the natural curves in the world of technology.

Patients have more technology in their hands. Theyre more accustomed to using it. Theyre more trusting of providing information and receiving information through digital devices. Most patients carry some device with them in their pocket all day every day thats perfectly suitable for research.

So the kind of hump to get over has been, will pharma decide to use these capabilities and thislets call it this new digital eraas a way to conduct the research that maybe we formerly would have done on paper or through a much more cumbersome process? So you take the idea that we want to decentralize outside of a site setting, then you add in that we have the technology. The patients have the technology. Theyre comfortable with it. We can scale it. Its affordableall of these things that you couldnt say 10 years ago or maybe even five years ago in some cases.

You start to layer in things like wearable sensors that are getting easier to use, better battery lives, smarter, faster, better-quality data. You put it all together. And were in this perfect storm in the industry right now to hyper-accelerate research across all different types of disease indications.

We saw a little bit of this during COVID. Maybe Ill call it kind of a foreshadowing of where our whole industry tries to go now. Because of a global pandemic, there was a lot of kind of consolidation around lets do this faster. Lets have more outreach to patients. Lets decentralize.

Now youre seeing that become the new normal, the trend. And everyones looking for ways to kind of leverage this perfect storm, if you will, as a way to change the way all clinical trials work into the future. And if we do it right, what well be doing is going from a world where we try to expose as few patients as possible to an experimental product, which, obviously, we always want to do that. But we want to expose the right patients.

We want to do it in a way thats not too burdensome for them. And we want to make sure that when that drug gets approved and hits the market and millions of people take it, that weve done the research in as close a setting as we possibly can to the kind of real-world commercial setting where those people will use that product.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

That sounds great. So how does a patient participate in a DCT?

Anthony Costello, Medidata

Interestingly, I would say patients dont get to choose DCTs as much as DCTs choose them. And its because if youre a patient, you enroll in a study many times because you have no other health care option for your particular disease. And sadly, for many patients, the clinical research may be the last option that they have after trying everything else for whatever condition they have.

So a patient will choose a study out of necessity in a lot of cases. And hopefully, what were aspiring to support in this industry and what were working with our customers to try to achieve is more optionality for that patient on that study to be able to use these technologies in their real-world setting.

Patient burden is a huge problem. In our industry, sticking on these trials for a year, a year and a half, is burdensome. Going back and forth to study centers all the time is very burdensome. We lose a lot of patients.

And frankly, we have a lot of patients who qualify for the study. They need the study. They have the right set of criteria, inclusion criteria, for that study, but they simply cant participate due to lack of geographical proximity to some study center thats running that trial.

So decentralizationif youre a patient on a study that happens to be decentralized, youre much more likely to stay with that study throughout, to be able to participate in that study regardless of where you live, and then, as I said earlier, to be able to provide real-world data from your day-to-day activities that are critical to the pharmaceutical company really understanding how their drug is going to work when it hits markets.

So its a hard choice to make for our customers. It is a challenge to decentralize a clinical program that you have formerly run entirely at research centers. But if you do it, theres a huge upside, both for patients and for the speed and accuracy of the research. And were expecting that both of those things are going to cause a forever trend of decentralization and in clinical trials.

Todd Pruzan, HBR

Thats great. It sounds like a very promising set of developments. Anthony, thank you so much for being with us today. This is fascinating.

Anthony Costello, Medidata

Thanks again for having me. Its been fun, and I appreciate it.

Learn more about Medidata and decentralized clinical trials.

Link:

Video Quick Take: Medidata's Anthony Costello on the Value of ... - HBR.org Daily

In a move long planned, the Agency for Cultural Affairs has relocated half its divisions from Tokyo to Kyoto as part of the effort to decentralize the government and empower local communities.

The relocation is the largest move ever of administrative functions out of Tokyo and the result of a plan originally made in 2016 to move government organizations out of the capital.

The relocation marks a fresh start for the agency and gives Kyoto a key role in supporting arts and culture, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on March 26 atthe new offices opening ceremony in the ancient capital.

Kyoto representatives lobbied hard for the agency to move there, saying that given the citys history, it can support the nations cultural heritage.

The relocation of central government ministries and agencies is something that has never been done in the past, said Shigeru Ishiba, then minister in charge of revitalizing local economies, in 2016 to emphasize the significance of the move.

However, the governments decentralization initiative, meant to revitalize regional economies, has seen only limited success so far.

Only three government organizations have moved their offices from Tokyo to elsewhere and only partly.

For example, while the Agency for Cultural Affairs six divisions (with about 390 officials) relocated to Kyoto, the other seven (withabout200 members) remain in the capital.

The original plan from 2016 said the entire agency would be relocated.

The Kyoto divisions include those in charge of religious matters and cultural properties, including those on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Go here to see the original:

Cultural affairs agency moves only some of its offices to Kyoto | The ... -

At Paris Blockchain Week 2023, Tether chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino spoke with Cointelegraph reporter Joseph Hall to discuss topics such as USD Coin (USDC) breaking its dollar peg and how it highlights the importance of Bitcoin (BTC) and decentralization.

According to Ardoino, stablecoin issuers should always make sure that their reserves remain protected. The Tether executive believes that a stablecoin issuers job is to protect reserves and funds with all its capabilities. Ardoino explained:

In addition, the Tether executive explained that he thought that overexposure in a single jurisdiction, which in this case would be the United States, could cause great issues. In the end, this is what happened, said Ardoino. He added:

When asked what he thought about USDC potentially going to zero, Ardoino pointed out that his firm was not hoping for this to happen. He said that if Tether (USDT) remained the only stablecoin in the market, the industry would not be an industry. If you are alone in the industry, its not really an industry, he said.

Related: Rattled crypto industry could emerge stronger after USDC depeg

Apart from the USDC incident, the duo also discussed other issues such as the dollar being a store of value and Bitcoin payments adoption in Lugano, Switzerland. When asked if the U.S. dollar can still be considered a store of value, Ardoino said that this could be the case in some countries. However, the Tether CTO expressed that in terms of storing wealth, Bitcoin is still the best. He said:

Lastly, the Tether executive also spoke about his firms collaboration with American clothing brand Guess to bring Bitcoin and Tether payments to retail stores in Lugano. Plan B, which is a joint project between Tether and the City of Lugano, collaborated with Guess to accept Bitcoin and Tether in local stores.

View original post here:

Tether CTO on USDC depeg: Bitcoin maxis were right all along | PBW 2023 - Cointelegraph