BREAKDOWN: Why the First US Crypto Bank Is a Big Deal
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kraken became the first crypto exchange to win a U.S. banking license this week. Here’s why that matters.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Nexo.io.
On this edition of The Breakdown weekly recap, NLW looks at:
- DEXetition – Uniswap’s battle with SushiSwap heats up as the former dropped the UNI governance token in what some likened to a crypto stimulus check
- The Fed has no clothes – After another FOMC meeting of “nothing new,” the mirage of Federal Reserve omnipotence is fading
- TikTok and WeChat banned from U.S. app stores – Is it just a negotiating technique? Whatever the case, people are not happy
- Kraken becomes a bank – What it means now that Kraken has been approved for a Wyoming Special Purpose Depository Institution charter
This week on The Breakdown:
Monday | The Business of Geopolitical Competition
Tuesday | The Decade of the Living Dead: How Zombie Companies Are Robbing Tomorrow’s Economy
Wednesday | Governments vs. Networks: The Battle for the Soul of Finance
Thursday | Monetary Policy Is Finished and Macro Debates Are Boring, Feat. Raoul Pal
Friday | ‘I Didn’t Buy It to Sell It. Ever.’ MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor on His $425M Bitcoin Bet
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:09.1 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:15.3 | The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDes. |
| 0:23.3 | What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, September 19th, and that means it's time for the |
| 0:28.7 | weekly recap. Let's kick off this week with a look at some vicious Dex Edition. |
| 0:34.9 | Uniswap made big headlines this week when they surprise announced the launch of their governance token, Uniswap made big headlines this week when they surprise announced the launch of their |
| 0:40.2 | governance token, Uni, and airdropped an absolute crap ton of it all over the crypto markets. |
| 0:46.6 | Basically, any eth address that had been used on Uniswap got 400 Uni. |
| 0:52.1 | Now, there were a few different narratives around this, and I want to dig into them. |
| 0:58.0 | One of the narratives was, hey, look, the good guys won. This stems from the idea that sushi swap, |
| 1:05.4 | which was the fork of Uniswap, that had seen so much press, so much buzz, so much hype, so much liquidity, only to have |
| 1:13.1 | its founder potentially exit scam before finally giving back what he took. |
| 1:18.2 | Anyways, this good guy narrative, good guy's win narrative was from the idea that sushi swap |
| 1:23.7 | represented the bad part of crypto in some way, that this forking and shiny object and |
| 1:30.1 | incentive creation that rips things out of the long-term community builder hands is a really |
| 1:35.8 | bad thing and crypto should be against that. I've shared my feelings. Basically, I think it's just |
| 1:40.6 | brutal competition, but even in that context, you have to admire that Uniswap was able to completely shift the narrative back to them. |
| 1:48.5 | So that good guy, bad guy language may not be something that I particularly focus on, but I do think that we're still learning what challenges Forks face. |
| 1:58.1 | And it's clearly not quite as simple as just forking away and rejiggering the |
| 2:02.7 | incentives to allow people to gain more in the short term. Another way to put it is, we're seemingly |
| 2:08.6 | seeing the risk of short-termism is that people come short-term, but then they leave short-term. |
| 2:14.4 | In other words, you can't fork community. That's one narrative. A second narrative is around |
... |
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