The Fintech Files: Binance’s £10bn ‘wake-up’ and why crypto students want your jobs
Crypto bros love to talk about how they’re “rewriting the rules” for practically everything finance to sport.
Or at least until the lawyers get involved. It’s happening more and more now that people have realized that you can actually do it lose money on crypto, in addition to going to ‘da moon’.
The biggest example of this in the UK is a £10 billion lawsuit led by the former head of the Competition and Markets Authority, Lord David Currie.
He is suing Binance and three other crypto exchanges for alleged collusion over their decision to remove a cryptocurrency called BSV from their platforms in 2019.
Not only is it the first major allegation of crypto competition in the UK, but it’s also unusual for the fact that the evidence stems from everyone’s favorite and pointless pastime: Twitter beef.
Financial News caught up with the 75-year-old ex-watchdog to find out what he thinks about it all.
The short answer? He hopes the lawsuit will give crypto firms “a bit of a wake-up call.”
Binance, meanwhile, said it would be “inappropriate” to comment on an ongoing lawsuit.
Headlines this week
Bitcoin Falls As Analysts Fear ‘A Massive Capitulation Is Coming’
Crypto firm B2C2 poaches Morgan Stanley director as Emea boss
US digital asset manager Wave Financial snaps up a Swiss crypto firm for Europe
Watch out – the crypto candidates are coming
Just when you thought crypto had run out of things to stick its nose in – now it’s taking over British universities.
The number of students enrolling in courses that teach crypto and blockchain is growing by the hundreds every year, United Nations reported. One course at the University of Exeter has increased to 700 students for the coming semester, compared to 50 when it launched in 2018.
And you know where the students go after university? The labor market.
JPMorgan, CitiGroup, Moody’s, Fidelity and Revolut (just to name a few) are all looking for people with crypto and blockchain chops at the moment.
And with more so-called “tradfi” institutions planning to follow suit, the crypto grads’ expertise will only become more valuable.
Lauren Weymouth, who runs a partnership between crypto-payments giant Ripple and major universities including Oxford and University College London, said the growing demand for the courses is “validation for the huge growth in technologies we’ve seen in recent years”.
“As a result, we are seeing universities turn to industry to help cover the costs of increasing content to keep up with this fast-paced sector.”
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In perhaps the most questionable endorsement of non-fungible tokens yet, The The Wall Street Journalreports that the Islamic State may be developing its own NFT (yep, that Islamic State).
Meanwhile, crypto hacks have cost the sector nearly $2 billion in stolen tokens this year alone. Bloomberg reports on why investors are finally paying attention.
…and finally, Crypto.com has sued an Australian woman after it gave her a $10.5 million refund when it was meant to send her $100. The stock exchange did not notice the error for seven months, TheGuardian reports – long enough for the woman to buy a four-bedroom house with the money.
The last word
It’s a Binance doubleheader this week after co-founder Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao insisted that the exchange is definitely not a Chinese company.
“The bottom line is that because we have ethnic Chinese employees, and perhaps because I am ethnic Chinese, we are secretly in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party. We are an easy target for special interests, the media and even policymakers who hate our industry, ” he wrote in a blog post. “This is obviously not true.”
Fact Check: CZ is a Canadian citizen who was born in China. His family left when he was 12, shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He returned to Shanghai in 2017 and founded Binance there in 2017. He then left again when China banned crypto exchanges later that year.
“Binance was never incorporated in China,” he continued. “We have no legal entities in China and we have no plans to.”
Fintech files don’t doubt the veracity of the post – and the parts about his family history are a genuinely interesting read.
It is also worth pointing out that Apple, Microsoft and Google have also distanced themselves from China recently. Good company to be in for an ambitious technology manager, no doubt.
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To contact the author of this story with feedback or news, email Alex Daniel
