May 27, 2022

Digital Assets Download- May 27

Author:

Joseph A. Castelluccio

Launching today: A curated mix of insights and headlines that provide a Layer 3 Legal Perspective™ on the digital assets multiverse – created by Mayer Brown’s global Digital Assets, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Group. Enjoy this edition of the Digital Assets Download below and find previous editions here.

The Lead Block

Original Mayer Brown content, perspectives and insights from across our global platform that touch on digital assets, decentralized finance, cryptocurrencies and related fields.

Stablecoins: The Collapse of TerraUSD and the Road Ahead for the “Less-Risky” Form of Cryptocurrency
Stablecoins—a digitally native medium of exchange that seeks to maintain a stable relative value—have seen explosive growth in recent years as they’ve become increasingly used not only for trading and payments but also in burgeoning or DeFi ecosystems. In light of recent activity in one prominent stablecoin—TerraUSD—in this piece, the Mayer Brown team takes a closer look at stablecoins and examines some potential legal and regulatory issues they present.

News Node

A curated selection of headlines and news from around this multiverse—including deals, developments and other disruptions in DeFi.

Seven significant crypto players—Binance.US, Circle, Solana Foundation, the Aave Companies, Hedera, TRM Labs and Civic—launched a community-driven initiative aimed at fraudulent activity such as scams and hacks.

Andreessen Horowitz Establishes $4.5B Crypto Fund, the Largest of Its Kind

Crypto Exchange FTX Looks to Expand Into Stock Trading

Based on news reports, the European Commission is considering hard curbs on the ability of stablecoins to become widely used in place of fiat currency

US Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration Request for Comment on “Developing a Framework on Competitiveness of Digital Asset Technologies”

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) released a report—titled “Banking in the Shadow of Bitcoin? The Institutional Adoption of Cryptocurrencies”—analyzing the roles of financial intermediaries in crypto markets and assessing related activity across the banking sector

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report examining institutional investor participation in markets for digital assets, including crypto-assets and decentralized finance (DeFi). The report—titled “Institutionalisation of Crypto-Assets and DeFi–TradFi Interconnectedness”—examines risks and potential benefits of the decentralization of financial services, as well as putting forward policy recommendations

Select Events

Selected events for deeper dives into different parts of the digital assets and DeFi world.

US House Committee on Financial Services Virtual Hearing on Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Examining the Benefits and Risks of a US Central Bank Digital Currency. May 26, 2022 (View Hearing Recording). The full committee held a hearing entitled “The Future of Money: Assessing the Benefits and Risks of a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency”. The witness list includes the Honorable Lael Brainard, Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

CFTC Staff Roundtable on Non-Intermediation. May 25, 2022 (View Hearing Recording). Staff of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission held a public roundtable to discuss issues related to intermediation in derivatives trading and clearing.

Learn the Lingo

For those new to the digital assets and DeFi world, each edition of the Digital Assets Download highlights a different term to help you be a part of the conversation.

Hash/Cryptographic Hash Function

A hash is an encrypted string of alphanumeric characters that registers a unique place on a blockchain. The string of alphanumeric characters has a fixed length and structure that is generated when an input string of any length—such as a block of transactions on a blockchain—is run through a mathematical algorithm called a cryptographic hash function.

Hashing is performed by the nodes of a blockchain and is a one-way function—if you put the same data in, you will arrive at the same unique string, but you cannot reverse the function and decipher the input data based on the hash.

While hash functions have been used in cryptography for decades, they are used in blockchains for a number of key purposes, including to derive addresses for users, to keep track of particular transactions, to store large amounts of data more economically and, importantly, to connect blocks in a blockchain (i.e., each block contains a hash of the previous block). Different blockchains may use different hashing algorithms—Bitcoin, for example, uses the SHA-256 hash algorithm.