Tornado Cash Fallout Prompts OFAC Sanctions, Google's Robot Algorithm PaLM, CME Group Ethereum Options
Cryptocurrency Privacy Controls, PaLM Robot Al Language, CME Group's Ethereum Options
By Terrence Hooi
Chief Investment Strategist
This Substack Post does not take into account nor does it provide any tax, legal or
investment advice or opinion regarding the specific investment objectives or
financial situation of any person.
1.) Tornado Cash Fallout and Coinbase could lose billions of revenue from Unstaking Ethereum
This week Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company might discontinue Ethereum staking due to regulatory challenges splitting the network into an OFAC-compliant censorable chain and a non-OFAC-compliant “uncensorable” chain. The recent downfall of Tornado Cash as a result of sanctions by the US treasury has signaled the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is taking steps to censor cryptocurrency that could be problematic for privacy controls.
Withe Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake, ~66% of calidtors to US-based regulated companies will have to comply with OFAC sanctions. As a result, censoring transactions could lose billions of dollars that could result in splitting the network into two different networks
OFAC-compliant censorable chain
Non-OFAC compliant “uncensorable” chain.
Singular’s Take: CeFi giants like Circle and Coinbase will most likely adopters of the OFAC-compliant chain and Coinbase could be losing billions of dollars in revenue as un-staking ETH from the Ethereum network goes against the ethos of crypto.
2.) Training Google’s Robots with State-of-the-art PaLM
Recently, Google revealed that it’s home robots using state-of-the-art PaLM can understand complex human language such as
Pick up TV remote
I’m bored, bring me the TV remote
Google’s PaLM has been significant improvements like labelling cause and effect, conceptual understanding, guessing movies from movies from emoji, and finding synonyms and counterfactuals.
So far, PaLM has shown to be much superior than other neural networks like GPT-3 and more recently LLMs like GLaM, LaMDA, Gopher, and Megatron-Turing NLG. LLMs have also been shown here to generalize well to coding tasks, such as writing code given a natural language description (text-to-code)
Singular’s Take: Advancement in robot algorithms enough to understand complex human language could accelerate the development of autonomous cars. However, much work needed to be done to improve robot algorithms to push the limits of model scale.
3.) CME Group to Offer Ethereum Options Ahead of the Merge
Recently, CME Group announced that it is planning to roll out a new financial product just in time for Ethereum 2.0. According the CME Group, the marketplace operates will launch ether (ETH) options on September 12 ahead of the Merge on Ethereum.
CME Group also offers options and micro-futures on the world's largest digital asset; the firm rolled out in March micro-bitecoin and micro-ether options.
The new Ethereum Options on top of the existing Bitcoin options, as well as micro-sized Bitcoin and Ether options will allow users to buy or sell a futures contract at a specified strike price for a particular time (options come with an expiration date).