Is DeFi Illegal Now? ($)

Sponsor: Mantle — Mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies.

1. 🧺 U.S. Prosecutors Go After Wash Trading Scams. Prosecutors charged 4 companies and 14 people over crypto fraud and market manipulation.
2. 👤 HBO Doc Suggests Early Bitcoin Dev is Satoshi. The new documentary suggests that developer Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim Todd denied and the broader crypto community shrugged off.
3. 💰 VanEck Debuts $30M Ventures Arm. The seed-stage fund will invest in crypto startups as well as fintech and AI-related ventures.

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📸 Daily Market Snapshot: Bitcoin dipped back to $60K as crypto investors enviously eyed Wall Street gains. Both the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average hit new records Wednesday, even as China's Shanghai Composite was hit with the worst sell-off since early-2020.

	Crypto $2.12T	↘ 2.5%	↗ 0.9%
	BTC $60,679	↘ 2.6%	↗ 0.3%
	ETH $2,369	↘ 3.3%	↗ 0.5%

Last month, a U.S. judge ruled that "control of funds was not necessary" for money transmitter laws to apply to Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm. This decision has sent shockwaves through the crypto world, raising an urgent question: Did this ruling just make DeFi development illegal by default?

Crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky is here to help us unpack what this all means. Jake, who serves as Chief Legal Officer at Variant Fund and sits on the board of the DeFi Education Fund, has called the Tornado Cash cases some of the most important legal battles in crypto history.

Hear all of the analysis! 👇

Scroll's long-awaited airdrop is almost here. We've learned more about the SCR governance token airdrop plans, and here's the wild thing – the final snapshot still hasn't happened.

We've had quests for the Scroll ZK L2 in our Airdrop Hunter tool for more than a year. Today, we've also updated our Bankless Guide to Scroll with early details on the coming token drop.

Check it out 👇

Mantle kickstarts Season 1 of Methamorphosis. Building on the success of their Liquid Staking Token, mETH, Mantle LSP announces plans for a new Liquid Restaking Token, cmETH, along with a governance token, COOK. With Methamorphosis, participants can now farm Powder for future COOK tokens and position themselves early for upcoming cmETH release.

Each week, Citizens get a curated list of market opportunities that the Bankless team is watching 👇

• 🎈 Claiming Optimism’s Airdrop #5
• 💱 Experimenting with yield derivatives on Spectra
• 👾 Minting a new Fren Pet for free
• 🔵 Trying Phantom’s new Base integration
• 👻 Earning rewards for supplying USDS on Aave
• 🤝 Borrowing against cbBTC on Folks Finance