👨‍🚀 Binance is pulling out of the Voyager deal

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vEmpire DDAO
April 27, 2023

👨‍🚀 Binance is pulling out of the Voyager deal 🥴 Gary Gensler's hypocritical stance on crypto 🧙‍♂️ Merlin DEX, a zkSync based exchange gets hacked 

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But here's what recently happened in the space:

Binance is pulling out of the Voyager deal

Binance.US has pulled out of the $1.3 billion deal to acquire bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital due to a “hostile” regulatory climate in the United States. According to a Tuesday tweet from Binance, it has exercised its right to terminate the asset purchase agreement with Voyager. Voyager Digital also reported that it had received a letter from Binance.US, terminating the asset purchase deal.

The termination of the $1.3 billion agreement marks a major setback for Voyager Digital and its customers who had hoped to get their money back. Though Binance.US will no longer be pursuing the deal, Voyager Digital is still actively seeking interested parties to acquire its assets through a Chapter 11 plan which allows for the direct distribution of cash and crypto.

Gary Gensler's hypocritical stance on crypto

SEC's Chair Gary Gensler hasn't always been against crypto, as it seems. Recently, a video that shows Gensler lecturing at a blockchain course in 2018 has resurfaced. During his lecture he said, "Three-quarters of the market is non-securities. It is just a commodity, a cash crypto.”

At that MIT lecture, he said that the debate over whether ICOs are securities “is not particularly relevant as a legal or regulatory matter” for most of the market.

However, this is in stark contrast to Gensler's current stance which has seen him label every crypto asset as security. His agency has also been active in clamping down on Crypto related activities such as staking and stablecoins. It appears that Gensler has done a full U-turn from his stance in 2018. Hurting the sentiment of many in the crypto community who had seen him as an ally for their cause.

And this is not the first time he changes his mind, the video of him preaching about Algorand (ALGO) and its technology has also been released, but in a recent enforcement action against Bittrex, he labeled ALGO and several other tokens as securities. This only adds to his reputation of not standing by his word.

It is because of this that one of the US Congressmen proposed new legislation to oust him and replace him with a director that holds more consistent views. This proposed legislation is yet to be passed, but it does show how frustrated are people getting with the current leadership of SEC.

Merlin DEX, a zkSync based exchange gets hacked

Merlin, a DEX built on zkSync network has suffered a liquidity pool hack. $1.82 million of funds were drained from the pool and quickly moved to Ethereum in USDC tokens. But the most interesting part that the exchange was audited for vulnerabilities by Certik, a supposedly top tier security auditing firm.

The community was quick to call the audit into question, with some speculating that the auditing process was incomplete or not done properly.

CertiK responded that the issue was most likely not related to the project code, but rather to the private keys and therefore not part of the scope of their audit.

Whether that is true remains to be seen. But it's not the first time that DEXes that have top-tier security audits still use faulty code and fail to protect their customers' funds.