This week in the focus of "Deconstruction" are the ambitious plans of Sam Bankman-Fried, Tether's strategy for circumventing MiCA rules and the ban on the digital dollar in the US. In addition, we will discuss the burst memecoin bubble, the legal battles of traditional exchanges over monopoly and the global trend of states toward destroying the secrecy of correspondence. The ambitions of Sam Bankman-Fried FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who is serving a 25-year sentence for one of the largest financial frauds, is making ambitious plans for life after release. He confessed to his cellmate that to "earn serious money" he would need $50 million-$100 million in starting capital, and mentioned a cryptocurrency project that "everyone will flock to." In parallel, he appealed to Donald Trump for a presidential pardon, and his parents hired lobbyists. The community again recalled FTX's venture investments (stakes in SpaceX, Anthropic, Solana worth a combined $114 billion), which the bankruptcy administrators sold off for a sum tens of times smaller. And yet most commentators agree: although SBF may be a brilliant investor, he did absolutely unacceptable things, illegally using clients' money. So even if he was not joking about a future crypto project, it is hard to imagine that he would manage to win back trust in himself. Tether's strategy in Europe The European authority ESMA announced that by July 1 all cryptocurrency platforms must obtain a license under the new MiCA regulation, otherwise they are obliged to completely cease serving clients from the EU. Tether's management deliberately declined to obtain a license, considering the requirement to keep 60% of reserves in European banks risky for financial stability. However, the company chose a strategy of circumventing direct restrictions and is now investing in partners that already have legal status. Through them, fully legitimate stablecoins will be issued, and in this way Tether will indirectly maintain its presence on the European Union market without direct subordination to local officials. At the same time, the forced delisting of USDT in Europe will hit professional market participants: market makers will have to split liquidity pools, inter-exchange arbitrage will become more complicated and spreads will widen. The ban on the digital dollar in the US The US is moving toward a legislative ban on the digital dollar at least until the end of 2030. The provision prohibiting the Fed from issuing a CBDC is embedded in an affordable-housing bill — it was precisely this packaging that made it possible to overcome the resistance that had stalled a separate anti-CBDC document. American lawmakers fear specific things: total surveillance of every transaction in real time, control over spending (programming money with the ability to freeze without a court, as in the digital yuan) and the displacement of commercial banks. Private stablecoins, meanwhile, are clearly exempted from the ban. For the global CBDC race this means that the world's largest economy is officially withdrawing from it, and stablecoins are designated as an alternative that the state is willing to tolerate. The consequences of the memecoin hype The revenues of the Pump.fun platform collapsed by more than 70%. The platform allowed anyone to issue their own token for a couple of dollars, which led to an explosive growth in the number of new coins, but in the end almost 96% of all traders either lost money or earned no more than $500. To prevent the price from falling, the developers announced a burn of tokens worth about $370 million (36% of the supply). The situation reflects a large-scale process of capital redistribution: investors are massively booking losses, withdrawing liquidity from unregulated instruments that large players regard as gambling, and returning funds to TradFi. The practice of buying assets without fundamental value has stopped working; traders have to return to basic rules and look for digital assets with real practical use, which makes the market safer. CME Group defends its monopoly The operator of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CME Group, will sue the regulator CFTC over its permission for the Kalshi platform to launch perpetual futures. CME head Terrence Duffy formally appeals to investor protection (comparing high leverage with the 2008 mortgage crisis) and the Dodd-Frank Act. At the same time, CME holds exclusive licenses for all the main benchmarks on which futures contracts are built. Duffy combined concern for investors and the defense of a monopoly in the lawsuit. The logic sounds roughly like this: we control the benchmarks, therefore new instruments on these indices are obliged to trade with us. A similar pattern is observed at ICE, which demands "equal rules" because of the growth of the Hyperliquid platform. The destruction of the secrecy of correspondence The UK government is preparing a law that will completely ban the use of social networks (Instagram, TikTok and YouTube) for citizens under 16, while in France and the EU an initiative is being promoted for the mass scanning of personal messages on smartphones before they are sent. A global trend is emerging: under the pretext of fighting terrorism or protecting children, governments are forcing citizens to give up the basic right to privacy. As Pavel Durov noted, a forced abandonment of end-to-end encryption technology (the embedding of backdoors) will in no way stop real criminals, since they will easily write their own closed applications. As a result, ordinary law-abiding citizens will be the ones hit. In addition, weakening encryption systems makes the corporate networks of banks and funds vulnerable to hacker attacks and the theft of databases, and to preserve privacy users will have to switch to decentralized services. This is an abridged version of the podcast. Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgiBzekHjfw Subscribe to the podcast: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Deezer Yandex.Music YouTube Music

Source: ForkLog