The tech news cycle this past week was dominated by the straight-out-of-HBO boardroom drama at OpenAI, but the crypto world – not to be outdone by its AI brethren – has brought its own bombshells.
The big story this week was around Binance, whose high-profile CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, will be stepping down from his post at the company as part of a sweeping plea agreement with U.S. prosecutors. The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance will pay over $7 billion in fines to the U.S. Treasury and Commodity Futures Trading Commission in “one of the largest penalties” the U.S. has ever obtained from a corporate defendant – money that could help the industry avoid yet another blockbuster criminal trial. Zhao has long been a controversial figure in the crypto space – owing largely to the opaque nature of his exchange giant, whose centralized command structure and shadowy inner workings fly in the face of core blockchain tech principles around transparency and decentralization. But as Zhao’s tenure at Binance was eulogized across X (formerly Twitter) this week, fans (and even some critics) credited him for spearheading a period of tremendous growth for the broader industry – even as it’s now clear that Binance’s own rise came at the cost of U.S. sanction-incompliance and in brazen defiance of money-transmitting laws.
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ORACLES’ NEED FOR SPEED: A single millisecond can make or break a trade in the world of traditional finance, but decentralized finance apps tend to operate on a much slower timescale – with certain market data taking minutes or even hours to populate on-chain. The year 2023 has marked a breakout in the race to provide lower-latency pricing data to blockchains, with oracle firms like Chainlink and Pyth Network duking it out in a battle to make on-chain trading more hospitable to speed-obsessed Wall Street speculators and high-frequency traders. Developers use oracles to shepherd off-chain data, like token prices, onto (or between) blockchains. The main issue until recently has been the inherent latency in decentralized networks, where geographically distributed nodes take time to reach consensus, leading to delays that can slow down data from oracles. Chainlink, a frontrunner in the oracle space, recently introduced Data Streams to reduce latency and operational costs, offering a pull-based oracle system that enhances efficiency. Pyth Network, an oracle firm that was in the news this week for its token airdrop, has also been an early mover in the latency race – it’s been particularly active on the Solana blockchain, where it offers low-latency pricing data sourced directly from first-party financial firms.
