OFAC

From Dominance to Compliance

Last Tuesday saw Binance settle its long-running legal disputes with several U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Justice (DoJ), the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). However, they failed to reach an agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding their pending charges. As part of the settlement, Binance has agreed to pay an eye-popping fine of $4.3 billion. Furthermore, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the CEO of Binance, will step down

The Four Quadrants of MEV Protection

Understanding the MEV Solution Landscape Like many other crypto narratives, the dark side of blockchain was first introduced on Reddit in a post titled “Miners Frontrunning.” In the now historical post, the author outlines how given the Ethereum mempool is inherently public, miners can frontrun transactions and profit on the ultimately arbitraged difference in that transaction. However, this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon in finance. The 2014 book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis investigates frontrunning orders in high-frequency trading. The paper Flash Boys 2.0, published in 2019, takes these observations into