Japanese rating agency Japan Credit Rating Agency Ltd. (JCR) on Friday announced it reaffirmed Romania’s foreign currency long-term issuer rating at BBB and the local currency long-term issuer rating at BBB+. It also improved the rating outlook from negative to stable.
An ECB working paper found DeFi governance remains highly concentrated, complicating efforts to identify who should fall under MiCA oversight. The European Central Bank published a working paper on March 26, finding that governance in four major DeFi protocols was heavily concentrated. The staff paper looks at Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap, and finds that while governance tokens are held across tens of thousands of addresses, the top 100 holders control more than 80% of the supply in each protocol. Based on holdings snapshots from November 2022 and May 2023, the authors found that a large share of governance tokens could be linked either to the protocols themselves or to centralized and decentralized exchanges, with Binance the largest identified centralized exchange holder across the four protocols. Read more
On the 28th day of the US-Israel war against Iran, US President Donald Trump’s decision to extend the “pause” on strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure until April 6 created the appearance of a diplomatic opening; but in effect, it reflected an attempt to buy time amid rising military, economic and political pressures, while keeping escalation options firmly on the table. The extension, framed by Washington as a response to “ongoing talks,” has been rejected by Tehran as psychological signalling, with Iranian officials maintaining that no such request was made and reiterating their rejection of the US proposal. This difference in itself underscores the underlying reality that the pause is less about de-escalation and more about managing the pace of escalation, allowing the US and Israel to sustain pressure through other means while avoiding an immediate dive into full-scale energy warfare. On the battlefield, the conflict continued to operate at a high intensity. Iranian ballistic missile barrages and ...
If betting markets are to be believed, the chances of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried getting a presidential pardon this year aren’t looking good. The chances of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried getting a pardon didn’t seem great this year, and a recent downtick on prediction markets shows that they aren’t getting any better. Both major prediction markets in the United States, Polymarket and Kalshi, have the likelihood of Bankman-Fried receiving a presidential pardon this year at 11% and 9%, respectively. Chances of a pardon have decreased 1% on Kalshi and 2% on Polymarket after a CNN interview on March 21 with Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried. In the interview, both explained why they’re challenging their son’s fraud conviction. Read more