Centralization Strikes Again - March 2022 Edition
“People need to wake up to the realities of what it looks like ten years from now when we have decentralized versions of all the things that are parasitically extracting value from each and every one of you.” — Aidan Hyman, ETHDenver panel
Timeline
Mar 1 - Reports of Russian bank accounts getting drained by the state surfaces. Source
Mar 3 - An MIT Technology Review investigation reveals that Minnesota law enforcement agencies have secretly developed an extensive surveillance program in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests. Tools include expansive tracking for social media, cell phone activity, and images of people’s faces. Individuals that are not suspected of any crime are also monitored. Source
Mar 4 - OpenSea, the preeminent NFT marketplace, deplatforms Iranian users, citing compliance with US sanctions. Source
Creators and collectors from Iran have been deplatformed from OpenSea for being in Iran, a country sanctioned by the US embargo. Link to various tweets in this thread, but please read what Mondoir had to say as well and understand how important decentralization is.Today, I’ve been notified that many accounts for residence of countries under economic sanctions by the US are now terminated. While I understand the obligations of a US entity to adhere to regulations, this raises a more important issue in the space; 🧵👇Amir ᵍᵐ @mondoirMar 6 - Rumours spread of a Russian disconnection from the global internet and moving exclusively to a Russian-based domain name service (DNS) system. Source Source 2
Mar 6 - Visa and Mastercard suspend Russian operations, leaving millions locked out of the payment networks. Source
Mar 8 - London Metal Exchange halts nickel trading amidst surge in prices; cancels all trades after 00:00 on March 8 in the inter-office market. Source
Mar 8 - Spotify and Discord experiences multi-hour outage. Source
Mar 9 - Slack experiences outage. Source
Mar 9 - Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, which has previously billed itself as a search platform which eschews personalized search rankings, decides to down-rank sites associated with “Russian disinformation”. Source
Mar 10 - The company formerly known as Facebook “allows” war posts urging violence against Russian invaders. Source
Mar 11 - Yuga Labs, creators of famed NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, decides to KYC its users for a collaboration with game publisher Animoca Brand. Faces severe backlash. Source
Mar 15 - DEX aggregator Matcha geoblocks Russian users and trades. Source
Mar 16 - Salesforce-owned Slack begins suspending Russian accounts to comply with international sanctions, locking out multiple organizations without notice. Source
Mar 16, 17, 22, 23 - GitHub experiences multi-hour outages. Source
Mar 17 - American Democrats introduces new crypto bill that targets publishing code and facilitating transactions, under the guise of Russian sanctions. Source
Mar 21 - Russia moves to ban Facebook and Instagram under ‘extremism law’. Source
Mar 23 - Twitter removes an image of an American politician pointing a blue SEGA gun during a testimony on video game violence, citing “graphic / adult content”. Source
Mar 25 - Coinbase Canada introduces policy mandating the collection of recipient name and address for any amount over $1k CAD. Source
Mar 25 - OpenSea delists an Ethereum Name Service address titled “calvin-klein.eth”. Source
Mar 25 - YouTube blocks Indian news channel WION for reporting Russian statement. Source
Mar 29 - Reports surface of hackers gaining subpoena powers via fake “emergency data requests” and harvesting sensitive consumer data from ISPs, big tech companies, and more. Source
Mar 30 - Bloomberg reports that Apple and Meta provided customer data to hackers that masqueraded as law enforcement officials and submitted forged legal requests. Source
Mar 31 - Two European parliament committees votes in favour of unleashing a surveillance regime on crypto transfers, self-custodial wallets, and more under the guise of AML requirements. Source
Op-Ed
The following excerpt was taken from a piece originally written by ChainSafe’s Jon Roethke. You can find the original full-length post here. If you are interested in contributing to this OpEd, please reach out on Twitter @haochizzle, Telegram @haochizzle, or email tim.ho@chainsafe.io. We’d love to hear from you!
How to Create a High-impact Guild
Hacks for remote-first organizations
In the last few years, ChainSafe has grown from a small startup to a team of more than 100 people scattered across the globe. During this growth, we’ve asked ourselves: what’s the best way to share knowledge across a wide range of technical domains in a remote-first environment? So far, our best answer is guilds.
Historically, a guild is a group of craftspeople or merchants who’ve banded together to share tricks of the trade. In our context, guilds are a place to learn, talk about experiences, and organically share knowledge, tools, code, and practice. ChainSafe has many active guilds and their value is hard to overstate.
Guilds:
Facilitate knowledge sharing
Encourage loosely structured collaboration
Support the continuity of culture within an organization
Broaden the scope of potential projects
Improve documentation of novel technologies
Foster bonding in a remote environment
Allow developers to move between projects more easily
Accelerated Learning
Onboarding is a challenge for every company. This is especially true in the blockchain space, given the quantity and velocity of information. In this context, guilds can be useful for people coming into an organization (or the industry) who want to accelerate their understanding. Starting from scratch is daunting. Leveraging the experience of others makes things more manageable. And this is true for tenured people as well.
Sometimes ChainSafe guilds feature an organized presentation, sometimes, they’re a free-flowing conversation, but ethos doesn’t change. We aim to foster informal, low-pressure, friendly spaces to stimulate connection, build foundational knowledge, and integrate new people into the company.
Our suggestion
Encourage bite-sized presentations with an emphasis on conversation rather than a typical unilateral presentation with Q&A at the end. It’s easy to tune out when a presentation is being delivered and harder to do so when there’s a dialogue and everyone feels involved.
For this to work, guild members must feel comfortable enough to ask questions that may seem obvious to those more well versed in the subject matter. Bottom line: make it a conversation, make things comfortable, and remember, diversity of thought is critical for innovation and effective learning.
… for the full-length post by Jon with the complete guide for organizing guilds in a remote-first environment, be sure to read it here!
If you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to send them my way, or reach out on my Twitter.
Learn more about ChainSafe by visiting our website, through our Medium, via Twitter, visiting the ChainSafe GitHub, or joining the conversation on our Discord.
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