Month: May 2023

Should We Worry About Tether’s Bitcoin-Buying Plan?

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With the new bitcoin-buying plan, announced about a week after the attestation, Tether joins the ranks of a number of institutional behemoths hoovering up BTC. Notably, MicroStrategy, the publicly-traded tech firm that after nearly two years of dollar cost averaging now essentially trades as a backdoor bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), is getting pretty close to owning about 1% of bitcoin’s total supply. Tether already holds a little over 52,000 BTC, making its bitcoin treasury among the largest among corporations, with plans to spend 15% of the “tangible gains from its…

BRC-20 tokens add triple-digit gains as PEPE, bitcoin slip

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Share Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn Share on Telegram Copy Link Link copied While PEPE is dominating headlines, the meme token is nowhere close to the performance of other BRC-20-compliant assets that have been tracking higher, posting impressive gains in the last week of trading. PEPE trails emerging BRC-20 tokens According to trackers on May 18, PEPE is down the performance leaderboard, sliding 24% in the last trading week and 15% on the previous day.  At this level, the token has a market cap of $10,012,422 or 26.55 BTC and its…

Bitcoin, gold and the debt ceiling — Does something have to give?

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Bitcoin (BTC) has been trying to break above the $27,500 resistance for the past week, but to no avail. One of the reasons limiting Bitcoin’s upside is the risk of an eventual U.S. default as the government struggles to get the debt limit increase approved in Congress.  Still, some analysts and investors argue that the U.S. debt ceiling standoff is merely a “show” because, ultimately, additional money will hit the markets. The US Debt Ceiling talks are all show. They’re going to print the dollar into oblivion. You need to…

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Roger Marshall’s Digital Asset Anti-Money-Laundering Act Won’t Stop Money Laundering, But it Could Ban Crypto

If the Warren-Marshall legislation fails the necessary test, does it do more harm than good? After all, money laundering is terrible. Shouldn’t the legislation be passed even if it only helps on the margins? Here is where the harms of the legislation, namely requiring those that develop software and validate transactions on a blockchain to register as financial institutions, are so problematic. The problem is these individuals can’t practically register as a financial institution. The authors of this legislation know this and further know that requiring software developers and validators…

US House stablecoin hearing focuses on competing bills for regulation

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State versus federal regulation was a key issue in the hearing on stablecoins in the United States House of Representatives on May 18. The House Committee on Financial Services’ new Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion heard testimony from five experts as it considered two proposed bills to regulate stablecoins. There were two draft bills under consideration by the subcommittee. The Republican bill was published in April ahead of a hearing on stablecoin in the Financial Services Committee. Ranking member Maxine Waters later introduced a competing draft based…

Pakistan Announces Fresh Ban on Crypto, but Adoption as a Hedge Remains Popular

On April 30, 2023, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported that banks have formally warned customers against using debit or credit cards for crypto trading. But Dawn also said that cryptocurrencies are gaining increasing popularity in the nation with the annual trading volume for Pakistan-based wallets going up to $25 billion, up from $18 billion to $20 billion a year ago, according to Zeeshan Ahmed, country general manager at Rain Financial, a Gulf-based trading platform for cryptocurrencies. Source

Blockchain developers launch $50M fund to increase Wormhole adoption

A $50 million fund has been launched to help startups that use the Wormhole cross-chain messaging protocol, according to a May 18 announcement. The new fund is being managed by venture capital fund Borderless Capital and is backed by over 20 other blockchain development teams and venture capital firms, including Circle, Polygon Ventures, Solana Foundation, JumpCrypto, and others. It’s time to make building in crypto more accessible than ever before. Introducing the $50m Cross-Chain Ecosystem Fund, powered by Wormhole! pic.twitter.com/y3VeCsUrSa — Wormhole (@wormholecrypto) May 18, 2023 The fund will help…

Former CFO indicted for diverting $35M to cryptocurrency venture

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Nevin Shetty, a former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at a Seattle start-up company, was indicted on May 17 in the U.S. District Court in Seattle on charges of wire fraud.  The indictment alleges that Shetty, 39, diverted approximately $35 million from the start-up company’s coffers to a cryptocurrency platform under his personal control. Shetty reportedly established this platform, known as HighTower Treasury, in February 2022, shortly before being notified of his impending departure as CFO due to concerns regarding his performance.  During the period from April 1 to April 12, 2022, Shetty…

Polygon to List Carbon Assets Pool From Solid World

Such contracts are often used in hedging strategies, but in the Solid World case they can bring certainty to carbon credit projects with long horizons. The liquidity pool will bring key funding to the mangrove projects “while providing structured inventory to distributors seeking to sell high-quality carbon credits,” the press release said. Source