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‘Probably Nothing’: Why People Still Hate Crypto

It ended pretty much the same way it began, with a tweet. Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron yesterday went to reassure users that the popular messaging platform will not be integrating crypto after all. This comes after a period of public backlash, where users threatened to or shared screenshots of deactivating their paid Nitro memberships, over the possibility that Discord would lean into crypto.

Earlier this week, over Twitter, Citron seemed to suggest that someone at Discord was working on Ethereum functionality. A screenshot showed MetaMask and WalletConnect, a tool used by many mobile crypto wallets, among the possible integrations alongside existing YouTube, Reddit and Facebook widgets.

This article is excerpted from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.

“Probably nothing,” Citron said, the ironic phrase used by crypto enthusiasts to say something is a big deal. Indeed, it would be something. People read into the comment that Discord might soon add native tooling useful for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Already the chosen home for many Web 3 projects, it seemed like Discord was joining the decentralized legion.

But not everyone was pleased with this potential new direction – a move that would reflect changing consumer behavior and perhaps a value shift at the gaming-focused company. It’s a useful reminder that even as crypto surges, becoming a darling of venture capitalists and a significant cultural and economic field, there’s still a significant amount of people that just don’t like what the industry stands for.

Slacktivists responded to Citron’s tweet calling for others to ditch the platform and cancel their paid subscriptions, one of the main revenue streams for a company that has resisted advertising. Many regurgitated claims of Ethereum’s intense energy use and noted how crypto scams have proliferated on the platform. Others just noted how annoying “NFT bros” can be.

Discord listened. Citron said Wednesday evening the platform has “no current plans” to integrate crypto wallets into its app. Indeed, this was never a formal announcement, and the tooling was likely part of a hackathon.

“We’re excited about the potential for Web 3 technology and the positive ways these communities are coming together on Discord, especially those organized around environmentally friendly, creator-focused projects,” the company told TechCrunch. “However, we also recognize there are some problems we need to work through. For now, we’re focused on protecting users from spams, scams and fraud.”

Web 3, the generic term for a blockchain-based alternative to the internet where users can own their data and hold stake in the tools they use, is a positive development. Outside of legal challenges to monopolistic internet giants, crypto presents the best way to counteract “surveillance capitalism.”

But for those that haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid, crypto appears to be hyper-capitalistic, capitalism-plus. It prefers markets over the state to find solutions and protect everyday people. It’s an avenue for the already rich to make almost insultingly large amounts of money. It advances the “neoliberal turn” towards financialization, globalization and commodification of everything.

Even though crypto promises a lot – in a phrase, “digital sovereignty” – it hasn’t achieved much over its decade-long existence. (Discounting the $3 trillion market cap.) That was a point repeatedly made last month, when Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) supporters took umbrage that the nonprofit focused on digital rights took a stand against overregulation of crypto.

The EFF shared over Twitter an op-ed written by heads of Fight For The Future and the Blockchain Association, two technology lobbying groups, that argued for crypto users to “confront” the “existential threat” of regulation. People were miffed – again, primarily, over environmental concerns and rampant scams. Some vowed to never again financially support the EFF.

Read more: More Firms Embracing the Metaverse and Gaming Stocks Have Already Benefited, Morgan Stanley Says

These are people who conceivably might support crypto from a digital rights and privacy perspective. But like the angry Discord mob, they seem to have already made up their minds about the industry. In both cases, these are likely savvy internet users and are not dismissing crypto out of hand.

There are legitimate reasons to be suspicious of crypto. Its current privacy issues (everything stays on a blockchain) and carbon footprint are solvable. It’ll be harder to reconcile crypto’s capitalistic aims – call it what you want, say Bitcoin is for all, but the money doesn’t lie – at a time when more people than ever are skeptical of the economic status quo.

Does crypto subvert the system or play into it? Is the discord it creates adding value? For now, as far most people are concerned, it’s “probably nothing.”

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Author: Daniel Kuhn

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Author: CoinDesk Staff

Miami’s mayor says residents will receive a bitcoin dividend in a MiamiCoin wallet

Miami is giving its residents a bitcoin dividend, according to Mayor Francis Suarez.

The Miami Mayor announced on CoinDeskTV today that a yield from the staking of the city’s MiamiCoin will be paid directly to residents who acquire a wallet, register for the dividend and pass a verification process. 

MiamiCoin is the city’s token derived from the CityCoins protocol, a Stacks-based protocol that allows residents to hold and trade their city’s token. The protocol generates revenue for the city when residents mine tokens, with those running the software receiving 70% of the coins they mint and 30% returning to the municipality in a city wallet.

Suarez continues to tout the project as a boon for Miami. In September, he announced that Miami had made $7.1 million since the protocol’s launch in August. At this stage, Miami has made over $21 million from the project. Suarez has pointed to the project as a possible avenue to alleviate the tax burden on Miami residents. 

In the near term, it will translate to a windfall for residents, according to Suarez. The city plans to stake its payout in bitcoin and give the yield to its residents. Connecting residents with wallets and discerning who will qualify for the dividend will pose a challenge, he said.

“Is it going to be, for example, taxpayers? Is it going to be people that vote in the city? People that have a city address? That’s going to be a challenge,” said Suarez.

It will work with exchanges to create a city wallet and help residents to acquire and register the subsequent city wallets for the dividend. The city is utilizing a separate bitcoin giveaway as a pilot program ahead of the dividend.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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Author: Aislinn Keely

‘Curve Wars’ Heat Up: Emergency DAO Invoked After ‘Clear Governance Attack’

The latest salvo in the multibillion-dollar “Curve Wars” might be the most daring yet, and the protocol’s response has revealed deep ideological fissures in the decentralized finance (DeFi) community.

Curve.Finance is currently the largest DeFi protocol with $20.8 billion in total value locked (TVL) per CoinGecko. The protocol holds a vital place in the DeFi ecosystem due to its CRV token rewards emissions – a key source of income for multiple other protocols and one of the foundational pillars of a rapidly-growing $270 billion ecosystem.

On Wednesday night a young project – memecoin-flavored Mochi Inu – executed a series of transactions that tilted CRV rewards in its favor by using a token-locking mechanism in Convex Finance, a yield farming protocol built on top of Curve.

This jockeying for CRV emission rewards is common practice among protocols, and often referred to as the “Curve Wars.”

Read More: How Yield Farming on Curve Is Quietly Conquering DeFi

In a Twitter thread Wednesday morning, Mochi formally announced themselves as a new player in the Curve Wars, writing that “Curve is the backbone of DeFi, and Convex is the kingmaker of Curve.”

Shortly after, however, the Curve Emergency DAO, a nine-person group using a multisignature scheme with limited governance powers over CRV reward emissions, cut off Mochi’s rewards, and in a governance forum post, semi-anonymous Curve contributor “Charlie” wrote that Mochi’s overnight rise was a “clear governance attack.”

In an interview with CoinDesk semi-anonymous Mochi founder AZ, also often referred to as Azeem, said that the Emergency DAO’s security concerns were “reasonable” and that he hopes to address them in the coming weeks.

Nonetheless, the decision from the DAO has prompted significant community debate, as some have argued that the protocol should not single out any one user and that blacklisting another protocol runs against DeFi’s open, permissionless ethos.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Charlie said that the decision to cut off Mochi’s CRV rewards wasn’t made lightly, but that the situation was unique.

“I hate this ‘I need protection’ meme we’ve seen from Gensler,” he said, referring to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. “Curve definitely doesn’t want to be gatekeepers or protectors but we gotta draw the line somewhere when it comes to bad behaviour. Mochi crossed it 7 times over last night.”

Exploitative or exploit?

Regardless of whether Mochi’s maneuvering was an attack or a clever abuse of various DeFi protocols’ functions, the events Tuesday night are a remarkable display of the interconnected nature of the DeFi ecosystem, spanning multiple protocols and functions.

Curve is a decentralized exchange tool primarily designed for swapping like-assets, such as different stablecoins or ETH and its staked derivatives such as stETH. Curve’s liquidity providers are rewarded with CRV, the protocol’s governance token.

At the core of Mochi’s “governance attack” is veCRV – voting escrow Curve, a locked version of CRV that grants holders the ability to vote on “boosting” CRV rewards to certain liquidity pools. Throughout 2021, various protocols have vied to accumulate CRV and lock it as veCRV in order to boost rewards to pools that will benefit them. As a result, locked Curve is a popular metric to track:

Mochi, a platform similar to asset-backed stablecoin issuers Spell and MakerDAO, heavily incentivized deposits to a Curve pool that included USDC, USDT, DAI and Mochi’s native stablecoin USDM leading into Tuesday night’s events, ultimately attracting over 170.2 million in liquidity at its peak, per Azeem.

Another key cog in the events is Convex Finance. Convex is a protocol designed to maximize CRV rewards, and the protocol is currently the largest veCRV holder with 136.58m tokens – over a third of CRV’s circulating supply. Users who lock Convex’s CVX token have the right to vote proportionally on how the protocol’s tokens are used for boosting emissions.

On Tuesday night, all of the above protocols and mechanics were on display. A Mochi team member swapped $46 million in USDM for DAI using the Mochi Curve pool, swapped the DAI for ETH, and used a large portion of that ETH to purchase massive quantities of CVX, which they then locked.

This would have allowed them to vote on additional CRV rewards for the Mochi pool, which in turn would have attracted additional liquidity, allowing them to swap even more USDM for stablecoins to buy more CVX – ultimately creating a flywheel heavily tilting CRV rewards in their favor and attracting huge sums of liquidity to their platform.

Multiple observers have noted that KEEP, FRAX, OHM, CREAM and other DAO communities are voting or have voted to pursue similar strategies (if at a smaller scale), but the demands of public governance have slowed them down, and they could not unilaterally move to seize voting power as Mochi did on Tuesday night.

Warning signs

As Mochi’s transactions unfolded, DeFi community members were quick to point out that the young protocol had numerous security and operational flaws, including that the team could arbitrarily print more USDM and that the price oracle for the token – a key piece of infrastructure that is often the target of hackers – was manually set by a team member’s address.

Additionally, Azeem is a controversial figure in the DeFi space. While running the Armor.fi insurance protocol, the developer was accused of personally deciding not to pay a user with a legitimate claim in February. Later in the month, following a social engineering attack on an Armor team member that resulted in a $1 million loss, Azeem defended his colleague by saying that the developer was “sleepy and tired,” a phrase which has become widely mocked.

Multiple high-profile DeFi developers criticized the scheme, with Yearn.Finance founder Andre Cronje referring to the transactions as “amazingly scammy.”

In an interview with CoinDesk, pseudonymous Yearn core contributor and one of the nine members of the Curve Emergency DAO, Banteg, said the flywheel was dangerous given USDM’s dubious backing.

“Internal thinking was around mitigating the feedback loop Andre described when he first drew attention to the issue. With high concentration of votes towards one pool, it could cut into other pools, ultimately hurting Curve [liquidity providers],” Banteg said. “We know for a fact USDM is a worthless collateral. In retrospect, Curve DAO should’ve done a better due diligence on it.”

The Emergency DAO ultimately elected to cut off the Mochi pool’s rewards early Wednesday morning. At the time of writing, the pool has over 31 million USDM valued at $.49 cents per token and $1.3 million in stablecoins. Banteg noted he was not among the signers on the transaction that ended emissions to Mochi’s pool.

Charlie said that the lack of basic security practices and not Azeem’s reputation led the DAO to take unprecedented action. This is the first time the Emergency DAO has been invoked.

“I don’t think this Mochi situation is comparable to any other protocol building around Curve. There is a clear pattern of misbehaviour and lack of concern for security, best practices and users’ funds.”

He added:

“I’m aware [Azeem] hasn’t got the best reputation but I also don’t know about what happened with those other projects and I prefer to work with the information I do have.”

Azeem told CoinDesk that Mochi will address the security concerns expressed by the Emergency DAO, and that the team plans to add “more secure multisig structure with additional signer requirements per transaction, suitable LTV parameters and clear tokenomics.”

“Once these are resolved we believe the gauge reinstatement will be deemed suitable, independent of strategic fears the whales and influencers may have with respect to our bold approach to gaining voting power in the DAO,” he said.

Rules of engagement

Mochi’s aggressive strategy and Curve’s ensuing governance action has prompted significant debate in the DeFi community.

Azeem blamed an unnamed “DeFi Cartel” for how Mochi Inu has been treated, saying that Mochi poses a threat to the Curve Wars status quo.

“They are shocked and feel threatened that a small player on the outskirts of the Curve/Convex ecosystem became a powerhouse and a threat to their fledgling monopolies overnight. Is this not DeFi?” He asked.

Likewise, a number of observers have criticized both the existence of the Emergency DAO and that they chose to act, saying that signaling out a single user is inappropriate in what should be a permissionless system.

Regardless of the controversy, Curve’s Charlie expressed some relief that there are now clear rules of engagement in the Curve Wars.

“I’m somewhat glad we drew the line of what a protocol can and can’t do. We’ve seen an escalation of bribes with different protocols trying to grab more and more power with Convex and Curve.”

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Author: Andrew Thurman

This Imprisoned Russian Artist Is Selling NFTs to Support His Family and Fellow Inmates

Every morning, Pavel Skazkin wakes up at the command of correctional officers while the Russian national anthem plays in the background. Four times a day, guards check on him.

The correctional facility where he lives is not as strict as the penal colony he was sent to at the age of 27, after he got caught with a package of marijuana and ecstasy. Inmates at his current residence can walk out of the guarded territory to attend their workplaces in a nearby town, as well as use internet-connected devices.

In the latter option he has found a creative outlet, a sense of purpose – and, thanks to the flourishing NFT market, extra income to supplement his inmate’s salary of $140 a month.

Skazkin, now 31, creates surreal digital art on an iPad and sells non-fungible tokens (NFT) of the works under the handle Papasweeds – a wordplay on his criminal charges, family story and self-reflection after four years of incarceration. His art NFTs, too, are a form of reflection on his life and the nature of the Russian penal system.

To help others suffering similar hardships, Skazkin has pledged to donate one-third of the proceeds from his NFT sales to Russia Behind Bars, a non-profit dedicated to aiding inmates and their families.

“I know how hard it is, both to be in prison and to wait for your family member to get out,” the artist told CoinDesk in a phone interview. “I’d like to help.”

Skazkin’s story is an unusually dramatic example of how the current wave of hype and speculation around NFTs sometimes provides new ways to support causes such as human rights, domestic violence victims and independent journalism.

Locked art

Skazkin started drawing his future NFT sketches while in the penal colony in Russia’s Bryansk region – 200 miles from his home in the Moscow area – where he was initially placed in 2017 after being sentenced to six years behind bars. All electronic communications and gadgets are forbidden in such facilities.

Three years into his term, Skazkin managed to successfully appeal for a lighter punishment and was transferred to the venue where he is serving his time now, also in Bryansk. And he immediately started turning his drawings into digital art, he said.

He sold his first prison-inspired NFTs for modest prices on Hic et Nunc, a lesser-known NFT marketplace that runs on the Tezos blockchain, which has lower transaction fees than the dominant NFT platform, Ethereum.

This is how Skazkin got into the Russian-speaking NFT community and joined the Telegram group of NFT Bastards, a loose group of artists that this year sold NFTs to help Russian online media outlet Meduza.

Read more: Russian Artists to Sell NFTs to Support Journalists Under Pressure

Then, NFT trader Ilya Orlov noticed the non-typical artist in the chat and thought he’d like to help.

“First thing we need to change [in Russia] is prisons,” Orlov told CoinDesk in a joint interview with Skazkin.

“As long as we’re torturing our own people this way, nothing can change for the better. We need to get people’s attention on that, especially now when the information [about torture in Russian colonies] got public,” Orlov added, pointing at the recent publication of blood-chilling video footage of inmates being tortured in one of Russia’s penal colonies.

Orlov is helping Skazkin to fund his NFT minting; with his inmate’s salary of about $140 a month, the artist can hardly afford network transaction fees (the so-called gas fees) for creating these tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. Therefore, a smart contract has been programmed to automatically split the proceeds from each NFT sale three ways: 33% will go to Papasweeds himself, helping him support his wife and three children, 33% to Orlov for his assistance and 33% to Russia Behind Bars.

Orlov said he believes Papasweeds’ prospects are huge. “In the West, people value and respect Russian pain and suffering, hence the popularity of Dostoyevsky,” he said. “I told [Skazkin], you get free, we apply for a U.S. visa and make you an exhibition in New York.”

Upon his release two years from now, Skazkin is planning to mint 72, or 66+6, NFTs, as written on his page on Foundation, a prestigious invite-only platform for NFT artists. Although 666 is the Biblical number of the beast, to Skazkin 66+6 is just a nice number, the artist told CoinDesk. He initially planned to do 666 NFTs until his prison term is over, but then realized he doesn’t have enough time until his scheduled release in 2023. So 666 turned into 66+6.

The weeds

Back in 2017, Skazkin, a not-too-successful web designer by trade, worked at an illegal online shop hosted on RAMP, a formerly popular darknet marketplace shut down by the Russian authorities the same year. One day, he was hired to pick up a package of drugs and pass it to sellers who would then divide the batch into smaller parts and deliver those to online buyers.

Skazkin was caught with that weed by the police and sent to jail for six years for drug trafficking. The prosecutor asked for a 10-year sentence, but Skazkin, a father of three, got six years.

After serving part of his term, Skazkin managed to litigate and win a lighter punishment, even though he had no attorney to help him draft court papers, he said. (His account was confirmed by Russia Behind Bars’ Olga Romanova.)

“I studied in the prison library, read the laws,” he said.

When asked about his nickname, Skazkin said it’s a portmanteau of several things. The nickname “papa” stuck to him after he became a father of three. “Weeds” is a double entendre: It refers to Skazkin’s drug-related crime; also, kosyak, the Russian slang for a bad mistake or a screwup is the same word as the one for a joint.

Skazkin is candid about his criminal charges and prison experience. He definitely ended up in prison for the right reason, he said. However, he believes his sentence was overly harsh. His first NFT work on Foundation, “Hall of Shame,” depicts a judge and a crying child in a courtroom – a metaphor of how he recalls his own trial.

“I felt like a kid being punished for the sweets he’d stolen, and there was nothing I could do. Whatever I had to say would sound like baby talk,” he recalls.

Spending several years in a Russian prison was a tough experience, but it changed him for the better, Skazkin said: “I got my brain in the right place. Got rid of many complexes, useless thoughts, became more aware.”

The lesson came at a steep price, though.

The penal colony near the city of Bryansk, where he served three years, is known as one of Russia’s cruelest correctional facilities, infamous for beatings and torture of inmates (links to articles in Russian).

“It was, you know, quite a school of humiliation,” Skazkin said.

Darknet education

It was working on the darknet that helped Skazkin to familiarize himself with the concept of crypto early on – back in 2017, he already had some bitcoin, he said.

In prison, he could only get news about crypto from print newspapers and magazines, or from the rare mentions on the Russian state TV the inmates were allowed to watch, or from his family members who would come to visit.

“In 2017, I saw bitcoin growing and was biting my elbows [because] I was in that place,” he said. In February of this year, Skazkin was reading Popular Mechanics magazine and saw a story about the famous meme-based NFT Nyan Cat, which sold for a whopping 300 ETH, worth about $590,000 at recent levels.

“I was like, what are these NFTs? OK, I know what crypto is, I had a bitcoin wallet, but this is also about drawing,” Skazkin said. He decided he would create his own NFT as soon as he got to the internet.

Olga Romanova, head of the non-profit Russia Behind Bars, said the organization has been raising money with crypto donations for five years now, and no less than 30% of all donations now come in crypto. Russia Behind Bars is accepting bitcoin, ether, litecoin and XRP, its website says.

NFTs, however, are something new for the advocacy group.

“Can’t say I understand digital art. But I understand people who got in trouble but weren’t broken, keep growing and trying to support their families, as well as other prisoners,” Romanova said: “This doesn’t happen very often and this alone deserves attention and support.”

Read more: Russian Activists Use Bitcoin, and the Kremlin Doesn’t Like It

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Author: Anna Baydakova

Crypto-Focused Bank Silvergate Rallies After JPMorgan Sees Industry Adoption Growth

Silvergate Capital Corp. shares jumped as high as 13% Thursday after JPMorgan initiated research coverage with an overweight recommendation and a $300 price target.

  • The price target would represent a 59% increase over yesterday’s closing price of $188.73. In recent trading, the shares were at $210, up about 11%.
  • “Silvergate’s status as the pure-play bank of the crypto ecosystem, has led to the creation of a bank not only with superior growth potential, but also that operates with one of the highest quality balance sheets in the industry,” JPMorgan analyst Steven Alexopoulos said in a note to clients.
  • JPMorgan sees Silvergate as a way for investors to gain exposure to crypto adoption and disruption.

Read more: Silvergate Capital 3Q EPS Beats Estimates; Digital Currency Deposits Grew to $11.2B

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Author: Michael Bellusci

Bitfarms Buys 24MW Crypto Mining Facility in Washington State for $26M

Canadian bitcoin miner Bitfarms (BITF), has bought a 24 megawatt (MW) hydro power plant in Washington state, which is expected to add 620 petahash (PH/s) of mining power, according to a statement from the company.

  • Bitfarms paid $23 million in cash and $3 million in common shares of the company at $7.17 per share for 414,508 shares.
  • Bitfarms said the 24MW capacity will increase the company’s total mining power to 106MW and is expected to cost 25% less than the company’s other power plants in Quebec.
  • “This low-cost power combined with the industry leading efficiency of the Bitmain S19j Pro means 6,200 miners in Washington could yield nearly 3.7 bitcoin per day at a cost of approximately $4,000 per bitcoin when all miners are installed,” said Ben Gagnon, Bitfarms’ Chief Mining Officer.
  • Bitfarms had 1.8 EH/s of mining power as of Oct. 31, according to a recent presentation.
  • The company also entered into a deal with the seller of the facility in Washington to co-develop additional mining farms in the area, which could increase total mining capacity up to 99MW.
  • On Oct. 27, the company said it is constructing two new production facilities in Sherbrooke, Québec that are slated to be completed in two phases next year, adding 78MW of total capacity.
  • Shares of Bitfarms rose more than 3% on Thursday and have climbed 331% this year.

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Author: Aoyon Ashraf

Investing in Bitcoin Directly May Be Better Bet Than Coinbase: Mizuho

Investors may be better off owning bitcoin directly versus shares of Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN) in order to avoid headwinds including growing competition and the ongoing “commoditization of cryptocurrency exchanges,” Mizuho Securities USA told clients in a note Thursday.

  • Mizuho has a neutral recommendation on Coinbase shares and a $300 price target. Coinbase was recently trading at around $339 per share.
  • Analyst Dan Dolev also said that yield compression continues to be a headwind for Coinbase, and “isn’t limited to one type of market condition.”
  • Mizuho noted the performance of bitcoin and Coinbase have been similar since the latter’s first day of trading on April 14, with bitcoin up about 2% since then and Coinbase up nearly the same amount.
  • Coinbase shares fell earlier this week after third quarter results missed expectations. The stock was up about 3% on Thursday.

Read more: Coinbase Analysts See ‘Green Shoots’ After Weak Third-Quarter Results

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Author: Michael Bellusci

Russian lawmakers prep legislation and form working group to address growing bitcoin mining industry

The leader of Russia’s legislature is calling for a new working group to focus on cryptocurrencies, with special attention to the rapidly growing local mining industry. 

On November 11, Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, directed his deputy, Aleksei Gordeyev, to create an inter-committee working group on cryptocurrency, to be headed by Andrey Lugavoy, who had initially pushed the issue before today’s plenary session. 

Lugavoy is a leading figure on the Committee on Security and Corruption Control. Central to his push for greater controls over the local crypto mining industry. Since China’s general expulsion of crypto miners earlier this year, the U.S., Kazakhstan and Russia have taken the podium as the largest contributors to Bitcoin’s hash rate. 

While Lugavoy proposed the legalization of crypto mining in Russia, which currently occupies a legal gray area, he also objected to Russian miners not paying taxes on their earnings, which he put at $2 billion per year.

Lugavoy also said that he had legislation already prepped to address these issues, but was not clear on when he would introduce it to the Duma. 

As the Russian mining industry grows, more official entities are expressing interest. It recently came to light that regulators were considering a proposal from Russian oil and gas giants allowing them to mine crypto using flare gas. These considerations seem set to accelerate the consideration of a long-pending law addressing crypto trading and payments within the country. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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Author: Kollen Post

Sotheby’s to hold real-time bids in ETH for Banksy art auction

The historic art auction house Sotheby’s announced Thursday that it will have real-time bids in ETH for its upcoming auction of Banksy paintings.

The auction, dubbed “The Now,” will occur on November 18 and consist of Banksy’s Trolley Hunters and Love in the Air artworks. As of publication, the paintings are estimated to cost between $5 to 7 million and $4 to 6 million, respectively, in USD.

Sotheby’s will also hold its auction at its digital headquarters in Decentraland, a virtual world platform, reports CoinDesk. 

Sotheby’s first began accepting cryptocurrency as payment in May of this year in a collaboration with the crypto exchange Coinbase, The Block previously reported.

However, “The Now” auction appears to be the first time the 277-year-old art house will prioritize crypto as payment over fiat currency. 

In addition to embracing cryptocurrency, Sotheby’s branched into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) this year with its auctions of Bored Apes and CryptoPunks — as well as launching its own curated NFT platform called “Sotheby’s Metaverse” on October 14.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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Author: MK Manoylov


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