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Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin criticized El Salvador president Nayib Bukele on Friday for forcing businesses in the country to adopt bitcoin. Buterin also called out “Bitcoin maximalists” for supporting Bukele.

“Making it mandatory for businesses to accept a specific cryptocurrency is contrary to the ideals of freedom that are supposed to be so important to the crypto space,” Buterin wrote in a Reddit post. 

Last month, bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador. It is optional for the country’s individuals to use the cryptocurrency, but all companies must accept bitcoin as long as they have the technology to do so.

“Every economic agent must accept bitcoin as payment when offered to him by whoever acquires a good or service,” article 7 of El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law reads. “Those who, by evident and notorious fact, do not have access to the technologies that allow them to carry out transactions in bitcoin are excluded from the obligation expressed in Art. 7 of this law. The State will promote the necessary training and mechanisms so that the population can access bitcoin transactions.”

This strategy of pushing bitcoin to people with almost no prior attempt to educate them is “reckless” and “risks a large number of innocent people getting hacked or scammed,” according to Buterin.

“Shame on everyone (ok, fine, I’ll call out the main people responsible: shame on Bitcoin maximalists) who are uncritically praising him [Bukele],” wrote Buterin.

What about ETH?

Would Buterin say the same things about Ethereum maximalists if El Salvador selected ether (ETH) as legal tender? Asked one Reddit user.

Buterin responded by saying that he had criticized Ethereum users and applications several times. Elsewhere in the thread, he said mandating “a specific cryptocurrency” is opposed to crypto’s idea of freedom.

Another Reddit user wondered if Bukele bought bitcoin at a low price and he wanted it to go up, so he brought the bitcoin law into the country. That is a “simpler and dumber hypothesis,” according to Buterin.

“Both for political reasons and because he’s a human being like the rest of us, he just loves being praised by people he considers powerful (ie. Americans). Bitcoin maximalists are a very easy community to get to praise you: you just have to be in a position of power and do or say nice things about them and their coin,” said Buterin.

© 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.

The official Twitter page for the non-fungible token (NFT) project Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) — a collection of 10,000 generative NFTs — announced Friday that it expects to launch its own token in Q1 of 2022. 

“It’s stupid easy to launch an ERC-20 token; it takes minutes,” BAYC wrote on Twitter. “It’s much more complicated to construct a legally compliant token and set it up in a responsible, sustainable way.” 

The BAYC team notes that it is these legal parameters, as well as other concerns like utility, governance, owner benefits and audience reach, that make the token launch tricky. However, they are working with the tech-focused legal team Fenwick West and blockchain-based tech firm Horizen Labs to handle such complexities. 

BAYC would be one of the first large-scale NFT project to airdrop tokens to holders. Loot Project, an NFT project of randomized adventure gear, had the token adventure gold $AGLD, an Ethereum token airdropped to Loot Project NFT holders. A Loot community member built the token, and Loot members had to figure out its use cases after the launch, reported CoinDesk. 

While details about the BAYC token have yet to take shape, the BAYC team appears to be building out the token ecosystem before the token launches, not after, as was the case with Loot.

© 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.

Quick Take

• For almost thirteen years of the blockchains’ existence, at least a dozen outages or accidental forks have occurred.
• Most often, incidents occurred with Ethereum, which is associated with its status as the first smart contract platform and a vast ecosystem.
• It is impossible to find all consensus bugs or prevent DoS attacks beforehand, but history shows that validators and developers quickly solve all issues.

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Binance.US has promoted its president Brian Shroder to CEO after the sudden exit of Brian Brooks two months ago.

The firm said Shroder would be moving from his role as President, which he began in September, to CEO in an announcement today. Shroder first took up the mantle as president following the departure of CEO and ex- U.S. Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks. Shroder was previously head of business development at Ant Group, and before that the Asia-Pacific Head of Strategy and Business  Development for Uber. 

Binance.US’ announcement also revealed that chief financial officer Joshua Sroge would be leaving the company and subsequently replaced by Eric Segal as Interim CFO. Sroge had initially been selected by the Binance.US board to take over in the immediate aftermath of Brooks’ departure. 

The firm will continue to search for a permanent CFO with executive search firm Russel Reynolds Associates. Binance.US said it’s conducting a search for “a new CFO with experience in initial public offerings.”

“Strategic differences” over the path to an IPO reportedly led to Brooks’ departure. Part of those plans included a bid to raise $100 million from venture capital investors. Those plans are still ongoing, despite some concerns from certain investors that Binance.US is too closely affiliated with Binance. 

© 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.

Investment platform Republic is now offering what it calls “Security NFTs,” aimed at giving music fans the opportunity to share the rights to artists’ royalties.

These so-called “S-NFTs” represent fans’ investments in artists’ songs and albums, and the subsequent returns those music assets generate through plays, streams and licensing. 

One of Republic’s main aims is to give artists back control of their music while also involving fans. This kind of investment generally involves buying music rights through “membership units” of the LLC that owns a song or album, the company explains on its website. 

“The same membership units that may typically be represented by an LLC Membership Certificate will novelly be represented by the S-NFT instead,” Republic’s Chief Strategy Officer Pialy Aditya told The Block.

Initially, fans will be able to invest in a new song called Mona Lisa by rapper Lil Pump featuring Soulja Boy, as well as an unspecified track from electronic artist KSHMR. Artists could eventually offer tickets, merchandise and “non-security” NFT drops to investors as well via Republic. 

Republic is using the decentralized peer-to-peer loan platform Opulous for its music-related investments. Built on the Algorand blockchain, Opulous focuses on DeFi loans for musicians and NFTs that allow music fans to have a share in artists’ music copyright. 

Republic is offering S-NFTs under the U.S. Regulation Crowdfunding (CF). “Republic is a registered crowdfunding portal which allows it to facilitate offerings under Reg CF,” Aditya said. “Like all Reg CF security offerings, these offerings are not approved nor qualified by the SEC.”

© 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.

Siacoin (SC) is the native cryptocurrency for the Sia blockchain platform. Siacoin serves as a way for customers to pay hosts for renting storage space. The Sia project is meant to create a distributed, decentralized network for cloud data storage. The utility is similar to Dropbox or Google Drive, but Sia allows individuals to make their hard drive space available for rent, and users of the platform can use other peoples’ hard drive space to store files.

Siacoin price

The Sia test platform went live in early 2015. That was shortly followed by the creation of the first siacoin block – also known as the genesis block. A block reward of 300,000 new SC was given to the Sia developers who mined it. A block reward is the number of newly created, free coins given to successful miners for creating new blocks.

A tapered issuance system was coded into the Sia protocol by the project’s developers where each new block mined produced 1 less siacoin as a block reward, until block number 270,000 was reached. After that, siacoin blocks rewards became fixed at 30,000 SC per block.

The total supply of siacoin is unbounded, meaning there is no hard limit on how many siacoins can be in circulation. That protocol was established to allow the Sia platform to scale to millions of users and ensure it could always be used.

To help keep the supply in check, Siacoin’s developers introduced a token burn feature – a mechanism for permanently removing tokens from circulation. According to the official website, “sellers of storage on the network will burn coins to prove that they are real and have good intentions towards the network.” In other words, hosts who remove more of their own coins from existence are presumed to be more trustworthy.

In January 2018, the price of SC hit its all-time high of $0.093 but dropped over the rest of that year. By November 2018, Siacoin had fallen under the $0.005 level and remained beneath the price point for more than two years until it returned above it. In April 2021, SC’s price rose to $0.063 – its highest level in more than three years.

How does Sia work?

The Sia blockchain operates using a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, the same kind of system Bitcoin uses to verify and secure transactions. Mining nodes on the Sia network run specialized computing equipment in order to compete for the opportunity to add new blocks to the Sia blockchain. When a miner successfully adds a new block to the Sia blockchain, they receive block rewards and any fees attached to the transactions they store.

Using this blockchain system, renters enter into contracts with hosts who specify prices, technical requirements and any other aspects of the relationship between the renters and the hosts. Contracts generally last 90 days and are automatically renewed ahead of expirations. Renters use siacoin to buy storage capacity, and hosts deposit siacoin into each file contract as collateral.

The project consists of two main products:

Sia Storage Platform: Renters (those looking to store data) pay hosts (those providing spare hard drive storage) using Sia’s native cryptocurrency, siacoin (SC).

Skynet: Skynet works similarly to the Sia Storage Platform, but data stored using Skynet is not encrypted and is publicly accessible through Skylinks – unique identifiers that point to data on the Skynet network. Contents can be accessed using web portals.

Key events and management

The Sia project was originally founded in 2013 by two computer science students, David Vorick and Luke Champine. A year later, the two started a company called Nebulous Inc., which received financial backing from Fenbushi Capital, INBlockchain, Raptor Group and First Star Ventures. A year later, the Sia storage platform launched.

• In October 2019, the project reached a $225,000 settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the unregistered securities offering of its siafunds token in 2014.
• In April 2021, the company officially rebranded from Nebulous to Skynet Labs.

One of the company’s most important hard forks to date (non-backward compatible upgrades that require all network participants to download the latest version) took place in February 2021. The event introduced a new nonprofit organization called the Sia Foundation – an entity that markets and develops the Sia network.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows that Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) purchased between $50,001 and $100,000 BTC on August 16. Bitcoin on this day cost over $46,000, according to the crypto price tracking website CoinGecko. 

Lummis has been a noted pro-bitcoin voice in Congress, establishing the Financial Innovation Caucus to educate members of the Senate on crypto and regularly speaking out on crypto-related issues. 

In an effort to limit members of Congress using non-public knowledge for personal gain, they are required to disclose investments within 45 days of the transaction. However, the Senator failed to disclose her August 15 BTC purchase within that time frame due to “a filing error,” reports CNBC. 

The purchase occurred around the same time Lummis championed compromises to the much-debated infrastructure bill, which required certain crypto operators report transactions to the Internal Revenue Service as brokers.

While the exact quantity of BTC Lummis holds is unknown, the senator held about five bitcoin as of late June of 2021 and supported the cryptocurrency as a type of retirement investment strategy. “I think one of the strongest stores of value for the long run is bitcoin,” Lummis said in June. 

© 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.

Senator Pat Toomey is not pleased with the U.S. Treasury’s much-anticipated work on stablecoins. 

In an October 7 letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Toomey criticized the process behind a much-anticipated report on stablecoins from the President’s Working Group.

The PWG is a collective of U.S. financial regulators including the Treasury. They are currently working on a framework for regulating stablecoins, with Yellen driving the project. The Biden administration has been sounding the alarm on stablecoins with increasing vigor. The term “systemic risk” and comparisons to the wildcat banks of the 19th century have grown more common. 

Toomey’s letter voiced concerns that the PWG has kept the pending framework behind closed doors and hasn’t sought enough input from the crypto industry and stablecoin operators.

“Since the PWG announced its stablecoin review, the administration has revealed very little about the process it is using to draft this report. It is my understanding that stakeholders have had only minor involvement in the process, with just a few stablecoin providers invited to participate. Those invited participants were given a mere five minutes each to make highly structured presentations.”

Toomey also cautioned against bringing the Financial Stability Oversight Council to bear against stablecoins, a prospect recently reported by Bloomberg. “The administration would do well to remember that America’s longstanding status as the world’s leading economy is due, in no small part, to our tradition of fostering technological innovation, not stifling it,” the letter concluded.

The leading republican of the Senate Banking Committee, Toomey has emerged in recently as possibly the highest-profile advocate for cryptocurrency in Congress. He was, for example, a driving force behind an amendment to change controversial crypto taxation provisions in the infrastructure bill. 

© 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.

Global crypto exchange Binance is cutting down its crypto trading offerings in South Africa.

On October 8, Binance published a blog post announcing the immediate end to futures, options, margin and leveraged trading for users in South Africa. Users with open positions will have until January 6 to close them.

On the firm’s local Telegram chat, a representative wrote: “Binance constantly evaluates its product and service offerings to ensure that they are not only welcomed by the users but also local regulators. We are following through with our commitment to compliance.”

Binance is not registered as a financial service provider with South Africa’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority, or FSCA, and it doesn’t seem to have applied for registration.

Alongside Nigeria, South Africa is the leading market for crypto trading in Africa. While local crypto exchanges have historically been largely unregulated, scrutiny has picked up recently. Last month, the FSCA warned Binance against providing investment advice, which the firm denied it had been doing. 

Just yesterday, the Financial Action Task Force released a new report on South Africa’s anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) measures. With many of its numbers on crypto exchanges from 2019, the report noted a lack of information and licensing in the local crypto industry. It said of virtual asset services providers (VASPs):

“VASPs are not subject to AML/CFT obligations other than the reporting obligations that apply to all businesses and are not subject to AML/CFT supervision. Some VASPs have voluntarily registered.”

Binance has had to cut down on its trading offerings and expand its know-your-customer standards around the world amid increasing regulatory scrutiny. 

© 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.

Quick Take

• The number of crypto M&A deals in 2021 is already double what it was in 2020.
• The larger trend reflects the overall maturity of the crypto industry, particularly the number of large firms with the capacity to buy up smaller ones.

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