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Wall Street banks including J.P. Morgan also saw the ruling as a positive outcome for the crypto exchange.

After the volume of Bitcoin Ordinal inscriptions dipped somewhat in June, activity has picked up again this month.

A busy weekend was particularly buoyed by Sunday, which saw slightly over 385,600 inscriptions, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard. That’s the third busiest day since the introduction of inscribing NFTs onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

On Saturday, the number of inscriptions hit 262,000, making for a weekend total of roughly 647,000.

The total number of inscriptions began to soar in May and is now racing towards the 18-million mark. Binance, the world’s largest trading platform for digital assets, began supporting Ordinals in May.

One of the busiest categories of Ordinal inscriptions this month has not been image or audio, but instead a type labeled “other.” During the past 30 days, NFTs minted on Bitcoin have seen sales over more than $127 million, according to CryptoSlam!.

© 2023 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.

On top of laying off employees, Binance is also reducing benefits, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper reported last week that Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, had laid off more than 1,000 employee in recent weeks. The company, which has billed itself as a “remote-first” company, at one point employed more than 8,000 employees around the world.

It’s now cutting back on “mobile-phone reimbursement, fitness reimbursement and work-from-home expenses, ” according to The Wall Street Journal. 

The exchange is battling a host of regulatory issues in addition to declining market share.

© 2023 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 development team behind the independent Celo blockchain says benefits could accrue from transitioning to the Ethereum ecosystem, in terms of greater liquidity, improved security and more compatibility.

Republicans want a state-level pathway for the approval and regulation of stablecoins, but they agree with Democrats that they should not create a “race to the bottom” for guardrails around the digital assets, said one of the authors of that bill on Monday.

“We do want to facilitate a state pathway, but to quote my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, we don’t want any race to the bottom,” said Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., a senior member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, during an online event with the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based thinktank. He added that under the current draft of the legislation, stablecoins would fall under review or enforcement by the Federal Reserve.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell told Congress during testimony last month that the central bank should play a role in regulating the payments tokens.

In the same livestreamed interview with the Atlantic Council, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., a senior Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, acknowledged the state versus federal policy tension in the stablecoin debate but said he didn’t see it as an insurmountable hurdle to a bill becoming law.

“We always have these arguments with the regulation of any financial product,” said the Connecticut Democrat. Himes added that proof of full one-to-one backing of stablecoins mattered the most of any provision, indirectly referencing the high-profile Terra/Luna collapses last year.

Hill said he hoped that comprehensive regulatory frameworks for stablecoins and crypto markets in the U.S. would advance out of House committees before the end of July, and Himes also expressed optimism about where talks stood for a stablecoins bill.

“The conversation happening right now is more between the committee and the regulators, and the conversations are happening I think formally and informally as we all work, I think, in good faith,” said the Connecticut Democrat.  

Trying to reach consensus

Congressional Democrats have voiced some skepticism around a Republican-led market structure bill. The legislation would grant the Commodity Futures Trading Commission broader oversight power over bitcoin and other agreed-upon digital commodities markets while directing regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission and CFTC to make clear the legal pathway for a digital asset to go from being a security investment to a commodity, an asset class with lighter regulatory disclosure standards. House Republicans have paired the two bills, given the role stablecoins play in cross-currency transactions within cryptocurrency markets, but delayed debate and a vote on them at the House Financial Services Committee by a week, suggesting more talks are needed to build consensus on the bills.

A federal judge’s split decision in a closely-followed case brought by the SEC against Ripple, a company that has sought to use its native token, XRP, as a traditional payment network alternative, may give more momentum to talks. The judge ruled that some of Ripple’s XRP sales did not violate securities laws, because of a blind bid process in place for them, so buyers did not know the sales benefited Ripple. However the judge in the case said that other direct sales of XRP to institutional investors, who knew Ripple sold it to them, did violate securities law, and set the table for a trial over whether Ripple executives are liable for those violations; the case is likely to be appealed. 

Another factor that could point toward a deal on digital assets between lawmakers of both parties is that federal regulators last year recommended legislation to create more direct oversight of digital asset spot markets and to put a comprehensive framework for stablecoins in place.  

Though Republicans, if unified in their narrow majority, can advance legislation out of the House of Representatives by themselves, Democrats control the Senate and White House, so for any bill to become law it would need sign off from the Biden administration and most Senate Democrats.  

Guarded optimism

Both Hill and Himes accentuated bipartisan support for getting a stablecoins bill done, even though Himes characterized himself as more of a skeptic of stablecoins.

“I am a skeptic on areas of mechanisms of exchange and stablecoins, but I also know that I’ll be wrong in certain areas, and that there is a huge amount of value there waiting to be innovated into existence and we need to make sure that that happens here, rather than somewhere else,” said Himes.

Asked to predict where debate on digital asset policy in Congress would stand a year from now, Hill expressed optimism about having a stablecoin law in place, but hedged a bit on the markets legislation.

“I’d like to say that a year from now we’ll have a stablecoin bill signed into law and we’ll have consensus on the regulatory architecture,” the Arkansas Republican said.

© 2023 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.

Artificial intelligence “may heighten financial fragility as it could promote herding,” the regulator said in a speech

Blockchain developer Neon Labs has launched the “Neon EVM”, a computing environment that will allow developers to write Ethereum applications on top of Solana. 

Neon’s implementation is a smart contract built on top of Solana that lets developers deploy Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) code — something that’s not been possible so far on the network. 

Neon Labs announced the completion of the necessary tooling for Ethereum developers to transition their projects to Solana, a move, it said, could potentially reduce the operational costs of their applications.

The team at Neon Labs expressed confidence that its EVM solution will integrate effectively with Solana’s high throughput capabilities to host Ethereum apps, and is currently conducting extensive tests in this regard.

In addition to providing access to the Solana network, Neon EVM hopes to enable Ethereum apps to take advantage of the functionality native to Solana, including parallel execution of transactions.

“We are very excited to see Neon EVM live on Solana Mainnet,” said Marina Guryeva, director of Neon Foundation. “Once we repeat these tests in production, we will present the figures based on the real-world data.”

In 2021, Neon Labs raised $40 million from Jump Capital, IDEO CoLab Ventures and Solana Capital, amongst others.

© 2023 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.

DeSantis in March signed a bill as Florida’s governor to prohibit the use of CBDC’s within his state.

Binance has stopped offering certain benefits to its employees on June 19 as the company’s profits continue to decline, according to former employees and internal company messages viewed by the Wall Street Journal.