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Author: Steven Zheng
Tesla CEO Elon Musk may have an on-stage discussion with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at an upcoming bitcoin event, according to recent tweets.
Earlier today, Dorsey made an offer to Musk that they have a conversation at the event, saying they should have “THE talk.” Musk replied, “Very well then, let’s do it.”
The upcoming event is called The B Word (in reference to bitcoin if you couldn’t work that out). Its focus is on how institutions can embrace bitcoin, which is fitting for Musk since his company Tesla invested $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency — before selling some just to prove liquidity, according to Musk.
But it will also be interesting to see a discussion between the two since Dorsey has very much become a bitcoin evangelist while Musk appears to be far more critical, both of the environmental implications of the technology and the community behind it (he was poking fun at bitcoin maximalists earlier today).
The event will feature speakers including ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, and former acting and deputy director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Michael Morell.
Musk did, however, finish his tweet with a winky face emoji, so you can never know if he’s being too serious.
© 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: Tim Copeland
El Salvador will be giving out $30 in bitcoin to any of its adult citizens that download a specific app and become verified on it.
The population of El Salvador is 6.5 million, with estimates suggesting that 70% of the population is over the age of 15. As a result, adults likely make up around 60% of the population. This places the upper bound at roughly $117 million of bitcoin, which would currently total around 3,440 BTC.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele addressed the nation last night, revealing the impending airdrop of sorts and detailing that bitcoin will become legal tender on September 7.
The President said that adult citizens who download the Chivo e-wallet and go through the facial recognition process, will each receive $30 in bitcoin.
On June 8, El Salvador approved its bitcoin bill, stating the cryptocurrency will become legal tender in the country. It also committed to providing exchange services for merchants, while also requiring that they accept bitcoin.
While this latter requirement was somewhat controversial, Bukele argued on the What Bitcoin Did podcast that the law was designed to protect the unbanked. He claimed it would be discriminatory if businesses weren’t forced to accept bitcoin because the unbanked wouldn’t necessarily have another means of payment.
In terms of why the country has put bitcoin at the forefront of its thinking, Bukele said on the podcast, “Sometimes you also have to take forward thinking decisions and try not to foresee the future but at least know where the world is going and try to get their first — so your people will get some benefit out of it.”
On mining bitcoin with geothermal energy from volcanos, Bukele said the country has found new wells that will provide a further 95 megawatts. He said this will be used for bitcoin mining and there has already been a lot of interest.
“We have had interest in probably 2 gigawatts, which is 2,000 megawatts and we only have 95 so they’re going to go like this. And they’re going to provide a lot of income to the country,” he said.
Bukele added that this income will fuel infrastructure developments in the country. In the future, he said he would like to see schools and pharmacies built with the resources that come as a result of the bitcoin law.
While El Salvador has little in the way of bitcoin infrastructure currently set up — just two bitcoin ATMs — it is working with Athena Bitcoin to change that. The company intends to invest $1 million to introduce up to 1,500 bitcoin ATMs in the region, per Reuters.
© 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: Tim Copeland
Poolin, one of the major Chinese crypto mining pools, has temporarily halted the bitcoin and ether mining payouts to users who have staked their hash rate tokens on Poolin’s Mars protocol.
Poolin said in a blog post on Friday that the operations of its proprietary bitcoin miners that serve as the underlying assets backing its recently issued pBTC35A and pETH18C hash rate tokens have been shut down as a result of the recent orders issued by the Chinese governments in Xinjiang and Sichuan.
Poolin rolled out the two ERC-20 tokens earlier this year that can be staked to earn wBTC and ether based on the computing hash rate that each unit of the token represents and that is mining on their respective networks.
“After Sichuan policy’s shoe dropped, we realize this time’s unexpected shutting down would eventually make unbearable economic loss on whole project which would likely leads to operational hardness. In this case, team decides to pause the wBTC/ETH output for all pBTC35A and pETH18C for less than 60 days which corresponding to the estimated schedule of miners migration,” the firm said.
“In [the] previous 30days, the Mars team has visited a lot of mining farms and signed long term facility hosting contracts with some mining farms under top-tier names,” Poolin said in the blog post, adding it’s currently relocating the machines backing the Mars project to new facilities with an expectation that the process will take 35 to 40 days.
The prices of pBTC35A and pETH18C both have fallen significantly from their initial sales prices and all-time-highs.
Poolin initially sold pBTC35A for $100 per each unit that has an underlying hash rate of 1 TH/s. It has now dropped to below $50 on Uniswap, down nearly 60% from its all-time-high of above $120.
The price for pETH18C has also plunged by over 60%, sliding below $10 just about three months after Poolin launched the token at $30.
Poolin’s suspension is the latest event that crypto mining operations are being severely impacted by China’s crackdown.
Nearly 50% of the bitcoin network’s total hash rate has gone offline since Xinjiang and Sichuan handed down the shutdown order for mining farms.
Following that, there has been a spiking circulating supply of secondhand bitcoin miners on the market as a result of the shutdown policy.
© 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: Wolfie Zhao
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Author: MK Manoylov
The U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday that it has charged a New Orleans-based cryptocurrency seller with running an unlicensed money transmitting business.
Michael Yusko, according to court documents released today, was accused of operating without a license. Prosecutors have alleged that Yusko ran a number of business banking accounts to support the sale of crypto, stating that he sold “Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies to customers” between August 2017 and June 2019.
“Yusko did not register any of these companies with [the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] as money transmitting businesses, however. If convicted, Yusko may receive a maximum of five years in prison, a maximum $250,000.00 fine, up to three years of supervised release, and a $100 mandatory special assessment,” the DOJ said in a statement.
FinCEN has long considered cryptocurrencies as a form of substitute for U.S. dollars in the context of money transmission, and Wednesday’s court documents the requirement to register with the U.S. agency.
© 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: Michael McSweeney
The crypto exchange and custodian Gemini announced Thursday that it plans to offset 350,000 metric tons of carbon through its new sustainability plan, dubbed Gemini Green.
Gemini will be “making contributions” to purchase the 350,000 in offsets through the University of Chicago-based non-profit Climate Vault, according to a company release. In the future, Gemini will calculate what portion of the Bitcoin network it owns, the energy and carbon emissions associated with that, and then offset it through its partnership with Climate Vault.
“As bitcoin emerges as a dominant store of value, it’s imperative that we incorporate sustainability for future generations,” said Tyler Winklevoss, CEO of Gemini, in the statement. “We are proud to team up with Climate Vault to offset our exposure to non-renewable mining and contribute to the decarbonizing of bitcoin.”
In recent months, offsetting has become popular among crypto companies seeking to reduce their carbon footprints, such as the bitcoin mining firm Greenidge and the crypto exchanges FTX and BitMex.
However, The Block’s reporting has found that carbon offsetting projects have faced criticism from environmentalists skeptical of their ability to actually reduce atmospheric carbon in the long term, and the difficulty of accurately calculating bitcoin carbon emissions compounds that issue.
© 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
The UK’s Metropolitan Police said Thursday that it seized £114 million in cryptocurrency — an amount worth about $158 million — as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
The Met Police said the operation “was carried out by detectives from the Met’s Economic Crime Command on the back of intelligence received about the transfer of criminal assets.” The operation is ongoing, according to the announcement.
Earlier this month, it was reported that the Met Police is seeking additional powers to halt the transfer of cryptocurrency funds as part of its operations. The Times of London specifically said that Scotland Yard wants legislative changes to make it harder for criminals to make such transfers.
“The conversations that we’re having is about how we align cryptocurrency to the same kind of approach that we have about cash-based criminality,” Mick Gallagher, a Met Police official, was quoted as saying.
Last month, local police in the West Midlands said they seized a bitcoin mining operation while hunting for a suspected cannabis grow operation.
© 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: Michael McSweeney
NFT marketplace Rarible has raised $14.2 million in a Series A round led by venture capital funds Venrock and CoinFund, with participation from 01 Advisors, a venture and advisory firm.
In tandem with the news, the platform also announced it will launch a marketplace on the Flow blockchain in a bid to take NFTs mainstream. Flow also powers the popular NFT basketball platform NBA Top Shot.
According to Rarible co-founder Alexander Salnikov, the marketplace plans to partner with several low-cost and environmentally-friendly blockchains.
“Flow has a fantastic track record of bringing NFTs mainstream by creating native experiences for non-crypto audiences,” Salnikov said in a statement. “As a blockchain, Flow enables easier access and lowers the entry barrier for consumers and brands via gasless minting, low-cost transactions, and scalability. As we enter the next stage, pursuing to further pioneer the mass adoption of NFTs, we see Flow as a perfect partner for this journey.”
According to Salnikov, the Series A funding will be used to make new hires as well as to continue developing the marketplace. More specifically, the Rarible team plans to adopt a layer 2 solution to bring down gas costs, which will make it easier for any digital artist to enter the space and sell their work. The team also plans to make the consumer experience more user-friendly and seamless by allowing users to carry out transactions using a debit or credit card.
Lastly, the team is working on launching a decentralized protocol that will be governed by its own DAO, which it says will “place decision-making power in the hands of our community.”
The Rarible marketplace, which launched in 2020, experienced a significant increase in trading activity with the NFT boom that took place earlier this year. However, it also encountered some issues with user verification, and some artists complained that already verified users with large followings were gaming the platform via wash-trading.
Following the reports, the marketplace introduced buyer and seller fees to discourage wash trading, and the Rarible team said it has created more avenues for users to report “pointless transactions.”
While there has been an overall decline in NFT transactions, Salnikov said he doesn’t believe the hype around the digital collectibles is dying.
“Even at the height of all the publicity and hype around NFTs, less than 1 percent of the world was in the market — and that is still true today,” he said.
“NFTs provide such a utility for artists, giving creators digital rights to their work, and I don’t see that going away any time soon — in fact, I believe more and more creators are going to be taking advantage of this and the adoption of NFTs will continue to grow,” he added.
© 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: Saniya More
Wall Street giant Citigroup has officially launched a new business unit dedicated to the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, according to a memo obtained by The Block.
The firm announced Thursday morning the new group, dubbed Digital Assets Group, which will sit within its wealth management division, Citi Global Wealth Investments, according to the meme.
“Given the exciting new developments we are seeing around cryptocurrencies, tokenization, and other advances powered by blockchain technology, we are pleased to announce the formation of the Digital Assets Group,” the memo said.
According to the memo, the unit will be led by Alex Kriete and Greg Girasole. The move by Citi makes it the latest bank to break into crypto wealth management.
Notably, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have launched their own internal initiatives to help their rich wealth management clients access the crypto market.
According to the memo, Kriete and Girsole will work on developing products and “work in tandem with our functional partners and the broader Capital Markets and Citi Investment Management teams to develop a robust and scalable value proposition.”
In May, Itay Tuchman, an executive at the bank, told the Financial Times it was exploring entering the market, but at the time had “not yet decided whether it would offer its clients cryptocurrency-related services.”
© 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: Frank Chaparro
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