Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.Top Stories This Week Infrastructure bill passes US Senate — without clarification on cryptoOn Tuesday, the controversial infrastructure bill passed in the U.S. senate In a 69-30 vote.The bipartisan bill proposes roughly $1 trillion of funding into transportation and electricity infrastructure projects. The bill also puts forward more stringent rules for firms handling crypto assets while expanding reporting requirements for brokers, who will be required to report digital asset transactions worth more than $10,000 to the IRS. Six senators, including Pat Toomey, Cynthia Lummis, Rob Portman, Mark Warner, Kyrsten Sinema and Ron Wyden, proposed an amendment to the buzz-kill bill on Monday that would exempt software developers, transaction validators and node operators as brokers, while proposing that tax reporting requirements “only apply to the intermediaries.” Their efforts didn’t bear fruit, however, with further clarification on crypto not provided.  Senator Toomey flamed the bill in the aftermath, noting that the legislation was “too expensive, too expansive, too unpaid for and too threatening to the innovative cryptocurrency economy.” Poloniex settles charges with SEC for operating unregistered exchangeThe United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, announced a $10 million settlement with cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex on Aug. 9. Poloniex was charged with facilitating trades in unregistered securities between July 2017 and November 2019. According to the indictment, the SEC also asserted that Poloniex employees were misbehaving, as they actively sought to circumvent securities regulation in a plot to increase the company’s market share. On the same day, SEC commissioner Hester Peirce — known colloquially as “Crypto Mom” due to her regular pushback against SEC crypto enforcement — slammed the regulators’ actions in a public statement. Crypto Mom questioned the regulators’ opaque regulatory framework that crypto firms must navigate in the U.S. while asserting that, even if Poloniex had tried to register with the SEC, they “likely would have waited…and waited…and waited some more” for a verdict. Coinbase’s Q2 profits top $1.6B as ETH volume surpasses BTC’s for the first timeCoinbase, the crypto exchange led by media-shy co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, posted Q2 profits of $1.6 billion this week. The firm released its Q2 report on Tuesday, and its net profit of $1.6 billion marked a mammoth increase of 4,900% compared to the $32 million recorded in the same period of 2020. Coinbase’s total revenue for the quarter was $2.23 billion, beating out analysts’ predictions of $1.78 billion in expected revenue. Interestingly, for the first time since Coinbase was founded nine years ago, Ethereum (ETH) had a higher trading volume than Bitcoin (BTC), with the assets representing 26% and 24% of total volume, respectively. 55% of the world’s top 100 banks reportedly have crypto and blockchain exposureDespite banks often taking time out of their busy schedules to slam crypto, a new research report found that 55 out of the top 100 banks by assets under management have some form of blockchain or crypto exposure.  According to research by Blockdata, the banks and their subsidiaries have direct and indirect investments in crypto and decentralized ledger technology firms.Notable banking giants named and shamed included Barclays, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, who were reported as the most active backers of crypto and blockchain firms, while  JPMorgan Chase and BNP Paribas were also identified as serial investors in the sector.  Winners and Losers  At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at $46,262, Ether at $3,189 and XRP at $1.01. The total market cap is at $1.92 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are IoTeX (IOTX) at 314.69%, XinFin Network (XDC) at 71.34%, and Ravencoin (RVN) at 71.23%. The top three altcoin losers of the week are THORChain (RUNE) at -12.02%, Quant (QNT) at -5.71%, and THETA (THETA) at -2.58%.For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.  Most Memorable Quotations “If #Bitcoin were to catch up to #Ethereum’s performance this year, the No. 1 crypto’s price would approach $100,000.”Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist for Bloomberg Intelligence “Shutting off this growth engine would be the equivalent of stopping e-commerce in 1995 because people were afraid of credit card fraud. Or regulating the creation of websites because some people initially thought they were complicated and didn’t understand what they would ever amount to.”Mark Cuban, billionaire investor “If you want to store your coins truly outside of the reach of the state, you can just hold those private keys directly. That’s the equivalent of burying a bar of gold in your backyard.”Nic Carter, co-founder of Coin Metrics “This legislation imposes a badly flawed, and in some cases unworkable, cryptocurrency tax reporting mandate that threatens future technological innovation.”Pat Toomey, U.S. Senator “I think we’re already past the stage of crypto early adoption.”Stephen Stonberg, Bittrex Global CEO “We are living in a time where everything is going digital, including traditional assets.”Austin Woodward, CEO of TaxBit “Given how slow we have been in determining how regulated entities can interact with crypto, market participants may understandably be surprised to see us come onto the scene now with our enforcement guns blazing and argue that Poloniex was not registered or operating under an exemption as it should have been.”Hester Peirce, commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission “Bitcoin’s journey to becoming Gold 2.0 has been beautiful.”Dan Held, Kraken director of growth marketingPrediction of the Week  Bitcoin Technicals: Why BTC price breaking $48K resistance is the key to new all-time highsBitcoin has recovered a notable amount of ground in recent weeks. The asset hit its all-time high of almost $65,000 back in April but subsequently fell in the days and weeks after, finding its way down to around $30,000. On multiple occasions, the asset briefly fell below $30,000. Recent weeks, however, have shown bullish price movement for Bitcoin, as the asset has posted chart action seemingly indicative of a reversal, based on analysis from Cointelegraph’s Michaël van de Poppe. The $48,000 price range on Bitcoin’s chart sits as…

This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations.  After ThorCHAIN and Chainswap were exploited, it’s safe to say that hacking cross-chain bridges seems to be the style of the season. This week, it was local project Poly Network that was fleeced of $615 million before leading the crypto community on a dramatic witch hunt to track down the attacker. While most news outlets have covered this story extensively, there are still a few points worth dissecting. Who are these projects?The first point is that most western DeFi users had never heard of Poly Network despite them amassing over $600 million in total value locked. Dovey Wan of Primitive Capital covered this on Twitter when she noted that the, “Chinese crypto community always have their own version to utilize the same blockchain infra, for good and for bad, most are unseen and lack of accessibility to westerners.” Only after Poly got hacked most CT came to know this “crosschain” project with over $500m TVL, just as the PlusToken case in 2018There are a VERY vibrant but completely different “Defi” communities happening in mainland China, despite the ban, despite many rugs and hacks— Dovey “Rug The Fiat” Wan🪐🦖 (@DoveyWan) August 11, 2021 So why are Chinese projects flying so far under the radar? The first reason might be a cultural and language barrier as Chinese marketing teams struggle to integrate into the fast-moving and esoteric world of Crypto Twitter. Instead of trying to win over global communities, they focus on integrations that can bring users over directly.According to SimilarWeb, Poly Network attracted over 58% of its web traffic from third-party website referrals, with Chinese DApps OpenOcean, O3 Swap, and Wing Finance at the top of the list. By contrast, Compound Finance receives more than half of its visits from direct hits, with only 16% coming via third-party websites. Compound’s two main websites for referrals are CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. This shows that the difference in how Chinese and international users behave is quite tangible and that to capture both audiences requires two very distinct strategies.    A DeFi island: Chinese dApps and websites are the major onramps for users to Poly Network. Source: SimilarwebUntangling the web Another more taboo talking point is that many of these large Chinese DeFi projects have ties to other projects. Poly Network has ties to the O3 network, which itself is incubated by Neo. The extent to which Neo is involved is indistinct but it explains why it’s rare to see Poly Network founders marketing in public. These ‘founders’ are often just figureheads for the parent company. The parent company gets all the benefits of launching a second token without taking the reputational or legal risk of being tied to it. If the side project succeeds, it can support the main network. If it fails, everyone moves on with their lives and pretends it never happened. It’s a big PR problem for O3Swap now that many of their user’s assets were compromised in the attack. This isn’t the first time that the team has had to deal with negativity, as they were accused of having a backdoor function written into their code that would allow them to rug pull. Although this has never been exploited, it does raise eyebrows about the intentions of the developers. After the hack, a lot of negativity flooded local social media, with comments calling into question the integrity of Chinese-made projects. One user on Weibo stated that you could beat him to death before he touched a Chinese project while another user just called it an inside job.   A user points out a potential backdoor in O3Swap’s code. Source: Weibo The bigger issue here is that prior to DeFi, substandard projects would never get off the ground, leading to a slow and painful soft decline in value for token holders. In this model, investors might still get the chance to recover some of their funds by selling on secondary markets. In the new model of DeFi forks, code can be deployed and amass hundreds of millions of dollars in TVL very rapidly and without adequate risk controls. Audits can be superficial, and staggeringly high yields can seduce retail investors into providing liquidity. If the code is compromised, all the assets are lost, resulting in a much more swift and comprehensive loss for investors.  Looking for silver liningsThe major positive in all this was the quick and united response of the Chinese blockchain community. Smart contract auditor Slowmist worked quickly with exchanges to limit the options of the attacker to liquidate funds. The company blog notes:“Special thanks to the teams such as Hoo, Poly Network, Huobi ZLabs, ChainNews, WePiggy, TokenPocket, Bibox, OkLink and many individual partners for synchronizing relevant attacker information with the SlowMist security team on time under the premise of compliance, and buying valuable time for tracking attacker.” Huobi’s co-founder Du June choed this on social media as well, stating that they would do everything in their power to protect the crypto community. This will be a welcome sign to Chinese DeFi users who want to see trust being rebuilt among the local players.   Huobi has taken notice of the large sum stolen from the #PolyNetwork tonight. Our risk control and security teams are already tracking and identifying the addresses involved. We’ll do everything in our power to assist and protect the crypto community. #StrongerTogether— Du Jun (@DujunX) August 10, 2021  

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is on a mission to make humans immortal. Buterin, 27, proposes the idea that “aging is an engineering problem.” He is not alone in his combined interest in Bitcoin and biohacking. Famous biomedical aging researcher Aubrey de Grey, Xanadu architect and Agoric chief scientist Mark Miller, Bitcoin Cash billionaire Roger Ver and former chief technology officer of Coinbase and a16z general partner Balaji Srinivasan, are all fascinated by the pursuit of longevity.De Grey recently helped advise a decentralized collective funding longevity research. He says:“I have been gratified since the beginning of blockchain to see the enormous fanbase that I and the longevity movement have in there.”Miller, alongside his engineering hall-of-fame accomplishments, is a senior research fellow at the Foresight Institute, a not-for-profit founded in 1986 with the aim of “advancing technology for the long-term benefit of life.”“I’m very much involved in this new world of crypto commerce, often referred to as the blockchain sector,” he says. “I’m very hopeful about that as creating an ecosystem in which secure software will dominate because insecure software results in massive losses quickly, with no recourse.”Srinivasan’s Twitter bio describes his vision as: “Immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life. #Bitcoin.” Srinivasan states that “the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality” and “life extension is the most important thing we can invent.”Blockchain communities are clearly excited about longevity. But what does cryptocurrency have to do with life extension, and where might this future be headed?It turns out that the link between crypto and cryogenics stretches back to core contributors, and the Cypherpunks mailing list and its links to transhumanist groups, including the first person to transact Bitcoin with Satoshi, Hal Finney.  If we’re being more open minded about accepting new weird ideas, can I suggest anti-aging research? Aging is a humanitarian disaster that kills as many people as WW2 every two years and even before killing debilitates people and burdens social systems and families. Let’s end it.— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 30, 2020  Crypto people are funding longevity researchCrypto philanthropists are donating significant wealth to this area, which is typically difficult to garner mainstream support for. They may be the only people on the planet optimistic enough to fund tech that currently only exists in sci-fi novels.According to Buterin, longevity is a battle worth fighting for. Buterin donated $25 million in SHIB cryptocurrency tokens to the Future of Life Institute in June 2021 and has donated over $350,000 to the SENS Research Foundation to “reimagine ageing”.He discussed the topic in recent podcast interviews with the likes of Lex Fridman and Tim Ferriss saying that “life extension is definitely really important to me.”“I think I hope to see the concept of seeing your parents and grandparents die just slowly disappear from the public consciousness as a thing that happens over the course of half a century.”Buterin has emphasized his adherence to the moral philosophy of effective altruism. This value, known to transhumanists as the moral urgency of saving lives, is perhaps what motivated his donations of dog coins to both COVID-19 relief in India and life-extension.“Just even the process of aging turning into something that just becomes reversible and it being a regular thing for people to live one and a half, two centuries and then go even further from there,” Buterin states.Pinned in Buterin’s Twitter is an essay called “The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant” by professor Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute. It argues that allowing death from old age is unethical. If you view aging as a disease, the urgency to support the transhumanist project also makes sense.    “While we still lack effective and acceptable means for slowing the aging process, we can identify research directions that might lead to the development of such means in the foreseeable future,” states Bostrom. The key to freeing humanity from the dragon tyrant of aging, is funding. The new riches from crypto are key.Bitcoin.com founder Roger Ver has already signed up to be cryogenically frozen. “Rather than investing in cryptocurrency stuff, I want to focus on the extreme life extension technologies, because if you die, you can’t enjoy your life anymore,” Ver told Cointelegraph. He’s so confident in the tech, he even considered being cryogenically frozen as a legitimate alternative to going to prison in 2002.  Roger Ver once considered killing himself and going into cryonic suspension to avoid prison.Now he plans to spend the next phase of his career — and his fortune — making cryonics a reality. https://t.co/IZ1Ham7NEa— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) April 28, 2021  DAOs are also taking part in this life extension renewal. “There is a strong overlap of crypto people and longevity people,” Vincent Weisser, core team member at VitaDAO tells Cointelegraph. VitaDAO funds longevity research and exceeded its initial token raise funding target of $490,000 in June 2021.Now, they are working with popular blockchain crowd-funding platform Gitcoin to include a future funding category for longevity and life extension.Transhumanist philanthropy and funding at scale holds the potential to significantly impact longevity research and the transhumanist project.What is transhumanism?Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that promotes the use of technology to enhance the human condition. This includes information technology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence for radical extension of human lifespan, augmentation of physical and intellectual capacities, space colonization, and super-intelligent machines.The goal is not just life extension, but “more,” to the point of becoming superhuman. Although the transhumanist pursuit of post-humanity is often thought of as medical, the gambit of transhumanist technologies includes economic and social institutional design and cultural development.Like crypto communities, transhumanism is grounded in a vision of evolution and individual freedom of choice. In practice, this leads to a sense of personal responsibility for contributing to solutions, such as biohacking or making provisions for being cryogenically frozen and one day hopefully reanimated. The goal of the transhumanist project for society is one based on freedom in determining social arrangements, enabled by self-generating systems and spontaneous order. This description of perpetual, open systems is similar to blockchain.Not everyone thinks eternal…

It probably came as little surprise last year when crypto intelligence firm Chainalysis declared East Asia “the world’s largest cryptocurrency market,” accounting for 31% of all cryptocurrency transacted during the previous 12 months. The region has a broad base of retail users along with a solid foundation of crypto traders and institutions, and China alone was at the time mining around two-thirds of all the Bitcoin in the world. In July 2021, Fidelity Digital Assets surveyed 1,100 institutional investors in the United States (408), Europe (393) and Asia (299) between December 2, 2020 and April 2, 2021. The study reinforced this idea, with the firm reporting that digital asset adoption rates are substantially higher in Asia (71%) than in Europe (56%) and the United States (33%). In March 2021, a Statista consumer survey of 74 countries on cryptocurrency ownership and usage determined that the Asian nations of Vietnam and the Philippines are ranked second and third globally, respectively.But the past is not always a prelude to the future, and there is no guarantee that East Asia will remain the world’s center of gravity for crypto adoption. China’s attachment to crypto is tenuous at best, and Beijing’s rollout of its digital yuan could cause reverberations throughout the region. When asked about the crypto prospects of East Asia, Kim Grauer, head of research at Chainalysis, tells Magazine that the region has recently experienced “a major decline in cryptocurrency adoption compared with other regions globally,” further adding: “This drop-off is driven by a decline in Chinese activity beginning 6 months ago, which coincided with various crackdowns there including the mining ban and the halting of derivatives trading by major exchanges. We hypothesize that much of this activity has migrated to DeFi, but that hasn’t picked up enough that it makes up for the losses in the derivatives market yet.”China’s dominance in Bitcoin mining made it “a natural marketplace for crypto,” says Lennard Neo, head of research at Stack Funds. But as reported, many rigs are moving elsewhere, including to Canada, Kazakhstan, Russia and the United States. Asked if Asia is likely to maintain its crypto dominance, Eloisa Cadenas, CEO of Mexico-based financial services firm CryptoFintech, tells Magazine: “It is a difficult question to answer because, when we think of Asia, we automatically focus our attention on China which, as we know, has taken quite restrictive measures in relation to Bitcoin, crypto assets and of course, mining.”     China’s digital yuan is likely to have a big impact on the region, Cadenas says. Indeed, she anticipates that other Asian countries will try to replicate the digital yuan model, and “It is likely that there is also an intention to block or restrict the market for crypto assets in such a way that only the CBDCs of each country can proliferate.”If that happens, the mass center of crypto adoption could move elsewhere — to Latin America or Africa, opines Cadenas. These are two regions where, according to her, there is “a greater possibility of adoption, since the economic, social and political context is different.” Asia’s crypto crown could indeed be in play now, as Latin America and Africa aren’t the only contenders. Here’s who could potentially fill the void if and when Asia falters:North AmericaTraditional “reticence” on the matter of digital assets is the result of three principal factors, according to another report by Fidelity Digital Assets: price volatility, concerns around market manipulation, and the lack of fundamentals to gauge appropriate value. But U.S. respondents appear to be coming to grips with digital assets, despite these shortcomings.“The strength of concerns [in the U.S.] decreased notably vs. last year across most factors,” reported Fidelity Digital Assets. “Price volatility concern fell 13 points, concerns around market manipulation fell 6 points and lack of fundamentals fell 8 points.”Elsewhere, some of the United States’ top legacy banks — including State Street, BNY Mellon, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs — have been making forays into the crypto space.On the mining front, the U.S. was already the number-two mining nation before China’s May crackdown on crypto mining, albeit a distant second. Back in September 2019, China contributed 75.53% of the global Bitcoin hash rate. But more recently, China’s portion of the hash rate has ebbed to 46.04%, while the U.S. has broadened its share to 16.85% globally. Henri Arslanian, crypto leader and partner at advisory firm PwC, tells Magazine: “The United States is probably the one country that has a lot of momentum now. The regulations are becoming clearer, there are numerous large crypto companies and there is a lot of capital flowing into crypto both from institutional investors and retail.” Meanwhile, north of the U.S. border, Canada has been innovating on the crypto front. The Purpose Bitcoin ETF, North America’s first crypto-based exchange-traded fund, launched in February and has been a big hit by most accounts. It was followed in April by an Ether ETF, with strong volumes reported. Many believe that it’s only a matter of time before Canada, with its vast hydroelectric resources, becomes a major player in crypto mining, particularly as more miners seek out renewable energy sources to power their rigs.Latin AmericaThe Latin American region could become a crypto adoption hotspot, and not only because El Salvador declared Bitcoin legal tender in June when it issued its Bitcoin Law — a historic move in the view of some.Many regional economies are sustained by remittances — i.e., money sent home from workers abroad. They account for 23% of El Salvador’s gross domestic product, for instance. In Honduras, remittances also exceeded 20% of the gross national product in 2019, according to Pew Research Center. By comparison, Mexico saw only a 3% share of its GDP driven by remittances, but its gross numbers are high — $42.9 billion in 2020, according to the World Bank, which is a number behind only China and India. Crypto and blockchain technology potentially offer a more efficient way to transfer overseas payments.The trend in Latin America “is toward retailers and unbanked users because with cryptocurrencies you can create cheaper financial products…

This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations.  Much like last week, China’s minor COVID flareups dominated the headlines as the country seeks to avoid more serious lockdowns. Cryptocurrency managed to stay out of the news, which considering the regulation recently, can only be viewed as a good thing. Much love for the layer-twosOn August 3, IOSG Ventures and Chainlink hosted the Demo Day of the Layer-Two Hackathon in Shanghai. The event aimed to support developers working on scaling solutions for Ethereum and was backed by major projects such as Polygon, Near, The Graph, and Matter Labs. The winning team, which won bounties and mentorship, was a Synthetix-based asset management project. The winners called themselves ObjK and used querying technology from The Graph to pull data from Synthetix, achieving an automated cross-pool portfolio rebalance. A number of layer two protocols attended the hackathon. China’s development community maintains a very cohesive and collaborative attitude. (Source: IOSG Ventures) Layer-twos have always been popular in China, particularly as users feel less concerned about custodial risks and decentralization. Last week, OKEx officially launched OKExChain, which is an EVM-compatible layer-two network similar to what other large exchanges have released.This is of interest due to OKEx’s large userbase, which ranks second only to Binance when sorted by volume. Layer-two networks released by exchanges often lack some of the technical strengths of the dedicated layer-two networks but have a massive advantage in access to users, assets, projects and communities.OKExChain was evidence of this as it amassed over $2 billion in assets in the first week. About $350 million of that is on AMM CherrySwap, which appears to be quite liberally based on BSC’s PancakeSwap. That TVL would rank around the 30th biggest DeFi app on all networks, around the size of OlympusDAO on Ethereum and BakerySwap on BSC. KSwap, another AMM platform on OKExChain, racked up over $684 million in 24-hour trade volume on Thursday, which puts it second behind Uniswap V3 for the busiest dApp in the industry. Of course, the challenge will be on the applications and network to maintain these early numbers after the generous APYs have been reduced to more sustainable numbers.Tracking adoption elsewhereDespite declining DEX trading volume on both BSC and Huobi Eco Chain, BSC recently saw an explosion in activity around CryptoBlades, an NFT game that accounted for more than three times the transaction volume of the entire Huobi Eco Chain on Thursday.Ultimately, for chains like Huobi ECO or OKExChain to compete with other layer-two networks, they must find a way to recruit unique app developers to their ecosystems, rather than relying on ports or forks from other networks. As Axie Infinity has shown, any blockchain network can become loaded full of transactions and users if the right application is deployed on it. Source: Bscscan.com China’s own shadowy super-codersAccording to a Chainanalysis report, more than $2.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency had been sent from Chinese wallets to addresses associated with illicit activity in the two-year period between April of 2019 and this summer.The bulk of this is related to the infamous PlusToken ponzi scam that took place in late 2019. Since then, the number of addresses engaging in scams and illegal activity has shrunk dramatically, indicating that Chinese clampdowns are having some impact on consumer protections.Regulators seem to be taking satisfaction in their victories, as evidenced by an article from a People’s Bank of China working conference last week, where the digital currency crackdown was mentioned in a list of 2021 efforts to date.Tech giants eyeing up the NFT spaceCrypto companies aren’t the only ones feeling the wrath of Chinese regulators these days. Over the past week, hundreds of billions of dollars have been wiped from Chinese tech stocks including online education, delivery, and video gaming.Tencent, which invests in a number of major game publishers, suffered a more than 17% drop in stock price this month alone. Still, that didn’t stop it from announcing this week that it would release an NFT trading platform that roughly translates as “Magic Core”. Third parties can reportedly release NFT artwork on the platform, and it’s designed by just one of several teams within Tencent that are developing NFT related services. Due to China’s strict regulatory policies, most of the NFTs launched by the major internet companies are built on private chains or consortium chain technology. Alibaba also launched an NFT platform in late June. 

What if sperm were uploaded — or perhaps, erm, unloaded — onto the Bitcoin network, and those seeking to become pregnant could turn the emotional, complex task into something more approachable, where they choose the right swimmers on the blockchain according to attributes like education level, hobbies and physical attributes? Wei Escala is the founder and CEO of Eggschain, an Austin-based startup building a supply chain solution for the assisted reproduction industry. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is the process of implanting a fertilized egg into a woman’s ovaries in order to induce pregnancy. This requires sperm, which is sometimes contributed by a partner and sometimes by a donor.It’s part of a new breed of projects built on Stacks, a blockchain that shares a native connection with Bitcoin through proof-of-transfer, which “enables decentralized apps, smart contracts, and digital assets” to be settled and verified on Bitcoin blocks. Eggschain is one of these new decentralized apps, or DApps.But why do sperm donations and embryo implantations need to be registered on a blockchain, to begin with? The answers lie in scalability for a seamless sperm selection process across various jurisdictions, not to mention high-level patient-data protection, guarding against loss or misfiling of data, and making the system more transparent overall.If things go well, Eggshain’s blockchain-based matching solution may soon bear fruit around the world. It’s not here yet, but the revolution is coming.EggschainEggschain’s blockchain is secured by Bitcoin via Stacks, a Y Combinator-incubated startup “building a user-owned Internet secured by Bitcoin.” In practice, this means that Stacks operationalizes smart contracts and DApps, such as Eggschain, by synching up with Bitcoin on every 10-minute block to embed an indelible, permanent record. Dear community, the moment we have all been waiting for.We couldn’t be happier to announce our first cohort of 25 startups building on Bitcoin w/ Stacks.👉 https://t.co/2iZ1kOiGhy 👈— startups.btc (@StacksStartups) June 23, 2021 The Eggschain solution has not yet been released. “I don’t want to commit to a timeline,” Escala says, in part because, “We are among the first developers building on the Stacks blockchain.” This seems to be a reasonable answer, as it is common for blockchain projects to hit delays — whether caused by technical, legal or budgetary challenges.While lower transaction fees influenced the choice to build on a Bitcoin sidechain instead of other chains like Ethereum, Bitcoin’s reputation as an incorruptible ledger was decisive. Bitcoin “will be around for hundreds or thousands or millions of years,” Escala says, as if stating a basic scientific fact. While speaking of millions of years can be written off as overzealous marketing, choosing a chain to track reproduction means backing the one most likely to survive far into the future.“Bitcoin is the oldest blockchain in the world and very established, and the gas fees are low compared to some of the other leading blockchains by a huge magnitude.”Escala explains that “When your sperm is donated, that is a transaction that gets hashed onto the blockchain,” complete with an indelible time stamp. Further transactions take place “when the sperm is implanted into a woman or into an egg.” The time between egg fertilization and implantation can stretch for years, and sperm has been kept frozen for as long as 22 years and still been used successfully.In practice, this means that a donor will be able to see how many times their sperm has been used, giving them a rough idea of how many children they might have and in what general areas. This may even serve to gamify the sperm donation experience, even if the donor is not willing to ever be contacted by their offspring.     Though Bitcoin itself is a transparent blockchain that allows transactions to be traced back, Escala explains that Eggschain, as it functions with Stacks, cannot be “backtracked” in such a way that the “family tree” can be tracked up and down. This is by design, as “Just because someone received your donated sperm, it doesn’t give them the authority to read through your life — it is almost an invasion of your privacy,” according to Escala.“Patient identifiable information cannot be on the blockchain.”Freezing desireIn India and much of Africa, it is normal for women to have their first baby by the age of 20. At 25, the United States represents the lowest mean age in the Western world, with the average first-time mother in countries like Germany, Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia flirting with or even surpassing 30 — the age at which fertility begins to decline.Though access to contraceptives and changed values contribute to the higher ages in the West, careers and finances often play a role. The pressure to delay pregnancy is all the more increased with the modern reality that career growth often requires frequent moving between offices and countries — though perhaps the work-from-home era will bring change. Heath issues like cancer, which is rising worldwide, is another driver for the treatment, as woman seek to preserve their eggs before they are potentially damaged through chemotherapy treatment. All things considered, it is easy to see why many women are choosing to freeze their eggs — just in case they decline in quality or run out before they want to use them.  Eqq quality begins to reduce at 30 and drops fast from 35. Source: SheCares  When her best friend chose to freeze her eggs in 2018, Escala “was a witness every step of the way — I felt like I almost lived through the entire experience.” In addition to a friend, however, she is a businesswoman, and she sensed an opportunity to improve the IVF process.In June 2018, Escala founded Eggschain.Breeding processProvided there is no preselected partner, the process of choosing sperm — or more accurately, a sperm donor — is an intimate and difficult one. For one, donors need to be checked at “an established lab for STDs, HIV and any hereditary diseases,” with their sperm held in quarantine for often up to six months.Depending on the sperm bank and the laws of the donor’s country, there is…