Crypto

John Paller is training a new generation of blockchain workers and giving them the tools to live free from the chains of full-time employment. After a chance conversation with a “Russian dude” wearing a weird T-shirt at a 2014 conference — Vitalik Buterin’s father, Dmitry — John Paller’s life was transformed by having a front-row seat for the birth of Ethereum. He went on to create the largest Ethereum hackathon and founded an initiative to help at-risk youth find job opportunities in the burgeoning crypto industry.According to Paller, the majority of workers in the United States will be independent and not tied to a particular employer within just a few years from now. But with so many of the necessities of life provided by employers rather than the government, he has set up a new token-based employment co-op to provide independent contractors with benefits, such as medical insurance and retirement plans.Purple state EthereumGrowing up in the predominantly Mormon state of Utah, which he describes as “a rather dogmatic society,” Paller remembers that as a child, he “always asked too many questions.” Not feeling like he fit in, he moved east — over the Rocky Mountains — to Denver, Colorado a few years after graduating from Southern Utah University with a business administration degree in accounting and finance in 1997.    Denver, according to Paller, is “more pragmatic politically — we don’t get caught up in political dogma as much as other states seem to do.” This, he surmises, is due to a mixture of geographical and cultural influences, with a libertarian wild west culture from Wyoming in the north merging with a more “liberal, progressive” approach from the south in New Mexico and west from California.“I think that Ethereum as a concept really relates well to this sort of egalitarian approach — building next-generation public infrastructure using smart contracts. We have a good tech scene here in Colorado.”He serves as the executive steward of ETHDenver, which started with monthly meetups of “a couple dozen people” before growing into the hundreds suddenly in 2017. This rapid growth inspired him to organize a hackathon in February 2018, a project for which he called up various industry players, such as Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Erik Voorhees, and dozens of other top projects and luminaries.“We were hoping for 401 people, and the reason for that was because ETH Waterloo in the fall of 2017 had 400 people, and we wanted to be the biggest one ever,” he says.The first event, which Paller describes as “part Burning Man, part SXSW, part DevCon, and part Hack the North,” was a huge success with 1,500 participants. With four years running so far, the event has become a home turf of the Ethereum movement. “This year, we did a fully virtual event, and we hosted over 31,000 people from 94 countries,” Paller explains proudly, adding that ETHDenver is transitioning into a true community-owned ecosystem called SporkDAO with a virtual launch party and NFT auction on June 26.Worker woesPaller’s background is in human resources and finance, and in 2002, he co-founded a staffing company called PeoplePartners to focus on recruiting in the financial sector. After some success, the company managed to buy and merge with another, Lakeshore, where Paller continued to serve as CEO, while the new firm focused on HR technologies in what he refers to as the “Uber-for economy” — where the firm was trying to create an app that would help companies find talent as quickly as Uber finds rides.Much of Paller’s vision for his HR firm revolved around a vague desire to help “democratize employment,” referring to what he saw as a lopsided social contract where employers have a huge amount of power over employees within U.S. society. Questions started to gnaw at him — Why is employment so disproportionate in power and value distribution? Why is healthcare in the United States tied to employment?It was while reading more broadly into economics and game theory, in hopes of answering these questions, that Paller came across Bitcoin from a friend working at a technology startup who told him it was the future of money. “I read the white paper, and I kind of didn’t get it, but I bought some,” he recalls.My name is Buterin, Dmitry ButerinBuying some Bitcoin on a whim was, however, not Paller’s only harbinger of blockchain destiny. While attending a small entrepreneurship conference in California in early 2014, he met Dmitry Buterin. “There was only probably like 30 people there, so it was a very intimate affair, and he was the interesting, you know, Russian dude with the weird T-shirts,” he says. As fathers, they connected over their families and because “politically speaking, we’re both libertarians.”Due to this chance connection, Paller had a direct line to Vitalik’s father, who made “social media posts on the Ethereum white paper and the ICO.” This meant that he had exposure to the project from an early stage and, in early 2016, asked Dmitry to connect him with his son, Vitalik, who “was kind enough to spend several hours with me talking about my ideas for use cases. In hindsight, he was very gracious because my use case ideas were terrible — I didn’t understand decentralization at all,” he recounts, adding that his mind was still stuck in the old world of centralized corporate structures.He eventually did have “the lights go on,” at which point he decided to do a full pivot in life. “It was almost kind of like my version of a midlife crisis,” he explains regarding his sudden decision to sell his business, effectively turning his back on a successful career.    Apprentio and the next generationIn 2018, Paller co-created Apprentio in collaboration with a local boys and girls club in hopes of providing at-risk youth with opportunities in the emerging blockchain ecosystem. Paller believes that the commonly prescribed path of high school/college/degree/job is not for everyone, especially considering that a four-year college degree in the U.S. can easily result in $100,000 of debt,…

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 Hawkish Fed comments push Bitcoin price and stocks lower againThe crypto markets had started the week with a spring in their step.Last Sunday, Elon Musk revealed that Tesla would be prepared to accept Bitcoin as a payment method again — once it could be proved that 50% of the energy used by miners comes from clean, renewable sources.Traders reacted positively to the tweet, and there were green candles aplenty. Upbeat sentiment helped drive Bitcoin above $40,000 for the first time in over a fortnight. Unfortunately, though, it seems prices above this level were unsustainable.A new wave of selling reared its ugly head days later after Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell suggested that interest rates may rise in 2023 — a year earlier than planned. Other officials went further, indicating the first increase could happen in late 2022.Bitcoin wasn’t alone in suffering the sell-off. Stocks and gold also fell, eating away at the narrative that BTC is an uncorrelated asset.With prices falling as low as $35,000, there are now fears that a “death cross” may be forming for Bitcoin. Some traders are forecasting that $32,500 could be the next stop before BTC revisits the swing low at $30,000. World Bank refuses El Salvador’s request for help on BTC transitionAs determined as El Salvador’s president may be to introduce Bitcoin as legal tender, a series of unfortunate events this week showed that it’s harder than it looks.The World Bank has refused to assist the country in its transition, citing “the environmental and transparency shortcomings” associated with the digital asset.Although prominent Bitcoiners weren’t pleased with the World Bank’s refusal, it’s fair to say that they weren’t surprised either.One particularly sarcastic contribution came from Blockstream’s chief strategy officer Samson Mow, who tweeted: “BREAKING: WORLD BANK CANNOT HELP EL SALVADOR MAKE WORLD BANK OBSOLETE.” Miaow.Elsewhere, an El Salvadorean minister denied reports that the country was examining the possibility of using Bitcoin for salary payments, warning such talk was “too premature.”Economists have also been continuing to issue warnings about the potential ramifications of El Salvador’s move. Steve Hanke pulled no punches when he said going through with this law has the potential to “completely collapse” the country’s already fragile economy.Striking a cheery note, he said the politicians who backed President Nayib Bukele’s Bitcoin Law were “stupid,” adding: “You’re not going to pay for your taxi ride with a Bitcoin. It’s ridiculous. […] 70% of the people in El Salvador don’t even have bank accounts.”   Mark Cuban calls for stablecoin regulation in wake of Iron Finance “bank run” Billionaire crypto enthusiast Mark Cuban has called for stablecoins to be regulated after losing money in a dramatic “rug pull.”Iron Finance fell victim to a “historical bank run” that detailed the price of the IRON stablecoin. Consequently, the value of its native token TITAN crashed by almost 100% over two days — from all-time highs of $64.04 to a mere fraction of one cent.In an email sent to Bloomberg, Cuban wrote: “Even though I got rugged on this, it’s really on me for being lazy. The thing about DeFi plays like this is that it’s all about revenue and math and I was too lazy to do the math to determine what the key metrics were.”Crypto Twitter, already reeling from the U-turn performed by Elon Musk, wasn’t a fan of Cuban’s remarks.Kraken’s CEO Jesse Powell said a lack of regulation wasn’t the problem, tweeting: “Not doing your own research and YOLOing in to a terrible investment because your time was worth more than your money is your problem.” The death of NFTs? CNN, Fox, Mila Kunis (and the U.S. Space Force) don’t think soEarlier this month, some critics were sounding the death knell for nonfungible tokens after a Protos report suggested that sales had slumped by 90% since the peak in early May. However, things may not be as dire as they first appear.First off, let’s not forget that Sotheby’s auctioned off a rare CryptoPunk for $11.8 million earlier this month… setting a new world record in the process. Also, it’s worth noting that there’s no shortage of new NFT announcements.Here’s just a few that have emerged in recent days. CNN said that it’s planning to tokenize historic moments from the news. That came as Fox, another U.S. media behemoth, revealed it’s launching a $100 million fund for NFT content creation. Sotheby’s confirmed that it is going to auction off the source code for the World Wide Web in the form of a digital collectible. And not to be outdone, A-lister Mila Kunis is wading into the “very masculine” crypto space by launching her very own NFT project.Even the much-ridiculed U.S. Space Force thinks that NFTs are out of this world. Its tokens are literally going to the moon — paying tribute to Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the lunar surface.Given how all of these projects have the chance to capture the public’s imagination, it may be unwise to characterize NFTs as a passing fad that’s fading away. ‘I have nothing’: Imprisoned John McAfee claims his crypto fortune is goneStill behind bars in Spain as he battles extradition to the U.S., antivirus software pioneer John McAfee has told his one million Twitter followers that he doesn’t have hidden crypto.He wrote: “I wish I did but it has dissolved through the many hands of Team McAfee (your belief is not required), and my remaining assets are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association.”And, striking a defiant note, he added: “I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing.”A Spanish court is set to make a decision on whether to approve McAfee’s extradition within days. The businessman is accused of tax evasion and failing to declare income from paid crypto promotions, consultancy work, and gains from his investments.During a…

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 Bill to make Bitcoin legal tender passes in El SalvadorEl Salvador has officially become the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.A law outlining the proposals, introduced by President Nayib Bukele, passed with a “supermajority,” attracting 62 out of 84 votes.Under the so-called Bitcoin Law, merchants must accept Bitcoin as well as U.S. dollars — and they’ll be expected to present prices for goods and services in both currencies. The government is going to be releasing an official crypto wallet for consumers to use, but they can rely on private providers if they prefer.Permanent residency is going to be available for those who invest 3 BTC in the country, and now, a 90-day implementation period has begun.As the 90-day implementation period begins, the president has asked a state-owned geothermal electric company to examine plans “to offer facilities for Bitcoin mining with very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable, zero-emissions energy” — from its own volcanoes.Unsurprisingly, reaction from regulators hasn’t been overwhelmingly positive. One executive at the Bank for International Settlements has called El Salvador’s move an “interesting experiment” — but warned that BTC hasn’t passed the test of being a means of payment. The International Monetary Fund has also warned the decision could have significant legal and financial ramifications. New report: El Salvador Bitcoin pump failed to attract smart money, for nowEl Salvador’s plans were first announced during a keynote speech at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami, but the markets appeared to pay little notice.Things changed on Wednesday — the day Congress passed the legislation. Bitcoin logged its best daily performance since Feb. 8, the day Tesla announced that it had added $1.5 billion worth of BTC to its balance sheet.Although there are reasons to celebrate, Stack Funds’ head of research Lennard Neo has warned there was little in the way of bullish reactions from so-called “smart” investors.Bringing the bulls back down to Earth, he warned: “We should not expect a significant impact on Bitcoin for a country with a GDP per capita less than 7% that of the U.S., with its economy suffering the worst crash in decades last year.”Bitcoin’s seven-day high stands at $38,334.33. The strong move helped save the bulls during Friday’s options expiry, because any level below $34,000 would have wiped 98% of call options. MicroStrategy gets $1.6 billion in orders in junk bond offeringMicroStrategy has attracted $1.6 billion worth of orders in a recent junk bond offering — four times more than what the business intelligence firm initially sought.Junk bonds are debt offerings by companies without investment-grade credit ratings and typically offer investors higher returns while carrying higher risk.It comes days after the publicly listed company, which owns 92,079 BTC with a current market value of $3.2 billion, announced plans to spin off its crypto holdings into a new subsidiary called MacroStrategy LLC.Although this has been interpreted as bullish news, alarm bells started sounding after the junk bond offering was announced — the latest in a series of debt raises to buy more Bitcoin. MSTR stock fell after the news.MicroStrategy closed the week at $516.44, some way off the year-to-date high of $1,315 that was seen in February.In a recent article, analyst Juan de la Hoz said MicroStrategy would be at risk of bankruptcy if Bitcoin prices fell, adding: “MicroStrategy is a rare high-risk low-reward investment opportunity, and a strong sell.” Bitcoin 2021 attendees’ positive COVID-19 tests are going viralSome of those who attended Bitcoin 2021 in Miami have tested positive for COVID-19, leading to a wave of negative media coverage and speculation that it may have been a “superspreader event.”Thousands of people went to the two-day event, which did not require proof of vaccination or enforce the wearing of face masks. There was little in the way of social distancing either as people packed into crowded auditoriums.One influencer on Crypto Twitter, Mr. Whale, estimated that there were more than 50,000 visitors at the event. He noted that this was the first major in-person conference since the pandemic began, and said dozens of participants have tested positive. Vitalik Buterin has made $4.3 million from his $25,000 investment in Dogecoin… so farEthereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed that he invested $25,000 into DOGE in 2016… and has made a pretty penny as a result.His first concern was how he would tell his mother — not least because “the only interesting thing about this coin is a logo of a dog somewhere.”Buterin told Lex Fridman’s podcast that he was caught off-guard by the speculative frenzy that resulted from Elon Musk’s fascination with the joke cryptocurrency.He recalled being in lockdown in Singapore when the price of DOGE shot up 775% from $0.008 to $0.07 over the course of a single day, thinking: “Oh my god, my DOGE is worth, like, a lot!”Buterin added: “I sold half of the DOGE, and I got $4.3 million, donated the profits to GiveDirectly, and a few hours after I did this, the price dropped back from around $0.07 to $0.04.”Assuming he held on to the remaining 50% of his DOGE stash, he would now be sitting on tens of millions of dollars in paper profits. Winners and Losers At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at $35,211.65, Ether at $2,318.90 and XRP at $0.81. The total market cap is at $1,493,755,186,500.Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the only two altcoin gainers of the week are Amp and Chiliz. The top three altcoin losers of the week are Internet Computer, THORChain and Synthetix.For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.   Most Memorable Quotations “Regulatory clarity enables companies like BlockFi to continue innovating. It enables consumers and investors to participate in this sector with the utmost confidence.”Zac Prince, BlockFi CEO “The ~$38,000 area for BTC is the one to watch right…

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and we throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes! This week, our 6 Questions go to Wes Levitt, head of strategy at Theta Labs.At Theta Labs, Wes works on corporate strategy, marketing and press relations, and analytics. He has been a speaker on blockchain topics at conferences including the New York Media Festival, Blockchain Connect and NAB Streaming Summit, among others. Prior to joining Theta Labs, Wes spent eight years in investment roles at Mosser Capital, a real estate private equity firm; and Redwood Trust, a mortgage real estate investment trust focused on securitized debt. Wes is a CFA charterholder and holds a BS in economics from the University of Oregon and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. 1 — If the world is getting a new currency, will it be led by central bank digital currencies, a permissionless blockchain like Bitcoin or a permissioned chain such as Diem?If it’s only one, I would say CBDCs are more likely since governments are unlikely to give up the power of issuing their own currencies. But Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can exist alongside CBDCs and serve a different purpose. Even if Bitcoin never replaces the major fiat currencies (or their CBDC successors), it is hugely valuable by providing an alternative to them. The mere existence of Bitcoin, with its fixed supply and pseudonymous transactions, should force central banks to think twice about inflating their currency values away or forcing widespread surveillance on consumers.It’s true that we aren’t seeing that yet with rampant money creation in the U.S. dollar, euro, Japanese yen, etc. in the past year — but that’s partly a function of Bitcoin and other crypto markets just being too small to be a workable alternative yet. But that’s changing quickly — you are seeing companies like MicroStrategy, Tesla and Meitu add Bitcoin to their corporate treasury, which becomes more and more feasible as Bitcoin’s market cap grows. Eventually, Bitcoin should grow large enough to be investable even at the scale of central banks, as an alternative or supplement to their gold holdings. 2 — Does it matter if we ever figure out who Satoshi really is, or was? Why, or why not?I do think it matters, but that it’s best for Bitcoin if we never find out who Satoshi is/was. A real person will have a backstory, profession, country of origin, etc., which could only lead to division and bias in the crypto community. It’s better that Satoshi remain more of a legendary figure that people can interpret as they choose to. I think Satoshi himself realized this, and it’s why he chose to remain anonymous. 3 — What’s the silliest conspiracy theory out there… and which one makes you pause for a moment?For silliest, I’ll go with a tie between QAnon and “Bill Gates putting tracking chips in the COVID vaccines.” Both are so stupid that they’ve become useful as a signaling device. If someone believes in one of those things, I can safely ignore anything else they say and save myself the time.The one conspiracy theory I 100% believe is that David Stern regularly rigged the number-one pick in the NBA draft. Ewing to the Knicks in ’85, New Orleans getting Anthony Davis after Stern traded Chris Paul away, Lebron and Rose go to their hometown teams, the Cavs get three number-one picks in four years after Lebron leaves… way too many examples to have happened by accident! 4 — Other than the present day, in what time and in what country would you like to have lived?I would have enjoyed mid-70s England, mostly for the music. You had the punk scene emerging with the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Damned, and many others. Iron Maiden and Motorhead are just getting started along with the whole NWOBHM [new wave of British heavy metal] scene. Plus, if you stick around until the late 70s/early 80s, you’ve got XTC and Depeche Mode and the Police just around the corner. One of the best five or so years in music you can find for a single country. 5 — Have you ever bought a nonfungible token? What was it? And if not, what do you think will be your first?My first-ever NFT was purchased for just the price of some ETH for gas — I created it myself with Enjin back in 2018. This limited edition “Wes-branded” sword didn’t make it into any crypto games, sadly, but it was obviously a very cool concept, even if it was still a few years before the mainstream use of NFTs. The entertainment space is getting the most attention for NFTs right now, but the idea of taking legendary items with me between RPGs is still the use case that resonates with me the most. I’m not much of an art collector myself, but I could absolutely see myself ponying up for rare items that are interoperable between games — now, I can justify that this NFT purchase is an investment I could use across many different games in the future. 6 — What’s the unlikeliest-to-happen thing on your bucket list?I’d like to live long enough to see humanity establish settlements on the Moon or Mars or other potentially habitable moons like Europa, and to travel there myself once that becomes feasible at a commercial level (i.e., without having to go through astronaut training just to go!) This still feels like too far away for my lifetime — we are 52 years post-Moon landing and barely any closer to permanent settlement. But the pace of technological discovery is always increasing, so I hold out hope that it will be in my plans for 2050 or so! Stay positive, and keep building! Crypto goes through breakneck cycles of euphoria and despair — you have to take a step back and look at the big picture sometimes to keep your head on straight…

The pandemic has changed society forever — and in many cases, not for the better. But when historians look back in a few decades, will they see this period as a turning point in the transition from an economy dominated by corporations to a new crowdsourced model where participants are incentivized with tokens to grow a project and share in the profits?It may sound far-fetched given that mega-corporations dominate the present reality, but imagine a world in which Uber drivers and their passengers own and operate a decentralized rideshare network. Or one where Airbnb property owners, guests and even the cleaning staff share in the success of the cooperative business.“What has happened over the last 10 to 12 months would have probably taken 10 to 12 years had it not been for the pandemic,” explains Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures. A VC fund, Framework Ventures has raised $115 million for two investment funds and is a major DeFi player, getting in early on Chainlink, Synthetix and Yearn.finance.Anderson says the concept of a decentralized collective effort has become normalized by working from home.“That kind of concept of working for a company where you show up every day, and there’s an office […] that’s kind of been broken down,” he says. “It forces people to have questions as to do we need that going forward?”The “Uber as a Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO)” concept has been around since at least 2016 when blockchain project Arcade City started talking it up in the wake of a successful fundraise for the ill-fated The DAO. However, it’s now finally beginning to capture the zeitgeist. This month alone, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman wrote a long discussion on the topic called “The Future of Work,” and Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal touched on it in his “There’s a New Vision for Crypto” piece. Meanwhile, tech billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted at the end of May that DAOs taking on corporations was the “ultimate combination of capitalism and progressivism.” The future of corporations could be very different as DAOs take on legacy businesses. It’s the ultimate combination of capitalism and progressivism. Entrepreneurs that enable DAOs can make $. If the community excels at governance, everyone shares in the upside. Trustless can pay— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) May 31, 2021 The DeFi sector has been at the bleeding edge of the rise of DAOs and Digital Organizations (DOs), which are similar but are less governed by code and aren’t autonomous. They enabled a cooperative model and collective ownership of protocols, becoming popular in DeFi as a form of governance and as a way to crowdsource development. Yield farming may have begun life with a poor reputation as guerilla marketing-meets-Ponzinomics, but it quickly became clear it was a great way to reward the most active participants in a community with tokens and often a share of the revenue. In turn, this incentivizes the best participants to help grow the protocol, bringing ever greater numbers into the project.“That ownership element is what has the power,” explains Anderson. “And the best communities are the ones where you’ve got the earliest adopters, brought in from the get-go, and they become your biggest supporters, they become customer support, they become business development.”Thinking biggerIf it works in DeFi, there’s no reason it can’t work in other industries and economies. Any marketplace could potentially benefit, and that doesn’t mean simply tokenized versions of eBay or Uber. Anderson uses the example of a clothing production line in which the sourcing of materials, the creation of clothing, distribution and sales could all be incentivized and organized through this new model.“I think what we’ve seen over the last few years is a peak of corporations. And what I think we now have with the formation of DAOs is almost as a replacement for a limited liability corporation or a corporation in general,” he says. “It’s a replacement of incentivization layers, like equity and stock options, with tokens.”“It’s mostly DeFi, but expanding beyond that, I think you can start to take this model into any marketplace. I think it ultimately becomes a really unique way of incentivizing participation.”  The model has plenty of advantages: being decentralized means that anyone, anywhere in the world who has an idea for building on top of the protocol — or who figures out a better way to do something — can jump in and reap the rewards. The process of iteration and evolution speeds up, too. No longer must you wait for the grinding gears of a corporation to grudgingly accept a new way of doing things. It simply happens via an efficient competition that produces the best outcome for a collective.“Ultimately, that makes things more efficient and scalable, but also more fair and open,” Anderson explains, adding that it enables anyone, anywhere, to compete with tech entrepreneurs in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, who previously had the advantage of being in close proximity to capital. “Breaking down those walls is really exciting, for the future of the world, but also the future of work.”“Community ownership, I think, is a fundamental difference and a fundamental innovation,” he says. “And that’s why I love tokens. It is a completely new design space; we’re just scratching the surface as to how we can use these in different and novel ways.”More equitable than equityIn a way, DAOs and DOs are a modern spin on older concepts around partnerships, co-ops and collaborations, made a thousand times more efficient by technology. And while our mental models for this sort of ownership currently look a lot like handing out equity, Anderson expects that to change as the use of tokens grows and evolves.According to Andersen, having a clear vision of the future — or a strong thesis about how things may evolve in the future — is one of the things that separates Framework Ventures from many other investors in the space. Unlike the short-term, price-oriented thinking that predominates in crypto, Anderson and co-founder Vance Spencer believe in looking at where digital finance is headed over a timeframe…

When the United States first began going after crypto companies for violating its economic sanctions rules, it didn’t exactly start with a bang.In December, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced a settlement with crypto wallet provider BitGo after the Palo Alto firm failed to prevent persons apparently located in the Crimea region, Iran, Sudan, Cuba and Syria “from using its non-custodial secure digital wallet management service.” The penalty for the “183 apparent violations” of U.S. sanctions? An underwhelming $98,830. This was “the first published OFAC enforcement action against a business in the blockchain industry,” according to law firm Steptoe, though six weeks later, the OFAC reached a similar settlement with BitPay, a payment processing firm, for 2,102 “apparent violations of multiple sanctions programs,” in which BitPay reportedly allowed persons in the same countries as in the BitGo case — but with the addition of North Korea — “to transact with merchants in the United States and elsewhere using digital currency on BitPay’s platform even though BitPay had location information, including Internet Protocol addresses and other location data, about those persons prior to effecting the transactions.” BitPay agreed to pay $507,375 to resolve its potential civil liability. But future violators may not be treated so leniently. It’s worth mentioning that economic sanctions are typically applied “against countries and groups of individuals, such as terrorists and narcotics traffickers,” according to the United States Treasury, typically “using the blocking of assets and trade restrictions to accomplish foreign policy and national security goals.”More enforcement actions are coming“The crypto industry should absolutely expect more enforcement actions from OFAC, and it can expect that there will be much larger penalties as well,” David Carlisle, director of policy and regulatory affairs at Elliptic, tells Magazine. “OFAC’s first two enforcement actions in this space were fairly simple cases, where the underlying violations were not egregious, and the fines were small. But the next cases could be different,” he says, adding:“There will undoubtedly be other cases out there that involve much more serious and egregious violations — and we can expect that OFAC will issue fines against crypto businesses that are much larger than those we’ve seen thus far.” Expect more enforcement actions like those targeting BitPay and BitGo, Doug McCalmont, founder of BlocAlt Consulting LLC, tells Magazine, as well as “the expansion of targeted individuals, such as coders linked to the technology.”Sanctions regimes have been applied extensively in recent years by the United States, as well as the European Union and United Nations, often targeting “rogue” nation-states, such as North Korea and Iran. One of the best-known early crypto cases involved Virgil Griffith, a former hacker, who was arrested in April 2019 after he spoke at a blockchain and cryptocurrency conference in North Korea, in violation of sanctions against that outcast nation, the U.S. charged.“Sanctions violations are a real problem,” says David Jevans, CEO of CipherTrace, whose crypto forensics firm recently found that more than 72,000 unique Iranian IP addresses are linked to more than 4.5 million unique Bitcoin addresses, “suggesting that sanction violations are likely rampant and mostly undetected by virtual asset service providers,” he tells Magazine.  It’s not only U.S. authorities who are concerned about “bad actors” using the nascent blockchain technology to dodge economic sanctions. Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, tells Magazine that authorities in Europe “are becoming more active and more focused. The crypto space is under increasing scrutiny, and I do think this trend will remain and accelerate.”Nor is OFAC’s recent crypto focus surprising, according to Robert A. Schwinger, partner in the commercial litigation group at Norton Rose Fulbright. The United States government has no choice but to rein in this new, cryptocurrency asset class because “not to do so would expose it to the risk that its sanctions regime could be rendered toothless by new financial technology. Players in the cryptocurrency space who ignore the restrictions imposed by U.S. international sanctions are being put on notice that they do so at their peril,” he wrote on Law.com. Is DeFi problematic?As crypto adoption grows, it seems only inevitable that its decentralized finance (DeFi) networks will push up against more nation-state prerogatives, including economic sanctions. But isn’t there something inherently problematic about cracking down on a decentralized exchange (DEX)? Does the exchange even have a headquarters address? Is anyone even home at home? And should it even answer to someone if it’s truly decentralized?Enforcing regulations in a decentralized world presents certain challenges, Timothy Massad, former chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a senior fellow at Harvard University Kennedy School, tells Magazine, but U.S. regulators are “trying to figure it out.” Might the government eventually put more pressure on developers at DeFi firms, including decentralized exchanges? “Yes, they can build into the code some proper procedures… but it’s a lot easier to go after centralized intermediaries,” says Massad.“I think we’ll see DeFi developers come under real pressure to ensure their platforms can’t be abused for sanctions evasion — for example, by enforcing address blacklisting,” says Carlisle, adding, “There’s a lot of talk lately about [traditional] financial institutions taking interest in DeFi, but it’s hard to imagine major institutions participating in DeFi unless they’re confident it can be compatible with sanctions requirements.” DeFi projects are “decentralized, disintermediated and borderless — everything our legal and regulatory frameworks are not,” Ferreira informs Magazine. The latter are built around centralized, intermediated and jurisdiction-based architecture. “Therefore, this is a challenge and a learning curve for regulators, and not all proposed solutions will be optimal,” Ferreira adds.  The European Union is aware of the DeFi compliance challenge. Its recent Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulatory proposal “will force DEXs to have legal entities in order to transact with EU citizens, effectively banning fully decentralized exchanges,” Jevans tells Magazine. He adds, “Many so-called DEXs have very centralized governance, venture capital investors and physical headquarters, causing the FATF to categorize them as VASPs.” Meeting compliance demands for digital service firms like BitPay and BitGo will require some effort. “Trying…

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 “Largest Bitcoin event in history” kicks off in MiamiSun, sea and satoshis were on the agenda as the biggest Bitcoin event in history kicked off in Florida.Organizers were expecting a huge turnout for the sold-out event, with some predicting there would be more than 50,000 attendees.Day one saw MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor reveal more about his experience in the crypto space so far. He said: “I realized that I first bought Bitcoin one year ago yesterday, and so this is the end of my rookie year.”Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey also declared that “Bitcoin changes absolutely everything.” He told the conference: “We don’t need the financial institutions that we have today” — and for money to be created for the world, it has to be developed internationally.One particularly eye-opening on-stage discussion came from Brian Brooks, a former regulator turned CEO of Binance.US. He said: “If you’ve never worked in a big bank, you have no idea how bad the problem is.” It’s Mati Greenspan versus the Maxis at “Shitshow” 2021For many, Bitcoin 2021 in Miami is the first physical event for many since the coronavirus pandemic began, enabling celebrities, cryptographers and CEOs to rub shoulders. Alas, you can’t please all the people, all the time.Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan had tweeted an innocuous comment about how Bitcoin 2021 was set to be the “Biggest crypto conference ever!”But he was quickly set straight by the likes of Bitcoin Magazine editor Pete Rizzo, who said: “It’s a Bitcoin conference, about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the subject and hence why it’s used as an adjective.”To be fair, organizers were crystal clear that it is a Bitcoin-only event, meaning no altcoins are allowed.But as DeFi Pulse’s founder Scott Lewis pondered…is it really possible to go for two days without talking about Ethereum?  “Discounted” Bitcoin more likely to hit $100,000 than $20,000 in 2021, says Bloomberg analystAlthough the party is in full swing in Florida, the fact that Bitcoin has been struggling to break $40,000 will undoubtedly have put a dampener on proceedings.That said, Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mike McGlone says there are still plenty of reasons to be bullish.In his latest Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index report, he said BTC is “stronger, greener and less extended” than during the height of the rally in April.He also maintained that Bitcoin’s bull market appears to be intact, with a $100,000 price target more likely than a retrace to $20,000.Alas, not everyone agrees with McGlone’s prognosis following the worst May for Bitcoin’s price in 10 years, with JPMorgan strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou writing in a research note that weakened institutional demand could drag BTC below $30,000. Feast or famine on Dogecoin as Coinbase pump triggers whales’ returnDogecoin — likened by some to “digital plastic” this week — has enjoyed quite a surge of late. The joke cryptocurrency’s price climbed 40% in a single day, driven by Coinbase announcing it would open its door to DOGE deposits on June 1.DOGE’s surge shook out more than $16 million worth of bearish leverage in a single hour, with the altcoin almost returning to a pre-crash high.One analyst, @HsakaTrades, declared that a “bored market” was gravitating to DOGE and rotating out of other altcoins. NFT sales down 90% since market peakWe’ve all become painfully familiar with the endless declarations surrounding the death of Bitcoin. Now, with the sale of nonfungible tokens sinking 90% since they peaked in early May, some are sounding the death knell for NFTs.After $102 million worth of NFTs were sold in a single day on May 3, just $19 million worth were sold in the past week. Over $170 million worth of NFTs were sold in the seven-day window on either side of the market top, equating to a near 90% decline since then.The number of NFT wallets showing any signs of activity on a daily basis is also down 70% since early May, after falling from 12,000 to 3,900. NFT sales and wallet movements were down across the entire range of token categories, spanning gaming, decentralized finance, collectibles, art, utility, metaverses and sports. Winners and Losers At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at $37,733.41, Ether at $2,787.12 and XRP at $0.99. The total market cap is at $1,710,804,430,870.Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Theta Fuel, Curve DAO Token and Siacoin. The top three altcoin losers of the week are UNUS SED LEO, Decred and Nano.For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.   Most Memorable Quotations “Who forgot to invite Elon to the #Bitcoin conference?”David Gokhshtein, Gokhshtein Media founder “Bitcoin is more likely to resume appreciating toward $100,000 resistance rather than sustaining below $20,000.”Bloomberg Intelligence “Right now, if you buy and sell gold, you get it taxed, they can do that. If you make a profit in Bitcoin, you read stories about people being taxed on it. You can’t tax money, you don’t tax it.”Ron Paul, former presidential candidate “Digital currencies are not substitutes for gold. If anything, they would be a substitute for copper, they are pro-risk, risk-on assets. They are a substitute for risk-on inflation hedges, not risk-off inflation hedges.”Jeff Currie, Goldman Sachs global head of commodities research “When something gets big enough, things like consumer interests and money laundering come into play. So there’s good reason to believe that [regulation] will happen.”Stefan Ingves, Sveriges Riksbank governorPrediction of the WeekBitcoin bulls give “conservative” 10-year estimate for hyperbitcoinization to hit Back to Miami now, where an eye-opening panel suggested that we may just be 10 years away from “hyperbitcoinization” — marking the moment BTC takes over global finance.Make no mistake, this would be no easy feat. It would involve billions of new users being onboarded by 2031. Then again, Bitcoin has already attracted hundreds of millions of users over the past 10 years.Unchained Capital’s Parker…

Jay is the Bitcoin OG who created a meme by buying a Lamborghini with the cryptocurrency. He went from a poverty-level existence to enjoying a well-off lifestyle in a gated community thanks to mining Bitcoin in the early days — but not without having to worry for his family’s safety.As BTC first broke the $1,000 milestone in December 2013, former Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan suggested that Bitcoin could not actually be used to buy anything of value.That’s when Jay (not his real name), then in his early 30s, and with the help of his wife who is also a Bitcoiner, used almost 217 BTC to purchase what is believed to be the original Bitcoin Lamborghini at the Lamborghini Newport Beach dealership. He then provided the evidence on the anonymous imageboard 4chan.This proved that Bitcoin had real value — who would accept fake money for a Lamborghini? A meme was born that launched a million other memes.“It’s kind of overwhelming as an individual — I created a meme.”An archetypal Bitcoin OG, Jay got his start around 2010. Despite being broke and supporting a family on very low earnings in Southeast Asia, he ended up setting up 20 GPUs, resulting in electricity costs that were six times his rent.  Buying a Lambo with Bitcoin in 2013. “I was really poor — I made like $8,500 per year while supporting a family, and babies cost money. I had businesses and savings before, but going to university and starting a family got me damn close to $0,” he recalls, bewildered.“It’s amazingly hard to HODL bitcoin when you eat pasta every day and make fuck-all, and spend what you do have on computers and miners. But I had that faith, I knew this was world changing.”   Today, Jay lives in a gated community within a small city of under 100,000 in Southeast Asia with his wife, three children, and three dogs — one of them a professionally trained and imposing guard dog whom I had no doubt was ready to rip my face off on command when I visited.His home actually consists of two houses on two streets, discreetly connected in the middle, creating an understated facade. Whereas the front garage contains “normal” luxury vehicles, the back holds none other than Bitcoin Lamborghini 2.0.“Sadly because I was so close to $0 and had kids, I had to sell so much BTC so early because I wanted some safety net. I could add at least one zero to my net worth if I had no family — but it’s a paradox because family is why I do it.”The Bitcoin Lambo in Texas at a CryptoWomen meetup in 2014. Supplied. Wealth worriesJay’s fortune is crowned by a loaded 1,000 BTC Casascius “physical Bitcoin” gold coin of which only a few exist. It is, in fact, the most valuable coin in the world, with a face value of approximately $60 million dollars and a collector premium of many millions more.This is how we came to meet, as I act as a broker of such rarities and wrote the Encyclopedia of Physical Bitcoins and Crypto-Currencies. For Jay, owning such coins can, however, prove stressful “if someone connects me to holding tens of millions of dollars in what are effectively bearer bonds.” Such coins hold the private key to the stated amount of Bitcoins under a tamper-proof label, making them comparable to bearer bonds, gold or cash.Such privilege is “difficult to deal with” on the family front, Jay says. Living in a country with a huge wealth disparity, he explains that money can be metaphorically used to build either a bigger wall to separate himself from the masses, or a bigger table in order to bring them to his side. “Honestly, I have to do both, but I want to build a bigger table,” he says. He feels that he faces very real threats, including the kidnapping of family members by international criminals.“I had issues with some Russian oligarchs in the past, but I don’t think I’m a target now.” A loaded 1,000 BTC Casascius coin, which Jay bought for $5,000Still, it’s hard to put worry or paranoia aside — states of mind that Jay considers natural to him. Late one night, as we enjoyed beer and burgers on the edge of town, Jay’s merriness suddenly turned to keen attention as he spied a vehicle loitering near his Lamborghini. “It’s been there over 30 seconds,” he said, appearing still nervous after the car drove off. “They were probably just admiring the car — but what if?” He was visibly uneasy.InitiationJay describes a normal childhood in an average lower-middle-class family in the U.S. midwest. Money was sometimes tight, but basic needs were covered and school was OK. He excelled in geography, which simply came naturally to him without the need to study.He started working at the age of 12, stapling large boxes together at a warehouse owned by a family friend. The work was repetitive and it was actually illegal to employ such a young child, but Jay was there willingly and feels that he gained a valuable perspective from socializing with business owners at such a young age.   After high school, Jay enrolled in a university close to home to study international relations and computer engineering. He, however, became disillusioned, believing that “a lot of what the university was teaching me was absolute bullshit” and mostly aimed at making him into “a good wage slave.” As he studied money, “it blew my mind that fiat money was based on nothing — it was debt.” He dropped out to run his own book-selling business, which he later sold to a firm that itself went on to be acquired by Amazon.“The realization of the financial system and money being bullshit helped motivate me to drop out of university in the U.S.A. and do my own thing.”Jay used the money to travel, first heading to Mongolia, which he felt might be a “missed gem” and might hold economic opportunities. Later in Kazakhstan, he spent…

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 WeekCoinbase gets off to a rocky start as it lists on the NasdaqIt was billed as a “watershed” milestone for cryptocurrency — the industry’s “Netscape moment.” This week, Coinbase made its stock market debut.There was no shortage of excitement in the run-up to Wednesday’s direct listing on the Nasdaq, with Bitcoin rallying to $64,863.10 before the open. COIN’s reference price was set at just $250, with all 1,700 staff pocketing 100 shares each.In true crypto form, it was a volatile debut. Coinbase’s stock quickly rose to $430 before falling sharply within the first few minutes of trading, closing its inaugural session at a still-impressive $328. It wrapped up Friday at $342, with a market cap of $67.2 billion.COIN’s arrival on Wall Street is significant because of how it gives investors indirect exposure to cryptocurrencies. Ark Invest is especially bullish on the stock, snapping up more than 1 million shares that will be shared across three exchange-traded funds.Overall, the stock’s performance has been hailed as positive so far, especially compared with how IPOs have performed in the past. Will this embolden other exchanges to follow suit?  Coinbase could see fee compression in long term, CEO expectsAs you’d expect, the exchange enjoyed much fanfare on the big day and even embedded the title of a New York Times article referencing Joe Biden’s stimulus package into the Bitcoin blockchain. Nonetheless, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was keen to address some of the concerns raised by analysts.Some fear that the mooted $100-billion valuation ahead of the listing was too high amid fears crypto exchanges will soon end up in bitter competition that will drive down fees — and affect overall profitability. Given how this accounted for 96% of Coinbase’s revenue in 2020, it’s kind of a big deal.On CNBC, Armstrong sought to tackle this head on. While he said that fee reductions are possible in the long term, the executive doesn’t believe it’s an imminent threat. Plus, by the time it is, he predicts “maybe 50% or more” of revenues will come from alternative streams such as debit cards and crypto custody. Dogecoin doubles in a day as YTD gains hit 5,000%, while Bitcoin price dipsBitcoin cooled once COIN started trading. And while Ether has comfortably outperformed the world’s biggest cryptocurrency this week (securing a new all-time high of $2,547.56 on Friday), altcoins have been stealing the show.If Dogecoin is a joke, it’s certainly wiped the smile off cynics’ faces. DOGE was trading at just $0.07 on Monday but began a frenzied 514% climb to highs of $0.43 by Friday. That’s a surge of 8,735% since the start of the year — and there’s little doubt it will have turned a number of enthusiasts into overnight millionaires.The frenzy saw DOGE leapfrog Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin in the rankings, with a market cap that’s twice as big as Deutsche Bank’s.Even professional traders have been caught by surprise. There’s one thing we know for certain, though: Bold predictions of a $1 DOGE one day are now looking less outlandish.  XRP price soars to new highs after recent legal victories and relisting rumorsWith the market cap of altcoins surpassing $1 trillion, one clear theme has emerged this week: Older cryptocurrencies are enjoying something of a renaissance. And it isn’t just DOGE that’s mooning… XRP is racing higher, too.XRP hit multi-year highs of $1.96 this week. Although that’s some way off the all-time record of $3.84 set in January 2018, this still reflects year-to-date gains of 790%. The latest spike caused a whopping $420 million of liquidations on derivatives exchanges.Momentum for XRP has been building thanks to a series of legal victories for Ripple in its battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission, along with rumors that the token may be relisted on multiple exchanges.Elsewhere, two forked projects that once sought to challenge Bitcoin and Ethereum for their seats at the top — Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic — also racked up triple-digit gains. Will other retro cryptocurrencies be next?  Jim Cramer cashes out half his “phoney money” Bitcoin to pay off mortgageEnigmatic CNBC host Jim Cramer risked attracting the ire of crypto enthusiasts this week — for two reasons.Not only did he refer to Bitcoin as “phoney money,” something that causes the red mist to descend for many maximalists, but he also revealed he has sold 50% of his BTC portfolio to pay off a mortgage.Cramer confirmed he had bought a lot of Bitcoin at $12,000 — meaning it had risen fivefold by the time he offloaded half of it. The anchor subsequently admitted: “I know people are going to be angry with me.”Some Twitter users likened the one-time crypto critic’s move to the infamous pizza purchase for 10,000 BTC. But others have praised Cramer’s move and argued that it’s important to take profits off the table, writing: “Selling only 50% after a 5x gain doesn’t sound toooo silly.” Winners and Losers  At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at $62,272.53, Ether at $2,466.78 and XRP at $1.69. The total market cap is at $2,274,625,979,472.Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic and Siacoin. The top three altcoin losers of the week are KuCoin Token, Klaytn and Celsius.For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.   Most Memorable Quotations “This is a really important day for the whole crypto world. This is saying ‘this is an asset class, and it’s an asset class that’s here to stay.’”Mike Novogratz, Galaxy Digital founder and CEO “We haven’t seen any margin compression yet, and I actually wouldn’t expect to see it in the short and the midterm. Longer term, yes I do think there could be fee compression just like in every other asset class out there.”Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO “PayPal really wants…

There is a Reddit post from August 2013, in which a purported time traveler shared a dystopian future brought on by the proliferation of Bitcoin in the year 2025. “Things are looking bleak here, and some of you will carry blood on your hands,” the time traveler warned readers, telling them of a world of vast inequality and economic decline. The Bitcoin “earlies” live in fortified cities, as there are no more governments due to the difficulty of enforcing taxation.This is the inspiration of the setting created by ENCODE Graphics, a comic publisher committed to “expressing the myths of the crypto scene and the metaverse in narrative form.” Characters PR1MUS and ONESHOT Part of the vision is to breathe life into the comic book industry, which suffered a crypto blow last month after DC Comics barred its artists from creating NFTs featuring any DC Comics intellectual property. This means that they cannot mint art featuring the likes of Batman, Wonder Woman or Superman.Despite this, ENCODE is seeing the artists from both DC and Marvel join forces with crypto artists around the world to create a new “universe with well-designed characters, which in turn will provide a basis for many more sub-projects.” All will be based around the concepts of crypto in a style that might be referred to as “cryptopunk.” An ENCODE spokesperson tells Magazine: “The vision to establish a comic project that provides a wonderful base for comic artists to make artworks in the spirit of Bitcoin, CryptoArt and our crypto community. This universe, with its beautifully designed characters, offers a potential that goes far beyond the creation of comic literature.”Who’s behind the mask?ENCODE Graphics is headed by an Austrian artist going by the pseudonym PR1MAL CYPHER, who started off as an individual artist but is now better described as the artistic director for his project. Originally versed in oil painting, he focused on digital CryptoArt with an element of social critique. He has taken an interdisciplinary approach to combine text with digital art on platforms SuperRare, MakersPlace and Nifty Gateway, and has also produced a run of silver coins funded with 0.01 BTC, in a style reminiscent of SATOSH1. His five-part NFT series “RIOT DAYS” featuring George Floyd is an example of his sociopolitical approach.According to PR1MAL, the goal of ENCODE is to offer “a glimpse into the future — a project that still guarantees the professionalism of the old publishers, but wants to live up to the symbols of CryptoArt and the Metaverse with new technologies.”   While PR1MAL is clear that there is no intention of competing with the big names in the world of comics, he states that the company is “keen to be a pioneer in the field” by leveraging the “possibilities of blockchain and the digital world in general. We will succeed in that.” This could certainly introduce a unique edge in drawing up a new generation of crypto-native comic book fans — and collectors.Though the rest of the lineup of writers and visual artists is not yet completely public, it includes a number of notables within the DC and Marvel experience. Some writers include Eisner Award winner Mike Baron; Chuck Dixon, who is known for Batman and The Punisher; Aaron Lopresti, who has written extensively for both Marvel and DC; as well as Scott Beatty, who has written encyclopedias based on DC Comics characters, in addition to his work for the publisher. The mysterious SATOSH1 Comic artists Will Conrad and Mark McKenna are represented on the visual side along with a number of new talents. McKenna is already familiar in the NFT scene, having released digital artworks on MakersPlace in December 2020. Despite the impressive lineup, there are hints of more to come, as the project’s organizer states that “Many of the already involved artists with rank and name currently remain under secrecy.”The time-traveler title mentioned earlier, otherwise known as 2084, centers on the recently returned Satoshi Nakamoto. Here, SATOSH1 explores a “distant dystopian future version of our Earth after the ‘Big Reset’, where the big corporations and citadels hold the power,” according to PR1MAL. The ongoing series is meant to constitute “an epic of CryptoArt” set in a fictional, polarizing future, filled with symbols and figures related to the culture around cryptocurrency intended as a recurring theme. 2084 is expected to stay in the production phase until summer 2021.“At the heart of ENCODE is the publication of stories that on the one hand take up the symbols and memes of crypto culture, but also the vision of the present that will be the reality of the future.”Another title, METATALES, is a graphic black-and-white anthology made up of a number of short stories by various artists. Some of these are about crypto, while others “are more socio-critical and portray our society in terms of technological developments.” Publication is planned for early June. METATALES – a comic anthology https://t.co/myelPiqDJRCurious what our anthology will be about #nftcommunity?Eisner Award-winner Mike Baron @BloodyRedBaron Chuck Dixon @dixonverse Aaron Lopresti @aaronlopresti and many more…#comics#NFT #NFTs#nftcollector #cryptoart pic.twitter.com/cJ5chV5J7b— ENCODE Graphics (@ENCODE_graphics) April 10, 2021 Pre-NFTDistribution of the comics has not yet been announced, but an NFT drop called GENESIS related to 2084 took place on April 17 on Nifty Gateway. The drop of four open edition works featuring SATOSH1 saw 148 sales, bringing in nearly $97,000 for the project. “The GENESIS drops help us with funding. Artists want to get paid,” says PR1MAL. A second, related drop is scheduled for June 4. SATOSH1 holding Lady Liberty The Nifty Gateway platform is owned by the Winklevoss twins, and was previously chosen as the main platform for Michael Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, for his drops because it allowed anyone to participate using a credit card or bank transfer, instead of being strictly on-chain. The launch of the GENESIS NFT series before the launch of the actual comic is interesting from the perspective of crypto history, since the set-up appears to be an echo of the pre-initial coin offering phenomenon that was commonplace in 2017. Pre-ICOs were opportunities for investors to get in…

Growing up in poverty in Suriname, Etiënne vantKruys was told by his teacher he’d never succeed — but it only made him more determined to not follow in the footsteps of his parents. Thanks, in part, to crypto, he’s now living the dream.Despite his high-flying crypto VC lifestyle today, vantKruys keeps at least one foot on the ground by remembering his hungry past. He grew up dirt poor in Suriname, where his father was a drug addict who was often in prison.“I was always hungry — like, dude, always hungry. Always like, ‘Fuck, I need to eat.’ Always, always, always — it sticks with you. I don’t care if I’m in Singapore at a famous crypto conference at a high-flying restaurant, I would still order food from right to left. I would start with the price, like, ‘What can I get?’ You’re aware.”Back in 2017, anyone could easily get in on highly public ICOs raising $30 million to $50 million with a white paper full of dreams just because it had the word “blockchain” in it. Things are different today, with venture capitalists having to network and clamor to get a small placement of $250,000. Cap tables that track investor allocations fill up fast, and investors are lucky to get a pitch before needing to decide.“In this cycle, with the speed of things, you don’t have time to consider,” notes vantKruys, who heads New York-based digital asset fund TRGC. Often the only investors who have the privilege of doing full, proper due diligence are the “alpha dogs” like Coinbase Ventures and Binance, for whom he says room will be made even after a round has closed.The short stickAs vantKruys, 45, stepped out of his Uber upon arriving in San Francisco from Amsterdam for Blockchain Week in 2018, he saw a sight that brought him back to his childhood. The vast homeless population, often suffering from mental health issues, reminded him not only of his father but of the life for which he too was thought to be destined. The reality on the street of the city of technology startups was little different than those of his native Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America where the average income is under $400 per month. vantKruys lived in residential accommodation with 80 other kids in Suriname. He remains in touch with many of them on Facebook and “three quarters are doing really well.”VantKruys had a difficult childhood and bounced around foster homes before ending up at a residential institution for 80 other disadvantaged children. He was born to teenage parents, and when not in prison, his father could be found “walking around the city in his underwear, dirty and unshaven — lost on heroin.” If his start in life were a poker hand, it looked much like a 2-7 offsuit — the worst possible combination.On his first day of elementary school, his classroom teacher told him and five other peers from the facility that “People don’t escape their circumstances.”“You guys have a 99% likelihood of repeating your parents’ lives,” the teacher lectured them in front of the whole class. VantKruys asked if that meant that he still had a 1% chance of making it. Some students began to giggle. “In Suriname culture, that’s a no-no. You never contradict or say anything smart to teachers. I got smacked as hell, like, ‘Know your place,’” he recalls. At eight years old, he knew there was a very hard journey ahead.But vantKruys had a plan. He believed in that 1% chance, even if no one would allow him to dream of it. “I thought of it like a boxing match in my head. I’ve got to beat 99 Mike Tysons to get where I want to, for that one shot,” he remembers. He worked hard, often getting the best grades.Homelessness was just one of the “Mike Tysons” he had to defeat. After high school, he managed to get into Utrecht University in the Netherlands to study pharmacy. He wanted to become a doctor, and his uncle covered his airfare. However, without money, he had to make do with sleeping in the central railway station, where he kept his things in a locker, and washing up at a local gym before heading to his morning classes.“This is just another Mike Tyson fight,” he thought to himself as he lived life in survival mode, convinced that one day there would be a final battle, and that he would make it.  VantKruys’ uncle lived nearby, and in 1998, his uncle introduced him to stock trading. The concept of buying portions of a company was entirely foreign, but he was enthralled. He went to one of his professors for advice, who suggested that “If you’re really interested in the funding of the biotech markets, you should look into the hedge funds on Wall Street.” VantKruys was off to the races.By using his knowledge of pharmacy to compare clinical trial data with public statements put out by companies, vantKruys managed to find an edge that “made a bit of money.” He dropped out of university so that he could focus full time on trading, developing a strategy around short-selling biotech stocks that seemed to overpromise without hard evidence.“I treat everything as a short — everything is bullshit until proven otherwise.”Enter BitcoinWhen the financial crisis hit in 2008–2009, vantKruys recalls going down the rabbit hole of endless questions: “What the fuck? What the hell is value? What is money? What is banking? What is finance?” the part-time stock trader remembers thinking as he investigated “all these conspiracy theories surrounding money.”When vantKruys read about Bitcoin on a forum around 2013, calling “bullshit” was his first instinct. However, many in his circle soon started talking about it, even at his birthday party in November 2013. “One of my colleagues came to the party and had everyone install the Blockchain.info wallet. Bitcoin, at that time, was like $300,” he recalls.By 2015, he was convinced that cryptocurrency was the future. He even left behind basketball,…

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and we throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes! This week, our 6 Questions go to Denelle Dixon, CEO and executive director of the Stellar Development Foundation.Denelle Dixon is the CEO and executive director of the Stellar Development Foundation, a nonprofit organization using blockchain to unlock the world’s economic potential by making money more fluid, markets more open and people more empowered. Before joining Stellar, Denelle served as the chief operating officer of Mozilla, one of the most successful mission-driven open-source organizations. During her tenure at Mozilla, she led the organization’s business, revenue and policy teams, including the ongoing fight for net neutrality and the global effort to ensure that people can control their personal data. She also pushed Mozilla to understand how to partner with commercial entities while staying true to its core mission of openness, innovation and opportunity on the web. A lawyer by trade, Denelle previously served as a general counsel and legal advisor in private equity and technology. Throughout her career, Denelle has been a vocal advocate for net neutrality, encryption, the disclosure of vulnerabilities by governments, and greater user choice and control. 1 — What’s one problem you think blockchain has a chance to solve but hasn’t been attempted yet?There is no shortage of ideas for what blockchain can solve in terms of efficiency, transparency, data security, speed and cost. The great thing is blockchain’s versatility can be applied to most if not all industries ranging from finance to healthcare to education to retail. And blockchain has been around long enough that it’s not just for crypto enthusiasts anymore. Companies, organizations and institutions are now looking for ways to make blockchain part of their tech stack. Essentially, if there is a process that can be improved upon with technology, blockchain has the potential to be part of that solution.But blockchain needs to further mature before we see a fully comprehensive solution happen. So, maybe “attempt” isn’t the right word here so much as “fully implemented.”I would love to see blockchain tackle cybersecurity. Staying indoors throughout the pandemic has only amplified people’s reliance on technology — through their modes of communication, shopping habits or content consumption/creation. But it’s difficult for users to choose between protecting their data and the incentives provided to them for providing access to their data — not to mention that users are constantly at risk of being scammed or hacked. So, while users need to take a more vigilant approach to safeguarding their own data, blockchain can protect users at the product level via decentralization and built-in encryption methods. I’m very excited to see where blockchain projects focusing on cybersecurity end up in the coming years. 2 — What do you think will be the biggest trend in blockchain for the next 12 months?From a general standpoint, as blockchain becomes more consumer-friendly, we’ll see more businesses and individuals begin to adopt it. Interest in blockchain is only rising as the technology and infrastructure becomes more robust and useful, allowing people to solve problems in increasingly versatile ways.This means that industries beyond just fintech will start thinking of ways blockchain can benefit them. I welcome the diversification of industries as they bring more applications, products and services to blockchain, as it indicates growing acceptance by the public that blockchain really can be part of the mainstream.Regarding financial systems, the conversation around stablecoins and digital currencies will continue to intensify. We’re finally starting to see buy-in from traditional financial institutions that blockchain is a cost-effective, swift and powerful solution. If these institutions begin issuing stablecoins on their own, as Bitbond and Bank von der Heydt did, the mainstream consumer will become much more comfortable with the idea of digital currencies and blockchain in general. 3 — What’s the most interesting place you’ve ever visited, and why?This is a hard question because “interesting” could cover so many feelings. If I had to pick one, I would go with Kraków, Poland. While my visit there was brief, I could feel the history — both beautiful and tragic — beaming from within the large, culturally distinct and historically significant areas of Kraków. The contemporary city boasts vibrant businesses with historic buildings and churches and cathedrals dotting the landscape. It was a moving juxtaposition for me, especially after visiting the Jewish Quarter — Kazimierz — which is an ever-present reminder of the tragedies inflicted during WWII combined with more recent brilliance in the resurgence of the Jewish community there with art exhibitions that commemorate the rebuilding. For me, going to Kraków was a lesson in life, art and cultural protection. 4 — What’s the future of social media?If anyone has watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix, they’re probably aware that social media has deviated far from its original promise: to provide a space where people can voice their thoughts and connect with one another.We see now that social media has a whole host of problems. Not only have the psychological and cultural impacts of social media been more dramatic than many of us anticipated but current policies and regulations are not enough to safeguard users.As with most technology, social media in itself is neither good nor bad. It’s a tool, albeit one that is highly susceptible to algorithmic changes and design choices in the hands of a few.So, will we see a lot more video-driven features because that’s what performs best according to the algorithm? Will we see the voices of a few rise to the top because they happened to say the thing that would get the most eyeballs? Will we see companies increase their prominence on social media because their advertising budgets are the primary source of revenue for these networks? Yes to all of the above.But now we know where the flaws of social media exist, and these networks need to be reexamined, redesigned and rebuilt with not just the input of a few, but from all voices….