Crypto

Proof-of-stake protocols were designed to encourage users to lock up their coins, but synthetic assets are circumventing that design to allow double-dipping in DeFi. One of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Asia, Tushar Aggarwal wears many hats: He started the crypto podcast Decrypt Asia, works as a venture scout with LuneX Ventures, and runs Persistence, a platform that lets users earn liquidity rewards while they stake coins. Aggarwal’s platform issues synthetic assets, perhaps better understood as “redemption coupons,” for staked coins that can be used elsewhere to maximize returns. This method is relevant for proof-of-stake coins, which are not machine-mined but accumulate to those who lock their tokens away from circulation. Persistence allows these staked coins to be used regardless.Originally from India, Aggarwal believes that cryptocurrency holds great things in store for the nation on both the GDP and individual worker levels. However, he works from Singapore due to the Indian government’s hostility toward the industry from which it could so greatly benefit.  Liquid stakingAggarwal, aged 28, started his journey in crypto as an investor in 2017, soon founding and hosting the Decrypt Asia podcast where he interviewed “all kinds of players in the ecosystem — fund managers, investors, entrepreneurs and service providers.” The podcast worked as a springboard of sorts, opening up opportunities to write about the cryptocurrency revolution for Tech in Asia, “the equivalent of TechCrunch in the West.” Aggarwal was an authority.In 2018, he was contacted by a venture capitalist who had come across his writings and podcast. The VC sought advice on behalf of his firm, Golden Gate Ventures, which was looking to set up a crypto fund. “I basically asked them for a job on the spot and became the first employee for the crypto fund of Golden Gate — that fund is called LuneX Ventures,” he recalls. Aggarwal still serves as a venture scout for the fund, which he describes as the “only regulated crypto fund of a VC fund in Southeast Asia.”He founded the Persistence platform in 2019 after a string of hackathons because “I wanted to move over to being an operator, as opposed to a capital allocator.”  Source: pSTAKE The platform’s functions are based on the Tendermint algorithm, meaning that it accepts proof-of-stake coins such as Persistence, REN, LUNA, CRO, IRIS, BAND, and KAVA. The magic is that even after being staked, synthetic assets based on the coins can be deposited as liquidity to a decentralized exchange to earn fees while the original coins are still “staked in the background, earning you staking rewards as well.”“We’re allowing you to stake in one place but issuing you a representative coin that you can use in other places.”“Liquid staking” is thus an appropriate descriptor, seeing as both liquidity provision and staking are combined. This process is beneficial because the tokenholder does not have to take a chance on either liquidity fees or staking, providing a higher yield on their capital. While the “original” coins are staked, the representative coins used to provide liquidity are 100% backed by the staked assets, meaning that “whoever ends up holding the representative coin then will ultimately get access” to the underlying asset. “Liquid staking is something that basically addresses the problems of whatever 10,000–100,000 folks who hold proof-of-stake coins and are familiar with how staking works.”Golden yearsThough he describes his parents as normal middle-class Indian civil servants, Aggarwal spent five years of his teens on the foothills of the Himalayas with “kids of really powerful politicians and folks who run corporate India.” The Doon School is “the Eton of India, which has produced prime ministers, army chiefs, journalists, movie stars, government officials, businessmen,” he explains, comparing his school to the famous British boarding school with a similar reputation. As the school was founded when India was still a British colony, “it espouses a lot of those ideals still which might be a little bit ancient from today’s perspective,” Aggarwal muses. In 2010 he headed to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, “which is, I think, one of the top five universities in Asia,” where he studied business administration under an arrangement where he promised to stay in the country for three years after graduating in exchange for a 60% reduction of tuition fees. Aggarwal explains that this bond arrangement was part of a “policy that Singapore had in place to attract talent from very young ages” — a successful policy, seeing as Aggarwal has not returned to live in India.Graduating in 2013, he worked in private equity at PwC for two years before moving to Sia Partners, a French boutique consultancy specializing in financial services. That role saw him spend time in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand while working with the private banking departments of European banks operating in the region.  A monumental achievement: We’ve exceeded $2,000,000 in #TVL! 🚀🦾 Take advantage of our 0% wrapping and service fees. @Cosmos & #Ethereum #DeFi is taking off!🌐 Liquid staking awaits here: https://t.co/ubfqwuGNDr pic.twitter.com/OSMt0UMRKh— pSTAKE Finance (@pStakeFinance) August 21, 2021 Working as a traveling consultant meant the bulk of Aggarwal’s everyday expenses were covered by his employer, giving him ample savings to sock away. “It’s a very Indian and Middle Eastern thing to do — where every penny that you save up, you put into gold or real estate — and that’s what I did,” just as his parents had taught him. Instead of buying apartments, which “have only so much room to grow,” he looked at the bigger, long-term picture and focused on land itself.After selling some property in late 2016, Aggarwal considered new avenues of investment. He first looked into angel investing but soon “came across crypto and basically just went all in.” He says that he was at the right place at the right time, explaining that “crypto was super hot in Singapore” when he invested in 2017, before listing off multiple projects from the time such as Republic Protocol, OmiseGo, and Kyber Network. He was fortunate with his timing, gaining financial independence in only a few short months.“By the end of 2017, I had…

Whether working in visual innovation or merely acting as a reporter, I’ve made a career out of diving headfirst into ideas that I know nothing about.The fresher, more complex the puzzle to be solved, the more I dig into it, going from unknown to known. And if I’m lucky, I’m gifted a day-long adrenaline rush and some unusual dreams in return for my services.When I was starting out, I worked as a breaking news journalist — a job that had me writing up to six news stories a day. On top of that, the pressure to catch every word in a presidential press briefing, for example, can be mind-bendingly intense and require such inconceivable attention. The only comparison I could draw would be day trading cryptocurrencies.And like crypto, my work would often visit me late into the night. Once in bed, I’d feel a cursor blinking just beyond my peripheral vision, or I’d see foggy headlines being written and rewritten so that they didn’t bust through their character limits. “U.S. president seeks deal with Iran on….” Delete, delete, delete. “President calls for trust with Iran on…” Was I asleep? Was I whispering to myself? The questions were the same then as they are now.Even picking up a box of cereal at the grocery store during that time could trigger feelings of computer keys being smooshed between my fingers.As I learned back then, what I was experiencing had ties to the so-called “Tetris effect.”You see, when Tetris was released in the 1980s, people were so hooked on Russian-American engineer Alexey Pajitnov’s video game that they’d see and hear it in everything they did.One writer for Wired in the early 1990s even called the game a “pharmatronic” in reference to its addictive powers.Journalist Jeffrey Goldsmith wrote of playing the game: “Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together.”Sound familiar? Seeing crypto candlesticks, anyone?Pajitnov told Wired: “You can’t imagine. I couldn’t finish the prototype! I started to play and never had time to finish the code. People kept playing, playing, playing. My best friend said, ‘I can’t live with your Tetris anymore.’”Tetris dreams became widespread fodder for conversation among gamers and psychologists alike. In fact, psychiatry professor Robert Stickgold and colleagues of his at Harvard Medical School found that of those they trained to play the game, more than 60% reported dreaming of images associated with it.Stickgold argued that these Tetris dreams were simply part of how human beings process information from our waking hours.Tetris has also been linked to the “flow state,” the name given to the groove you achieve when you focus so heavily on a goal that the world around you melts away.Kerr agrees that the crypto visions I had, mostly late at night, sound like the Tetris effect. But he’s quick to point out that our brains will gravitate toward puzzles, no matter what they are.“We are natural problem solvers. And crypto is like a big puzzle in some ways. Dreaming has been linked to problem-solving abilities. And crypto is a problem we want to solve and get right and make money from,” Kerr says.

If you thought remote work was game-changing, wait until video game work gains traction. Blockchain-based NFT games such as Axie Infinity and Splinterlands have demonstrated that a play-to-earn business model has the potential to revolutionize the gaming industry.Pandora’s box has been opened, so to speak, and play-to-earn is here to stay. There are already people logging on to an online video game to spend their days earning a living. In this piece, we will explore what a world where earning income through video games is the norm will look like.After Venezuela endured cataclysmic hyperinflation, it left individuals working minimum wage jobs and earning an unsustainable $5 dollars a month. However, in the wise words of Jeff Goldblum, “life finds a way.” Individuals had devised a means to earn a living through playing the video game RuneScape (OS).This was achieved in a form of in-game labor — gold farming — where users would play the game to extract various items to sell to users for United States dollars. This happened despite the RuneScape developers Jagex forbidding any form of transaction of digital items for real-world currency.    It was a controversial practice and some RuneScape players thought farmers were simply exploiting the game without contributing anything to the community. This led to them PK’ing (player-killing) players they thought were farmers. Which in turn, opened up a new earning opportunity to provide security to these player’s farming accounts. This perfectly exemplifies how new job markets can snowball. Venezuelan players were able to provide a living for themselves, and there were even some media reports of players earning more than local doctors.  Gold farming meme from Reddit. (Source: Reddit) Economies emergingAs long as in-game transactions can happen between players, users will attempt to exploit this by buying items with real-world money. For the integrity of the game, it is not in the best interests of developers to allow individuals to pay to win, as it provides an unfair advantage to users with the most disposable income.However, the fact that digital items are gaining such value and new “jobs” are being created may lead to an all-out gold rush (pun intended). It parallels the emergence of the internet and the avalanche of developer jobs that brought with it.Blockchain gaming is still very new and if job markets can develop in games that weren’t designed for them, one can only imagine the possibilities found within games designed to allow economies and job markets to function properly.These new markets will need to be drastically different from what was observed in RuneScape. In-game items that provide an unfair “advantage” should not be on the market for real-world transactions, as this will discourage new players that feel they have to pay their way to a playable standard. But, there is no reason why items that don’t have utility can’t be sold. In-game items that don’t have utility will usually find value from aesthetics.Aesthetic value is not to be taken lightly. This can be seen in games like Counter-Strike where gun skins are being sold on secondary markets for $4200, and even in League of Legends where the character skin “PAX twisted fate” will set you back $300.  Splinterlands is a blockchain based game. (Source: Splinterlands) What sort of jobs?Looking forward, what might jobs that provide real income look like in a blockchain governed game? While it’s difficult to speculate, I will attempt to provide some rough ideas:Time-intensive tasksOne thing that will always be tied to value is time. Video games have long included time-intensive tasks in their games, and as we saw in the Venezuelan RuneScape example, players transacted their time to farm gold. The in-game items that are farmed have value because of the time it takes to gain these items. Blockchain gaming can take this one step further, where players can offer their time to extract certain in-game items for real financial incentives. This is clearly seen in Axie Infinity where players will grind quests to gain SLP, the native token for Axie Infinity. It is claimed that if Axie Infinity players invest the necessary time they can earn up to 4,500 SLP a month which is currently worth around $935.Item generation/designAs mentioned, aesthetics can represent serious value to some users. Blockchain sandbox MMORPG game Ember Sword has realized this and will open up the design process of items to game users who can spend time designing a new aesthetic skin (an item that represents the same utility but differs by how it looks) and sell this to other users as an NFT. These NFTs can have coded royalties that will allow both the user who designed the item and the developers to own a percentage of royalty to further receive profits if the item is sold for a higher price on the secondary market. There is then a further scaling possibility for users to brand their items and even create an in-game company by hiring virtual employees to apply their branded design fundamentals to items. This same principle can be applied to virtual architects, interior designers and stylists, and the list goes on and on.     Social/personalityPersonalities can be very valuable and this is most clearly seen in twitch streamers. There are individuals who, although lacking skill or technique in video games, attract millions of viewers. There are opportunities for certain individuals with “attractive” personalities being paid to simply spend time around a certain area of virtual land to bring in more users to the area. This may be something you would want to pay someone to do if you owned, for example, a virtual casino, so the deal may be mutually beneficial financially. Again, a form of royalty/commission can also be present here for certain users as an incentive to fulfill this role to a high standard.Playing For othersOne tried and tested in-game value generation task can come from dungeons, raids and boss fighting tasks. This will typically involve users having to battle their way through a large number of enemies to get a final boss who, if users can…

The summer of regulatory action has now become a global phenomenon. Lawmakers and politicians are waving their fingers and making threats toward the industry’s leading virtual asset service providers — a term coined by the FATF to describe exchanges, wallets, custodians and even DeFi platforms. But when it comes to crackdowns on cryptocurrency, few places do it with the effectiveness and experience of the Chinese government.Unlike in the United States, China’s regulators are not having a public discourse about it. Decisions are made behind closed doors, and announcements come swiftly, posted on government websites or in speeches from well-primed officials. The directives come from the very top and are swiftly reiterated and enforced by lower-level officials in provincial- or city-level government, by state-owned enterprises and by financial institutions. This top-down style of regulation tends to make the “China ban” seem very repetitive and severe. In reality, the same regulation can be repeated dozens of times by different branches, scaring the public but having very little additional impact on the industry.  3000 kilos of #bitcoin miners packing to be airlifted to the US. pic.twitter.com/d07y5GUBB3— 8BTCnews (@btcinchina) June 21, 2021  What’s the issue this time around?Although owning cryptocurrency has never been officially banned, the need for reform in other areas of the industry was probably present. According to Winston Ma, former managing director and head of North America at China Investment Corporation, the Chinese government has pushed the regulations with the aim of protecting consumers, becoming closer to carbon neutrality targets and achieving greater financial stability. While the last reason is more subjective, there’s no denying that China’s opportunistic mining industry and speculation-heavy retail investors were running largely unchecked at the beginning of the year. Ma will be among the first to note the effectiveness of the changes taking place, especially for the mining industry, telling Magazine: “So far, the impact from the energy perspective is the most obvious: After the central government initiated the cryptocurrency crackdown campaign in May, major coal-based power producers such as Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, which were previously the top two cryptocurrency mining hubs in China, have been among the first regions that quickly developed local rules to clean up mining businesses.” This won’t be a short-term adjustment. Most large mining firms have moved abroad, and the overall BTC mining hash rate is still down by around 40% from the highs of the spring, prior to the crackdown. Energy and climate policies were the focal point of China’s all-important five-year plan that was released this spring, cementing the importance of cleaner energy consumption for the foreseeable future.Despite its significance to the crypto community, mining is not much of a contributor to the national GDP. Revenue for Chinese miners was just shy of $7 billion for the 12-month period leading up to June, a number far too insignificant to move the needle for the government. The revenue of ride-sharing app Didi was by itself over three times that in 2020, and the Chinese government had very few hesitations about cracking down on it after it emerged that it had provided user data to U.S. regulators. Didi apps were removed from domestic app stores, and now competitors are lining up to fill a massive market share should Didi fail to resolve its legal issues.   Although Chinese miners were raking in money, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to stave off regulation from the government (data from June 2021)  Sally Wang, vice president of portfolio marketing at Sino Global Capital, notes that despite Chinese regulators not tolerating risk areas that threaten financial stability, there’s been a huge increase in blockchain use cases at national, regional and city levels.“We’ve seen miners move out of China, and we’ve also seen large fintechs, such as Alibaba, experiment with NFTs. Token-less blockchain projects in China have seen huge growth.” This type of development has allowed players to continue contributing to a healthy blockchain ecosystem in China, with local governments supporting major events like the World Blockchain Conference in Hangzhou and the upcoming Shanghai International Blockchain Week in September.    Regulator influence on the declineThe original crackdown that banned ICOs and exchanges in 2017 caught the crypto industry at a vulnerable time. The majority of worldwide trading volume at the time originated from China or happened on Chinese exchanges, and the large ones were registered and based within the mainland. This left them at the mercy of authorities and taught the industry a valuable lesson about managing geographic risk. After that, key industry players such as Binance, Huobi and OKEx began setting up in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, where regulators were more open-minded. Subsequently, these exchanges are now slightly removed from the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, provided they aren’t too conspicuous when recruiting Chinese users.  Throwback to 2017: This Cointelegraph graphic shows how fearful the industry was after the future of many large exchanges was thrown in doubt.  As more and more of the industry shifts overseas, the impact of regulators is lessened. Unfortunately, miners who were keen to take advantage of low-cost energy from China’s abundant hydropower and coal-powered plants were not as quick to decentralize. That left them in a precarious position, sparking a wave of panic after China cracked down on miners earlier this year. The good news for investors is that miners have now responded by also relocating abroad, reducing the need for any future negative regulation against the mining industry.Reading the tea leaves with regulatorsRetail trading is still a major uncertainty, as large, predominantly Chinese exchanges like Huobi and OKEx make up around 20% of global volumes, according to FTX’s volume monitor. Binance makes up over 50% of global volume and likely has a large percentage of Chinese users as well.While users can’t directly buy cryptocurrency with fiat on these platforms, P2P transactions still make it easy for savvy users to purchase on platforms like Binance, using Chinese bank accounts and commercial payment apps to transact between the yuan and stablecoins.     To this point, the government hasn’t been successful in slowing this volume, even though bank accounts are…

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…

This “Crypto City” guide looks at Melbourne’s crypto culture, the city’s most notable projects and people, its financial infrastructure, which retailers accept crypto and where you can find blockchain education courses — and there’s even a short history with all the juicy details of famous controversies and collapses. Fast factsCity: MelbourneCountry: AustraliaPopulation: 5.15MEstablished: 1835Language: English Australia’s second-largest city may lack Sydney’s amazing harbor views, but it makes up for it with a focus on art, sports and culture. There are more live music venues here per capita than any other city in the world, and the city has produced heaps of notable acts, including Nick Cave, Men at Work, The Avalanches and Kylie Minogue.Located on the southern coast of Australia, Melbourne wasn’t founded until almost 50 years after Sydney, but it quickly became the wealthiest place in the world during the Gold Rush, from the 1850s to 1880s. It’s a very multicultural city, with the 10th-largest immigrant population globally. The city also ranks at number 27 on the Global Financial Centers Index and is home to the Australian Rules football code, the Australian Grand Prix and the Australian Open. It was the filming location for the first Mad Max film alongside Chopper and Animal Kingdom. Politically, Melbourne is more left-wing than any other city in the country and is home to the union movement. The Yarra River in Melbourne. Source: Pexels Crypto cultureMelbourne embraced cryptocurrencies early on, and a thriving community was built up through regular meetups including Blockchain Melbourne, Women in Blockchain, Web3 Melbourne and futureAUS. Karen Cohen, deputy chairperson of Blockchain Australia, recalls there being a huge influx of newcomers during the ICO boom in 2017.“The meetup culture was really exciting. We couldn’t get enough space, so people were watching our meetups on Facebook Live because they couldn’t get into the room because it was so busy.”Talk & Trade meetups were held every Wednesday from 2015 to 2019 at the Blockchain Centre. Located at the Victorian Innovation Hub in the docklands, the Blockchain Centre was the heart of the community in real life, at least until the coronavirus pandemic struck.Melbourne has been home to numerous crypto exchanges since 2013, and a plethora of ICOs were also founded in the city in 2017 and 2018, including CanYa, which operates freelancer platform CanWork, and blockchain voting company Horizon State.While the pandemic has moved most things online for the past 18 months, Blockchain Australia hosted a series of events at YBF Ventures in the Melbourne central business district (CBD) for the national Blockchain Week earlier this year, and Talk & Trade is now held at RMIT, in between lockdowns.With live events beginning to reemerge as vaccine rates slowly grind up, YBF Ventures will relaunch its blockchain community meetups, supported by Cohen as the expert in residence for blockchain. “2020, sadly, has been hard with COVID, so it’s had to move online,” she says. “But I think if we were able to meet in real life, it would still have very much a meetup culture.” Melbourne has the largest tram network in the world. Source: PexelsProjects and companiesMelbournites appear very interested in solving the problem of interblockchain communication, with at least three major cross-chain projects having strong ties to the city. CanYa founder JP Thor helped found the cross-chain decentralized liquidity protocol THORChain, and some of the anonymous local devs from THORChain went on to work on a similar project called Sifchain. Melbourne’s Simon Harman founded another cross-chain automated market maker, Chainflip, along with the privacy project Loki, which is now known as Oxen.Web 3.0 developer studios Flex Dapps and TypeHuman are located here, as is the white-label blockchain services provider Pellar, whose infrastructure processes 10 million requests a day from around the world. Researchers from the government-run Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and Monash University invented the MatRiCT technology (licensed to Hcash), which protects crypto from being cracked by quantum computers. NFT digital racehorse game Zed Run just raised $20 million from investors including TCG and Andreessen Horowitz. Algorand also has a noticeable presence in Melbourne, including through the Meld gold platform and Algomint. Dear Elon,Best regards.Chris Hemsworth, @THORChain CEO, 2021 pic.twitter.com/4MDli8anpW— Fede ⚡️ (@ledgermex) May 14, 2021 Crypto exchanges headquartered in Melbourne include BTC Markets, Cointree, CoinSpot, CoinJar, noncustodial exchange Elbaite and OTC service Caleb and Brown. Major global fiat-to-crypto on-ramp Banxa is also based in the city.Up-and-coming projects include insurance platform Day By Day, onboarding and fraud protection platform FrankieOne and accounting software AEM. DeFi-focused crypto fund Apollo Capital — which is a big investor in Synthetix and Internet Computer, among others — is also based in Melbourne. Apollo’s chief investment officer, Henrik Andersson, co-founded the decentralized pool trading platform dHEDGE and yield platform mStable (and helped out with a few ideas for this guide). Melbourne only has a dozen or so Bitcoin ATMs. Source: PexelsFinancial infrastructureThe first Bitcoin ATM was installed at the Emporium in 2014, but there are only 13 Bitcoin ATMs dotted around Melbourne, mostly in big shopping centers. Australian banks have a slightly wary approach to crypto — while many banks are happy to allow users to send funds to exchanges, plenty of users have reported being suddenly debanked, especially those running crypto-related businesses. “They close accounts at will based on crypto use, and we’ve seen that happen, so they’re still not supportive as an industry,” says Cohen.The New Payments Platform in Australia is something of a competitor to crypto (at least in terms of payments), allowing instant, 24/7 bank transfers using a phone number or email address. Often referred to as PayID, it was cited by the Reserve Bank of Australia as a reason that a central bank digital currency is not needed in Australia just yet. There are hundreds of retailers here in the Blueshyft network (Synthetix founder Kain Warwick’s other project) that accept cash payments over the counter for crypto exchanges.Where can I spend crypto?According to Coinmap, you’ll struggle to spend cryptocurrency directly in Melbourne at present, with fewer than 40 retail outlets accepting Bitcoin. (By way of comparison, Ljubljana…

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 Amazon plans to accept Bitcoin payments this year, claims insiderThe crypto community was going wild at the beginning of this week after rumors circulated that Amazon was planning to accept Bitcoin payments. The rumors started after Amazon posted a job opening for a digital currency and blockchain product lead on July 22. Four days later, an anonymous source within Amazon reportedly told London business newspaper City A.M. that the e-commerce giant was planning to start accepting Bitcoin (BTC) payments by the end of 2021. “This isn’t just going through the motions to set up cryptocurrency payment solutions at some point in the future — this is a full-on, well-discussed, integral part of the future mechanism of how Amazon will work,” the source told City A.M., according to a report published on Sunday.Chinese crypto journalist Colin Wu attributed Monday’s surging market action, during which Bitcoin gained roughly 15% in less than three hours, to Amazon’s rumored plans. How wrong that very self-assured sounding quote from an unnamed source turned out to be after the multinational giant refuted the speculation two days later. “Notwithstanding our interest in the space, the speculation that has ensued around our specific plans for cryptocurrencies is not true,” a spokesperson said. Bitcoin struggles at $40K after ‘most confusing’ Jerome Powell press conferenceBitcoin rose above $40,000 on July 29, a day after the Federal Reserve hinted that it was getting closer to winding down its asset purchasing program that has boosted the economic recovery of the United States. The digital gold previously approached $41,000 ahead of the critical Fed update. Unsurprisingly, it started losing upward momentum after the Federal Open Market Committee released its policy statement, followed by a press conference helmed by the Fed’s chairman, Jerome Powell.Powell had previously said that the Fed’s asset purchases would continue until it sees “substantial further progress” in the U.S. economic recovery. However, for a while, it was unspecified as to what that actually meant, and Powell finally cleared that up after being questioned in a July 28 press conference.Turns out that “substantial further progress” means strong labor numbers and gains towards maximum employment. Maximum employment refers to the highest level of achievable employment that the economy can sustain while maintaining a stable inflation rate. Given the rise of inflation and the decline of jobs due to the pandemic, the Fed’s maximum employment targets may need further clarification.   BTC investors have been closely monitoring how soon the central bank might unwind its $120-billion-per-month bond-buying program due to its role in aiding the Bitcoin bull market. Binance cuts withdrawal limits, rolls out tax reporting toolFollowing increased scrutiny aimed at Binance from governments and financial institutions across the globe, the world’s biggest crypto exchange has been working on regulatory compliance. In the latest attempt to maintain dialogue with global regulators, Binance introduced withdrawal limits and a new tax reporting system.    The company officially announced on July 27 a major update to its Know Your Customer policies, significantly reducing maximum withdrawal amounts for users who have not completed full identity verification.Effective from the date of the announcement, new Binance accounts whose users have completed only basic account verifications will be unable to withdraw more than 0.06 Bitcoin per day, worth roughly $2,329 at the time of writing. Previously, the maximum daily withdrawal amount was capped at 2 BTC, or about $77,661. On July 30, the platform also announced that it will be shutting down its crypto derivatives trading for customers across Europe, first starting with Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. This week, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO and founder of Binance, said he wanted the crypto exchange to work with local regulators as it establishes regional headquarters.Zhao, also known as CZ, hinted that Binance would depart from its decentralized approach to finance and that wanted the exchange to coordinate with regulators as the company expands.“We want to be licensed everywhere,” CZ said. “From now on, we’re going to be a financial institution.” MicroStrategy pledges to buy more BTC despite paper loss on its holdings of $424.8M in Q2MicroStrategy pledged to buy more Bitcoin despite reporting impairment losses of $424.8 million in Q2, after it stated that it was “pleased” by the results of its digital asset strategy in its July 29 Q2 report. At a first glance, it appeared that MicroStrategy had lost the plot, as the Q2 report showed that as of June 30, MicroStrategy held an approximate 105,085 BTC with a carrying value of $2.051 billion, at an impairment loss of $689.6 million since acquisition. The average carrying amount per Bitcoin was an estimated $19,518. Earlier this week Elon Musk’s Tesla also published a Q2 report which showed a $23 million impairment loss on its Bitcoin holdings.As both firms categorize Bitcoin as an “intangible asset,” accounting rules mandate that they must report an impairment loss when the asset’s price drops below its cost basis. However, they are not required to report price appreciation in the specified asset until the position is realized through a sale.The digital asset figures were calculated using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) — a collection of commonly accepted accounting rules used for financial reporting. The firm also provided non-GAAP calculations, which in this report exclude the “impact of share-based compensation expense and impairment losses and gains on sale from intangible assets.”The non-GAAP figures paint a different picture for MicroStrategy’s digital asset holdings, with the BTC cost basis at $2.741 billion but its market value is $3.653 billion, which reflects an average cost per BTC at $26,080 and a market price of $34,763 as of June 30.This may be the reason why MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor continues to double down on BTC and pursue the hodl modl. PayPal set to launch crypto trading in the UK and may embrace DeFiOn July 30, it was revealed that global payments platform PayPal is looking to…