Decentral Block Post

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

Kraken’s Jesse Powell will step down as CEO, stay on as board chair

After more than a decade heading up crypto exchange Kraken as CEO, Jesse Powell has decided to pass the torch to the company’s chief operating officer, Dave Ripley. Powell is not done with Kraken, however. He will become chair of the board for the organization. “It’s just gotten to be more draining on me, less fun,” Powell said, as quoted in by Bloomberg. Ripley joined Kraken as chief operating officer in 2016.

South Korean ministry recommends enactment of special Metaverse laws

In line with other advances South Korea has taken to embrace the digital world, the country wants to create new laws regarding the Metaverse, according to plans from the Ministry of Science and ICT. The ministry wants proper laws in place for the Metaverse, but thinks it’s unwise to form-fit current regulations to new technology. Previous news saw South Korea invest $200 million toward metaverse development in the country.

Increasing numbers of employees are quitting 9–5 corporate jobs to work for DAOs. While the money’s great, DAOs fall into a legal gray area, and it can be tricky to get your foot in the door.

Researchers Nataliya Ilyushina and Trent MacDonald from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Blockchain Innovation Hub take you through how to get started.

This year could see two emerging workforce dynamics come to a head. Twenty-one million Americans quit their jobs in 2021 — heralding the “Great Resignation” era — after an extended experience working remotely during COVID-19 lockdowns and dissatisfaction with conditions upon reentering their workplaces.

One in 5 workers reported an intent to quit their jobs in 2022. At the same time, the peak number of members of decentralized autonomous organizations at the start of August 2022 was 3.4 million, with over 140,000 new members joining in July 2022 alone.

Although the “Little Migration” to DAOs pales in comparison to the Great Resignation, we might still wonder if these two trends are connected in some small way.

The sustainability movement has emerged as a 21st century megatrend, and it shows no signs of abating. Record heat in Europe, wildfires in the U.S. West, floods in Pakistan, drought in China, and accelerating ice cap melt in Greenland and Antarctica have driven home to many the looming threat of climate change.

Meanwhile, the New York Times declared in December “the sustainable industrial revolution is just getting started,” and even heavy industries like shipping, steel, and plastics are beginning to grasp the importance of an ecologically sustainable future — developing products like “green steel,” which is a fossil-free steelmaking process.

But hurdles remain, including questions about transparency, accountability, traceability, trust, data integrity, and even greenwashing (making false or insincere environmental claims.) Or as the Times asked: “Can some of history’s highest-polluting industries be trusted?” in spite of their professed good intentions.

This is where blockchain technology could make a difference. Like the sustainability movement itself, blockchain tech is global, 21st century, and mostly unformed though likely to be shaped soon by new laws and rules. Blockchains can simplify and lower costs of ESG (environmental, social and governance) reporting, build trust in “collected” data, develop new eco-related trading markets, and suggest new sources of innovation.

In March, for instance, automaker Volkswagen announced that it was using blockchain technology to help ensure that electric vehicle (EV) charging stations were using sustainable sources to recharge their electric cars. This move is aimed at consumers who want validation that the energy being used to recharge their vehicles isn’t coming from brown coal-powered electric companies or the like. BMW is said to be developing something similar.

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

Breaking: Historic day for crypto as Ethereum Merge to proof-of-stake occurs

Ethereum’s highly anticipated conversion to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, dubbed “the Merge,” took place at 6:42:42 am UTC on Sept. 15. The move is a key part of an overarching multi-year transition for the Ethereum blockchain. “It starts a chain reaction of changes,” Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and president of StarkWare, told Cointelegraph regarding the Merge. The Merge will reportedly help the Ethereum blockchain reduce its energy consumption by around 99%. 

During a viewing party before the network’s shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to PoS, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said: “[It] has obviously been a dream for the Ethereum ecosystem since pretty much the beginning. We started the proof-of-stake research with that blog post on Slosher back in January 2014.”

One party known as ETHW Core disagrees with the transition, however, aiming to maintain a PoW version of Ethereum via a fork in the 24 hours following the Merge. Multiple crypto exchanges plan on listing the forked chain’s related asset, ETHPoW (ETHW).

Abra announces plans for US bank supporting digital assets

Digital asset trading platform Abra announced that it was establishing two financial institutions: a United States bank and an international crypto business. Aimed to open in 2023, the U.S. state-chartered bank will operate under the name Abra Bank and will be compatible with digital assets in a format similar to money at traditional banks, or so it appears. Stationed beyond U.S. borders, a branch known as Abra International is also in the plans. The firm is looking to check all the appropriate boxes for Abra Bank and Abra International in terms of regulation.  

This is the second part of my column about the crackdown on insider trading involving crypto. In the first part, I discussed the criminal indictment of Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager at the OpenSea NFT marketplace. I also discussed the SEC’s allegations against former Coinbase employee Ishan Wahi, his brother and his friend, based on the “misappropriation” theory of insider trading.

Powers On… is a monthly opinion column from Marc Powers, who spent much of his 40-year legal career working with complex securities-related cases in the United States after a stint with the SEC. He is now an adjunct professor at Florida International University College of Law, where he teaches “Blockchain & the Law.”

Since the United States v. O’Hagan Supreme Court case in 1997, the misappropriation theory of insider trading liability has been explicitly recognized. Both before that date and after, “misappropriation” of company secrets or confidential information used in connection with stock trading has been an active area of Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement and criminal prosecutions.

Examples include a former writer for The Wall Street Journal in United States v. Winans; employees at the magazine stand Hudson News in Securities Exchange Commission v. Smath; a printer at a company that printed tender offer documents in Chiarella v. United States; and more recently, financial analysts in United States v. Newman and Salman v. United States. On the same date as the SEC filing against Ishan Wahi and his two associates, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York unsealed a parallel criminal indictment that charged these same three defendants with wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy.

Tippees that receive material, nonpublic or confidential information from a tipper violate insider trading rules if they know the tipper breached a duty they owed to another and received some sort of personal benefit from the tip. The Supreme Court said in the 2016 Salman case that the personal benefit need not be financial or pecuniary. The benefit requirement is satisfied by bestowing a gift of this information on a trading relative or a close friend.

In Part 1, we detailed three of the different kinds of crypto OGs you might meet at an industry party.

They were: (1) shadowy super coders and/or anon founders, (2) “reputable” and respected OG industry leaders like Vitalik Buterin and Brian Armstrong, and (3) the comeback OGs, who were trying to shake off the stink of a failed project.

This time around, we meet even more categories of crypto OGs, with insight from the insiders most familiar with them.

The “NeoGs” market makers and traders

There are a select few crypto players who joined the game late, yet they rose to prominence to become behemoths in terms of net worth and impact. Usually, these are savvy market makers and traders who are often mistaken for OGs.

Take, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX trading exchange and quant trading firm Alameda Research. Amid the recent crypto collapses, he gained even greater prominence as he stepped in big to provide bailouts and minimize the contagions.

There’s a version of the future that’s tantalizingly possible in which Ethereum becomes the base layer for pretty much everything.

Recent advances in a technology called zero-knowledge Rollups — from StarkWare, Polygon and zkSync — enable the blockchain to move from fewer than 20 transactions per second to… well, an infinite number of TPS.

In theory, it would allow the entire world’s financial system to run on Ethereum.

“I think it’s theoretically possible,” explains Declan Fox, product manager for rollups at Consensys, which provides Ethereum infrastructure and apps like MetaMask. “We have the technology to achieve that kind of throughput necessary.”

With recursive rollups and proofs, we theoretically can infinitely scale.

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

US Fed vice chair Michael Barr favors hard line on crypto, OCC acting head no friendlier

Global crypto regulation remains a prevalent topic looming over the sector. Recent comments from United States Federal Reserve Board Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr and Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu favored a lean toward more government overwatch. Barr expressed a desire for stablecoin regulation as well as crypto-related banking regulations. Hsu’s comments included looking at the industry cautiously.

GameStop doubles down on crypto amid a new partnership with FTX US

GameStop is teaming up with crypto exchange FTX US in a promotional partnership. So far, 2022 has seen GameStop pursuing increasing involvement in the crypto space, evident in its NFT marketplace launch and its new gaming division devoted to Web3. GameStop has a long-term vision for crypto involvement, according to CEO Matt Furlong during a Q2 fiscal year earnings call.

Crypto OGs — slang for Original Gangsters — have acquired almost a mythical and godly reputation in an industry populated with libertarians, anti-government rebels, innovators, get-rich-quick scammers, hackers and degen investors with rampant gambling addictions and toxic social media behavior.

Who are these OGs exactly? Unlike the rich and powerful in the traditional finance and conventional tech sector, crypto OGs are often protected by a layer of decentralized anonymity in a particularly wild corner of cyberspace. Who deserves this mythical label? The year they got into crypto? Their current net worth? Their lifestyle? Their impact on the industry?

How can you separate the randos and wannabes from the OGs? Without further ado, here’s our guide to spotting OGs at any networking party, written with insider tips from real-life OGs.

1. The shadowy super coders and/or anon founders

These are the OGs that look underwhelmingly and deceptively average.

In New York and San Francisco, they’re the ones going around like starved college students, burying their heads under a hoodie and nodding to electronic beats from their headsets on a subway train. In Singapore, they are the ones blending in seamlessly with any given “uncles” at Kopitiams, wearing nondescript shabby shirts, slippers and Bermuda shorts.

It took a few years, but government crackdowns on “insider trading” involving digital assets have finally arrived. It’s about time! Insider trading occurs often in our securities markets, so it was only a matter of time before crypto and other digital assets would be exploited improperly by miscreants for financial gain.

Powers On… is a monthly opinion column from Marc Powers, who spent much of his 40-year legal career working with complex securities-related cases in the United States after a stint with the SEC. He is now an adjunct professor at Florida International University College of Law, where he teaches “Blockchain & the Law.”

Back on June 1, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York announced a criminal indictment against a former product manager of the OpenSea marketplace, Nathaniel Chastain. He is charged with using the confidential information about which nonfungible tokens were going to be featured on OpenSea’s homepage to buy them in advance of that event, and then sell them after they were featured. It is alleged that to conceal the fraud, Chastain conducted these purchases and sales using various digital wallets and accounts on the platform. He is charged with wire fraud and money laundering through making approximately 45 NFT purchases on 11 different occasions between June and September 2021, selling the NFTs for 2x to 5x his cost.

There are a few interesting things to note about the indictment in United States v. Chastain. First, the criminal charges do not include securities fraud. Why? Because while there may be occasions when an NFT sale involves the sale of “investment contracts,” which are one kind of “security” under the federal securities law, it seems here that the NFTs in question did not fall under that categorization. Also, even if some of the NFTs might be “securities,” the U.S. attorney wisely found no need to tack on that added charge, given that wire fraud carries a longer prison term. Wire fraud is also easier to prove.

Second, the indictment does not indicate the amount of financial gain Chastain obtained from this purported scheme. Given this, I can only assume it was a relatively small dollar amount, probably less than $50,000.

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

Mastercard taps Paxos to launch crypto trading for banks

Banks will soon be equipped to offer clients crypto trading and custody thanks to a new program called “Crypto Source” from Mastercard and Paxos Trust Company. As part of the program, Mastercard will cover some of the compliance, security and interface details while Paxos handles crypto custody and trading. Expected in the final quarter of 2022, the Crypto Source program will essentially provide the underpinning that will let banks offer crypto trading and custody to their clients.

Jack Dorsey unveils decentralized social with algo choice and portable accounts

Under the supervision of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a new social media platform called “Bluesky Social” has entered its private beta phase after years of anticipation. Underpinning the platform is a protocol known as the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (formerly named ADX). The protocol essentially removes the walls around user data, letting users move their accounts from platform to platform rather than having their profiles and information locked on a single platform.

Decentralized finance is beginning to embrace a hot new phrase: “real yield.” It refers to DeFi projects that survive purely on distributing the actual revenue they generate rather than incentivizing stakeholders by handing out dilutionary free tokens.

Where does this real yield come from? Are “fees” really a sustainable model for growth at this early stage?

It depends on who you ask. 

The DeFi ponzinomics problem is our natural starting point.

Ponzi farming

DeFi started to arrive as a concept in 2018, and 2020’s “DeFi summer” saw market entrants — DeGens — piling headfirst into DeFi to early mind-blowing returns of 1,000% a year for staking or using a protocol. Many attributed the real explosion of interest in DeFi to when Compound launched the COMP token to reward users for providing liquidity. 

Sunny Aggarwal has vivid memories of some of the worst days of his life earlier this year. The blockchain co-founder and his Osmosis protocol were hit hard by the Terra–LUNA collapse and are still recovering from its fallout today.

“The Terra crash hit us incredibly hard because we were one of the biggest DEXs for providing liquidity to TerraUSD and Luna Classic,” he explains, “At one point, it made up over 50% of our liquidity.” 

“I always tell people that the Terra Luna protocol was created by someone with either an IQ of 50 or 150. And frankly, I can’t tell which one.”

Aggarwal is a co-founder and leads the development of the $225-million Osmosis DEX, which, at one point, eclipsed $2 billion in TVL before the coming of the crypto winter.

The rise of cross-chain bridges 

Osmosis is a decentralized exchange (DEX) operating on Cosmos, the creator of the interblockchain communications protocol (IBC).

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

Starting in early 2023, Coinbase’s payment service, Coinbase Commerce, will facilitate crypto payments for customers purchasing Google’s cloud services thanks to a deal between the two companies. Google will only allow certain crypto assets for payment, including Bitcoin. Initially limited to certain participants, the option to pay with crypto will eventually be expanded to other customers, an executive at Google Cloud told CNBC. Google Cloud has taken several other steps toward crypto and blockchain industry involvement in 2022. 

BNY Mellon, America’s oldest bank, launches crypto services

Banking giant BNY Mellon has entered the crypto custody field, offering certain customers Bitcoin and Ether custody services via a new platform. The 238-year-old bank will provide bookkeeping for clients’ crypto in a similar fashion as it does for traditional assets, while also handling clients’ private keys. BNY Mellon’s CEO of securities services and digital, Roman Regelman, said: “With Digital Asset Custody, we continue our journey of trust and innovation into the evolving digital assets space, while embracing leading technology and collaborating with fintechs.”

Crypto is currently languishing like the internet did in 1996 with slow speeds and few practical use cases, says Steve Newcomb, chief product officer of Matter Labs.

But a major increase in bandwidth and security soon after saw the internet become a crucial part of daily life across the globe — and we’re right on the cusp of that happening for crypto in the next few months.

“Nobody trusted their credit card on it and everybody thought it was a fad and there weren’t any use cases for it,” Newcomb explains. 

“And then we had 10x moments in bandwidth and then SSL came, and HTPS where you got that lock — that was a 10x moment in trust. Suddenly in 2005 ecommerce just went through the roof.”

Crypto’s ‘10x’ moment could finally be here, with zkSync’s Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible mainnet launching on October 28. EVM is essentially the operating system for Ethereum and enabling it to work using zero knowledge rollups means everything running on Ethereum can seamlessly port over to experience a huge jump in speed and lower costs. 

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

Musk’s deal for Twitter looks set to go with original $44B price tag

Elon Musk is back on track to buy Twitter. The billionaire originally decided to buy the social media network back in April 2022, settling on a price tag of roughly $44 billion. He subsequently attempted to cancel the agreement, claiming inadequate transparency from Twitter regarding the firm’s financial health as well as fake account and spam bot prevalence on the platform. Musk now intends to complete the original $44 billion deal, according to a legal filing.

EU regulators ban cross-border payments from Russian crypto accounts

In light of recent escalations in the Ukraine-Russia war, the European Union has banned crypto activity between member regions and Russia, no matter how small the transaction. The ban covers “all crypto-asset wallets, accounts, or custody services, irrespective of the amount of the wallet,” according to an Oct. 6 statement from the European Commission. Russia, on the other hand, has taken the opposite stance, evident in its approval of cross-border crypto activity in recent weeks.

Want to sue a crypto project that ripped you off? That will be $1 million, thank you. Luckily, there are options for those who face the daunting prospect of spending a small yacht’s worth of money in lawyer fees for their chance at crypto justice.

In practice, the majority of victims of international blockchain scams find themselves with little hope of recovering their money. According to crypto law expert Jason Corbett, a normal court case to recover $10 million–$20 million dollars in the blockchain sector can easily cost between $600,000 and $1 million, with an average timeline of 2.5 years.

But there are a range of cheaper and better options to get a successful outcome — if you learn how to work with the system. Legal investment funds can finance your case for a share of the judgment — sort of like a VC firm for lawsuits.

“The vast majority of lawsuits — up to 95% — are privately settled before they go to court,” Corbett says.

Common blockchain disputes

Corbett has six years of experience in crypto law as a managing partner of international blockchain-specialized boutique law firm Silk Legal. Speaking with Magazine about his new crypto litigation financing project Nemesis, Corbett notes a clear “increase in disputes stemming from deals gone wrong, contractual breaches and bad actors over the past months” due to the bear market, which has seen many projects go sideways.

In another reality, Bill Noble would be just another guy in a suit behind a big desk at the Fed or the SEC, probably murmuring negative incantations like “crypto is bad.”

He’s certainly got the track record for it: JP Morgan, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs. But that’s Noble in an evil mirror dimension. In our world, he is a true crypto guy, talking to me in a t-shirt with bicycles in the back of the room. He turned from the Dark Side and joined the rebels.

He is known for his popular YouTube podcasts and TV appearances. Currently, he is a senior market analyst at Token Metrics.

Wall Street career

While studying economics (1987–1991) at Rutgers University in New Jersey, he managed to wangle one of only two sought-after internships at the time at JP Morgan’s forex desk on Wall Street. Noble started off when trading technology was primitive and lots of analysis was done by hand on paper. In August 1990, he was put in charge of the desk, while everyone went on holiday, “‘Cos nothing happens in August, let the kid fill in.” Then Iraq invaded Kuwait, and all sorts of craziness broke out in the markets.

“The price volatility seemed so extreme to me. I had no idea how anyone kept track of this. So, I went to the technical analyst who was attached to the currency unit. I said, ‘I bet everybody comes to you looking for help trying to figure this out.’”

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

Pro-centralization Russian president grants citizenship to Edward Snowden: Report

Edward Snowden has reportedly received Russian citizenship via a decision from the country’s president, Vladimir Putin. Snowden has been a permanent resident in Russia since 2013 after he exposed secrets relating to the United States National Security Agency. However, Snowden favors less government involvement than Putin’s approach to leadership. Snowden has offered comment on crypto multiple times and helped build crypto asset Zcash.

Breaking: Interpol ‘Red Notice’ issued for Do Kwon — South Korea prosecutors

Global criminal police organization Interpol has put out an alert known as a Red Notice in order to help locate and arrest Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon, wherever he may be. Terra’s ecosystem fell apart earlier in 2022. Charges were brought against Kwon in South Korea for his involvement in the Terra project. Kwon has tweeted that he is not hiding. He was thought to be in Singapore, although Reuters reporting has indicated a possible change in location. Authorities in South Korea have also taken steps to freeze funds reportedly associated with Kwon.

When Redditor Joe Greene started the Top 10 Cryptos experiment in 2018, he bought $1,000 of Dash, NEM and Iota, among others, only to watch it crash to $150. But five years on, his experiment has paid off big time.

The rules: Buy $100 of each of the top 10 cryptocurrencies on Jan. 1, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Hold only. No selling. No trading. Report monthly.

Every January since 2018, Greene has reviewed a list of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap from his tropical office in Bali. He puts $100 of his own money into each, tracks the performance every four months or so, and publishes the findings on his website and on Reddit.

When he began, crypto indexes were few and far between, so there wasn’t an easy alternative. Having invested in stocks for years before moving into crypto, Greene predicted that chasing tokens on a hot streak was dangerous — unless done consistently — and this was indeed proven so by his experiment with the Top Ten Crypto Index Funds.

Bitcoin 2017

Like almost everyone else that year, Greene was mesmerized by the sudden rise of Bitcoin during the 2017 bull market. “I remember looking to buy a rig to do some mining, but it turns out they were all sold out. So, I thought, ‘Whatever, I’ll just go out and buy some coins instead,’” he tells Magazine. A combination of the underlying technology, the financial elementsand the future direction of the asset class kept Greene in the sector. He has been blogging with the project ever since.