Decentral Block Post

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes!

This week, our 6 Questions go to  Rene Reinsberg, a co-founder of Celo, an open platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone.

Rene Reinsberg is a co-founder of Celo and president of The Celo Foundation, a grant-giving organization supporting the carbon-negative Celo blockchain. He has been working at the intersection of finance, technology and development for the past 15 years, including at Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, General Catalyst Partners, the World Bank and TechnoServe. His previous company, Locu, was acquired by GoDaddy where he served as vice president of Emerging Products post-acquisition.

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

Peter Schiff’s bank closure strengthens Bitcoin case for financial freedom

Avid Bitcoin hater and gold peddler Peter Schiff saw his bank in Puerto Rico, Euro Pacific International Bank, shut down this week, with regulators pulling the plug on the grounds that the bank was not maintaining the net minimum capital requirements. Schiff noted that, as a result, “accounts are frozen and customers may lose money.” The crypto community on Twitter was quick to swoop in, with pseudonymous user HodlMagoo noting the priceless irony: “Do you understand why you need bitcoin now?”

Traditional venture capital funds drive valuations through multiple funding rounds. Startups aim for initial public offerings or other exits. Then the sharemarket decides upon a more realistic valuation. 

But in cryptoland, tokens introduce market capitalization while a company is being built.

This means there are a lot of competing interests and agendas. Token sales for Web3 startups can be the bastard child of a personality cult leader founder and a bunch of VCs, raised by a group of Discord-dwelling degens manning a DAO, while speculators trade 24/7 and the media circles.

So, how do founding teams get the balance right between the needs and wants of the VCs and what’s best for the community? Are the interests of VC funds aligned with the interests of token holders?

This column’s goal has never been to provide investment advice on cryptocurrencies or other digital assets, nor has it been to provide individualized legal advice. It has mostly been about my desire to freely set forth in writing my thoughts on the state of the crypto market and the legal affairs surrounding it.

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 a course on “Blockchain & the Law.” 

So let me state the obvious: It has been a particularly bad past two months in cryptoland. Both in activities relating to digital assets and crypto prices. However there are silver linings to consider. And when considered, perhaps readers will gain a greater perspective and not act in a reactionary way with their digital assets or blockchain business.

As crypto winter sets in once more, industry players in Australia, one of the world’s most crypto-friendly nations, watch closely for a shift in the regulatory climate.

Anthony Albanese, the new Australian Labor Party prime minister, has made regulating crypto a top priority. However, neither he nor his cabinet has given a clear indication of how it may approach the unregulated space.

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes!

This week, our 6 Questions go to Alyssa Tsai, founder and CEO of Panony — an incubator, investor and adviser for blockchain and Web3 business.

My name is Alyssa Tsai, and I’m the founder and CEO of Panony. There are three pillars of businesses under our group umbrella. PANews is one of the earliest crypto media outlets in Greater China and South Korea. It has published over 20,000 articles, with an average of over 5 million page views per month. At Panony, we invest in blockchain projects worldwide and consult Fortune 500 companies for integration and expansion into the industry, spanning the entire spectrum of the blockchain industry from solution providers and exchanges to public chains, protocols and DApps. I’m also a limited partner of NGC Ventures, the Animoca Metaverse Fund and the Delta Fund.

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

After 8 years dumping billions of XRP, Jed McCaleb’s stack runs out in weeks

Ripple Labs co-founder and former chief technology officer Jed McCaleb is nearing the end of his eight-year-long XRP dumpathon. The former Ripple exec has been gradually shedding his stash of 9 billion XRP since his departure in 2014. As of June 30, McCaleb only had 81.53 million XRP worth $26.55 million remaining, much to the delight of die-hard Ripple supporters.

The story of how a Bitcoin OG set up a Libertarian crypto community and commune for digital nomads on beautiful islands in Thailand three times — and why he hasn’t yet given up on the dream.

It’s a wild tale involving “unchecked merrymaking,” crypto-influencers, police grillings, seasteading, a reported $20,000-a-month burn rate, rumors about shamans and drugs — and a major collision between idealism and reality. It was also, by all accounts, a whole lot of fun.

Kieran Warwick created the play-to-earn game Illuvium with his brothers Aaron and Grant — all siblings of DeFi maverick Kain, the founder of Synthetix. He shares his alpha on how NFT game mechanics can be designed in such a way that playing them can be fun and profitable in the long term.

Warwick entered the retail world right out of high school, eventually becoming an online shopping entrepreneur. He got his start in the crypto world at brother Kain’s company BlueShyft, which first made Bitcoin and crypto exchange payments available over-the-counter at more than one thousand physical retailers around Australia in 2015.

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes!

This week, our 6 Questions go to Sonali Giovino, head of communications at Defiyield, a cross-chain asset management protocol that empowers users to be a part of the DeFi ecosystem.

Sonali Giovino has been working in the crypto space since 2017 when she began holding weekly educational workshops, which lead to public speaking events on cryptocurrency and blockchain and her production of Vancouver’s first Blockchain Yacht Cruise Conference. She brings 20+ years of experience as a technical communicator to her position at Defiyield, previously holding roles in marketing, project management, business development and event coordination. She is passionate about growing the DeFi community and introducing others to asset management and has emerged as a recognizable female thought leader in the tech space as a result. 

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

Court documents reveal Do Kwon dissolved Terraform Labs Korea days before LUNA crash

Terraform Labs co-founder dissolved two of the entity’s locations in South Korea, as well as Terraform Labs Korea, just prior to the LUNA and UST collapse, according to legal documents. Although the decision to dissolve the offices was made during an April 30 shareholder meeting, the timing raised eyebrows within the cryptocurrency community. 

As one might expect, the aftermath of Terra’s implosion continued to reverberate across the market this week. South Korea’s government is looking into the situation and Do Kwon himself could be summoned to a parliamentary hearing.

The rise and fall of the Terra blockchain and family of related tokens is both one of the most convoluted and one of the most important stories happening in crypto right now.

Assembled here is a plaintext explanation of what Terraform Labs built, why it got so big, why it imploded, what it means for the markets, and what you need to know to keep yourself safe from similar projects in the future.

What exactly is Terra?

That’s a great question, and we will answer it. But first, let’s found a bank.

Our bank will do all the usual bank things, like take deposits, pay interest, enable payments and make loans. Obviously, we could restrict ourselves to only loaning out money we actually have, but that is tedious and unprofitable. So, like any bank, we will make more loans than we receive in deposits and keep only a fraction of our customers’ deposits available as cash to withdraw when they need it. The amount we will keep available as cash is 0%.

It will be fine! Since we are loaning out 100% of our reserves, we will be very profitable; and since we are very profitable, we will be able to pay very high interest rates. No one will want to withdraw! If we ever do need money, we can sell stock in our very profitable bank. When demand for our deposits grows, we can use the new money to do stock buybacks. Since everyone is confident in the value of our stock, they will know we can back up our deposits; and since everyone is confident in the demand for our deposits, they will value our stock. Nothing could go wrong.

Over-the-counter, or OTC, trading refers to any trading that is not done via an automated exchange. What exactly is OTC trading? Who does it, and why? To learn more about what an OTC desk is and how these “under the radar” exchanges operate, Magazine spoke to a few insiders to get the scoop.

The most popular conception of OTC trading revolves around massive off-market deals, like when companies such as MicroStrategy make multimillion-dollar purchases using OTC desks run by the likes of Coinbase or Kraken.

OTC trading is, however, not the exclusive domain of the rich, as it can also refer to peer-to-peer platforms like LocalBitcoins, which has been helping individuals trade BTC both in-person and via bank transfer since 2013. Even some crypto ATMs can be categorized as OTC trading, as these transactions do not always clear on an exchange. In between these two are medium-sized regional OTC desks, which facilitate purchases and sales of crypto by both individuals and companies.

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes!

This week, our 6 Questions go to Dominik Schiener, a co-founder of the Iota Foundation, a nonprofit organization, and the creator of the Tangle, a permissionless, multi-dimensional distributed ledger designed as a foundation of a global protocol for all things connected. 

Dominik Schiener is a co-founder and the chairman of the Iota Foundation, one of the largest and greenest cryptocurrency ecosystems in the world. The Iota Foundation’s mission is to support the research and development of new distributed ledger technologies, including the Iota Tangle. Raised in Italy, Dominik oversees partnerships and the overall realization of the project’s vision toward the machine economy. He is a strong advocate for research-based, community-vetted, transparent developments in the cryptocurrency sector.

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: Terra blockchain officially halted following LUNA price collapse

This week, news about the Terra ecosystem dominated the headlines after algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) lost its peg to the U.S. dollar — and continued to crash. 

At its lowest point during the week, UST fell to around $0.13, according to CoinMarketCap. The meltdown also affected LUNA due to its symbiotic relationship with its sister asset. After reaching a high of $120 in early April, LUNA’s value plummeted this week to basically zero. 

Do Kwon, CEO of Terraform Labs, looked to impliment certain measures to right the sinking ship, as per Cointelegraph’s reporting on Thursday. Subsequent reporting showed that the Terra blockchain halted operations briefly after LUNA’s hyperinflation significantly reduced the cost of a governance attack on the network.