Decentral Block Post

As I go about the Miami conference, I wonder, Aside from some of the conference speakers, where are these Bitcoin maximalists I keep hearing so much about?

When I tell the customs official I’m going to Miami for the Bitcoin 2022 conference, there seems to be a light in the man’s eyes. He peppers me with questions, even though I’d gotten up at 5 am that day to fly, and my smartwatch is telling me that my energy levels are only at 70%. The customs official has way more interest in the subject than I can handle.

Why am I going to the conference? The philosophy of the event fascinates me — it’s a Bitcoin-only conference — with the divide between Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrency world growing year by year.

I don’t go into that much detail with the customs official, though. Sometimes, when I interact with too many crypto people, I forget that everyone else has paid so little attention to this space, they still use the terms “Bitcoin” and “cryptocurrency” synonymously. If I offload onto the customs official everything that’s on my mind, he’d probably think I’m autistic or drunk (or maybe both).

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 Ming Duan, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Umee, a cross-chain DeFi hub that allows decentralized interactions between different blockchains.

Ming Duan’s knowledge of the crypto and blockchain world goes back to 2014 when she initially learned about the emerging industry through the first-ever blockchain course taught at a business school. Since then, she has developed extensive crypto investment knowledge through hands-on practice. Duan brings unique insight to Umee, having experience as both a crypto investor and builder in the ecosystem. Her goal for Umee is to build a platform where individuals can interact with different tokens and chains all in one place. While propelling Umee forward, Duan leads crypto investments at Argonautic Ventures and Fenbushi Capital. She graduated from Duke University and received her Master of Business Administration degree in 2016.

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.

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Fed hikes interest rates by 50 basis points in effort to combat inflation

On Wednesday, the United States Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) voted to raise interest rates by 0.5%, marking its biggest upward adjustment in over two decades. It was the second rate increase of 2022, with seven increases expected in total for the year.  

In a press conference following the FOMC meeting, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell further cemented the need to continue raising interest rates to combat inflation.

Gaming is now one of the most profitable sectors of the entertainment industry, with consumer spending in the United States growing 8% in 2021 to top $60.4 billion in revenue. Worldwide, the games market generated an estimated $180.3 billion in 2021, up 1.4%.

Within that segment are the hugely popular play-to-earn blockchain-based games, which are growing at an even faster pace given their virtual standstill some two years ago. But are blockchain games good enough to compete with more mainstream titles?

In its 2021 annual report, The Blockchain Game Alliance says that NFT games generated $2.32 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2021, or 22% of all NFT trading volume. Making the most waves was Axie Infinity — with its much-publicized popularity in the Philippines during COVID-19 lockdowns — which became the first blockchain game to top $1 billion in NFT sales.

The report reveals that 68% of BGA members felt the growth was attributable to the P2E sector, and 85% said true ownership of digital goods in games is the secret sauce behind blockchain game successes.

Walking into Remote and Digital’s La Casa co-working space on the tropical island of Koh Pha-ngan, you wonder how anybody gets any work done. I sip a cocktail and wait for my burrito as James Brown plays in the background.

There’s a real palm tree growing at the edge of the cafe, and behind it sits shallow crystal blue water stretching off for miles, with Koh Samui’s jungle-covered mountains jutting up in the distance. Adding to the ambiance, kite surfers are getting massive air off small waves, before gently floating back to earth.

30-year-old Belgian blockchain developer Jérôme Van Vlierbergen is one of the regulars at this Ban Tai co-working space and runs his Equinox Launchpad here. He explains Koh Pha-ngan (or Koh Phangan) has a thriving crypto scene, mostly populated by digital nomads like himself.

“There are a bunch of people here that own crypto or they’re doing something with crypto — because when you have money, you like to be somewhere where it’s a nice place to live.”

Ironically, of course, you need very little money to live here. You can rent a desk at La Casa for less than $3 a day, rent a scooter to get around for under $4 a day, and rent a whole house for $500 a month. With beautiful food, postcard-style views and half a dozen other coworking spaces with gigabit internet, it’s no wonder Koh Pha-ngan has become something of a mecca for crypto digital nomads.

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 Nikki Farb — an active investor and advisor to technology companies who is currently a venture partner at Headline, a venture capital firm.

I invest in consumer tech (with a real love for marketplaces) and Web3. I’ve invested in Consensys (MetaMask), AfterParty, Fractal, Aloft, Wander, MarketerHire, SudShare and a few others I can’t share just yet. 

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

Fed money printer goes into reverse: What does it mean for crypto?

Over the last two years or so, the United States Federal Reserve has flooded the financial system with excess liquidity — benefiting stocks, crypto and other markets as well. Now, the Fed is going in the opposite direction in order to combat inflation. In addition to raising interest rates, the central bank has begun the process of quantitative tightening (QT). It’s not entirely clear how the crypto markets will respond to the Fed’s QT efforts, but the short-term outlook probably isn’t good for risk assets.

Scott Melker, better known as The Wolf of All Streets, is a trader and crypto advocate who is far more approachable than his online handle might suggest. A former DJ, Melker operates a small crypto advocacy empire spanning YouTube videos, podcasts and a popular newsletter.

Scott Melker is open about his initial intentions in the crypto industry. “I simply came to trade and make money,” he admits, getting involved after hearing friends go on about the gold-paved streets of the blockchain world where 100x weekly returns were common. Being familiar with the more conservative movements of the stock markets since childhood, Melker was lucky to learn proper trading before entering the unregulated crypto casino.

“XRP was like a penny or something then,” he recalls. Crypto was also popular in the DJ community, something Melker attributes to the community’s risk-taking nature. He attributes his success to lucky timing in early 2016, soon cashing out his initial investment to play with his winnings.

“There was this sort of groundswell in the DJ community. They understand technology, and they’re kind of wild and speculative. That’s how I first discovered it.”

The crypto beats stopped soon enough. The 2018 bear market meant that “If you wanted to stick around, you really had to justify it to yourself, and you probably went way further down the rabbit hole to understand the importance of the movement,” Melker explains. He began to truly appreciate Bitcoin’s fundamentals and “understand the purpose of individual altcoins.”

In the precariousness of Web3 open-source code, iterative development and “move fast” ethos, things break. And through breaking, things are also made. A new project allows anyone to create a copy of someone else’s NFT, aptly named “Mimics.”

But how does Mimics work, and what does it mean for the NFT art market to have a new variety of fakes? And will it result in token standards being upgraded and improved?

I met the anonymous founder of Mimics in a “Web3” office that was brimming with software developers writing lines of code as they nodded their heads in time to deep house and sipped cups of tea.

On semi-regular occasions, I drop in to visit some local devs in the blockchain space and learn more about what they are working on. They have always been welcoming and jovial, inviting me to share in their ritualistic Friday afternoon “meme creation hour” and have a go at spinning the in-office DJ decks.

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 Andrew Levine, CEO of Koinos Group, which is focused on accelerating the transition to a more decentralized future by helping entrepreneurial developers, entrepreneurs and enterprises build disruptive blockchain-based solutions.

Andrew leads a team of industry veterans accelerating decentralization through accessible blockchain technology. Their foundational product is Koinos, a feeless blockchain with infinite upgradeability and a proof-of-burn consensus.

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

Andreessen Horowitz closes $4.5 billion crypto fund amid market turmoil

Venture capital player Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, has unveiled a new $4.5 billion cryptocurrency fund. The a16z fund is the fourth of its kind and more than double the amount of its third crypto investment fund. With $3 billion earmarked for venture investments and $1.5 billion for early-seed projects, the fund will look to invest in companies at various stages in their life cycle. Andreessen’s new fund provides a strong indicator that venture capital interest in the crypto market remains high despite evidence of a brutal bear market.

Stablecoins provide a false sense of security. They give the impression to the uninitiated and/or uncaring that a particular coin is pegged to the U.S. dollar, or an equivalent of the dollar in terms of value and stability, and that if you want to convert your stablecoin to dollars, you can do so easily and instantaneously. Yet, they do no such thing, as demonstrated by the recent collapse of Terra and its TerraUSD stablecoin and LUNA token and also made clear in September 2008 by the collapse of the Reserve Primary Fund money market fund during the height of the global financial crisis.

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, I now unequivocally state what is obvious: If you are an owner of or investor in any cryptocurrencies, you need to understand this lack of protection and safeguard the portion of your wealth held in digital assets. You can protect these assets by keeping them in cold digital wallets, on exchanges registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or with another entity regulated by the SEC, CFTC or Treasury. Even entities and exchanges with BitLicenses, such as Coinbase and Gemini, may not provide sufficient protection.

The primary use case for cryptocurrency in most wealthy countries is acquiring it and holding it, trading it, or using it in various other ways to make more money. In the developing world, where access to financial and banking systems is limited or nonexistent, innovative humanitarian organizations are piloting micro-blockchain ecosystems.

In the summer of 2021, Hope for Haiti was ready to launch a cryptocurrency pilot program to provide 150 mothers with cellphones, digital wallets and payment cards that use near-field communication technology. Each mom participating in its community nutrition program was set to receive $50 per month in cUSD for six months to spend on family essentials. A select group of local vendors was trained to use the system and poised to accept the cryptocurrency payments. On Aug. 14, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake rocked Haiti’s Tiburon Peninsula, decimating the area.

Hope for Haiti had to delay the project and immediately shifted to disaster relief. The organization received thousands in cryptocurrency donations in short order. Skyler Badenoch, Hope for Haiti’s CEO, tells Magazine: “We probably brought in a hundred grand in crypto to support our earthquake relief efforts. Whether it was $50,000 in Bitcoin from Binance Charity. [..] We were getting Ethereum donated to us. We got $10,000 in Dogecoin donated to us. It came from all over.”

In the space of a few short years, former high-school dropout cashier from Sweden Carl “The Moon” Runefelt has been transformed into a top crypto influencer who shares videos of his life of private jets, supercars and million-dollar watches that inspire his followers and annoy his critics. 

Drawing from quantum physics, he has an explanation for his unlikely success — the universe isn’t real but is merely a construction of our minds in which we are able to rearrange reality to match our wildest dreams. Despite critics and controversy, Runefelt continues on a mission to inspire his followers to live their dreams.

Law of attraction

“My parents told me that I should stop this nonsense. They said Bitcoin was shady,” Runefelt recalls. 

Runefelt, 27, came across Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in 2018 while researching ways to make money to climb out of his lowly job as a cashier. He was quickly captivated, seeing large price swings and the fact that coins that had recently peaked at $20,000 were bought for mere dollars only a few years earlier. This path seemed promising, and he committed himself to learning. 

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 Daniel Yan, founding partner and chief operating officer at Matrixport — a digital assets financial services platform where users can invest, trade and leverage crypto assets.

Hey guys, this is Dan — I am a founding partner at Matrixport. I have been COO of the company since 2019 overseeing the day-to-day operation of the company. Late last year, I started to spend most of my time building Matrixport Ventures — the venture investment arm of the company. It has been a great experience for me both personally and professionally. There has not been a boring day since I dipped my toes into crypto, let’s say! Prior to my stint in crypto, I was an options trader in the investment banking industry. 

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

SBF and Alameda step in to prevent crypto collapse contagion

Sam Bankman-Fried stated on June 20 that his firms Alameda Research and FTX would be “stepping in” to help companies with liquidity troubles amid the current bear market. Over the course of the week, Alameda dished out a loan of roughly $500 million to Voyager Digital, which is suffering from exposure to the potentially insolvent Three Arrows Capital, while FTX supplied BlockFi with $250 million worth of credit.

Photography often has to weather disruptive changes — from film to digital, for example — and photographers find themselves needing to master new technologies or face losing out to more tech-savvy competitors. NFTs are just another transformation in how we consume images. Can photographers adapt and benefit from them?

Back in the dark ages

I go back a long time in photography. To the dark ages — or at least the darkroom ages, to be more precise — when images were analog and negatives or color transparencies had to be developed through some arcane magical process I didn’t quite understand. If you had told me you had to wave a Harry Potter wand and shout “Developus!” I would have believed you.

Accredited investor laws are the bane of many in the crypto industry, who see them as preventing small investors from accessing big opportunities. When Celsius was recently forced to cut off access to U.S. citizens who were not accredited investors, many cried foul.

Did it help some users avoid the current crisis? Or do accredited investor laws go too far in saving users from themselves — and from profits, too?

Two weeks ago, as speculation about Celsius’ solvency began to mount, users started experiencing trouble withdrawing money from their accounts. Though Celsius CEO and founder Alex Mashinsky appeared to initially write the issues off as baseless rumors, the company soon announced a “temporary halt” on withdrawals. Users were — and, as of the time of writing, remain — unable to access their funds, which are, at least in theory, still earning interest.

Magazine had interviewed Mashinsky about investor accreditation on May 25 before Celsius ran into serious problems in the public area. The resulting drama makes the topic all the more timely. So, what does Mashinsky have to say about accredited investor laws?

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 Annabelle Huang, the managing partner at Amber Group, a global leading digital asset platform.

Prior to Amber Group, I served as the Asia lead at AirSwap, a decentralized trading platform that enables peer-to-peer trading on the Ethereum blockchain. Before transitioning into digital assets, I advised private equity funds, U.S. corporates and hedge funds on structured solutions and risk management as an FX structurer at Deutsche Bank and Nomura in New York. My background in traditional financial markets, coupled with my experience in institutions and macro markets, has given me a unique vantage point in developing the product strategy and solutions delivered through Amber Group. 

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

Binance ends support for anonymous Litecoin transactions

Binance has decided to ban Litecoin (LTC) transactions sent through the most recent MimbleWimble (MWEB) upgrade from its exchange, noting that such transactions would now result in the loss of the related LTC. Binance isn’t delisting LTC entirely, unlike other exchanges that have decided to remove the cryptocurrency. Among its changes, the latest Litecoin MWEB update ushered in privacy features. Binance’s decision to end support for these transactions comes as global crypto regulation remains an ever-present focal point in the industry.