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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 to issue long-awaited guidelines for granting master accounts to crypto banks

Crypto’s continued journey into the mainstream has come with various levels of regulatory action across the globe. This week brought clarity in terms of expectations for crypto-focused banks seeking accounts with the United States Federal Reserve. A framework released by the Federal Reserve Board details expectations for such applicant banks, including the level of due diligence to be provided based on each applicant’s risk level. Giving crypto-focused banks access to the Fed’s so-called “master accounts” has been a slow process, but it suggests that regulators are gradually integrating digital assets into mainstream finance.

BlockFi tops the Inc. 5000 list with almost 250,000% revenue growth in three years

Centralized finance player BlockFi topped Inc. magazine’s 2022 list of U.S. companies showing the highest revenue growth over the past three years. Although the list showcases 5,000 companies posting revenue growth, making it into consideration for the list requires paying a small fee and submitting an application. Be that as it may, BlockFi has tallied a 245,616% increase in revenue — substantially higher than the company holding second place on the list.

Hiring in the crypto world can be difficult. Web3 companies are often disorganized and lack HR departments. Developers sometimes want to remain anonymous — even to their potential employers.

Some employees don’t exist at all, while others are secretly juggling three other remote gigs. Then there are those who pretend to be employees but are really just plotting to rug everyone.

The job of a hiring manager is no easy one. This goes doubly so for the Web3 world, where expectations both from employers and employees can be drastically different compared to the Web2 corporate world.

Magazine spoke to Declan Strain, managing partner of Dubai-based talent consultancy BlockDelta, which helps companies in the Web3 industry connect with workers of all levels. After 20 years as a recruiter, he became involved in the blockchain space in 2015 and set up his specialist consultancy in 2017.

“A traditional recruiter won’t be as successful as someone who lives and breathes this space,” he says, referring to his efforts to “be part of the fabric of the metaverse” by attending events and making connections in person.

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

Elon Musk: US ’past peak inflation’ after Tesla sells 90% of Bitcoin

With Tesla now having sold 90% of its Bitcoin holdings during the bear market, Elon Musk says the U.S. economy is “past peak inflation” and predicts that only a “mild to moderate” recession could be incoming. “We sort of have some insight into where prices are headed over time, and the interesting thing that we’re seeing now is that most of our commodities, most of the things that go into a Tesla — not all, more than half the prices — are trending down in six months from now,” Musk said at Tesla’s 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

Coming sooner: ETH devs move up the date for Merge

The long-awaited Merge looks to be ahead of schedule, with Ethereum core developers Tim Beiko and Terence Tsao agreeing on a developer call Thursday to tentatively set the date of the Merge for Sept. 15. The previously estimated date from Beiko was Sept. 19, and suggested that the final preparation work is going smoothly after the final Goerli testnet merge went off without a hitch this week.

Decentralized autonomous organizations come in all sizes and flavors. Some can seem sweet; others turn sour. It can be fun and interesting to create one that suits your needs and satisfies your hunger for something new.

We talk to the master chefs — Noam Hof of DeepDAO, Stru Delman of Aragon, and Fabien of Snapshot — who are mixing up new and exciting recipes for participatory goodness that you can bake at home.

A DAO is an online community that collectively controls a cryptocurrency fund to achieve a particular goal — whether buying a copy of the United States constitution or running a DeFi protocol — explains Delman from Aragon, an organization that “midwifes” DAOs and has helped usher almost 4,000 DAOs into existence.

“The idea is attempting to automate as many exchanges between people as possible and making it trustless so you don’t need to trust people,” Delman explains. “This makes it easier to collaborate with people that you meet online or to create a global team.”

You’ll need a good idea and a recipe for how to achieve success. Is it going to have the substance to make a fulfilling meal, or will it collapse like a badly done souffle?

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 Tongtong Bee, co-founder of Panony — an incubator, investor and adviser for blockchain and Web3 business.

I’m Tongtong Bee, the co-founder of Panony and founder and editor-in-chief of PANews. I started my professional journey as a journalist at China’s traditional news outlets, including China News Service, Jiemian and Cailian Media Group. Since 2015, I’ve been covering blockchain and fintech news as one of the few journalists in China to focus on these sectors at the time. 

My focus on economic issues and emerging technologies led to me being selected to report on the “Two Sessions” (NPC and CPPCC) in 2018. And that’s the year my business partner Alyssa and I started PANews. We’ve published over 20,000 articles with an average of over 5 million page views per month, became a frequently cited source in crypto and blockchain journalism, including Forbes, Caixin, CCN, and we’re an official news source of Tencent News.

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

Crypto fundraising hits $30.3B in H1, outpacing all of 2021: Report

A report from crypto analytics firm Messari on Tuesday showed that the crypto sector has raised $30.3 billion in funding this year, already outpacing the total for all of 2021, which was $30.2 billion. The figure was achieved via 1,199 funding rounds in the first half of the year, with $10.3 billion, more than a third of the capital, going towards the centralized finance sector. Notably, the NFT gaming sector raised more than all of decentralized finance at $4 billion. DeFi, comparatively, raised just $1.8 billion.

Michael Saylor will step down as MicroStrategy CEO but remain as executive chair

Bitcoin maxi Michael Saylor is set to step down as CEO of MicroStrategy on Aug. 8. With president Phong Le taking over as CEO, Saylor will assume his new role as executive chairman — a position that will focus almost entirely on building MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin reserves. “I believe that splitting the roles of Chairman and CEO will enable us to better pursue our two corporate strategies of acquiring and holding Bitcoin and growing our enterprise analytics software business,” he said.

The traditional film industry is one of the most centralized and traditional of them all. Just a handful of movie studios and streaming conglomerates control the lion’s share of the global film market. 

But nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and a growing crypto-centric community of enthusiastic filmmakers might just disrupt the industry. 

Some independent projects offer a glimpse into Web3 filmmaking, while others provide a window into distribution. Decentralized streaming also demonstrates what community-based film development and exhibition might look like in the not-so-distant future. Thanks to the popularity of NFTs, the Film3 ecosystem is about to evolve beyond its embryonic stage. Although the trend is very fresh and a multitude of kinks need to be worked out, keep an eye on this emerging crypto sector as it continues to pick up steam. 

Many blockchain companies now believe that regulation is inevitable, but there’s a growing debate over where to draw the line between protecting users and strangling the lifeblood out of the industry — or forcing it outside the United States. 

“Whether we like it or not, regulation is coming,” Sheila Warren of the Crypto Council for Innovation tells me during an interview in the lead up to the recent Collision conference in Toronto, Canada.

The CEO of the industry lobby group for blockchain technology explains that rather than trying to stop the inevitable, many companies are now focused on lobbying for rules that work for them instead.

Why the change? With every week seeming to bring new stories of loopholes, hacks and algo stablecoin failures — from the popular Netflix QuadrigaCX documentary to the dizzying world of crypto transaction mixers and the steps law enforcement used to track two Americans accused of selling fraudulent NFTs — increased regulation is starting to look like a better idea. And not just for businesses but also for legislators worried about being reelected. People seem to love hearing about crypto scams and lost money… as long as it’s not their own.

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 Kim Hamilton Duffy, director of identity and standards at Centre Consortium — an open-source technology project designed to create a more inclusive global economy.

Kim is a leader in the emerging decentralized identity field and has architected successful open-source projects such as Verite, Blockcerts and the Digital Credential Consortium toolkit.

1 — Which countries are doing the most to support blockchain, and which ones will be left behind?

Rather than assessing this through the narrow lens of whether certain crypto transactions are taxed, I think about whether countries are supporting innovation in blockchain — and, more broadly, decentralized architectures — in a collaborative, responsible, sustainable way that can benefit individuals and businesses. 

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

‘Bullish rate hike’ — Why crypto spiked in the face of bad news

Despite the U.S. Federal Reserve announcing a 75-basis-point interest rate hike on Wednesday, the crypto markets pumped significantly on the same day with the momentum continuing through the week. Quantum Economics founder and CEO Mati Greenspan jokingly called it a “bullish rate hike” and stated that investors were clearly expecting far worse. Analysts such as Swyftx’s Pav Hundal suggested the recent rally may be due to an easing of inflationary pressures around gas and goods such as corn and wheat.

Ethereum dev confirms Goerli merger date, the final update before the Merge

On Thursday, lead Ethereum developer Tim Beiko revealed that the final Goerli testnet merger ahead of Ethereum’s long-awaited Merge and switch to proof-of-stake will occur between Aug. 6-12. In what has been a long and much-delayed roadmap since late 2020, the Ethereum network is now in the final stages of completing its largest upgrade to date. The official Merge is slated for Sept. 19 but could be subject to further delays if there are issues with the Goerli testnet.

Economics is the study of human behavior involving scarce resources — and the effects those behaviors have on those resources, explains Roderick McKinley.

Tokenomics in crypto is a related but different field. Tokens are a way for projects to raise funds and build communities, and designing the way they work can be much more complex than traditional equity raises — and potentially much more problematic.

“In tokenomics, the token or digital asset is the scarce resource. But we can now design features for these programmable digital assets, influencing how people behave and interact with each other, often creating new possibilities for exchange altogether,” McKinley says. He explains the distribution of tokens and the outcomes of that distribution are key matters for investors and for how the business ends up operating.

McKinley has worked on a range of different projects, including ParallelChain, GBC AI, Avarta, Fluid, ShopX, Terona and Kasta. But what is it that a tokenomics expert provides to projects?

“I typically deliver a range of services to projects. These include a design of the token’s supply alongside other economic features that make the token useful, so it attracts demand, helping clients to understand how to use the technology in ways that fit their business and, finally, how to make a compelling fundraising case,” he says.

A friend of mine who is a seasoned Web2 tech executive joined a Web3 company in June. A switched-on operator, he asked to speak with all 16 staff before deciding to join the firm.

This shows that Web3 joiners need to really hone in on the mission when jumping ship from the old tech world.

Is the blockchain tech business model really plausible? You almost need to be a seasoned venture capitalist or world-class engineer when considering a new project’s potential to build a new L1 blockchain as promised — and, thus, deliver your token rewards.

The risk-reward metrics mean there are opportunities for great success. But with great success come great tax problems…

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 Pat Duffy, co-founder of The Giving Block — a crypto donation solution that provides an ecosystem for nonprofits and charities to fundraise Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Pat is co-founder of The Giving Block, and has raised over $100,000,000 in crypto for nonprofits in the last year. From 2020 to 2022, Pat and his co-founder Alex Wilson grew The Giving Block from a four-person team into one of the fastest growing companies in the nonprofit sector, with thousands of nonprofit clients and the world’s largest crypto donor community.

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

3AC founders reveal ties to Terra founder, blame overconfidence for collapse

After five weeks of being AWOL, the founders of defunct crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, resurfaced via an interview with Bloomberg. The duo admitted to operating the firm with overconfidence as a result of the multi-year bull market. They also noted that they were very close with Terra founder Do Kwon and, despite running a major hedge fund, were shocked that the project’s extremely risky algorithmic stablecoin went bust. Zhu and Davies said they overlooked several red flags as a result of the kinship.

Mojang Studios bans Minecraft NFT integrations

Minecraft developers Mojang Studios banned nonfungible token (NFT) integrations in their wildly popular flagship game this week. The firm cited issues with NFTs being associated with price speculation, exclusion and rug pulls. “To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications,” the firm announced. Crypto-skeptic gamers also called on Fornite developer Epic Games to follow suit, but the company said it “definitely won’t” institute a similar ban.

Property is the world’s single largest store of wealth, and if the cryptocurrency and blockchain world is seeking an express route to mass adoption, it could do worse than partnering with the real estate industry. 

According to a September 2021 report by Savills World Research, the estimated value of all the world’s real estate stands at $326.5 trillion. By comparison, crypto-sector market capitalization was about $1 trillion in mid-July. 

Widely credited as the inventor of digital cash, David Chaum is sometimes known as the “father of online anonymity” or the “godfather of cryptocurrency,” whose work inspired the near-mythical group called the Cypherpunks from which Bitcoin emerged. 

Beginning his studies in computer science in the late 1970s, when encryption was classified at the same level as nuclear technology, Chaum quickly realized that the technology would be crucial to ensure the continuation of privacy and democracy in the digital age. More recently, he founded xx Network, a privacy-focused blockchain whose connected xx Messenger Chaum hopes will withstand attacks even by quantum computers of the future.

“The National Security Agency was taking the position that cryptography was born classified, even if you created it yourself — like nuclear weapons technology,” Chaum recalls. He was told around 1980 that conferences on the subject would naturally not be allowed and that “people who organize them would be prosecuted.” 

Cryptography, encryption, cypherpunks, xx Network, xx Messenger, xx Coin, privacy, quantum computing, Ecash, DigiCash, democracy, Hannu Nurmi — “I was risking spending the rest of my life in jail,” he says.

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 Lisa Fridman, the president and co-founder of Quadrata, a network that brings an identity and compliance layer to DeFi across existing public blockchains.

Lisa Fridman was previously the head of blockchain strategy at Springcoin (Spring Labs). Prior to joining Spring Labs, Lisa served as a co-head of strategy at Martlet Asset Management, CEO of PAAMCO Europe and the global head of research at PAAMCO. Lisa is an experienced investor and a business builder. Throughout her career, she has worked closely with institutions, delivering bespoke solutions. She received her Master of Business Administration and graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Business Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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

OpenSea lays off 20% of its staff, citing ‘crypto winter’

Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea plans to lay off around 20% of its staff, with co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer citing “an unprecedented combination of crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability” as the reasons behind the move. He also added, “The changes we’re making today put us in a position to maintain multiple years of runway under various crypto winter scenarios (5 years at the current volume), and give us high confidence that we will only have to go through this process once.”

Celsius has filed for bankruptcy

Celsius, the crypto lending platform that has had customer funds locked up for several weeks but previously claimed to be more trustworthy and safer than a bank, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday. According to an email received by Celsius customers, the company voluntarily filed petitions for Chapter 11 reorganization and used the same firm as Voyager Digital for its bankruptcy proceedings. It is unclear what will happen with users’ funds at this stage, given there may be a $1.2 billion hole in the firm’s balance sheet.

Jane Thomason is an Australian academic who spent 15 years running hospitals and doing development work abroad followed by a 20-year stint building a $250-million revenue company. 

Thomason — now a blockchain adviser to the World Health Organization — says she “had an epiphany” while thinking about the 2004 Tsunami in Indonesia, in which the lives of over 200,000 people were washed away.

“No one knew the identities of the people coming to the hospitals — all the identity documents were gone, all the bank records were gone, all the health records were gone. People wanted to send money to the people who were alive, but no one could send money directly.”

Miami is fast becoming one of the major hubs in the crypto world with more and more blockchain companies moving to the city each year.

Miami famously plays host to the Bitcoin Conference each year, and digital assets have been embraced by the mayor and the wider population. Here’s your ultimate guide to the crypto city of Miami.