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| What you need to know today in crypto and beyond April 13, 2021 Sponsored By: If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.
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Today's must-reads Top Shelf Bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) hit new all-time highs in overnight trading.
THOR, UNWRAPPED: Thorchain, a blockchain that enables direct, decentralized trading of base layer cryptocurrencies, will go live today after three years of development. Based on the Cosmos consensus protocol Tendermint, Thorchain advances the trustless world of crypto trading by removing the need for “wrapped assets,” which is typically how different blockchains interact. CRIME & THE TRANSPARENT: An ex-CIA director has launched a new pro-crypto lobbying group, Crypto Council for Innovation, aiming to influence international crypto regulations. Of particular note: the former CIA Man thinks criminals – who are “technology agnostic” – are moving away from Bitcoin due to the transparency of the blockchain system. EVERYTHING ELSE: Ethereum incubator ConsenSys raised $65 million from white gloves like JPMorgan, Mastercard and UBS, and crypto-natives including Protocol Labs, Alameda Research and The LAO. Telegram is nearly done paying back qualifying TON investors from its $1.7 billion initial coin offering – it’s now eyeing an IPO. Canaan Q4 revenues collapsed as supply-chain disrupted the mining machine maker’s core business.
– Daniel Kuhn
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Overheard on CoinDesk TV Sound Bite “I definitely see a world where Coinbase is a distributor of decentralized finance products.”
– ConsenSys Global Fintech Co-Head Lex Sokolin, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover."
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A message from CoinDesk CoinDesk's Quarterly Review Webinar Series The suits are here to stay, but retail isn’t going away. While Q1 saw the emergence of retail investors as a market driver, crypto caught explosive interest through non-fungible tokens from investors, celebrities and the general public.
Every Monday at 11:30 a.m. ET, crypto analysts Noelle Acheson and Christine Kim will discuss the performance and milestones of bitcoin and ether compared to macro and other crypto assets, along with important developments in the emerging DeFi and NFT sectors.
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What others are writing... Off-Chain Signals Bearish: Kraken’s Jesse Powell warned of a crypto crackdown on CNBC, HSBC reportedly bans customers from buying MicroStrategy shares (Reuters), the shady startup – BitClout – selling “shares” in celebs (Yahoo) Bullish: Crypto goes to Washington (Politico), TIME and MicroStrategy are paying execs in BTC, NYSE is doing NFTs, well over half Luno’s customer base is in Africa (TechCrunch) Ridiculous? YouTuber Jake Paul Seeks $10 Million for NFT of Knockout Punch (Decrypt) “We are in the Pre Silk Road era of the Metaverse,” where Discord is a trade route and NFTs are silk. Another take on how NFTs, DeFi and Web3 are intertwined.– D.K.
Investor Momentum to NFT Boom: CoinDesk Research's Quarterly Review Introducing CoinDesk Research's quarterly review, covering the main developments over the first three months of 2021 in Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, stablecoins and – of course – NFTs.
The report presents over 100 insights on how retail investors are picking up market momentum, how Ethereum activity is not being driven by NFTs as much as one might think, how stablecoins have responded to increased activity, how DeFi is for now the realm of decentralized exchanges and more.
Download the CoinDesk Quarterly Review, First Quarter 2021.
Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway
The Balaji Blueprint With Coinbase going public this week, crypto passes an important milestone. The $100 billion-plus listing validates the industry on Wall Street and could catalyze a new wave of crypto startup funding.
But, even now, we’re only at the very beginning of what this tech can do. We’re passing through the validation stage to the point where things get really interesting. We’re about to see what happens when millions of people start using radically new forms of money, with all the economic consequences that flow from that.
For a taste of what could happen next, it’s worth reading Balaji S. Srinivasan. A former Coinbase CTO and board partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Srinivasan is a genuine big-thinker with a history of making ahead-of-the-curve predictions.
Srinivasan recently wrote about how India could adopt a digital rupee and a series of “national software stacks and neutral crypto protocols,” helping its entrepreneurs to get funding and leapfrogging a less-than-modern economy into the future. His mercifully clear “Add Crypto to IndiaStack” essay should be required reading for policymakers trying to work out what the crypto fuss is about.
The existing IndiaStack is a robust set of APIs for mobile payments (UPI), identity (Aadhaar), KYC (eKYC) and much else. Srinivasan proposes that India add a digital rupee and wallet to this, allowing citizens to move money between mobile phones without going through banks.
After that, he suggests, the wallet can be enabled to accept other select forms of crypto, allowing entrepreneurs to access pools of overseas capital, including the billions already moving around decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms. This can help address India’a SME “funding gap,” which is estimated at $250-500 billion.
“By adding both a digital rupee and crypto support to IndiaStack, we could turn every phone into not just a bank account but a bonafide Bloomberg Terminal, giving every Indian the ability to make both domestic and international transactions of arbitrary complexity, attracting crypto capital from around the world, and leapfrogging the 20th century financial system entirely,” Srinivasan writes.
Indian officials have shown a disdain for crypto trading up to now, even threatening to ban it recently. But Indians have shown a lot of interest in bitcoin. Srinivasan shows how the underlying tech might become acceptable: i.e. within a government-organized program.
The involvement of any state bodies in the emerging crypto-economy will be an anathema to some. But governments won’t want to be left out, especially as China (India’s great rival) develops its own powerful crypto stack, including a digital currency and a blockchain-based services network.
Srinivasan sees IndiaStack as a way to escape the control of the legacy American-run financial system and the emerging Chinese-blockchain nexus. India can put itself at the forefront of a new “non-aligned” movement (what he calls the "Decentralized Movement"). Instead of swapping American surveillance for Chinese surveillance, he argues countries can align themselves with the ethos of Bitcoin and Ethereum “that all of them benefit from but none of them control.”
– Ben Schiller
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