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The new appointments deepen the digital bank’s expertise in digital assets, regulatory compliance and bank operations as it hopes to become a federally chartered national bank.
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Ontario government freezes millions more in donations to Freedom Convoy
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The Ontario Provincial government in Canada has been granted an order from the Superior Court of Justice to freeze millions of dollars in donations on the GiveSendGo platform from reaching the Freedom Convoy protesters.
This is the second time the truckers have been denied access to funds since GoFundMe froze $10 million in donations last week and later refunded donors following a backlash.
The latest attempt to defund the protest pertains to donations made to the “Freedom Convoy 2022” and “Adopt-a-Trucker” pages on the GiveSendGo fundraising platform. As of Thursday, “Freedom Convoy 2022” had raised $8.4 million and “Adopt-a-Trucker” had received $686,000.
The Post Millennial writer Ian Miles Cheong tweeted today:
“Bitcoin fixes this… They’d have to make cryptocurrency illegal in Canada.”
Benjamin Dichter, one of the organizers of the fundraiser, agreed with Cheong. He tweeted today that, “This is good for Bitcoin.”
A group of supporters earlier formed the HonkHonk Hodl organization specifically to help the convoy raise funds in Bitcoin. As of the time of writing, the group had raised 21 BTC ($902,000).
Bitcoin payment processor OpenNode wrote last year that the BTC payment solution is a viable alternative for people who have been censored by traditional payment methods.
“One of the benefits of Bitcoin is its censorship resistance. Without any central authority to dictate who can and can’t use Bitcoin, it has proven to be the currency of choice for many individuals and organizations who have been left out of traditional payment methods.”
OpenNode wrote that accepting BTC donations spreads awareness of Bitcoin among donors and receivers, and encourages adoption.
Related: Protesters migrate to crypto fundraising platform following GoFundMe ban
However there is debate over whether the Ontario government is able to freeze the funds. GiveSendGo tweeted today that a Canadian government has no control over how funds are managed on its U.S. based platform. The company assured protestors that: “All funds for EVERY campaign on GiveSendGo flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns.”
Know this! Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo. All funds for EVERY campaign on GiveSendGo flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.
— GiveSendGo (@GiveSendGo) February 11, 2022
However, Toronto Sun political columnist Brian Lilly pointed out that even though GiveSendGo is based in Boston, the Canadian court order prevents any Canadians from accessing the funds. He said “Withdrawing it in the US and sending it here would be a violation.”
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EU finance chief says digital euro bill coming in early 2023
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The European Commission has announced that a bill for a digital euro will be proposed in 2023.
As first reported by Politico, EC finance chief Mairead McGuinness officially disclosed the EU’s formal consideration of digital euro legislation at a fintech conference on Wednesday.
“Our goal is to table legislation in early 2023,” the Commissioner for Financial Service said. “A targeted legislative consultation in the coming weeks.”
The European Central Bank (ECB) is already experimenting with designs and systems for a digital euro, with a prototype expected sometime in late-2023. If a digital euro is to be implemented, it will require the seal of approval from Eurozone governors. If they give the green light, then the digital euro could be ready for issuance by 2025.
The digital euro is a central bank digital currency (CBDC) — a financial instrument that central banks around the world are exploring very seriously. The increased interest in CBDC’s has emerged from growing concerns that domestic currencies will eventually be undermined by the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies.
“If we don’t satisfy this demand, then others will do it,” ECB Executive Board member Fabio Panetta said in mid-November, pushing for the implementation of a digital euro.
Last year, the ECB conducted research and published a report on digital currencies. It found that a digital euro may help lower interest rates, speed up transaction processes and decrease cash use.
Irrespective of the reported benefits, central bankers face an uphill battle to win over the public. Research conducted by the UK economic affairs committee and Germany’s central bank shows that the majority of respondents oppose government-backed digital currencies citing skepticism of benefits and fears of government snooping.
Related: IMF recommends CBDC and global crypto standards for financial stability
But official interest in CBDCs around the world has taken off with Kenya’s central bank recently seeking public input around a digital shilling, while Thailand has already begun implementing regulation for a future retail CBDC. The Central Bank of the Bahamas was one of the first to roll out a CBDC, the Sand Dollar in October 2020.
China however, maintains the first-mover advantage in the world of digital currency. The country has outstripped the international community with continued and significant leaps forward in the CBDC space.
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China’s Metaverse plans: Decentralization not required
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Experts say that China’s corner of the Metaverse is likely to evolve very differently to other international markets and that decentralized infrastructure may not be part of the game plan.
The Sino Metaverse seems likely to repeat what happened with the web. When the internet first went mainstream in the 1990s, many people theorized that it might accelerate democracy in China.
NewZoo’s 2021 trend report “Intro to the Metaverse” claimed that the Communist nation’s distaste for decentralization won’t necessarily deter it from participating in the Metaverse, but the experience may be very different, similar to the way the internet looks different behind the Great Firewall.
China filters politically sensitive content by stringently managing its local internet and blocking overseas websites.
Mario Stefanidis, vice president of research at Roundhill Investments, told The Wire China that it seems likely China will take a similar approach to Web3 trends,
“It will be much easier for China to oversee development of a local metaverse rather than allowing users to access the ‘global metaverse’ and spending significant resources censoring and blocking certain experiences.”
Nina Xiang, journalist and founder of Asian tech intelligence and data company China Money Network, added that the divide will be particularly noticeable between China’s metaverse and the U.S.
In an announcement for her new book, Parallel Metaverses: How the US, China and the Rest of the World Are Shaping Different Virtual Worlds, she wrote that “the materialization of the Metaverse will take place amid persistent US-China geopolitical and technological rivalry.”
“This means there may be greater divergence among the two countries’ metaverse ecosystems related to major players, content creation, infrastructure outlays, applications, product formats, laws and regulations, and investment opportunities.”
Tech giants pave the way to the Metaverse
Chinese companies are certainly very interested in the potential of the Metaverse. In the three months to end of November 2021, more than 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) was invested in Metaverse-related ventures. During all of 2020, only 2.1 billion yuan was invested, according to Chinese crypto venture capital company Sino Global.
In December, Chinese search engine giant Baidu announced its own metaverse app XiRang, which translates to “Land of Hope.” Despite the app’s planned focus on digital infrastructure, Baidu vice president Ma Jie made sure to highlight that it will not support cryptocurrency or NFTs.
Chinese entertainment conglomerate Tencent is the largest video game company in the world based on investments. It announced plans to acquire VR hardware maker Black Shark in January this year and the company’s president Martin Lau also called the Metaverse a “real opportunity” in a recent earnings call.
According to the Intro to the Metaverse report, Tencent doesn’t need decentralized infrastructure to achieve its vision for the metaverse due to its existing market dominance.
“Tencent can theoretically achieve high interoperability without decentralized infrastructure because the Tencent ecosystem itself already covers most vertices in the game and tech services industry.”
According to analysis from local media publication IPRdaily, Tencent filed a total of 4,085 patent applications for virtual and augmented reality technology during 2020 and 2021. It was far from the only Chinese company to do so, with six of the top ten companies in terms of VR and AR patent applications over the past two years being Chinese.
In China,3700 companies have applied for registration for Metaverse name… #meta #metaverse #china pic.twitter.com/nCj0EF9eeW
— Metaverse Planet (@metaverseplane) February 10, 2022
China’s challenges
However, China’s efforts in the Metaverse are still lagging behind, according to a Jan 27 analysis from Reuters. It cited “less investment by domestic tech giants,” and also pointed out that “industry-leading products like Meta’s Oculus virtual reality (VR) headsets are banned in China.”
Related: Shanghai includes metaverse in its development plan
User content generation is also one of the key pillars of the Metaverse, but is also notoriously difficult in China, given its stringent restrictions on expression. NewZoo suggested that companies such as Tencent will likely produce their own Metaverse content through “reusable game modes, live-ops and IP collaborations.”
Gaming is an essential part of the Metaverse bu also face stringent regulation from the Chinese government, which bans everything from strong violent content, to the depiction of anything that could be construed as “obscene.” During the past year, the government also started to impose restrictions for how long minors could spend playing games.
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BBC pulls doco as doubts emerge over trader who turned $50 into $8M
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The BBC has pulled a documentary focused on a 20-year-old crypto trader who supposedly turned $50 into an $8 million fortune last year.
The doco was titled “The Crypto Millionaire” and followed the story of Birmingham-based Hanad Hassan, who claims to have made a return of around 16,000,000% in one year from trading unspecified crypto assets.
The story was set to be broadcast this week and explore how Hassan had started to give back to the community following his newfound wealth, however the show was canned after the Guardian reported on Feb. 10 that it had raised concerns with the BBC’s research:
“The Guardian asked the BBC if it was confident in his claimed financial returns and questioned why the program’s promotional material did not mention that Hassan’s cryptocurrency Orfano was abruptly shut down in October, with many unhappy investors claiming they were left out of pocket as a result.”
“The BBC swiftly said it had withdrawn the show but did not make any further comment on its editorial checks,” wrote The Guardian’s media editor Jim Waterson.
In a now-deleted promotional story for the documentary on the BBC’s website (that can still be found via web.archive.org), it reported that Hassan had initially turned $50 into $1 million in Q1 2021, before going on to co-found his own “special cryptocurrency” that donates all of its profits to charity.
It is unclear how Hassan made the remaining $7 million of the reported $8 million figure, as the BBC did not specify the details behind his “net worth” and how he generated the money between Q1 and Q4 2021.
According to Coinmarketcap, Hasan’s ORFANO token was released on April 2, 2021, and had a 6% tax on all transactions using the asset. Out of the tax generated from the token, 2% of it was allocated to a wallet address for charity donations. There is no listed price history for the token, however the BBC reported that OFRANO donated $200,000 to charity last year from its profits.
Looking at posts from the r/Orfano community on social media platform Reddit, it appears that the project went cold around September before closing down in October suggesting that ORFANO lasted only around five or six months. Numerous users in the subreddit alleged that the project may have been illegitimate, although that’s a fairly common claim made by community members whenever projects end unsuccessfully.
Related: UK tax agency cracks down on rules around DeFi lending and staking
In a message to the community that was reposted on Reddit, Hassan and co-founder Ahmed wrote:
“Things haven’t gone the way we had planned and after careful consideration we have decided that we will [be] stopping the continuing of the project. The team have put in every effort to maintain and grow the token but we don’t see any progress and a way to bring Orfano x back to the good days.”
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Belarus Moves to Allow Investment Funds to Acquire Crypto Assets – Regulation Bitcoin News
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The crypto-friendly nation of Belarus is preparing to permit investment funds to put money into digital currencies. A proposal to do so is part of a package of necessary legal changes tailored to attract such institutions to the country.
Finance Ministry Takes Steps to Facilitate Crypto Investments in Belarus
Amendments aimed at luring investment funds to Belarus have been published by the Ministry of Finance for public consultations. Despite having in place a regulatory framework for collective investments, not a single fund has been registered in the country so far, the department noted in its motives for the initiative.
One of the main reasons for the absence of such funds is that they are currently prevented from investing in crypto assets, representatives of professional circles have pointed out. The market for “digital signs (tokens),” the legal term used to describe cryptocurrencies, has been growing at a fast pace, the finance ministry has acknowledged.
To lift the restrictions, the ministry has drafted a resolution amending its own decree on activities in the securities market pertaining to investment funds. It plans to allow the funds to simultaneously operate as securities dealers and residents of the Belarus High-Tech Park (HTP). The latter manages a special legal regime established to facilitate the country’s digital economy, including the crypto sector.
Another concern expressed by professionals is the absence of long-term guarantees from the government regarding the existing tax cuts for the industry. To address the issue, the Ministry of Finance has put forward new provisions which will extend the tax exemptions for entities working with collective investments until Jan. 1, 2031.
Belarus opened its doors to crypto businesses with a decree “On the development of the digital economy” which went into force in the spring of 2018. The document, signed by President Alexander Lukashenko, introduced tax breaks and other incentives for companies dealing with digital assets.
Despite Lukashenko hinting last March at a possible tightening of the regulations, Belarusian officials have more recently indicated that the authorities in Minsk have no intentions of adopting stricter rules for the crypto space, even as the country’s closest ally, Russia, is discussing a proposal to ban a range of crypto-related activities.
While using cryptocurrency as a means of payment is prohibited in Belarus, HTP residents can issue and exchange coins and tokens and the country’s largest bank offers a service allowing users to buy and sell digital currencies. The crypto adoption index by Chainalysis ranks Belarus third in Eastern Europe, after Russia and Ukraine, due to strong peer-to-peer activity.
Do you expect Belarusian authorities to adopt the proposed changes and allow investment funds to work with cryptocurrencies? Tell us in the comments section below.
Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.
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GameStop Taps Immutable X for NFT Marketplace, Launches $100M Gaming Fund
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The gaming retail giant said Thursday it tapped the layer 2 system, to be used atop Ethereum, because of Immutable’s “zero gas fees for trading and minting NFTs in a carbon-neutral environment,” according to a press release, referring to non-fungible tokens.
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Electricity Consumption in Siberian Region Rises Fourfold Due to Crypto Mining
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Data center businesses, including legal mines, have to pay around three times the residential price for electricity, Sergey Arestov, a co-founder of BitCluster, told CoinDesk. If you are engaged in industry, you must pay for electricity accordingly, he said.
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Cyber vigilante hunts down DeFi scammers running away with $25M rug pull
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In the world of digital finance, where the weapon of choice for a heist is a computer rather than a semi-automatic firearm, tracking down scams and frauds from across the world becomes a near-impossible feat for centralized police forces.
However, in an interview with Cointelegraph, an anonymous cyber vigilante shares insights into how he went about tracking down a group of decentralized finance (DeFi) scammers responsible for the $25 million StableMagnet rug pull, coordinating with police authorities and eventually having the stolen money returned back to the investors.
The StableMagnet platform lured unwary investors under the pretext of high returns against stablecoin deposits. In a typical rug pull event, StableMagnet managed to run away with the $25 million that was invested by over 1000 users.
##StableMagnet #rugpull $22m and growing. Its SwapUtils library code is NOT verified and *DIFFERENT* from main Swap contract: https://t.co/Ls5XNA5UXf. @bscscan There is a need to verify the library code!
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) June 23, 2021
Right before the rug pull, the cyber vigilante (anonymous for obvious reasons) examined the code to ensure the legitimacy of the project prior to investing himself. However, what he missed out on were a number of messages on Twitter alerting him on the possible exploits and vulnerabilities in the system.
Taking things personally, the vigilante — an active ethical hacker — set out to track the scammers and bring justice to the investors. He told Cointelegraph:
“I just felt like this was the only opportunity in my life — to have a very meaningful impact in a situation where most people are not going to have the time and the gusto to do that kind of thing.”
Starting from tracking down a GitHub account to identifying all family members of the scammers through social media accounts, our vigilante’s investigation pinpointed a group of Chinese locals from Hong Kong.
Eventually, the anonymous vigilante tracked down the scammers’ travel to a Chinatown in Manchester — a temporary move until the commotion died down:
“I didn’t want them to go to jail. I don’t like the centralized forces to come into the decentralized world as much as we possibly can.”
Taking the matter into his own hands, he booked a one-way flight ticket to Manchester while contacting local police authorities citing the narrow timeline before the scammers move to a different location. To the vigilante’s surprise, the Greater Manchester Police reacted swiftly and arrested a few of the scammers.
The police retrieved different pieces of a single USB device from the scammers, which contained roughly $9 million:
“Once that occurred, it was believable to the other project people (scammers) that I wasn’t BSing about finding them and knowing where they were and being able to get them taught if
Following the arrests, other members of StableMagnet cooperated with the cyber vigilante and returned the majority of the loot. Ever since the development, his message has been heard loud and clear, “maybe it’s not a good idea to scam, at least not on the Binance Smart Chain.”
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Decentralized technology will end the Web3 privacy conundrum
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Although the modern internet connects us like never before, one thing that younger generations have never truly experienced is the feeling of genuine privacy. Even older generations have forgotten what life was like before our every thought and action were tracked.
Web3 envisions an open, trustless, permissionless internet where users can interact with each other peer-to-peer without giving up ownership control, privacy or relying on intermediaries.
Underlying that vision, blockchains are one of the most important tools. They eliminate the need for trusted third parties and help to create a direct relationship between users and service providers, recording the rules of engagement on immutable ledgers and even storing direct interactions between them. Blockchains also fundamentally reconfigure the structures and power balances in data ownership.
With blockchains, individuals can now bypass centralized websites and costly intermediaries and interact directly with each other with end-to-end encryption. People can buy assets such as houses or works of art, access public resources, and participate in high-level decisions. Moreover, the control and management of those processes are much simpler using a decentralized platform where third parties are unable to gain access to data unless participants agree to enable it.
That’s the theory.
The reality of blockchain privacy
In reality, today’s blockchains are “pseudonymous,” where users are identified by an alphanumeric string of characters known as a public key. However, associations between the activity in a transaction and metadata can often undermine pseudonymity. This renders one of the main proposed benefits of blockchain useless and potentially exposes sensitive information to all participants in a network.
We may not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but we can track the transactions associated with their addresses. Blockchain forensics firms, including CipherTrace and Elliptic, regularly use the digital ledger to trace financial activity on the blockchain.
Related: Web 3.0 needs more users, not more investors
A seemingly unrelated phenomenon has been recently observed in the ever-growing world of blockchain-based markets, where trades, visible to miners, become subject to “front-running.”
While this doesn’t have much to do with privacy at first glance, this type of attack occurs when a miner is able to read the plain-text transactions submitted on-chain and insert their own transactions ahead of users, getting the best deals and leaving the rest of us with less value. The maximal-extractable value (MEV) refers to the amount of value that miners can suck out of the system by front-running — value that users would otherwise receive.
Since January 2020, miners have extracted hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in value from Ethereum users. Clearly, this a real problem the industry needs to address.
This begs the question: Where are the blockchain layers that deliver real privacy?
Related: Browser cookies are not consent: The new path to privacy after EU data regulation fail
As things currently stand, the implementation of privacy has not been given the priority that is needed or deserved. Instead, the blockchain community chose other priorities — notably, addressing the scalability, speed and cost challenges that have been holding blockchain back from mass adoption.
The solution for Web3 privacy already exists
It’s not just willful negligence, of course. There is a good technical reason that web applications today are unable to execute on existing blockchain architectures. Because all participants are currently forced to re-execute all transactions in order to verify the state of their ledger, every service on a blockchain is effectively time-sharing a single, finite, global compute resource.
Another reason that privacy has not been prioritized is that it’s very hard to guarantee. Historically, privacy tools have been slow and inefficient, and making them more scalable is hard work. But just because privacy is hard to implement doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a priority.
The first step is to make privacy simpler for the user. Achieving privacy in crypto should not require clunky workarounds, shady tools or a deep expertise of complex cryptography. Blockchain networks, including smart contract platforms, should support optional privacy that works as easily as clicking a button.
Blockchain technology is poised to answer these calls with security measures that guarantee utmost privacy with social accountability.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and secure multiparty computation (sMPC) are two technologies that can revolutionize the way we perceive internet privacy and help us regain control over the personas we create online.
Related: The crypto industry royally screwed up privacy
Both solutions will allow the internet to become a place where our sensitive data is released only with our approval. However, each solution has its own drawbacks.
Kinks in blockchain privacy
While ZKPs allow for basic transfers, they do not allow multi-user interactions. And while sMPC allows for multiple users, it can be prohibitively slow on its own. The obvious answer is to couple the two technologies together to cancel out the pitfalls and create a fast, secure, highly private framework from which to stage Web3 projects.
Perhaps the right way to look at web privacy today is that we are finally at the end of a huge log jam. The destination — a better form of privacy where the user is in control — was never in doubt, but there were other fish to fry.
The jam was caused by an understandable focus on solving scalability, speed and cost, leaving too little energy and investment to address privacy. But that’s the past.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Adam Gagol is the co-founder of Web3 venture studio Cardinal Cryptography and of Aleph Zero, a Swiss organization offering a scalable privacy-enhancing smart contract infrastructure suitable for enterprise-grade applications. Adam earned a Ph.D. in mathematics for his work on applications of probabilistic methods in combinatorics. In the blockchain space, Adam’s achievements with Cardinal Cryptography include designing Aleph Zero’s consensus protocol, which was peer-reviewed by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2019.
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