Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
Taxes news
- The active management firm Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood said that bitcoin (BTC) investors in the US shouldn’t transact with the coin until the tax code is changed. During a Thursday webcast hosted by the Cboe exchange, Wood has advised cryptocurrency investors against using the cryptocurrency as a payment, Market Insider reported. “The IRS has something to say about this, so if you have huge gains in your bitcoin, I don’t think I would bear much in the way of transactions until we get maybe some changes on the tax front,” Wood was quoted as saying.
NFTs news
- Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, the second-largest art museum in the world, founded in 1764, said that it will host an exhibition of non-fungible token (NFT) art this year. The exhibition is being developed by the Museum’s Department of Contemporary Art, while Aksenov Family Foundation will be the strategic partner of the project. The museum said that NFTs are the “most urgent agenda in the field of contemporary art today.”
Blockchain news
- Major crypto company Crypto.com has launched, what it calls a fully decentralized open-source public blockchain, the Crypto.org Chain. It’s designed to be a public good that helps drive mass adoption of blockchain technology through use cases like payments, decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs, they said.
Mining news
- Hut 8 confirmed that it purchased USD 30m of Nvidia’s new crypto mining-specific graphics processing units (GPU) with the aim to expand into mining for other cryptos besides BTC. By buying CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) miners, the company’s operating rate increased by c. 1,600 G/H. Miners will be used to mine alternative blockchain networks, and expand revenue and opportunity, in addition to core Bitcoin mining operations, they said.
- Argo has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with DMG Blockchain Solutions (DMG), a blockchain and cryptocurrency technology company, to jointly launch “the first Bitcoin mining pool powered exclusively by clean energy,” it said. The Terra Pool will initially consist of both Argo’s and DMG’s hashrate, mostly generated by hydroelectric resources, and it represents “the first-ever opportunity for the creation of ‘green bitcoin’.”
Adoption news
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Brian Brooks, a former Coinbase executive and former acting head of the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told CNBC that BTC was the first coin to show that “finance could be done on a networked basis as opposed to at the bank,” adding that “the reason there was something like USD 61bn worth of bitcoin transacted yesterday is because that network has been adopted by people who used to go to the bank.”
Investments news
- US-based crypto bank Avanti has raised USD 37m from Series A investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Binance.US, Morgan Creek Digital, Slow Ventures, and the University of Wyoming Foundation, among others. Avanti said it has raised a total of USD 44m since its inception. It will put the funds toward meeting regulatory capital requirements and investment in its engineering team.
CBDCs news
- China proposed a set of global rules for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on Thursday, including how they can be used around the world, as well as monitoring and information sharing, Reuters reported. Mu Changchun, the director-general of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC)’s Digital Currency Institute, laid out the new proposals at a Bank for International Settlements seminar, saying that: interoperability should be enabled between CBDC systems of different jurisdictions and exchange; information flow and fund flows should be synchronised so as to facilitate regulators to monitor the transactions for compliance; and a scalable and overseen foreign exchange platform supported by distributed ledger technology or other technologies is proposed.
Legal news
- Instagram personality with nearly 1m followers Jegara Igbara, known as “Jay Mazini”, has been charged with wire fraud, said the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The charges are related to a scheme in which Igbara allegedly induced victims to send him BTC by falsely claiming to have sent wire transfers of cash in exchange for the coin. Igbara never sent the money, and stole at least USD 2.5m worth of BTC, the SEC said. He’s being held on state charges in New Jersey and will make his initial appearance in the Eastern District of New York at a later date.
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