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| The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day Feb. 18, 2022 Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here. Supported by
Welcome to The Node.
In today’s newsletter: Court ruled to freeze “Freedom convoy" bitcoin addresses (if they can get the keys). FBI's new cybercrime team includes crypto analysis specialists. And Terra's Do Kwon is ordered to comply with SEC subpoenas.
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Today’s must-reads Top Shelf NO TRUCKS GIVEN: A private class action lawsuit against participants in Canada’s “freedom convoy” has won the right to temporarily freeze crypto assets directly and indirectly related to the protest. The injunction names crypto platforms Bull Bitcoin, TallyCoin, Binance Smartchain, among others. Charity campaign “HonkHonkHodl” raised over 21 BTC to support the trucker’s protest against coronavirus vaccine mandates by using fundraising platform Tallycoin – an effort that faced challenges getting the funds to intended recipients. Earlier this week, Canada’s government issued a never-used Emergencies Act allowing banks to suspect protestors’ accounts and expand anti-money laundering rules to block fundraising efforts – including through crypto.
CYBER CRIME: In December, hackers stole $77 million from AscendEX, mostly in ether, BSC and MATIC funds that have stayed largely dormant but are now being transferred to decentralized exchange Uniswap, on-chain data firm PeckShield said. Separately , U.S. officials seized almost $30 million worth of crypto related to NetWalker ransomware in January of last year, according to blockchain research firm Chainalysis. Meanwhile, the FBI is launching a new team to investigate crimes involving cryptocurrencies.
DON’T, KWON: Terraform Lab’s CEO Do Kwon has been ordered to comply with subpoenas issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in its investigation of Terra’s Mirror Protocol, according to a filing dated Feb. 17. Terraform and Kwon sued the agency, saying it violated its own rules and the Due Process clause of the U.S. Constitution in publicly serving Kwon with a subpoena =in September.
MINING QUESTIONS: Questions swirl around NuMiner Global, a New York-based company, that claims it has built a low-energy, high-yield crypto miner. On Feb. 3, Sphere 3D , a Toronto-based data management company, announced it was acquiring 60,000 mining rigs for about $1.7 billion from NuMiner. Sphere 3D’s stock surged following the announcement, but other companies raised red flags over the NM440, the new rig, with some skeptics saying the companies' promises were technologically infeasible. A search on the New York state company registry yielded zero results for “NuMiner,” and some of its promotional material appears to be stolen, according to a CoinDesk investigation by Eliza Gkritsi and Aoyon Ashraf.
NETWORK GROWTH: The backers of The Graph, a protocol that aims to make on-chain data more accessible to decentralized applications, have launched a $205 million fund to support developers using The Graph’s querying technology. Growth-orientated crypto projects often start funds to lure developers into building applications or use their product. Elsewhere, The Helium Network, a crypto-powered distributed network of long-range wireless hotspots, has amassed over half a million miners across the world. Launched two years ago, it is expected to double to 1 million nodes in the next six months. (It also just closed a $200 million Series D.)
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Overheard on CoinDesk TV... Sound Bites "We're finding this incredible convergence between the gaming market and the crypto market."
–Immortal CEO Jordan Sherman, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover."
What others are writing... Off-Chain Signals Georgia becomes latest US state to weigh tax incentives for bitcoin miners (The Block) Picasso’s Granddaughter Says Family Will Continue Producing NFTs (Decrypt) Kraken ‘Cannot Protect You' From Canadian Government Freezing Crypto: CEO (Decrypt) Bored Apes Founders Doxxed: CEO Speaks Out (YouTube) Andrew Yang Turns to DAO in Web 3 Lobbying Push (Blockworks) Reversal in NFT Market Triggers Plunge in Ethereum Burn Rate (The Defiant) Ukraine already trades more crypto than fiat currency. Now assets like bitcoin are officially legal (Fortune)
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Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway ETHDenver Shows Not All Crypto Communities Are the Same In a day focused on reforming economics and society, ETHheads discussed "public goods," Schelling Points and how DAOs can return power to the people.
Thursday was the first day of the “official” ETHDenver conference, complete with an opening ceremony. That doesn’t feel terribly meaningful because the pre-conference #BUIDLweek has been going full steam ahead for days, and there will be post-conference stuff going on for days after (Breckenridge Ski Resort, brace yourself). It did bring a huge influx of general-public attendees. More on them in a moment.
I spent the day at Schelling Point, a one-day miniconference within the conference, held at the same huge five-floor “Crypto Castle” as the bulk of the main conference (confused yet?). The Crypto Castle is pitch-perfect ETHWorld, featuring an NFT (non-fungible token) gallery decorated with e-waste and vacuum cleaner parts, attendees dressed like space fairies dancing through the halls, and tables and tables of free T-shirts, most of them bright purple and featuring some kind of cartoon animal.
Schelling Point was focused on, for my money, the most interesting intellectual stream in cryptocurrency: incentive design for social good. A “Schelling Point” is very broadly a thing that brings people together organically to interact or collaborate, without communication or planning. Schelling Points can be actual places or social nexuses like a campfire, or more abstract convergence points like price in a free market. Naval Ravikant likely introduced the game theory concept to many crypto types.
Most Schelling Point speakers discussed the broad question of how to use distributed systems to organize people to improve the world. DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, were frequently brought up as voluntary gathering places for people to take collective action. That’s a really exciting concept because unlike the social media platforms or forums where many socially-concerned people spend time now, DAOs have actual power (and money) directly attached. Belonging to a DAO can feel like a meaningful choice. And as the history of online forums shows, it’s clear we need a richer alternative to collaboration online and take real-world action.
It’s also clear that crypto has become a Schelling Point, or a series of Schelling Points, for politics. Bitcoin has been a massive conceptual magnet for libertarian thought and activism. And the Schelling Point event was a window into the much-less-widely understood politics of the Ethereum community. The distinction is almost always lost in loose criticisms of “crypto” as fundamentally regressive or antisocial.
Ethereum politics is still essentially a capitalist framework, as speaker Abbey Titcomb of Radicle emphasized. But what separates Ethereum politics from the type of hyper-capitalist libertarianism often advocated by bitcoiners is a clear-eyed acceptance that markets as currently structured fail, again and again, in predictable and well-understood ways and need both restructuring and supplementing. If you strapped “Bitcoin Standard” author Saifedean Ammous into a “Clockwork Orange”-style viewing chair in front of a talk titled “Morality and Market Failure,” I suspect he would burst into flames.
At Schelling Point, there was a particular focus on environmental externalities and underfunded public goods, topics on which ideological bitcoiners often seem not just indifferent but even hostile. Several speakers discussed “regenerative economics,” a framework that aims to restructure markets to incentivize maintenance of natural resources and the “commons.” There were also frequent and trenchant critiques of contemporary democratic processes, particularly the slow feedback loop between elections and legislative action. A broad consensus emerged on the crucial importance of giving people more frequent and varied ways to signal their desires and have those signals actually have an impact on the way the world is run.
The event was backed by Gitcoin, a fundraising platform oriented towards social change initiatives. Gitcoin co-founder Vivek Muthra captured both the vibe and the challenge of the conference’s premise when he declared that “we owe something to people who are not in this room today, and that’s something those of us fortunate to be here should think about.” Can we remember “people who are not yet part of the game,” and can we “welcome them quickly and meaningfully?” he asked.
Admirable though it was, this call to action would prove a bit ironic: Not everyone would be quickly and meaningfully welcomed into the game of ETHDenver. As I mentioned, a lot of new attendees showed up on Thursday, and I mean a lot. According to one source, there were more than 50,000 applications for the few thousand available free tickets to the conference. Lines to register and get into events were long all day – I heard of waits up to three hours to get into the Crypto Castle.
I wouldn’t know anything about that, though, because I have a glorious badge, better than the general public’s wristbands. Having a badge means breezing right past those long lines. This isn’t uncommon at conferences, but it’s uniquely structured at ETHDenver. For most conferences, you pay a lot more money to get a higher-access badge. But everything at ETHDenver is free, with badges reserved for presenters, organizers, volunteers and the press.
In other words, ETHDenver replaces an economic hierarchy with a status hierarchy. Whether that’s an improvement is a judgment call, but it does seem to have had the glorious side effect of keeping Wall Street vampires far away – the only blazer I saw all day was on a fellow journalist.
The ticketing design, along with the openness to economic reform, may also have contributed to the clearly more inclusive atmosphere. I’ve been to every kind of crypto conference under the sun, and while they’re still overwhelmingly white and male, Ethereum events consistently have far more women and Black and Latino folks in attendance and on stage than others. To be mercenary about it, this is a huge long-term competitive advantage for the Ethereum ecosystem, and for the goal of making all communities more powerful.
How to Create Millions of NFTs Without Holding Crypto
Many businesses around the world are exploring ways to take part in the booming non-fungible token (NFT) market, which has been sweeping the digital world over the past year. But when they try to get set up to create and sell NFTs on a large scale, they can run into insurmountable hurdles.
The first of these is due to how NFTs are paid for. To sell NFTs, you need to pay for the blockchain transaction fees (gas fees) to create them. To pay for them, you need to have cryptocurrency available at a blockchain address on the blockchain on which you’d like to create NFTs. If you want to create NFTs on multiple blockchains – you guessed it – you have to have different cryptocurrencies available at multiple addresses on multiple blockchains. For many enterprises, especially those without experienced blockchain developers onboard, this is a significant issue.
*This is sponsored content from Tatum.
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