Every Big Bank Will Have a Crypto Play

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

Nov. 8, 2021

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Today’s must-reads

Top Shelf

INFRASTRUCTURE BILLED: The U.S. House of Representatives voted late Friday night to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill that contains a controversial cryptocurrency tax reporting requirement. The requirement expands the definition of “broker” to potentially encompass miners and other crypto-specific entities that don’t actually facilitate transactions and ignited a fierce backlash among the crypto community. The bill now goes to U.S. President Joe Biden for his signature.

BIG BANKS: The banking industry will most likely try to capitalize on the demand for stablecoin deposits on the back of the market’s exponential growth, Morgan Stanley’s lead cryptocurrency strategist, Sheena Shah, said in a report. Separately, former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit said in the coming years “every large bank and/or securities firm” is going to consider enabling crypto trading.

VENTURING IN: Sequoia Capital is backing a seven-figure token round for decentralized finance (DeFi) lending project Parallel. The round, which values the Polkadot-based protocol at $250 million, comes less than two weeks after Sequoia pledged to restructure its investing playbook to, in part, more aggressively court crypto plays. This is one of the first times Sequoia has invested in a token round (it co-led with Founders Fund). Meanwhile, rival VC Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has led a $50 million Series B for Matter Labs, which is building Ethereum scaling protocol zkSync.

MOVING ABROAD: Huobi Global will move its spot trading services to Gibraltar after receiving approval from the Financial Services Commission (FSC) to begin the transition. The crypto exchange received a Gibraltar operating license in 2018, and is likely looking for a new home away from Chinese regulators.

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Overheard on CoinDesk TV ...

Sound Bites

“We’re trying to set up a regime where stablecoins are in fact stable. But that’s not a free proposition. It requires choices to be made.”

–Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu, on CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover.”

What others are writing...

Off-Chain Signals

A message from Amber

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Crypto is on the rise. Crypto knowledge, however, is stuck on the runway: It turns out that 96% of U.S. adults can’t pass a test on crypto basics. Throughout November, Crypto Literacy Month aims to change that. Brush up on your crypto knowledge!

Putting the news in perspective

The Takeaway

Don’t Hire People 'on the Blockchain'

Will Gottsegenhere. Ever since the word “bitcoin” wormed its way into the mainstream, people have been obsessed with putting things “on the blockchain.” There’s an army of crypto influencers and snake oil peddlers out there dedicated to promoting this stuff: real estate on the blockchain, social media on the blockchain, Soundcloud rap on the blockchain.

It makes sense, in a way – smart contracts let you put any sort of computer program on the blockchain, and shiny new tech can be an attractive angle for investors. But how much of the tech we already use today really needs a crypto component?

The latest case of crypto overreach comes from an investor named Greg Isenberg, who operates a design studio-cum-investment fund called Late Checkout. He used to run a social startup called Islands, which – in a miracle of good timing – he sold to WeWork in the summer of 2019, just before the workspace juggernaut’s fall from grace.

In a tweet last week, Isenberg suggested that recruiters put their hiring processes on the blockchain. Unfolding over the course of a few halting lines, the post reads like a bad prose poem:

How it will work:

- You apply for a job
- It scans the blockchain and rates your set of on chain experiences and credentials
- If above a certain rating, you’re hired within 60 seconds

No prejudice, no wasted time, no pain

Just a quick yes or no

This is a big deal

Similarities to China’s social credit system aside, the idea is almost too easy to trash. That’s because we already have a system in this vein, without a crypto component, and it doesn’t work.

“Automated resume screening” – a computer program meant to separate the good candidates from the bad, without the need for human discretion – is a notoriously ineffective framework.

A report from Harvard Business School earlier this year outlined how so-called Applicant Tracking Systems and Recruiting Management Systems are trained to maximize efficiency, rather than seek the best candidates. Though they’re “vital,” according to the study, they contribute to a “broken” hiring market.

There’s a danger in reducing human beings to data on a spreadsheet: a GPA, an SAT score, a Bboolean value set to “true” or “false” depending on whether an applicant graduated from a four-year college.

Of course, Isenberg was just spinning his wheels for a sympathetic audience. Most of the influencers on “Crypto Twitter” are very obviously biased – deep-pocketed investors with a financial stake in promoting this tech, or crypto enthusiasts looking for ways to get richer.

And yet the more investors start to buy into these dangerous ideas, the more they start to look like reality. It doesn’t matter whether consumers actually want to live in Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse; we may end up there anyway, because that’s where the money is.

Why should it be any different in crypto?

–Will Gottsegen

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