Sen. Cynthia Lummis' Bitcoin Bag

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

Oct. 8, 2021

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Today's must-reads

Top Shelf

REPPING BTC: Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) disclosed purchase of bitcoin worth $50,001-$100,000, according to a Periodic Transaction Report filed Thursday. Lummis, who has been buying bitcoin since 2013, executed her latest purchase on Aug. 16 via the brokerage platform River Financial.

FINANCIAL RISKS: The Bank of England said crypto assets are becoming more integrated into the U.K.'s financial system. While they don't yet pose a major risk, increased regulation is needed as crypto's influence grows. In its latest Financial Stability Report the agency once again cautions "prudence" for banks looking to move into the industry.

SOCIAL TOKENS: India's Tik Tok competitor Chingari has raised $19 million from many prominent crypto investors including Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research, Kraken and Galaxy Digital. The capital will go, in part, towards developing the short-form video platform's $GARI social token on Solana. Founded in 2018, Chingari reportedly has 30 million monthly active users and 78 million downloads.

HYPERINFLATION: Venezuela's new digital bolivar isn't digital and it won't solve the country's economic crisis, especially after spectacular failure of its national cryptocurrency petro, writes CoinDesk's Andres Engler. In view of the hyperinflation in the Latin American country, the government decided to remove six zeros from the currency and issue a new bolivar. For a third time.

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As heard on CoinDesk TV...

Sound Bites

"This is like the perfect bridge between the traditional financial world and blockchain."

–Stellar Development Foundation CEO and Executive Director Denelle Dixon on the network's partnership with remittance firm Moneygram, on CoinDesk's "First Mover."

As crypto adoption accelerates, so too does demand for academic research and teaching. Rigorously researched, here are the Top Universities for Blockchain by CoinDesk results. This year's ranking rates 220 schools internationally, expanding the sample from just U.S. schools last year. View the top institutions.

What others are writing...

Off-Chain Signals

Former "The O.C." star Ben McKenzie co-wrote an essay excoriating Kim Kardashian and other celebrities for the "moral disaster" of crypto shilling (Slate)
New collateralized stablecoin magic internet money (MIM) is challenging MakerDAO in the stablecoin space. The protocol accepts many types of collateral and advocates decentralization away from corporate-friendly coins like USDC. (Owen Fernau/The DeFiant)
Indian crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber has become the country's second crypto unicorn in just two months. (Monika Ghosh/Forkast)
Bitcoin Magazine does a nice breakdown of Arcane Research's lengthy Lightning report. The number of users with access to Lightning payments increased by 11,164% to 9.7 million users in September, compared to 87,000 in August.
"Worldwide fiat lords neg Bitcoin" (Protos)
Notorious art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi enters the NFT world (Yogita Khatri/The Block)
US-listed mining firms have hoarded over $1 billion worth of bitcoin (Wolfie Zhao/The Block)
DeFi mainstay Yearn Finance has made its first move beyond Ethereum, adding support for the low-cost, speedy Fantom Network (Liam J. Kelly/Decrypt)

A message from Apollo Fintech

Gold Secured Currency (GSX) is trust backed by assets, gold and land mineral rights that provide a minimum asset value AND grow your investment. The assets will generate income to maintain GSX and increase its value.

GSX will be used in Knox World Wire, a global bank-to-bank instantaneous transfer system that will see it have massive daily use in both volume and value.

Additionally, sub-2 second transactions make GSX a perfect currency for any marketplace.

Putting the news in perspective

The Takeaway

The Ethereum Login Is Coming

A forthcoming standard will create a potentially more secure, private alternative to Facebook and Google identity services.

Over the past few weeks, Facebook has been raked over the coals in the press and U.S. Congress for practices that are hard to regard as anything short of evil. In essence, the company allegedly knew for years that its algorithms were pointing users to content that was harmful in a variety of ways, but did nothing, because change would mean losing money.

If you've ever used your Facebook account to log into another service online, you've been helping the social network make your online experience more toxic, even if you're not a user of Facebook.com itself. Or maybe you do much the same using Google or Apple identity services. All involve major trade-offs – like possibly having your data shared with U.S. intelligence.

It's one of the core quandaries of today's internet. While the 'net's inherent anonymity is definitely a good thing, it leaves users of ID-reliant tools in thrall to major centralized identity providers and their seemingly inevitable abuses. Blockchain developers have long talked about developing "decentralized" identity standards to save us from the dangers of Big Login, and at least one significant step towards that future appears imminent: Sign-in With Ethereum is coming.

It's just what it sounds like: a standard way to use an Ethereum wallet that you own as an identifier across multiple services. If your first thought is, "my name isn't even attached to my ETH wallet," that's exactly the point: Using a cryptographic marker as an identity means the user, not the identity provider, has total control over what information is associated with it. Eventually, you'll be able to decide, for instance, whether a particular service needs your name, proof of your age or a glimpse of your ETH balance. You won't have to send all that information to every service you use.

The standard is being developed by Spruce Systems, a former ConsenSys spoke that won a recent development RFP from the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum Name Service. The initial goals are modest (always a good sign, in my book).

"We're starting with not as serious, not as strong identity," says Spruce co-founder and CEO Wayne Chang. "Because we want to be battle tested. In the short to medium term it's more like social media credentials that tie their Twitter handles to a blockchain … We don't want to provide [know your customer] credentials for buying millions of dollars of financial securities right yet," though that's a possibility down the road.

Applications for this initial iteration, according to Spruce, are more likely to include lower-security uses like gating content for non-fungible token (NFT) holders. But, eventually, by integrating secure off-chain storage, Sign-in With Ethereum (let's just call it SIWE) could also offer "strong" options such as government ID. Users will be able to control access to that data and remove or disassociate it at will.

One significant hurdle for SIWE is the inherent risk of reusing any identifier, particularly an address that can likely be pretty easily linked to wallets used for financial activity. While the idea of using multiple or disposable wallets as a security measure is familiar to crypto users, it's probably a bridge too far for normies, at least for now – one more reason SIWE is starting with baby steps.

Spruce regards its work as a community project, and it is holding weekly community calls as it develops the SIWE standard. Information about those calls and how to participate should be coming soon at Login.xyz.

–David Z. Morris

Sponsored Content

Coinbase: Why Digital Asset Adoption in Commerce Is Gaining Momentum

A number of large companies have been adding significant amounts of bitcoin to their balance sheets, signaling corporate America's growing confidence in BTC and other digital assets as a potential hedge against the possibility of rising inflation.

At the same time, some of the more forward-looking organizations also see digital adoption as a way of gaining a competitive advantage, whether it's through utilizing crypto to make secure international transactions or integrating it into their business operations.