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| What you need to know today in crypto and beyond March 8, 2021 Sponsored By: To unsubscribe from all CoinDesk mailings, click here.
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Editor’s note: In the “Takeaway” section of Friday’s issue of the Node, the second line of the fourth limerick contained an offensive term that was not consistent with CoinDesk standards. The line has been replaced in the online version. The author regrets the error and any hurt inadvertently caused.
– Marc Hochstein, executive editor, CoinDesk
Top Shelf Today's must-reads
PAYPAL PROVES? In a company podcast, a Goldman Sachs lead made sly reference to a coming wave of mergers and acquisitions in the cryptocurrency infrastructure space. Goldman is finding many clients want to hold bitcoin directly, or trade spot, which is difficult for the Wall Street bank to offer compliantly. Elsewhere, JPMorgan is beefing up its digital asset team, with 30+ job offerings. As if on cue, PayPal said it will acquire crypto infrastructure provider Curv, confirming a CoinDesk report but not disclosing terms.
SERIOUS INVESTMENTS: Hong Kong-listed Meitu said it has purchased $22 million in ether and $17.9 million of bitcoin, making it the first time a firm has disclosed a major purchase of ETH for its treasury. It plans on building Ethereum-based applications, or even buying out projects. Meanwhile, a company owned by one of Norway's wealthiest residents, Aker ASA, has spun out an entity dedicated to investing in bitcoin companies. It will also store 100% of its treasury in bitcoin.
INCOMING, CRYPTO: The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is spinning up a new program dedicated to rooting out those tax evaders with crypto income. “Operation Hidden Treasure” is training agents to sleuth around blockchains, working with analytics firms and using its working relationship with Europol. As Carolyn Schenck, of the IRS Office of Chief Counsel, put it: “These transactions are not anonymous. We see you.”
– Daniel Kuhn
Sound Bite Overheard on CoinDesk TV
SPAC tailwinds Cipher Mining, a U.S.-based company, is capitalizing on two financial phenomena that have gone haywire last year: cryptocurrency mining and SPACs (special-purpose acquisition companies).
The company announced last week it intends to go public through a merger with Good Work Acquisition Corp. Cipher was recently formed as a subsidiary of the Dutch bitcoin mining company Bitfury.
Cipher CEO Tyler Page appeared on CoinDesk TV this morning to discuss the company’s position. It will focus on spinning up mining facilities across the U.S., attempting to make use of this nation’s sometimes abundant and cheap sources of energy.
SPACs, aka backdoor listings, allow private firms to easily go public by merging with shell companies without the baggage of the traditional initial public offering (IPO) process. They’ve had something of a moment in 2020, with internet-famous investors such as Chamath Palihapitiya and celebrities emerging as prominent backers.
“I think the SPAC wrapper… does provide certain benefits,” Page said, adding later, “Our business model is an interesting way to get exposure to the bitcoin space.”
“If we see more large companies in the U.S. using bitcoin as a treasury asset, and large Wall Street banks embracing the space from a custody perspective, you start to see more of a vital national interest in making sure that infrastructure is safe and secure. That’s actually a tailwind for us,” he said.
Watch the full interview, and more, from First Mover.
– D.K.
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Introducing "The Hash," news analysis on CoinDesk TV From the world leader in crypto news and events, the all-new CoinDesk TV covers the rapidly evolving world of digital finance and its role in the global economy.
We cut through the hyperbole and confusion to explain what’s happening in this fast-changing industry and why it matters to investors, companies and governments.
On "The Hash," a daily panel show, CoinDesk journalists Zack Seward, Benjamin Powers and Will Foxley choose five of the day’s big stories to hash out and analyze. With a personality-driven, fast-paced, entertaining format, it presents themes ranging from serious to fun.
Watch "The Hash" daily on YouTube or CoinDesk.com.
Off-Chain Signals What others are writing....
- D.K.
The Takeaway Putting the news in perspective
O.G. status in crypto is a liability "Bitcoin is rapidly becoming the crypto version of Australian wildlife. We separated ourselves, blocked all cross-pollination and now there's an isolated gene pool producing weird versions of everything."
So security researcher and Summa founder, James Prestwich, contended in a tweet last summer.
Is bitcoin complacent? An austere monolith? A hermit kingdom? I don't know. Bitcoin is probably fine, but underlying Prestwich's hot take is a larger point that's relevant beyond BTC: a lengthier crypto tenure does not equate to greater wisdom.
In the crypto culture, there's a strong tendency for folks to flex about when they bought in. For me, I feel like the right date marking the beginning of my blockchain journalism is September 2015, when I wrote enough about Imogen Heap's music-rights tracking project to become curious.
But the allure of greater vintage is so tempting here, so I can date it to December 2013 when I first started following Charlie Shrem, a scrappy young Brooklyn, N.Y.-based tech entrepreneur, though, truthfully, my interest in bitcoin was really only ancillary then, going no further than the fact that it counted as "tech."
Tenure yields respect; not as much respect as heavy bags, mind you — but in absence of bags, time counts.
But it shouldn't count for that much. In fact, having watched this space roughly as long as the Ethereum blockchain has existed, I'm happy to go a step further: Tenure can be a liability.
Tenure is, in particular, a liability for those who have dipped out and come back. But some who never left remain stuck in ancient ways.
Time is not data
One way to measure how much data can be gathered in a particular time period is by counting people. Of course we can't count people in crypto very easily, but we do have counts of active wallets, which is a decent proxy (noting, obviously, that many crypto users have more than one wallet — as they should).
So let's say you were super early to the space, say from late 2011 to early 2015. You lived in a world that had only a little over 10,000 active bitcoin wallets and faded out when there were under 200,000. There were zero Ethereum wallets.
Now, let's compare you to a relative newbie. Say that person showed up in early 2017, before the BTC price really started sailing high but close enough that you could smell a change in the air. There would have been 500,000 active bitcoin wallets and 20,000 or so Ethereum wallets.
If he or she stuck around for roughly the same amount of time, that newcomer would have the opportunity to meet vastly more people, watch vastly more experiments and learn vastly more lessons. There's just more going on now.
And, lest we assume these new arrivals are just random, it's worth noting how many blockchains have healthy and growing developer communities.
These days, more people show up for the first time in one year than were ever present early on. Framed like that, it's crazy to presume perspectives gleaned in those hazy bygone days are inherently superior to more recent ones. This isn't some fantasy story about lost and forgotten magicks. This is technology.
One of the chief blind spots that I see in the OGs is dismissing anything that's new. There's the Bitcoin Maximalist and the Ethereum Maximalist. The two are largely caricatures, though. Many bitcoiners grudgingly accept Ethereum is here to stay and vice versa, but there's still a knee-jerk attitude of not just skepticism, but dismissal of any new coin or consensus mechanism.
Moar chainz
"Scam" and "s**tcoin" get thrown around much too flippantly, which diminishes the charge's impact when it actually should stick (and often enough it should).
For anyone who left and missed the mid-2010s, this is understandable. The space was awash in cash grabs then. But the quality of new blockchain architects has changed: Polkadot is not equivalent to TrumpCoin. Tezos is a more thoughtful piece of software than BitShares.
Once upon a time, most new cryptocurrencies were lame forks of bitcoin (or forks of forks) with some marketing slapped on. Auroracoin, anyone? Remember potcoin? Dogecoin.
But that's simply no longer true. Today, many new blockchains are initiated by talented, well resourced teams. No doubt many of them will fade off into obscurity, but so do many startups. Startups are afforded the benefit of the doubt, and new blockchains by well-intentioned creators should be, too.
When they do fail, there are lessons to be learned for the whole industry. Oldheads who dismiss them out of hand will miss out on those lessons.
Not every OG has failed to adjust his or her thinking to the modern reality. For example, consider Boost VC. In 2014, it promised to back 100 bitcoin startups. In 2018 we reported that it hit its goal, but the firm also changed the terms of its pledge. It had funded 100 crypto startups, not just on bitcoin.
Boost co-founder Adam Draper explained at the time that it just wasn't kosher in 2014 to talk about anything but bitcoin, but times changed and Boost changed with it. Not everyone has.
Later in his thread, Prestwich wrote, "Our Core Dev ivory tower is now sitting next to a small skyscraper, and it's past time we walked out and asked the neighbors what they're up to."
– Brady Dale
What are bitcoin and ether's value propositions for investors? A new report by CoinDesk Research explains how the two most popular cryptocurrencies by market capitalization behave in the market, how their infrastructure differs, and what on-chain metrics say about them. Download "Bitcoin + Ether: An Investor's Perspective" from the CoinDesk Research Hub.
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