CoinDesk Reports

This week, “Opinionated” hosts Anna Baydakova, Danny Nelson and Ben Schiller are talking to Eric Wall, chief investment officer at a Swedish hedge fund Arcane Crypto – and one of Crypto Twitter’s favorite trouble stirrers. 

“I spent my entire 20s in bitcoin. What the f*ck,” Eric tweeted in July on the day of his 30th birthday, and that decade did not pass in vain for him: He’s been trading bitcoin since Mt. Gox (and lost his money there), he worked as a crypto guy in the legacy fintech firm Cinnober, and now he’s advising a hedge fund on crypto investments. Throughout crypto and mainstream. Eric saw a lot and has a lot to say.

You might be surprised to learn he doesn’t believe in technical analysis as a basis for trading decisions. Why, and what is he using instead? Just wait and listen. 

From bitcoin trading basics, we’re going right into the wild world of DeFi. Are there better protocols for DeFi than Ethereum? Is it better to invest in totally decentralized projects, or those that can freeze their coins? Will the regulators clamp down on DeFi and destroy it?

And, last but not least, what is the “digital condom” Eric thinks beginning traders might want to use when they jump into the dangerous world of DeFi? Listen to and learn from Eric together with Anna, Ben and Danny!

Eric Wall’s Twitter handle is @ercwl. 

Mentioned on this episode:

• CoinDesk: Thorchain's RUNE Token Tumbles After 2nd Exploit in 2 Weeks
• CoinDesk: Poly Network Hacker Releases Private Key for Remaining Looted $141M
• U.Today: Arcane Assets CIO Ridicules Charles Hoskinson And Cardano For Bitcoin Criticism On TV 

This was produced, announced and edited by Michele Musso. 

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The fight that crypto exchange Coinbase took to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week highlighted that the federal government’s approach to regulation is broken. 

This episode is sponsored by Quantstamp and Insider Protocol. 

What can be done to improve the relationship between the crypto community and the powers in Washington, D.C.? Is a more comprehensive legislative approach to regulating the industry viable, one that properly protects consumers but also embraces the positive aspects of blockchain technology to encourage innovation that serves the public good? 

For this week’s episode, “Money Reimagined” co-hosts Michael Casey and Sheila Warren talked to Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) about the crypto industry’s standing in Washington and what needs to be done to foster a more constructive relationship with policymakers. 

Emmer has become one of the most vocal supporters of the industry in Congress. He is the co-chair, along with Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), of the Congressional Blockchain Caucus.

In this episode Emmer talked about the bipartisan nature of the small but growing community of crypto supporters on Capitol Hill and why the technology encourages people to cross party lines. He also discussed what needs to be done to build on that collaborative base to get meaningful reform, and what’s at stake in terms of U.S. global leadership in technology and finance if it doesn’t happen. 

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Quantstamp is the leader of blockchain security, having secured over 100 billion USD worth of digital assets. Visit quantstamp.com to learn why top DeFi projects like Maker, Compound and BarnBridge trust Quantstamp to secure the financial infrastructure of tomorrow. Learn more at quantstamp.com/blog.

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The Option X algorithm from Insider Protocol allows not only hedge funds but also ordinary users to earn up to 25% per month using the High Frequency Trade Layering method with our Bitcoin bot. You can swap your crypto instantly with our Atlas Swap. For more information, visit insiderprotocol.com

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This week, “Opinionated” hosts Anna Baydakova, Danny Nelson and Ben Schiller are getting a bit more light-hearted, discussing the hottest topics of this summer, which (sigh!) is officially over.

First, let’s get it clear: We’re not crazy about all those central bank digital currency (CBDC) announcements the central banks did throughout this year and summer. To Ben Schiller, they pretty much remind him of the 2018 hype around enterprise blockchains, which mostly came to nothing.  

The reason we are talking about it now? Nigeria announced it would work with a crypto startup, Bitt Inc., on a future launch of the eNaira, one of the rare instances of a central bank named a partner in the industry. Will the central banks of the world do something meaningful with all these CBDC plans in the end?

On the other side of the stablecoin agenda, Tether is resisting the full disclosure of its reserves with teeth and nails. Last week, the company appealed CoinDesk’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request on information about Tether’s reserves composition, which the company provided to the New York Attorney General as part of the investigation into iFinex settled earlier this year. 

Turned out, at least part of the crypto community is sympathetic with Tether, arguing the company has the same right to privacy as any individual. We’re discussing this point of view.

Last but not least, we couldn’t miss the latest Udi Wertheimer trolling campaign on Twitter where he stated that “bitcoin is the digital real estate.” Crypto Twitter gleefully picked the punch, and we did, too! But with the narrative ever shifting, what is bitcoin for you? Let us know in replies, and give the podcast some love wherever you’re listening to it!

Happy autumn, subscribe for more great guests and discussions in September!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Nigeria’s Central Bank Taps Bitt to Launch CBDC by Year’s End
• Tether Asks Court to Block NYAG From Releasing Documents to CoinDesk

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Cryptocurrencies were once an obscure topic in Washington, something  a lawmaker could comfortably ignore without worrying about the impact on their political prospects. Not anymore.

This episode is sponsored by Quantstamp and Insider Protocol.

In this week’s episode of Money Reimagined, co-hosts Michael Casey and Sheila Warren examine the small but growing political clout that the crypto industry is acquiring. The wealth the industry generates buys influence and drives the creation of products and services that threaten the incumbent interests of the existing political-financial system. 

They do so with the help of Jarrod Loadholt, a partner within law firm Ice Miller’s Public Affairs Group, who, among other prior roles, has acted as senior counsel to the House Committee on Financial Services and CoinDesk’s own Nikhilesh De, our managing editor for policy and regulation.

Loadholt and De walk us through the many regulatory issues coming down the pike for the crypto and digital assets industry. They discuss the fight over the infrastructure bill’s flawed crypto tax-reporting provision and what it means for crypto companies’ compliance obligations, the outlook for ETFs and the need for an international regulatory framework for the industry. 

They also talk about the possibility of a turf war between the Commodities and Exchange Futures Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose crypto-savvy chairman, Gary Gensler, is signaling an expanded role for the SEC in areas such as decentralized finance (DeFi).

The story that emerges is one of the legitimization of the industry as it starts to earn a seat at the table. However, extreme tensions will also continue to generate around this highly disruptive technology as the pace of innovation accelerates and continues to develop products that either skirt the law or occupy an ambiguous space within it.

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Quantstamp is the leader of blockchain security, having secured over $100 billion worth of digital assets. Visit quantstamp.com to learn why top DeFi projects like Maker, Compound and BarnBridge trust Quantstamp to secure the financial infrastructure of tomorrow. Learn more at quantstamp.com/blog.

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The Option X algorithm from Insider Protocol allows not only hedge funds but also ordinary users to earn up to 25% per month using the High Frequency Trade Layering method with our Bitcoin bot. You can swap your crypto instantly with our Atlas Swap. For more information, visit insiderprotocol.com.

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This week on “Opinionated,” the hosts dive deep into the non-fungible token (NFT) boom with guest Andrew Steinwold, managing partner at Sfermion, an NFT fund. Andrew works with wealthy clients from around the world who want a piece of the digital art boom. 

Our biggest question for Andrew was last week’s biggest news: Visa bought a CryptoPunk.

By Andrew’s telling, paying $150,000 for a pixelated head is a relative bargain, especially as an advertising tool. It’s good for CryptoPunks, too: Its narrative firepower only grows stronger with a name brand such as Visa buying in.

But what of the wacky NFT world beyond? Do other digital art pieces carry the same gravitas? Could Danny, who blew $150 on an NFT of a duck, ever recoup his cash? Andrew dredges up the ugly truth: Not all projects are going to make it.

He’s more bullish on the burgeoning internet economy that NFTs could support, things like digital land rights, digital clothing, digital games. His bets – and his clients’ bets – are that NFTs can create a new rail in online commerce and ownership.

Andrew provides the gang with some insight into the current NFT boom and debates what makes something valuable, even if it doesn't physically exist.

Mentioned in this episode:

Andrew’s podcast: Zima Red

Andrew’s NFT fund: Sfermion

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In the latest episode of “Mapping out Ethereum 2.0,” CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington announce the podcast is coming to a close, but finish strong, discussing Visa’s $165,000 CryptoPunk purchase, “orphaned blocks” on the Beacon Chain and the Ethereum gas limit debate.

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

Visa announced on Monday that it acquired a member of one of the most valuable non-fungible token collections within crypto, called a “CryptoPunk”. CryptoPunks are 24x24 pixel art images depicting eccentric cartoon characters with mixed traits and accessories. 

Kim noted that Visa’s purchase of an NFT “wasn’t so much an investment decision as … really [an experiment] with NFTs wanting to learn more about how they work.”

Even so, market participants responded to the news by making investments in NFTs of their own. $100 million in trading volume took place in the 24 hours following Visa’s announcement, Edgington said. 

The duo also discussed a recent issue with the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain that caused network participation rates to drop a few percentage points and some validators to miss out on rewards. 

The root cause of the issue originated with validator operations by staking as a service Lido. Due to a misconfiguration of their validator software client, Lido was producing orphan blocks that had ripple effects on validators across the network. Orphan blocks refer to blocks proposed by validators that are not included in the blockchain. 

Edgington noted that the issue has since been resolved and participation rates are back to 99% from their recent lows between 96-98%. 

Joining Kim and Edgington for their final episode, CoinDesk Research’s Teddy Oosterbaan discusses a recent debate in the Ethereum community about the governance process for raising Ethereum’s block gas limit. 

To learn more about the significance of gas limits on Ethereum and the controversial project seeking to improve governance around changing the gas limit, listen to the full episode of “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.” 

Links:

The Ethereum Gas Limit Project Twitter - https://twitter.com/ETH_EGL/status/1429530226908930048  

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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For this special inaugural “OG edition” of “Money Reimagined,” hosts Sheila Warren and Michael Casey sit down with crypto entrepreneur, investor and long-time cypherpunk Austin Hill. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

This is the first in an ad hoc series in which “crypto OGs,” people who’ve been working in the space for some time and have made significant contributions to it, discuss their origin stories, their experiences and their views of the industry’s future. 

Austin Hill is the ideal person to kick this off. He is perhaps best known in the crypto community for being the first CEO of Bitcoin development company Blockstream. But his roots in crypto run much deeper than that, back to before even the arrival of Bitcoin, when he founded a company in the 1990s called Zero Knowledge Systems whose mission was to use the tools of cryptography to build business models around services designed to protect people’s privacy online. It was one of the first attempts to align business opportunities with the Cypherpunk ethos of “Don’t Trust. Verify” – a paraphrasing of Ronald Reagan that Hill and fellow Blockstream founder (now CEO) Adam Back coined together. 

What we get from Hill is a journey. He tells of being influenced early on by the radical ideas of Timothy May and the Cypherpunk movement, which leads, among other projects, to some early, failed dabblings in electronic money. He then describes his discovery a decade later that Bitcoin had solved many of the problems of those first prototypes, which leads to the founding of Blockstream. We learn of why he left that well-funded company amid the stress of the brutal “block size war,” and how he has now found peace doing his own thing even as he turns his focus to the very biggest of challenges, how to save humanity from itself. 

Keep your eye out for later “OG Edition” episodes in the near future. 

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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This week, “Opinionated” hosts Ben Schiller, Anna Baydakova and Danny Nelson talk to Angela Walch, a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio and a research associate at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London.

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

An original and independently minded commentator on the crypto industry, Walch was a key voice in the recent debate over the infrastructure bill and its cryptocurrency-related tax-reporting provision. Walch testified before the U.S. Senate about the increasingly systemic role played by cryptocurrencies and why the legislation shouldn’t be rushed.

She wrote an op-ed for CoinDesk saying the “process being used to regulate crypto through an unrelated bill on infrastructure is deeply flawed and risks increasing rather than reducing harms to the public.”

On our show, Walch shared her experience talking to the legislators and why the most controversial part of the bill may not have been as unfair as the industry has claimed. The bill suggests that anyone who facilitates crypto transactions should be considered a broker for the legal and tax purposes. 

Should crypto miners actually be considered brokers? Are large crypto celebrity investors doing the industry a favor in their advocacy? What is the best way forward for crypto regulation in the U.S.?

Listen to Ben, Anna and Danny discuss these and some other burning questions with Angela Walch and watch out for her new coming op-eds on CoinDesk.

Angela Walch handle in Twitter: @angela_walch 

Mentioned in this episode:

Angela Walch’s op-ed for CoinDesk: Congress, Don’t Rush Regulating Crypto

Angela Welch’s testimony in Congress, July 27, 2021: Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for?

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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Blockchain technology has accelerated conversations around decentralization, anonymity, agency and empowerment around the world. On this week’s “Money Reimagined,” hosts Michael Casey and Sheila Warren are joined by two experts to discuss digital security and privacy, with a focus on India. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

Dr. Usha Ramanathan is a lawyer and human rights activist in India. She has worked since 2009 to critique and challenge India’s controversial digital identity program. Marta Belcher serves as general counsel of Protocol Labs, chair of the Filecoin Foundation and special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Belcher recently testified on crypto before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Initiatives have been popping up around the globe, claiming to address social issues such as banking the unbanked, humanitarian data within refugee camps and identification programs to increase access to governmental programs. There is a romantic appeal to believing these initiatives are built upon a foundation of good intentions, but the reality is often far more complicated, with motivations like a simple money grab, user data collection, or surveillance coming into the mix. And regardless of intentions, these efforts often result in harmful consequences to the users they are engaging.

India’s Aadhaar structure, a biometric, digital and physical identity system, is the world’s largest biometric ID system. It is highly centralized, and the data honeypot it presents has gotten the government of India in trouble more than once. An increasing number of systems, from the mundane like grocery shopping to the official like marriage registrations, require an Aadhaar number.

And it’s not a perfect system. Individuals can and have been barred from receiving essentials because of technical snags in the registration process with Aadhaar. The system also brings up serious privacy concerns.

While some choose to use blockchain technology for its ability to transact anonymously, others work towards establishing digital self-sovereign identity solutions. Where is the balancing point between anonymity and ease of use? Is the additional space anonymity provides around an individual essential to their rights in markets and society?

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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Image credit: anand purohit/iStock/Getty Images Plus, modified by Coindesk

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In this week’s episode of “Mapping out Ethereum 2.0,” CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington invite Alexander Blum, the managing director of digital asset investment fund, Two Prime, to discuss institutional interest in ether, regulatory trends in DeFi and key metrics to suggest ether is outperforming bitcoin. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

Two Prime is a fund that only invests in two crypto assets, bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH). The firm also trades BTC and ETH options to further amplify the returns of their underlying holdings. Near the beginning of the year the fund was equally exposed to both ether and bitcoin, but outperformance and rebalancing have now given the fund an allocation to ether of about 70%. 

“I am not here ideologically. I am here trying to make money for people … and on both a fundamental and technical level, ETH looks more promising right now,” said Blum. “Ether is really open source. People are trying new stuff, they're experimenting, they're making mistakes, there are people who are excited about stuff. To me, bitcoin feels like a bunch of like monks protecting their holy sacred grail.” 

On the decentralized finance (DeFi) side, Blum noted there’s high technical risk associated with these applications due to the composability and lack of segmentation in the DeFi market. Similar to the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, the leveraged and layered nature of DeFi products means it could be easier for an error in one application to introduce cascading risk to other applications. 

Kim and Edgington also discussed the first release of formal verification code specifications for the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain. Formal verification goes beyond normal software testing and allows developers to see how their code could react to a variety of real world situations. 

Edgington noted, “Ethereum bugs are particularly serious. I mean, they have devastating effects. If the protocol forks because clients disagree with each other about the state, then there's a huge amount of value at stake.”

Formal verification is the largest step forward in ensuring that serious bugs in Ethereum 2.0’s protocol layer code are caught before the merge to proof-of-stake. Kim saw taking these extra precautions as an important step to transitioning Eth 2.0 from an “experimental project” to a production-ready network. 

To hear the full conversation featuring Blum, Kim and Edgington, check out this week’s episode of “Mapping Out Ethereum 2.0.” 

Links:

A Derivatives Trader's Guide to Institutional Crypto and Defi, A Report by Two Prime - https://twoprime.io/a-derivatives-traders-guide-to-institutional-crypto-and-defi/ 

The Rise of Institutional Ethereum Investors, A Report by Two Prime - https://twoprime.io/the-rise-of-institutional-ethereum-investors/ 

Formally Verifying the Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 Specifications, Blog Post by Consensys - https://consensys.net/blog/developers/formally-verifying-the-ethereum-2-0-phase-0-specifications/ 

Eth 2.0 Formal Verifications Specs - https://github.com/ConsenSys/eth2.0-dafny 

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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