CoinDesk Reports

With all the gyrations in crypto markets, it is easy to lose sight of why this technology has drawn so many passionate believers. In this week’s episode we go straight to that point by diving into the theme of human rights and the role that bitcoin can play as a medium for saving and spending that is free from the confiscatory powers of government – including those of authoritarian regimes. 

This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io and The Sun Exchange.

Throughout its life, communities of activists all around the world have taken to bitcoin as a tool of empowerment. Sometimes it’s because they live in places where the local currency is constantly being debased by profligate governments. Sometimes it’s because they are at risk of having property seized by the regime. Sometimes it’s because they need a way to fund dissidents’ activities.

To explore all this, we speak to the Human Rights Foundation’s outspoken chief strategy officer, Alex Gladstein, on how he, a career human rights campaigner, found his way into the weird world of bitcoin. We also have the pleasure of talking to an activist in Sudan, a person who goes by Mo and the podcaster pseudonym of @SudanHODL.

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InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io

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The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets.

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In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington discuss the significance of three events: an Ethereum 2.0 milestone, an Ethereum hard fork upgrade and the public listing of a major cryptocurrency exchange. 

This episode is sponsored by hellointerpop.io, The Sun Exchange.

Beginning with Coinbase’s direct listing on Nasdaq, Kim and Edgington consider whether this watershed moment in the cryptocurrency industry is really something to get excited about. 

“Bitcoin was created to be this peer-to-peer payments network, where you don’t need any financial middlemen; but here’s Coinbase. Everyone is getting so excited and happy [about] Coinbase even though it’s doing the very thing that Bitcoin was created to deal with and get rid of,” Kim said. 

Concerns over centralized actors overshadowing the decentralized purpose of blockchains is also relevant to Ethereum. Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura is an example of a company who has faced criticism in the past for their expanding role as the “gatekeeper” to Ethereum. 

“It’s an interesting spectrum and we’ve only just begun on this journey,” said Edgington. “Only a few million people have interacted with the blockchain, any blockchain, so far, and there are a few billion yet to reach. I think we need to make it as easy as possible from them to do so.” 

Kim and Edgington also discussed the milestone of the Ethereum proof-of-stake network, also called Ethereum 2.0, reaching its one millionth slot. A slot on Eth 2.0 is space for a block containing transactions and user data to be processed and finalized. Every 12 seconds validators, which are the equivalent of miners, can propose a block into a slot and earn rewards. 

“It’s just a number, but it’s a good point to take stock of where we are. [Eth 2.0] has been running for four and a half months now and it’s been totally trouble free. It’s just been incredible,” said Edgington. 

Finally, the two dissect the post mortem of Ethereum’s latest backwards-incompatible system-wide upgrade known as the Berlin hard fork. Everything didn’t go as planned and, as Kim notes, it’ll become increasingly important that things do work as Ethereum releases more ambitious upgrades in future. 

Check out the full podcast episode hosted by Edington and Kim to get all the latest commentary around Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0. 

Links mentioned in this podcast: 

• What’s New In Eth2 (www.eth2.news)   
• Valid Points (https://www.coindesk.com/newsletter/valid-points)   

InterPop is redefining the future of NFTs and fandom. Learn more at interpop.io

The Sun Exchange is offering CoinDesk Reports listeners a free solar cell with your first purchase and automatically lease them to power businesses in sunny, emerging markets.

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There are no take-backs in the Bitcoin environment; and, with future governmental regulations coming, the question becomes: what is the true value of investing in bitcoin? 

In this episode of “On Purpose,” host Tyrone Ross sits down with financial advisors Ronnie Colvin, Manish Khatta and Courtney Ranstrom in this special edition of ‘The Bitcoin Haters’ Ball’. They explain the sage advice that they’ve guided their own clients with right now in regards to the Bitcoin Bull market. They also highlight many of the tremendous risks that purchasing bitcoin or increasing in cryptocurrency is an enormous risk.

Ransom: “I tell my clients to not invest in bitcoin any more than they are willing to lose.”

Colvin, Khatta, and Ranstrom give their 3 key takeaways that aid in minimizing future investment risks:

• There are no consumer protections at all. When using bitcoin as an everyday transaction, be aware that losses are a reality.
• Be as educated as possible when weighing the implications and risks associated with crypto investments.
• As an advisor, be educated and highly mindful of your clients; it is essential to continue to research as bitcoin is ever changing. 

Our Haters’ Ball guests: 

Ronnie Colvin : IT Financial Planner who assists technical professionals in building a roadmap for their financial future as he helps them to figure out where they are, where they want to go, and how to get there.

Manish Khatta : Is the President & Chief Investment officer of firm Potomac. Manish is a staunch believer that investment risk is something that can be contained and conquered, using quantitative trading systems.

Courtney Ranstrom: Co-Founder & Financial Life Planner at Trailhead Planners. Helps clients discover what wealth means to them. 

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This week’s Money Reimagined episode was recorded at the ideal moment to take stock of the biggest development in the crypto space this year: Coinbase’s public listing on the Nasdaq exchange. The show was recorded on Wednesday, the day of the listing, just after 4 pm, the time at which U.S. stock markets closed. 

So, with the help of Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Vigna (who was Michael’s co-author for both The Age of Currency and The Truth Machine) and of CoinDesk Director of Research Noelle Acheson, we broke down the day’s action, the history of what brought us to this point from when Coinbase was first launched in 2012, and what this means for the future: for Coinbase, for the crypto community, for Wall Street, and for Main Street,

In tying itself to the corporate “suits,” is this disruptive firm from the crypto universe going to shake up the Wall Street establishment from within, or will those older institutions constrain it?

What does the sudden scramble up the crypto learning curve look like for all those institutional investors who now feel they need to own – and therefore understand -- this stock and the weird new decentralized financial industry it services?

Who’s the next Coinbase? And what does the inevitable influx of investment in search of that “new new thing” do to the funding of new projects and new ideas among startups that may end up supplanting Coinbase and eventually rendering it obsolete?

We address these and many more in this episode. 

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In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington discuss the future of cryptocurrency mining and staking with former CoinDesk Market Reporter Will Foxley. 

“I’m pro both proof-of-stake and proof-of-work. I don’t know which one wins out over the years [but] to me it comes down to capital costs,” said Foxley. “Both have capital costs no matter what and both use energy just in different ways.”

To Foxley, the new Editorial Director at Compass Mining, these two seemingly opposing blockchain systems are really two sides of the same coins. Both rely on computers to devote a certain amount of energy towards securing and maintaining a decentralized digital ledger. 

While mining does require comparatively more computing power than staking, validators in proof-of-stake networks do still rely on energy expenditure in some form, according to Foxley. 

The key question is how we define where energy comes from.

From Edgington’s viewpoint, the matter isn’t quite so ill-defined. 

“Proof-of-stake for me wins heavily here,” says Edgington, “because the amount of energy needed to secure the network is something like one ten thousandth of what Ethereum is currently using for proof-of-work mining and that’s not a small difference. That’s a material difference to the heat emissions and CO2 emissions on the planet.”. 

The long-run sustainability of either system depends on the types of users that will be most incentivized to participate either as a miner or staker. While miners are becoming increasingly professionalized and centralized, the more lucrative a cryptocurrency becomes, the more people will be incentivized to become validators in a proof-of-stake network and  greater numbers of users will engage in staking. 

For the full commentary on this topic of mining versus staking, check out this week’s episode of Mapping Out Eth 2.0: Ethereum as it was meant to be. Starting next week, Edgington and Kim will take over as show co-hosts. 

To follow Foxley on his new voyage into the industry of cryptocurrency mining, subscribe to his new newsletter, Compass Mining Memo.  

Links mentioned in this podcast: 

• Justin Drake Bankless Podcast Episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWqhn1hXvVc) 
• Rayonism Hackathon (https://rayonism.io/) 
• What’s New In Eth2 (www.eth2.news)   
• Valid Points (https://www.coindesk.com/newsletter/valid-points)   

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A few weeks ago, the non-fungible token (NFT) world saw one of the first blockchain art heists, with several users seeing their marketplace accounts taken over and their valuables stolen. In this special episode of “CoinDesk Reports,” Managing Editor Adam B. Levine digs into the thorny issue of not just what can but what should be done in these situations.

This episode is sponsored by Interpop.io

This time we speak with Marguerite deCourcelle, CEO of Blockade Games, the creator of Neon District; and William Quigley, CEO of WAX, a blockchain designed specifically for NFTs. They help us understand the ground truth about blockchain collectibles and how that both helps and hurts when things go wrong. 

Later, we hear from Alex Salnikov, a co-founder of Rarible, for a different perspective on where mass adoption is pushing the still-nascent technology. Oh, and there's at least a sort-of happy ending, too, for the victims in our tale. 

As always, we'd love to hear what you think. Have something to say? Send us an email at [email protected].

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InterPop is building the architecture of an entirely new landscape of fandom using technology built on the Tezos blockchain to drive their vision. Visit hellointerpop.io to learn more.

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Without letters of credit, bills of lading, shipping documents and trillions of dollars in global goods trade would grind to a halt. (And you thought our dependency on the Suez Canal was a problem!)

This episode is sponsored by Interpop.io

But the world’s system of trade finance, a highly complex setup involving banks, insurers, shipping companies, data providers and all manner of intermediaries, is far from ideal. 

There is massive fraud – check the New York Times’ account of the recent Greensill Capital collapse for – and severe inequity in terms of who gets favorable borrowing terms and who doesn’t. Without access to the trusted data needed to prove their creditworthiness, millions of small-and-medium enterprises are unable to obtain credit to cover the risks associated with exporting their goods. So they either run the risk of non-payment or simply cannot participate in the global economy. 

As a measure of that inequity, Sheila noted in her monologue to this week’s Money Reimagined episode – in which we talk to two blockchain pioneers trying to fix the trade finance industries many problems – that there’s currently a $1.5 trillion global trade financing gap. But then in his first comments, Tallyx CEO Aditya Menon offered an alternative analysis of how much of the goods trade goes unfinanced and came up with a $5 trillion number. That’s about half of the global trade in goods. 

Can blockchains and tokenization address these inequities? 

As you’ll hear from Menon, as well as from Skuchain co-founder Rebecca Liao, the answers lie in figuring out how to incentivize all participants – the exporters, importers, shippers and financiers – to share data in a way that unlocks funding faster. 

Skuchain is focused on making the information richer and more reliable along the supply chain. Tallyx is figuring out how to turn the contractual information such as invoices into tokens of value that can be traded in ways that allow smaller suppliers to monetize their legitimate receivables.

The problems they are trying to solve aren’t easy. But that’s what makes their work so compelling. 

Blockchain projects like Skuchain and Tallyx offer a healthy reminder that beyond the razzamatazz of crypto markets and celebrity non-fungible tokens, meaningful impact is also possible if you work hard at the core problems faced by real-world entities.  

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InterPop is building the architecture of an entirely new landscape of fandom using technology built on the Tezos blockchain to drive their vision. Visit hellointerpop.io to learn more.

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In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Will Foxley and Consensys’ Ben Edgington meet up with Coogan Brennan to discuss solo staking on Ethereum 2.0.

This episode is sponsored by Interpop.io

Coogan Brennan’s passion for training is contagious as he equips new generations of developers with information. Brennan says, “Education has been the North Star for a lot of the work I have done in Ethereum.” He sees the world of crypto as “learner led” and feels that “it’s such a young industry that no-one can claim to be a senior educator or developer.”

Coogan is a prime example of the learner-led culture and he first heard about crypto while running a tailoring business. After years of grappling with the many complexities related to Ethereum, he now works as a trainer at ConsenSys, which is a leading Ethereum development shop.

Join us as we discuss a series of in-depth articles that Coogan wrote about becoming a solo staker on the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain.

This journey into staking required a shift of mindset. We are all familiar with images of the Proof-of-Work server farms. It’s easy to imagine that we would need a similar kind of kit to run an Eth2 staking rig.

We also take the chance to discuss the complexities of working at a company like ConsenSys. Brennan explains a bit more about his work when he says, “to be an employee of ConsenSys is to live with great contradictions”. He sees one of ConsenSys’ great survival strategies as “its ability to fund wild dreamers.”

Finally, we inevitably arrive at our favorite topic, Ethereum governance. Coogan describes Ethereum as a “dynamic, moving, evolving beast.” Does this make it ungovernable?

Coogan is “always urging people to go further and further down the wormhole.” Listen to the full podcast to catch his infectious desire for learning.

Coogan’s articles:

• My Journey to Becoming a Validator on Ethereum 2.0: Part 1, Part 2
• How to Monitor Your Eth2 Validator and Analyze Your P&L
• How To Safely Migrate Your Ethereum 2.0 Validator Client

Twitter handles:

• ConsenSys Academy: @ConsenSysAcad
• Coogan: @BEB_AND_SON
• Will: @wsfoxley
• Ben: @benjaminion_xyz

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InterPop is building the architecture of an entirely new landscape of fandom using technology built on the Tezos blockchain to drive their vision. Visit hellointerpop.io to learn more.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nischal Shetty, the CEO of India’s top crypto exchange WazirX joins hosts Danny Nelson and Anna Baydakova on this week’s Borderless to talk crypto bans. Rumor has it India’s government is gearing up for a crypto crackdown; possibly a complete ban. Is that really the case? Nischal helps untangle fact from fiction in one of crypto’s most exciting emerging markets.

The conversation then turns to crypto-environmentalism, first through mining and then via NFTs. Miami’s dream of becoming a hub for “clean energy” crypto mining could run into some pretty “hot” opposition. Meanwhile, another NFT marketplace is bending the knee to environmentalists’ demands, but only slightly.

https://www.coindesk.com/miami-mayor-wants-city-to-become-bitcoin-mining-hub

https://www.coindesk.com/nifty-gateway-pledges-to-go-carbon-negative-amid-criticism-of-nfts

https://www.coindesk.com/cbdcs-will-reduce-demand-for-bitcoin-says-south-korea-central-bank-chief

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In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Will Foxley, along with Consensys’ Ben Edgington, discuss the importance of naming conventions around the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade and the impact of staking on the long-term market value of ETH. 

Did you know the first use of the term “Ethereum 2.0” was by founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin back in April 2014 when he first began exploring the benefits of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain protocols?

At the time, Ethereum 2.0 referenced one thing and one thing only: a version of the Ethereum blockchain protocol secured entirely through proof-of-stake validation, as opposed to proof-of-work mining. 

Over the years, Ethereum 2.0 as a term has evolved and grown to encompass other improvements to the network including optimizations for scalability, smart contract functionality and blockchain interoperability. 

Given recent discussion over proposals to speed up Ethereum’s transition to PoS, certain developers such as the Ethereum Foundation’s Danny Ryan are pushing back on using the loaded terminology of Eth 2.0. 

“It’s not just about naming things. It’s about how the Ethereum roadmap has kind of evolved over the years,” said Edgington, adding: “It’s not just about changing names for the sake of it. It’s about saying, ‘We’re not doing a new chain anymore. This is no longer the plan. We are upgrading the existing chain.’”

As plans for Ethereum’s future change, so, too, will conventional naming for its updated roadmap. Keeping up with constant iteration to Eth 2.0 and what this upgrade will actually entail, however, is a “moving target” that, according to Foxley, many mainstream financial analysts are in the dark and left wondering about. 

Some, as I point out, are also worrying about the impacts of an imminent PoS protocol on the long-term value of ether. Given that under PoS it will require less computational energy to create new coins on Ethereum, could the market value of ether be negatively impacted as a result? 

Listen to the full podcast to hear from Foxley, Edgington and Kim on what’s at stake for Eth 2.0. 

Links mentioned in this podcast: 

• What’s New In Eth2 (www.eth2.news)   
• Valid Points (https://www.coindesk.com/newsletter/valid-points)   

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