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Coinbase, leading cryptocurrency exchange, announced their Digital Asset Policy Proposal. A set of recommendations to the US government on how the industry should be regulated in order to maintain America's financial leadership. It's a nascent space and it should be regulated with care so as not to snuff the decades of innovation, company creation, economic freedom, and just plain experimentation that comes with a new technology.

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History has been made. The SEC has approved a Bitcoin ETF. Standard retail brokerage accounts in the foremost capital market in the world can now gain exposure to Bitcoin. It will be available as early as next week. You may ask yourself why a Bitcoin ETF matters if you can just buy Bitcoin on an exchange like Coinbase. Two reasons. First, many retail investors don't have crypto exchange accounts. This will give those with your standard brokerages like Charles Schwab and Etrade a way to trade Bitcoin. Secondly, this is nod by the SEC, that a Bitcoin ETF is safe for investors. This is a huge step in the maturing of Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market in general. Bitcoin just keeps becoming more and more relevant. Step by step. Thank you Matt Levine for your excellent rundown.

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Facebook via WhatsApp already provides private, secure, and end to end encrypted messaging to over two billion people- more than any other company on the planet. They've take that a step further by enabling end to end encrypted chat backups. So no one, not Facebook or Apple and Google where the backups are stored, can view your messages.

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Tether is the most popular USD stablecoin with $69bn minted. For users to be able to trust it, they need to know that Tether has $1 worth in reserves for every $1 in Tether they have minted. The problem is, Tether has a horrid track record of stable reserves. Many have called them a scam for years, with a recent Bloomberg piece only adding to that narrative. Here is Tether's response to the Bloomberg piece.

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Axie Infinity is more than a game, it's an economy, it's a governance system- something only possible when building on the blockchain. a16z recently announced their investment in Axie Infinity, and any time they do I always look into the project. Will a game that rewards player for playing, gives them true ownership of in game items, and gives them a vote in how it develops be enough? Do enough people actually care about these pillars, or do they just want a fun game. Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is damn certain, only in the cryptocurrency world can these questions even be explored.

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Numerai allows anyone in the world with an internet connection to be rewarded for supplying accurate insights to their trading model. Built on Ethereum and made possible by the NMR token- rip bong- welcome to the future. And for the first time Numerai has released their fund performance, and the system is working.

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Mirror today launched public access to their next generation Web3 publishing tool. I dive into the epic things Mirror offers and riff generally about where Web3 fits into the cryptocurrency and blockchain narrative.

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Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp suffered a major outage lasting about 6 hours. We dive into what we know and what we don't know. Thank you Krebs on Security, Cloudflare, and Robert Graham for your coverage.

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We talk the Pandora Papers in front of $23 million mansion owned by King of Jordan Abdullah- just one of the many details released. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists which lead the effort describes it thusly: "Millions of leaked documents and the biggest journalism partnership in history have uncovered financial secrets of 35 current and former world leaders, more than 330 politicians and public officials in 91 countries and territories, and a global lineup of fugitives, con artists and murderers."

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Riffing Visa's newly announced Universal Payment Channel project and my thoughts on crypto in general. I always like following what the established companies are doing in the crypto space. Their project purports to allow compatibility between multiple cryptocurrency blockchains and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Imagine paying someone from your Bitcoin wallet and having it auto convert to the cryptocurrency or currency of the payee's choice. Without you or the payee even knowing it. That's the goal.

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by no gradient, produced by chuck "finch" finley, music by chris hoog, artwork by logan faerber