“On Monday, Los Angeles-based money manager Arca began selling shares in the “Arca U.S. Treasury Fund,” an SEC-registered closed-end fund whose digital shares – ArCoins – trade atop the Ethereum blockchain. The fund invests a majority of its assets in short-term U.S Treasury bills and notes.
The launch marks the first time the crypto-skeptical SEC has allowed a fund represented by cryptographic tokens to enter the investment markets under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Arca has been pushing for various forms of the ArCoin proposal for nearly 20 months.
Our announcement today is a ground-breaking and transformative step toward the unification of traditional finance with digital asset investing as this new category of regulated, digital investment products is made available to investors.
ArCoin, which uses the ERC-1404 protocol, restricts where holders can send a token to a collection of whitelisted addresses. That’s a crucial point for regulators wary of letting tokens outside their scope.”
“China is imposing checks on large banking transactions. The measure is in response to fears of surging bad debt by China’s small lenders.
Over time they may also cause larger depositors gradually to switch their accounts from riskier local banks to the larger, less risky banks, something that Beijing might actually prefer if it wants to re-centralize the banking system.
Last month authorities stepped in to halt bank runs at two local lenders, and last year, the Chinese state was forced to bail out and seize several struggling banks. China’s bad debt problem is expected to worsen this year, with an increase of 8 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion).”
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“The company is looking for a ‘strong developer experienced with Ethereum and blockchain architecture‘ to join its Global Commercial Payments team.
Successful applicants will be tasked with working on Visa’s generically titled, ‘Non-Card based payment innovation and product.‘
Visa’s new initiative looks set to leverage Hyperledger blockchain technology.”
“Strike, which has now entered the public beta phase, enables interaction with the Bitcoin and Lightning protocols with no wallet, seed, channels, liquidity or white papers, while Know Your Customer protocols are kept to a bare minimum.
While Strike does let one purchase Bitcoin with a debit card or bank account, it can also be used for remittances and personal payments, micropayments and both online and offline purchases.
Strike has also been working to provide merchants with tools to process contactless payments, and an improved e-commerce system is also being rolled out.”
“Savvy attackers might be able to “loot” bitcoin from others by way of the Lightning Network if users aren’t careful.
Developers have long known about this attack vector. But before Harris’ and Zohar’s report, no one had done a deep analysis to measure in detail how feasible such an attack would be. These researchers found an attack is not very hard and it could be lucrative for attackers.
Harris notes an attacker targeting 100 channels leads to a reward of “at least” 7402 HTLCs, with the average HTLC today holding about $138 worth of bitcoin. That could mean a payday of roughly $1,021,476.
The researchers argue the attack is systemic and ‘eliminating the risk entirely seems to be a complicated task.’ That said, Harris suggests several strategies for solving the problem, or at least ameliorating it if the issue can’t be stomped out entirely.”
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“More than 40 companies in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry collected at least $18 million in payroll loans from the U.S. government. The PPP was created by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 outbreak to help businesses pay their employees during the ongoing economic crisis.
Loan recipients included Zcash developer Electric Coin Company, Ethereum venture studio ConsenSys and Rainberry Inc., the U.S. entity acquired by Justin Sun’s Tron Foundation at the time of its BitTorrent acquisition in 2018. Crypto venture firms were also represented on the list, including Polychain Capital and Unchained Capital.”
“The Chinese government sees new technologies as a “leapfrog opportunity” to chip away at the dollar’s hegemony.
If you’re approaching this [DCEP] from a crypto or blockchain framework, I think you’re going to really have a hard time understanding what it is and what and why it’s so important.
DCEP’s not about Bitcoin. It’s about potentially internationalizing renminbi, at least to some extent.”
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“Voice was originally destined for the EOS public blockchain, but now runs on a private version of the protocol.
The website is open for people to browse, however only early access registrants will be able to publish content before August 15 [and requires KYC].
The platform rewards users with Voice tokens for posting quality content, thus incentivizing good contributions.”
See Also: Voice
“The moves ratchet up the volume on a longstanding debate and raise important questions about free speech in the modern internet era, including what constitutes hate speech, whether platforms are obligated to allow hateful content and, most of all, who should get to make decisions about the nature of content.
The standards for describing the targeted speech are overly vague and broad, meaning they give full power of discretion to those that enforce them. Giving individuals that power means they’ll enforce them in accordance with their personal views and may mean that speech by minority views and voices is disproportionately censored.
Even if you disagree with information, censoring it doesn’t destroy it, it just allows it to spread without counterpoints. But on the positive side, it highlights the profound censorship.. on Web 2.0, and the more widespread [the] awareness about it, the better.
Rather than going after legislative fixes for Section 230, James said solutions offered by blockchain and the decentralized Web 3.0 provide a better path, which would not allow for centralized censorship.”
“Binance cannot market or offer derivative services of any type in Brazil, irrespective of the contract’s underlying asset, without CVM approval, the order said. That’s because Brazilian law treats all derivatives products as securities.
Brazil threatened the exchange giant with a R$ 1,000 ($186) daily fine.” 🤔🤣
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The Disrupt 