“The tone of Congress towards crypto was markedly changed from past years. Crypto executives received encouragement from both Democrats and Republicans. The five-hour hearing took place before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services where six CEOs testified about the growing importance of crypto and the industry’s desire for regulation.
While such hearings in the past have focused almost entirely about the criminal use of Bitcoin, Wednesday’s session saw members inquire about everything from the security advantages of blockchain technology to the potential for crypto to provide greater financial inclusion.
“Web3 can empower anyone,” said Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Oh), using a relatively new term that describes an emerging stack of applications that don’t rely on a centralized authority to function.
Gonzalez and others repeatedly invoked the prospect of the U.S. losing out on crypto-related innovation as a result of cumbersome regulation, and asked if the industry would benefit from a more cohesive policy from the U.S. government.
Crypto CEOs urged Congress to clarify the overlapping jurisdictions between agencies like the SEC and CFTC, and to allow companies like Circle—which has issued more than $30 billion in stablecoins—to come into existing banking system.
It is not immediately clear what the upshot of Wednesday’s hearing will be, though several members of the Committee declared they would being working on bills to streamline crypto regulation and support the industry.”
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“After picking Arbitrum to scale its Community Points program, the popular online discussion community appears ready to expand the initiative to a potentially much larger audience. Today, the site launched a new website for its Community Points beta program and opened up a waitlist form, which lets users and moderators alike request the feature for their community, or “subreddit.”
Users can earn Community Points in eligible subreddits by posting and engaging in discussion. The crypto points have value within each respective community and can be used to purchase features or engage in community governance, but they can also potentially be swapped for other cryptocurrencies or tokens at exchanges, or used for other external purposes.
Community Points are the first step towards a different future for online communities. These tokens live on the blockchain, which means they are truly owned by the community. Over time, your community will benefit from even greater control and independence—on and off of Reddit.”
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“The move comes mere weeks after co-founder Su Zhu “abandoned” Ethereum over its prohibitively high fees for new users.
Zhu said in a Telegram chat with CoinDesk that the hedge fund is bullish on ETH because the macro environment has become calmer and that ‘both U.S. and Chinese stock markets are healthy.‘
It now appears like a healthy flush out of leverage after weeks of excess and dispersion.”
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“Visa’s crypto advisory team will work alongside the company’s consulting and analytics group to advise banks on their crypto strategy and execution, as well as to help banks build crypto teams.
Sheffield says there’s been an inflection point over the last nine months in which banks have started to recognize their consumers want access to crypto. Meanwhile, they also want to figure out how they can better serve crypto businesses such as exchanges and wallets.
Every bank should have a crypto strategy.”
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“Messari announced Wednesday the launch of “Messari Governor” – a platform for engaging in the governance of many of crypto’s top DAOs.
DAOs manage an overwhelming percentage of DeFi’s $280 billion in total value locked (TVL), as well as a growing percentage of crypto’s nearly $3 trillion aggregate market capitalization. Despite their growing prominence, however, keeping up with the internal workings of DAOs is a notably tricky business.
A website like CoinMarketCap lets you see the table stakes for a token. We wanted to build a place where you can easily see the table stakes for governance.
Members of the Messari research team add new proposals to the platform as they’re posted, rank them based on importance and type of proposal, and also gauge how warmly a community has received the proposal. The platform also contains links to both voting portals and the governance forums for the relevant DAOs.”
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“The reform plan is said to be the biggest shake-up of the Australian payments system since the 1990s.
The government is in favor of six out of nine reforms proposed by the Senate Committee, including a licensing regime for crypto exchanges, laws to govern decentralized autonomous organizations, and a common access regime for new payments platforms.
If we embrace these developments, Australia has an enormous opportunity to capitalize on the convergence between finance and technology.
For businesses, these reforms will address the ambiguity that can exist about the regulatory and tax treatment of crypto assets and new payment methods. In doing so, it will drive even more consumer interest, facilitate even more new entrants and enable even more innovation to take place.”
The Disrupt 