Word on the Block | Forkast.News: Recent Episodes
Forkast.News
A weekly, 30-minute podcast interviewing leading CEOs, policymakers, and thought leaders in the world of blockchain. Produced from Asia by Forkast.News, and hosted by award-winning anchor Angie Lau, Word on the Block goes beyond the headlines in providing in-depth, 1:1 interviews with the newsmakers shaping the rapid innovation and impact of blockchain, crypto, and emerging technology on business, politics, and the global economy.
Crypto and blockchain has seen everything this year. From the start with it’s all time highs and it’s role in the Ukraine War, to the year ending with the debacles of Terra Luna and the mess left by FTX and much more.These instances have left industry edging more towards the importance of security and regulations in the space. We spoke with the Independent Community Bankers of America's Brian Laverdure to learn more about developments in crypto asset regulation and how they might help the industry rebound.
Macros and microeconomics have taken a hit on the industry, leading venture capitalists and investors to take a more cautious path when investing. But some believe the opposite, now is the time to seize the opportunity. Why should we be investing during the crypto winter? What value can you get out of this? And what should we be investing in?Get the answer to all these questions & more in the latest episode of Word on the Block
As China’s dominance in the world of blockchain grows, the question that everybody is asking is - can one be tracked by this technology?
Watch what Yifan He, who is building Chinese Blockchain Based Service Network or BSN & taking it to the world, has to say in this conversation with Forkast’s Angie Lau.
Find out why he doesn’t believe in cryptocurrencies & why non-crypto blockchains are going to be what traditional industry & systems back on. And what are the synergies and links there are, if any, between the Digital Yuan & BSN.
China now has an over 80% share in blockchain patent applications worldwide. This shift in China’s strategy comes even though crypto currencies are frowned upon in the country. Even though crypto currencies are one of the most popular applications of blockchain technology globally, China has taken a different route as it develops Blockchain Base Service Network or BSN.
How exactly does BSN work? Is it linked to existing public chains? Or is it developing in isolation? Is BSN China’s connection to global blockchains? And how does it operate without crypto currencies? What is NTT & how does one use it?
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been around for a little bit more than a decade, but compared to the insituationals companies they are still in their infancy. But as blockchain and crypto grows, more and more institutional players are joining the fields.
You know things are getting serious when one of the oldest ventures joins the game supporting ventures that disrupt the way we invest and work in.
When did they realise that they would no longer turn a blind eye to these disruption? What made them join forces and build infrastructure on it? Will this pave the way for more institution to join in?
Get all these answers and much more on the latest episode of Word on the Block where we are join by Alex Mansion of Standard Charted Ventures.
The right policy structure is critical for success. As the blockchain & cryptocurrency sectors grow & break through barriers set by traditional industry, having the right guardrails in place will be essential to help it get to the next level.
So which agency or agencies need to develop policies for the crypto industry? What are the rules that need to be written? How do we ensure the policy architecture does not stifle innovation? Are cryptocurrencies securities or commodities? And does any one country in the world have the lead in formulating crypto policy?
Get the answers to these questions and a whole lot more in this conversation between Tomicah Tillemann and Forkast’s Angie Lau.
Hong Kong based crypto unicorn Animoca Brands has invested in over 340 web3 projects and companies so far, and more are coming. We find out how they find the right ventures to back and what challenges and opportunities they are spotting in this age of the crypto chill. And why are they participating in the Open Metaverse Alliance, what exactly is it and why do we need it.
Hong Kong based crypto unicorn Animoca Brands has invested in over 340 web3 projects and companies so far, and more are coming. We find out how they find the right ventures to back and what challenges and opportunities they are spotting in this age of the crypto chill. And why are they participating in the Open Metaverse Alliance, what exactly is it and why do we need it.
NFTs have become ubiquitous, but they are a lot more than just a picture. They are a way to prove provenance, secure authenticity and a whole lot more. And Artifact Labs, which originated within the realms of one of Hong Kong’s oldest newspapers SCMP, is using NFTs to preserve Asia’s historic moments.
Find out the challenges they’ve faced along the way as well as their thoughts on the Chinese NFT landscape. And what are the missing pieces in the crypto regulatory puzzle and what can be done better.
NFTs have become ubiquitous, but they are a lot more than just a picture. They are a way to prove provenance, secure authenticity and a whole lot more. And Artifact Labs, which originated within the realms of one of Hong Kong’s oldest newspapers SCMP, is using NFTs to preserve Asia’s historic moments.
Find out the challenges they’ve faced along the way as well as their thoughts on the Chinese NFT landscape. And what are the missing pieces in the crypto regulatory puzzle and what can be done better.
The world of finance is male dominated and this is true of the web3 world as well. Per a McKinsey report, all male teams snagged 85% of venture funding in the US in 2018, compared to a measly 2% by all female founding teams. How can this equation be made more equal? How can women get access to a more inclusive financial system and what needs to change?
Forkast’s editor in chief Angie Lau speaks to Wendy Diamond who leads the Women's Entrepreneurship Day Organization or WEDO, that is trying to solve these exact problems that women across the world face when it comes to accessing, participating and using the existing financial ecosystem.
While there are thousands of blockchains around, most of them work in their own galaxy and interoperability is still a challenge. However, Cosmos is trying to change that by creating an internet of blockchains.
How exactly are they creating that internet & what challenges are they facing as they try to create a system that could operate over the next few decades? And why is uplifting grassroot communities and creating systems that support local economies top of Cosmos agenda?
Find out the answer to all these questions and more in the latest episode of Word on the Block.
We are just about beginning to scratch the surface of what a metaverse could be & the opportunities it presents. A world where our digital avatar is our identity & we can do things without being restricted by location or access.
Forkast’s Editor in Chief Angie Lau chats with Sandra Helou, the cofounder of Metapolis to understand not just the opportunities but the challenges & difficulties a metaverse could present & how to navigate through this new landscape. She believes decentralization can exist with accountability.
The Metaverse is coming but are we prepared? What are the opportunities and challenges this new alternate reality presents? And what role will demographic gravity play in easing us into the Metaverse?
Will rules of the real world apply in the virtual one and what will it take to be a responsible corporate leader in it? And what could be the social and societal ramifications of living a digitally immersive life?
Forkast chats with one of South East Asia’s largest banks to find out how it is getting ready to engage in this new world.
There are thousands of blockchains in the crypto universe, but Tezos has emerged as the chain of choice for artists & creators across the globe.
What’s driving artists to TZ and how is that changing the world of NFTs & art? Tezos is also among a select few private blockchains that have made their way into China, what’s been their experience so far & where do they go from here?
You’d find the answers to these questions & a whole lot more in this exclusive chat between Forkast’s editor-in-chief Angie Lau & TZ APAC’s Katherine Ng.
The crypto markets maybe in the throes of the bear market, but those building foundational level technology are still hard at work.
We discuss how blockchain technology has evolved over the years & how it’s changing the way industries operate. How open source projects enable diversity & the need for permissionless & hybrid blockchains. And the role of the Linux Foundation in nurturing the blockchain technology of tomorrow.
An old boy’s club - that’s how the world of finance & investing is often seen. And unfortunately the crypto ecosystem is looking no different.
What will it take to make the world of Crypto more inclusive? Is there a need for gender focussed policy action? And who are the female changemakers in Web3 who are shattering the glass ceiling? Get the answer to all these questions as NEAR Foundation & Forkast launch the Women in Web3 Changemakers 2022.
Name, Image & Likeness, or NIL law has given many student-athletes a chance to monetize their talent.
How has it changed the lives of these high school & college sportsmen & women? And is it making fans invest in their future? How is the recent chill in crypto air impacting platforms that are helping build a business based on NIL? And what’s the future of digital currencies?
Get the answer to all these questions in this conversation between Forkast Editor in Chief Angie Lau, Ben Armstrong & Aaron Murray
Chaos, doubt & FUD has taken hold of crypto investors as we deal with the contagion from collapsing crypto hedge funds & exchanges. And the ripples from Terra’s de-peg have shaken the world of stablecoins with allegations & rumors now at Circle’s doorstep. How is the issuer of the world’s second-largest stablecoin, USDC fairing? Are its assets safe? Are USDC holders safe in case of bankruptcy? How has USDC managed to increase its market capitalization in these chilly times? And what are the company’s plans for the crypto winter?
Get all the inside details on this exclusive one-on-one conversation between Jeremy Fox-Geen, Chief Financial Officer of Circle, and Forkast’s Editor-in-Chief, Angie Lau.
Vignesh Sundaresan, more popularly known as “Metakovan” changed the face of NFTs with his $69 million purchase of Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”.
Why did he pay $69 million for the NFT? What drives his investment thesis? And what value do NFTs hold?
Find out in this exclusive conversation with Forkast’s Editor-in-chief Angie Lau, as he talks about the people who have inspired him and his crypto journey.
Japan was among the first the world to introduce crypto-linked regulations in 2017. The country has now passed a law that clarifies the legal status of stablecoins, but what exactly does it mean? And what needs to be done to hasten institutional adoption of digital currencies?
And what can other countries learn from Japan’s experience of regulating digital assets? Forkast’s editor-in-chief Angie Lau talks to Phillip Gillespie, CEO of B2C2 that is looking to bridge the gap between cryptocurrencies and traditional finance by providing crypto liquidity to institutions.
One in three people in the world are gamers but only a fraction of them are in Web 3.0 gaming. What will it take to bring them into blockchain gaming? And what’s missing from the current spectrum of blockchain games? Singapore-based gaming startup Ethla's CEO Wui Ngiap Foo talks about the gaps & opportunities they are spotting in gaming. And how they are looking to onboard the next billion users into crypto.
Singapore’s Temasek, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, has been looking at blockchain technology since the crypto winter of 2018.
How much of its US$270 million portfolio is geared towards crypto & blockchain projects? Have they invested in Bitcoin? And how do they pick & choose businesses they’d like to be a part of?
Get the answers to all these questions and more as Forkast’s Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau meets Pradyumna Agrawal of Temasek in Singapore.
Singapore headquartered Crypto.com, is dreaming big and hopes to have 100 million users on its platform by the end of 2022. Brand recall & trust are going to play a big part in acquiring new customers for the crypto exchange. So what are the challenges ahead of them and how are they dealing with cross jurisdiction regulatory differences?
Find out in this conversation between Forkast’s Editor-0in-Chief Angie Lau & Crypto.com’s Eric Anziani.
DBS Group is one of the oldest and biggest financial groups in South East Asia, and they now have their eyes focussed on the digital economy.
Forkast’s Angie Lau talks to the group’s CEO about how they are transforming not just themselves but architecture of the existing financial systems. And what’s the role for regulators in shaping this new economy.
What exactly is the Metaverse and how will it transform our lives? Will legacy financial institutions continue to remain relevant in the new virtual reality? And what is attracting Web 3 and crypto firms to Dubai?
Forkast’s Editor in Chief Angie Lau speaks to Citi’s Ronit Ghose to answer these questions & more.
The recent events in crypto markets have reiterated the need for a crypto regulator & greater oversight over digital assets. Will this be a key factor in bringing traditional finance firms to the world of DeFi? What is the knowledge gap that exists in the crypto industry? And where and how is FTX looking to deploy its US$2 billion dollar crypto venture fund?
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Amy Wu, head of FTX’s Ventures join in on this exclusive conversation to answer these questions & more.
Anthony Scaramucci, Founder & Managing Partner of alternative investments firm Skybridge says he’s looking to create the bridge between traditional finance and Defi, the future of finance. He says it is odd that legacy financial firms are investing in companies that buy crypto tokens but won’t invest in underlying tokens directly. He also believes crypto is about individualism and empowerment and governments cannot ignore it anymore.
Listen in to the entire conversation between Anthony Scaramucci and Forkast’s Editor in Chief Angie Lau straight from the Bahamas.
From the rustle of the paper to the news at your fingertips on your smart device. Technology has changed not just how we consume news, but how the people who bring you the news work. Will blockchain technology be the next leap for journalism? How could NFTs help journalists benefit from their work? Could crypto tech raise the trust between news providers and their audiences?
Find out in this exclusive one-on-one chat between Dwayne Desaulniers, Director for Blockchain and Data at the Associated Press, and Forkast’s Editor in Chief Angie Lau.
Will China beat the US to the first Central Bank Digital Currency? How soon might we see the first digital dollar? And what’s the role played by dollar backed stablecoins playing in the current financial system?
How are policy makers and regulators in the US shaping the crypto story? Kristin Smith, Executive Director at the Blockchain Association answers all these questions & more in conversation with Forkast’s Angie Lau.
From Gucci to Louis Vuitton, Spider-Man to Batman, there's no escaping the craze for NFTs. The market for NFTs or non-fungible tokens catapulted to US$18.5 billion in 2021, a rise of over 500 times compared to the previous year.
So what are the opportunities for this segment? Would GameFi continue to drive the rise or will we see new use cases take the lead? Forkast’s Angie Lau is in conversation with Duc Luu of Spores Network to answer these questions and more.
From the recent launch of Bitcoin-based exchange-traded funds in the U.S. to El Salvador’s plan to raise US$1 billion through BTC bonds to fund its “Bitcoin City” property development, growing mainstream adoption of the world’s original cryptocurrency is demanding increased scalability.
Adam Back, a Bitcoin development veteran and CEO of blockchain technology company Blockstream, which is working in partnership with El Salvador’s government on its Bitcoin-backed bond plan. says the solution lies in layer-2 networks.
Layer-2 is a secondary protocol built on top of a blockchain such as the Bitcoin network or Ethereum. Mirroring the protocol evolution of the internet, layer-2 technology such as Bitcoin’s Lightning and Liquid networks tackle scalability issues by moving processes off the main chain.
“While it's difficult for (all) potential users of Bitcoin to directly hold it on-chain, there are different use cases that can use it in different ways,” Back told Forkast.News in a video interview. “[Layer-2] provides a different kind of section of transactional capacity-optimized for use cases.”
“You can onboard more users and there's less data hitting the main chain ... it has some trade-offs, but it provides similar kinds of assurances to the main Bitcoin chain.” Back said, “It's difficult to have a single protocol that's optimal for everything.”
Taproot — the last major upgrade of the Bitcoin network, which went live last November — came four years after the SegWit soft fork, the only other big change to the network, implemented in 2017. Given the slow and irregular pace of upgrades, most Bitcoin network innovations take place on layer-2.
“If you look at the internet and the base layer of the internet being TCP/IP … the TCP/IP protocol essentially hasn't changed in decades, yet there's an enormous amount of innovation on the internet. But it's happening in the layer above, or in the application layer,” Back said. “And that's considered, in engineering terms, a good way to do it, because you want the best technology to be robust.”
Watch Back’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about layer-2 solutions, the “block war” between layer-2 providers, the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade and BTC’s mainstream adoption.
The price of Bitcoin has dropped by more than 22% in the past 30 days. Predictions that the world’s original crypto would top US$100,000 by the end of the year are beginning to look overly optimistic, to put it diplomatically. Yet Mark Yusko, chief executive and investment officer at Morgan Creek Capital, is holding firm in his belief that Bitcoin will be worth US$250,000 within the next five years. He thinks Bitcoin’s current low price, as denominated in U.S. dollars, is bunk.
“It’s interesting that in the short run, when prices fall, as they have in the last few weeks, people start to get a little antsy and start to question these long-term trends and fundamentals,” Yusko told Forkast.News in a video interview. “Price is a liar.”
In terms of Bitcoin’s actual value, the truth lies in gold, Yusko said, asserting that fiat currencies can conceal changes in real value.
“If you look at U.S. stocks, we’re having new all-time highs,” he said. “That’s because we denominate in a depreciating asset — the dollar.”
The S&P 500 has soared more than 98% over the past five years. However, last month, it took just 2.57 ounces of gold to buy the index, the same as it did more than 16 years earlier, in October 2005. That price was unchanged from June 1997, 24 years ago. In contrast, Bitcoin, currently trading at a value worth around 26.97 ounces of gold, has skyrocketed more than 60-fold in the five years to date.
By the end of November, U.S. Consumer Price Index inflation was running at 6.8%, the highest level since 1982. The inflation rate across the 19-member eurozone had reached 4.9%. Bitcoin — often touted as a safe-haven asset and a hedge against inflationary pressures — had slumped to below US$50,000 for the first time since early October.
Yusko attributes Bitcoin’s slide to the launch of a series of U.S. exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on Bitcoin futures.
“[What a Bitcoin futures ETF] does is allow me to create a paper version of Bitcoin, which is completely independent of the 21 million supply … And that contract then allows someone to go short on the other side,” Yusko said. “This time, within days of (Bitcoin’s) peak at US$68,000 … (came) the issuance of (ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF) BITO. And I believe a bunch of banks and others have gotten short on the other side, and they’re pushing the price down a little bit.”
Watch Yusko’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the secular and cyclical dynamics of Bitcoin, the impact of Bitcoin futures ETFs on the market, how investors should distribute wealth in the crypto space, and upcoming opportunities in 2022.
A recent US$40 million-plus bid for a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution by 17,437 virtual strangers may have failed to win the prized historical document, but it thrust the decentralized autonomous organization that united them into the spotlight.
ConstitutionDAO’s audacious campaign, which raised the money for its auction bid within a week, catapulted not only itself but also the entire DAO phenomenon into the public consciousness.
A DAO is like a virtual flash mob — a leaderless group of like-minded people working together toward a common interest. Governance is achieved through the use of smart contracts and votes among members who use tokens instead of ballot papers.
If this novel fusion of a leaderless organizational structure with decentralized technology can work to get auction bids up and running, who’s to say it can’t be applied in the finance arena?
Not Marcello Mari, the CEO of SingularityDAO — which is using SingularityNET’s artificial intelligence technology to handle the complex tasks of data processing and crypto asset management in decentralized finance.
“Imagine an AI that can do price prediction for you, analyze the different market trends, and make suggestions for you on your crypto investments,” Mari told Forkast.News in a video interview. “People can just invest in this basket of tokens in these portfolios, and then the AI will do everything else for them.
Yet even in an organizational structure that appears as democratized as a DAOs, the issue of power concentration persists: the democratic principle of “one person, one vote” is critically compromised by the fact that those who hold large proportions of issued tokens command a commensurately large share of votes.
“My vision is to have DAOs that are actually managed by artificial intelligence delegates,” Mari said. “What we want to see in the future is AIs that are able to make decisions based on the community vote.”
Despite this decentralized ideal, Mari’s position as a DAO chief remains a contradiction in terms. So SingularityDAO has its sights set on complete decentralization over the next five years to phase the leadership role out as its users become accustomed to its artificial design.
“If this happens in five years’ time, I’m done. I’m out. I don’t need to be the CEO of the DAO anymore,” Mari said.
Watch Mari’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about how DAOs work, how AI will shape DAOs and DeFi and where ConstitutionDAO went wrong.
Shipping times from China, the world’s biggest exporter, are set to grow longer amid a new set of Covid quarantine mandates for vessel crews. The new rules mean that seafarers may have to spend as much as seven weeks in isolation for each return trip.
That latest blow to the logistics industry comes as the Covid pandemic appears to have gained renewed momentum, propelling a surge in demand for products as consumers around the world stay at home.
Adding to the bottleneck is an increase in U.S. manufacturing output to levels not seen since March 2019, which will likely be augmented by the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden recently signed into law.
“There’s a lot happening in terms of supply, as we know — unprecedented volumes going on with demand currently,” Dennis Delgado, the co-founder and chief product officer of supply chain-focused blockchain firm SyncFab, told Forkast.News. “There’s a huge backlog in the industry.”
The use of blockchain to facilitate logistics processes is one of the technology’s less-talked-about success stories, in which it incorporates layers of trust through which enterprises in the supply chain network can share data and digitize paper-shuffling manual operations.
Yet the logistics business has proved somewhat resistant to the allure of blockchain technology, a reluctance attributable largely to regulatory concerns and a lack of knowledge.
“You’d be surprised at the number of companies and vendors we work with that are still hesitant to adopt new technologies,” Delgado said. “When you get into some of the larger organizations that have been around for decades, they have entrenched systems in place that can vary from department to department.”
A talent crunch in the logistics sector has deepened supply chain problems across a range of industries. Consulting firm Deloitte argues that the evolving complexity of supply chain management requires not only a larger workforce but also new skills.
According to Delgado, SyncFab and partner firm Smart MFG can make manufacturing “cool again” by adding incentive layers in which MFG tokens are used to reward supply chain processes that may otherwise go unnoticed, such as quoting for work.
“Areas like that, where we normally don’t think would necessarily be paid or rewarded, we disagree,” Delgado said. “We think there are a lot of opportunities there that these blockchain tokenomics can bring, and with the added layer of getting a newer generation interested in manufacturing again.”
Watch Delgado’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the current supply chain crisis, how NFTs can be used in manufacturing, and how blockchain can help digitize legacy industries.
The decentralized finance sector has undergone phenomenal growth this year, with its value soaring more than tenfold to US$250 billion. But as it becomes too big to fail, its lack of regulatory access points is raising concerns among finance industry observers and finance industry oversight bodies.
“[DeFi] will be difficult to tackle because our current frameworks for financial services are built in the construct of having a financial intermediary in every single financial service provision, and that’s been the access point for the regulators and supervisors,” said Iota Nassr, an economist and policy analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “In DeFi, of course, this is non-existent, and this is becoming a big puzzle for us.”
The new paradigm is perplexing not only for policymakers and regulators, but also for many investors, despite its much-lauded attributes of transparency, pseudonymity, and claims to represent a democratization of finance. Nassr points out that the very complexity of DeFi protocols requires esoteric knowledge that remains out of reach for ordinary investors, and which puts better resourced — and, by implication, larger — market participants at a strategic advantage when it comes to benefiting from all that this new industry has to offer.
“We have this paradox where we have absolute transparency, but at the same time, we have the need for some technical, engineering, software development or coding skills which the average user does not have,” Nassr said. She added that this produced a level of opacity that — when coupled with the lack of the customary investor protections found in traditional, regulated financial products — could expose many investors to miscalculations of risk and financial losses.
DeFi’s ability to foster financial democratization — with its inherent promise of inclusion in a finance sector long dominated by Wall Street and institutional players — was not a given, she said, amid the preponderance of those same institutions, alongside family offices and professional investors, in the space.
“We need to be really cautious when arguing for DeFi for financial inclusion, at least at this stage of development,” Nassr said. “For the moment, DeFi activity is concentrated on institutions, and we see a lot of family offices participating in this market to enjoy the leverage opportunities that are available there.”
In Q2 this year, transactions worth US$10 million or more accounted for 60% of all DeFi deals, and Nassr said that if smaller institutional and professional investors were included in that calculus, it would show that almost 95% of total transaction volume in the sector involved non-retail investors.
“Retail users who wish to execute very small-value transactions may be faced with disproportionately high fees, and this is effectively pricing them out,” she said. “This is not to say that there is no potential, but we don’t see this practically happening today.”
A new OECD report entitled “DeFi: Activities, Risks and Why it Matters” is due out in January. Watch Nassr’s full interview with Forkast.News for a sneak preview of its contents.
It may have taken a global pandemic to do it, but millions of unbanked people in Latin America have been propelled into the financial system since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis.
Some 17% of the region’s unbanked population had gained access to the system by autumn last year as, within a matter of months, pandemic-related subsidies made financial inclusion a necessity.
Nevertheless, in Brazil, 34 million adults — almost one in six Brazilians — remain unbanked, according to São Paulo-based research firm Instituto Locomotiva. Those without access to basic financial services like savings accounts, credit and loans are disproportionately women.
“Many of the wallets and the banking records are in the name of the husband,” Taynaah Reis, chief executive of blockchain-powered neobank Moeda Seeds, told Forkast.News in a video interview. “This becomes a problem when [women] look for credit.”
Fortunately for Reis — who says that even she had limited access to information and credit, despite the benefits of privilege and a private school education — she was able to raise capital for Moeda Seeds through a US$20 million initial coin offering.
Being in blockchain has given Reis the opportunity to see the technology’s promise to democratize access to capital. But the sector has attracted its fair share of criticism, from worries over the speculation rife in crypto to concerns about the carbon footprint of such an energy-intensive industry.
Yet Reis says there are also ways for the industry to promote and foster environmental and social sustainability.
“Now, we have the COP26 (United Nations Climate Change Conference), and many discussions on climate change to hold every country accountable and every individual accountable, as well,” she said. “We see opportunities to create different economic models and assets that are sustainable over time.”
Moeda Seeds has itself created one such model, entering into a partnership with Brazilian forestry manager 3Agro on a non-fungible token project. The scheme allows buyers of the tokens not only to support the planting of açaí trees in the Amazon region through their investment, but also to gain exposure to revenue generated by the sale of the berries from the trees that are grown as a result.
With this kind of creative thinking, Reis says, blockchain-based finance can unleash forces for increased prosperity, social inclusion, environmental responsibility and the greater good.
The first Bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund made its debut on Wall Street just a little over a fortnight ago. Six days later, Mastercard partnered with digital asset management company Bakkt to bring cryptocurrencies into its network. As increasing numbers of mainstream finance sector businesses enter the crypto space, digital assets are reaching a level of maturity that’s defying the predictions of their critics.
“Blockchain, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are no longer some young, innovative technology,” Blockdata co-founder and managing director Jonathon Knegtel said in a video interview with Forkast.News. “It’s almost a teenager.”
Moves by traditional finance sector players such as banks to integrate crypto with their existing products and services are giving the digital asset industry the momentum it needs to achieve critical mass in the mainstream, Knegtel explained.
“[Mastercard and Bakkt’s partnership is] making it a lot easier for people to actually enter the ecosystem and partake,” he said. “Because more users are coming in, the value goes up, and then the value gets circulated inside, and people start funding each other. And that's the stage we're at now.”
Amid all this, crypto banks are emerging to further disrupt the banking system. These crypto banks — and digital asset businesses — resemble “challenger” banks such as PayPal and Revolut, providing crypto-focused financial services such as borrowing, lending and saving. If the previous wave of finance industry disruption was brought on by challenger banks, crypto banks appear to represent the next one.
“Challenger banks definitely introduced the concept, but that means it's a lower jump for them to then jump to the next point and be exposed to crypto,” Knegtel said.
The crypto space has seen major growth in 2021. In the third quarter, blockchain companies raised US$6.5 billion, a 30% increase from the previous quarter, according to Blockdata. Half of the 20 biggest venture capital firms now have exposure to crypto exchanges, and institutional decentralized finance is expected to become a US$1 trillion industry.
The growth in the capital involved comes as blockchain companies reach critical mass and require larger fundraising rounds, which Knegtel believes is a sign that the crypto space is reaching maturity, although he also points out that the growth of the DeFi space remains minuscule compared to traditional finance.
“US$1 trillion is just 1% of the assets under management of the top 100 banks in the world,” he said. “One percent as a part of an asset diversification strategy in 2021 is not that much. And that alone would bring another US$1 trillion.”
Watch Knegtel’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about crypto banks’ disruptive effects on the banking system, how regulation can propel the crypto space into maturity, how DeFi may challenge centralized crypto banks, and the risks behind the burgeoning market for non-fungible tokens.
Bitcoin may have taken a back seat in the collective consciousness of the crypto community this year as the non-fungible token scene took off and decentralized finance enjoyed an Indian summer, but the coin that started it all has been back in the headlines lately. Bitcoin has returned to valuations last seen during the heady peaks of spring, a BTC futures fund began trading on Wall Street earlier this month, and a Central American nation has adopted it as a parallel currency.
The world’s original cryptocurrency remains the subject of debate, concern and criticism, but for a number of crypto watchers, 2021 marked the beginning of the end of traditional finance, with Bitcoin poised finally to transform the space.
“A few hundred years ago, we were still in a world that was ruled by emperors — shahs, sultans, kings, czars... Within a span of 80 years that all disappeared,” Ben Caselin, the head of research at crypto exchange AAX, told Forkast.News in a video interview. “Things change.”
As things have changed, Bitcoin has also changed. The peer-to-peer payment network described in mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakomoto’s original white paper has evolved into an asset class held by a wide range of investors — from retail traders to traditional finance sector businesses to governments. Caselin insists that in order to navigate a crypto space that has grown well beyond Bitcoin, it is critical to recognize Bitcoin’s core principles, which extend beyond its technology.
“Bitcoin is not just a technology. It’s not just an asset,” Caselin said. “It’s also a set of principles, and it is also a very unique entity now in this world, just like the internet … Bitcoin is the awakening of humanity to its own sovereign capacities.”
Amid the rise of new blockchains with more powerful functions and faster transactions, concerns have grown that Bitcoin is being outmoded. With thousands of cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications appearing, many investors have diversified their crypto portfolios.
“There's a lot of experimentation going on,” Caselin said. “If you really want to stick to the Bitcoin network, you could almost say that things that really succeed in the altcoin space perhaps will eventually graduate to Bitcoin.”
Bitcoin broke its own price record this month to trade at US$66,930, and Caselin believes that institutional adoption will be the deciding factor in whether it rises further.
“For Bitcoin to keep rising, more capital needs to come in, and that cannot just be small money,” Caselin said. “It makes sense in the bigger scheme of things that now it's the time for institutions. But they also have to kind of go through … cultural transformations.”
Watch Caselin’s full interview with
Forkast.News
Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about why Bitcoin is still the next big thing.
Blockchain is becoming increasingly integrated into the corporate world, and luxury brands are particularly well-positioned to reap the rewards of digital innovation, which is set to play a part in an industry that’s constantly seeking to reinvent itself.
The Covid-19 pandemic has taken a significant toll on the luxury sector, which shrunk by as much as 22% in 2020, setting its growth back five years. The Big Four fashion weeks, for instance, saw Paris, Milan, London and New York welcome only a handful of their usual stylista guests or put their shows online as much of the runway set stayed away.
Out of the crisis, however, other opportunities are rising as blockchain beguiles brands in the luxury business that were wondering how to navigate the new landscape.
“The big brands are beginning to see that there are new channels, new markets that they can be marketing and selling into,” Zilliqa co-founder Max Kantelia told Forkast.News in a video interview. Zilliqa is a layer-1 blockchain with smart-contract capability.
A collector himself, Kantelia says blockchain will bring two major changes to the luxury industry: proof of provenance and the tokenization of physical collectibles.
As the NFT sector has gained momentum this year, major luxury brands have begun to embrace it. Such storied fashion houses as Louis Vuitton and Burberry have been exploring NFTs in gaming, and Gucci released a four-minute NFT film created for its 100th birthday that was snapped up at a Christie’s auction.
Yet the virtual-world fashion experience remains difficult and somewhat inelegant for an industry that prides itself on its sleek appeal. The process of setting up Ethereum wallets and the like can be a turnoff for even the most ardent luxury lover.
Kantelia says luxury brands need appropriate venues, and suggests the next step is to create digital assets that complement, not replace, real-world ones, bridging the gap between the physical and digital universes.
Listen to Kantelia’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about what he sees as the digital future for luxury goods, arts and gaming, the regulatory environment in which it will operate, and why blockchain interoperability will underpin the development of the emerging ecosystem.
As the adoption of blockchain technology grows around the world, so have the barriers between blockchains in different countries and regions.
Much like the internet, which started out as small sets of nodes in universities before expanding globally to form an interconnected and far more useful World Wide Web, blockchain nodes — now distributed across the globe — are in need of greater interoperability.
“At the end of the day, the primary catalyst for blockchain is really its connectivity [and] it’s about decentralization,'' said John DeVadoss, the co-founder of InterWork Alliance (IWA), in a video interview with Forkast.News.
The IWA, a non-profit organization working on the adoption of tokens for day-to-day operations, recently announced its merger with the Global Blockchain Business Council. One of the IWA’s major projects to connect the blockchain space is building a Token Taxonomy Framework (TTF), which defines a common language, behaviors and properties for tokens. The TTF allows its users to choose what and how much they would use the framework.
Blockchain standards and national, unified infrastructure such as China’s Blockchain Services Network enhance the connections across global blockchain ecosystems. But mainstream adoption of the technology is still slowed down by other factors. DeVadoss believes that one of the main factors that is stagnating a global blockchain explosion is the misconception of the distributed ledger.
“Much of the mainstream enterprise IT world still thinks of blockchain as database because they are unable to see beyond the technology,” DeVadoss said. “There has never been a stack like a blockchain stack because none of them had economic protocols baked inside intrinsically.”
Despite what DeVadoss characterizes as a popular misconception of blockchain as a “trust machine,” he still sees the technology as beneficial, with adoption likely to continue exploding in the coming years.
“I have seen tremendous amount of uptake through the InterWork Alliance and — of course — now with the GBBC,” DeVadoss said. “There’s tremendous amount of latent interest and I think it’s going to explode over the next 18 months.”
Watch DeVadoss’ full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the IWA’s efforts to connect the blockchain space, how the blockchain is changing the business logic, and why data stored on the blockchain can't necessarily be trusted.
Bitcoin took another major leap recently toward becoming mainstream after its adoption by El Salvador as legal tender. Meanwhile, central bank digital currencies (CBDC) are gaining momentum in economies around the globe.
Michael B. Greenwald, the first US Treasury attaché to Qatar and Kuwait, and now the director of Tiedemann Advisors, sees El Salvador’s venture as Bitcoin’s great inflection point as the world keeps a close eye on Bitcoin’s first national testbed.
“Countries like El Salvador, they're not going to have huge impacts on what the U.S. does or others do, but it definitely does bring the issue to the table and it raises alarm bells,” Greenwald told Forkast.News in a video interview. “Ultimately, it's going to be the large central banks and what it means for them as they create a new digital asset framework.”
In Asia, China’s e-CNY experiments are expanding to more cities and sectors. The digital yuan may be China’s effort to counteract what Greenwald calls the “weaponization of the dollar”.
“But let's remember there's a divide of the Fed right now,” Greenwald said. “You've got Randy Quarles and Lael Brainard, where one is pushing a stablecoin approach and one is pushing a central bank digital currency.”
Such divisions will likely spur debates for years to come and may ultimately lead to U.S. policy paralysis, Greenwald predicts, “without any real action.”
In the meantime, the digital yuan is already being used widely in what is already essentially a soft rollout across China, from public transport to the country’s futures market, which Greenwald sees as an alarming challenge to the dollar’s future international dominance.
Could there also be a scenario where these rival currencies will one day coexist in the same digital wallet? According to Greenwald, a future digital dollar and the digital yuan will unlikely cozy up to each other, especially not in the near future.
“But I do see a digital dollar in the same wallet as a digital yen or a digital euro or a digital pound,” Greenwald said. “The cross-border issue in a future digital wallet, that’s definitely one of the issues the Fed is looking to tackle in the coming months to years.”
Watch Michael Greenwald’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the internal divisions within the U.S. over a CBDC, the future of Bitcoin as a currency outside El Salvador, how the central banks of the art world are leading the NFT revolution and more.
Cardano’s much-anticipated Alonzo hard fork finally kicked off a new era of smart contracts on the blockchain. Because of that new capability, the proof-of-stake platform can now host decentralized applications (dApps) in the highly competitive decentralized finance (DeFi) space.
But the unregulated Wild West of DeFi recently received some significant noise complaints from the Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, who told the Wall Street Journal that DeFi projects are not exempt from regulations.
“We will see over the next few months to years, some form of a crackdown,” said Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of Cardano developer Input Output Hong Kong, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “[That] means that the next generation of DeFi is up for grabs.”
Hoskinson compares what might be an upcoming surge in DeFi regulations to the initial coin offering (ICO) upheavals of 2017, in which global crackdowns on questionable crypto projects and outright scams shut down waves of companies but also led to the creation of new financing models that gave birth to a new generation of projects like ICP and Solana.
“The winners of the future in the DeFi space are going to have liquidity and interoperability, the ability to move multi-chain,” Hoskinson said. “And finally, cost predictability is such an important thing… It’s so bizarre how we just tolerate massive swings in the price of doing business.”
Cardano did not make it to the first wave of DeFi, which generated superstars such as Uniswap, MakerDAO and many more. Even so, despite calling DeFi’s current state a “bubble,” Hoskinson remains bullish on DeFi in the longer term. Cardano, its founder says, has had its eyes on the so-called “second wave of DeFi” all along.
“We need governance, we need certification, we need insurance, we need regulation on these things, metadata identity… at the same time, you need to decentralize,” Hoskinson said. “The next wave of [DeFi] will do that with a straight face and will be significantly harder to regulate in a traditional sense. The way we constructed Cardano was for that second wave.”
Watch Hoskinson’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about Cardano’s plans for its new smart contracts ecosystem, how a regulatory compliant DeFi community might take shape, the promises and pitfalls of non-fungible tokens (NFT), what he sees as the top five uses for smart contracts, and more.
Why is Axie Infinity so popular, and what is the potential of play-to-earn gaming? Two venture capitalists share insights on Asia’s special place as GameFi’s hub.
Highlights
- Binance’s user agreement: “So in their user agreement, when you sign up, you are not permitted to sue them in any jurisdiction around the world. The only place that you are allowed to sue Binance when you sign up to that agreement is the Hong Kong International Arbitration Center… The other interesting thing is, Binance obviously doesn’t want to be subject to local jurisdictions because they don’t want to be regulated, which is a very smart thing to do if you’re in their shoes.”
- The “ski lift ticket” rule: “In every jurisdiction in the world, there is some iteration of what I call the ski lift ticket rule, which is that when you go skiing and you buy a lift ticket, you sign the lift ticket. And when you sign the lift ticket, you say that even if somebody that works for the mountain pushes you off the chairlift and you fall and get hurt, that you cannot sue the mountain. The reality is, even if you just fall off the chairlift and get hurt, you can sue the mountain. Why? Because in click through, one way, non-negotiated contracts, especially with large financial players, there are certain rights that you simply cannot give up.”
- The international rule of law: “Generally, because these companies are regulated, consumer fights happen locally. They happen in your country pursuant to jurisdiction. They do not happen under international law. Because when you’re regulated as a company, you are required to show up in that country’s court system to have the fight. So this is very unique. For a lot of reasons, but most interestingly to me is because consumer arbitration as a world, as a group, as a community, this is really one of the first times that the question has not been consumers of this jurisdiction or consumers of that jurisdiction, but the consumers of the world and a community.”
- Demarcation of corporate assets: “Bitcoin, Ethereum, those are community assets. I think those should be minimally regulated. The corporations that utilize community assets to make profit from consumers, those are corporations trying to make a profit. And right now, they’re doing a good job of wrapping themselves in the cloak of community assets, but they are not community assets. The internet is a community asset. Amazon is not. The blockchain is a community asset. Binance is not. And so I think that that is the line of demarcation that we need to have.”
Highlights
- SCMP’s foray into NFTs: “ARTIFACT is our attempt to create a new standard for historical NFTs. For us, anything that is as an account of a historical moment, so new stories, or potentially a historic artifact itself, recreated or sometimes created for the very first time as a digital asset. So we do actually think that this is a very different world to the NFT world that has exploded over the course of really the last six months.”
- Preserving history on the blockchain: “One of the areas where we believe NFT can truly benefit an entire industry, actually, not even industry should across industries, is in recording history, recording historical accounts and historical assets, which together we are referring to as ARTIFACT. So our project is to set a standard, and by standard, I mean a specific smart contract with a specific metadata structure that will allow anyone eventually to be able to mint NFTs that are historical and be able to sell and trade them on a very specific market, that we are going to be building a marketplace platform that serves both the issuer world and the collectors world.”
- Blockchain brings context to history: “Any single story never lives by itself. It lives within a timeline of events. It lives within a historical context of the moment. It lives within contemporaneous analysis and insight. And it’s really, really hard to be able to showcase all of that complexity through a single news story, even in a newspaper, not to mention a single article digitally. But blockchain allows us to create that context and have that context be fully transparent, the process of how a story came to be fully transparent.”
- Time travel through a metaverse: “Sandboxes are really, really exciting new canvas. So much of understanding Hong Kong, understanding greater China requires experience. Like the scale of the Forbidden City. You can describe it in words. But until you walk into the Forbidden City for the very first time, it’s really hard for any human being to truly understand how incredibly, not only massive, but like what that moment in time would have been like when the court was filled. And Hong Kong is the same way for people who have not experienced Hong Kong…. Our hope is that The Sandbox will allow us to actually be able to tell that story properly for the first time.”
Highlights
- Facebook’s foray into the metaverse: “Facebook is now saying they are transitioning into becoming a metaverse company, away from being a social media company. But this isn’t anything new. They’ve been undergoing this transition for a long time, of course, with their acquisitions in VR and Oculus. But of course, they’re also trying to launch [Diem], which is their own cryptocurrency. That’s no coincidence. They understand that there will be this economic system that is woven throughout the metaverse.”
- Fortnite’s venture to the open metaverse: “Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games — who also has a duopoly on gaming engines with the Unreal Gaming Engine — he himself has stated that he believes the metaverse needs to be open for all the reasons he’s a sci-fi nerd, as you would expect as well, that we saw with Ready Player One. He fears that when he’s gone, Epic Games could be an evil corporation and it could have power beyond the wildest imagination. And it will try to seize control of the metaverse. So he’s already talking about the open metaverse. He’s just raised over US$1 billion to make Unreal and Epic Games more open.”
- Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are now the economic layer of the metaverse: “But if we kind of focus on NFTs, because I think that’s more generally how people will invest in the metaverse, these effectively are collectibles in different media types and different forms. But ultimately what they do is they restore the idea that you can have something that is digital and scarce, which is ultimately the web broke collecting. It made anything that was digital close to free, or at least people expected it to be free.”
- Why metaverses need interoperability: “Let’s say they get bored with the game and people always eventually get bored with the game. You can’t perpetually keep people locked in and entertained by a game. That could last for a decade. It could last for a year. It could last for a month. But ultimately they’ll get bored. And when they get bored, then what? Ultimately, in this case, all the value and time that they put into it is lost. They can’t transfer that out of that system.”
Highlights Separating money from the government: “A good way to frame this is like, as most people understand, that back in the 1500s, 1600s, this concept of separating church and state. It was a struggle — a fight. Ultimately, I think people realized that it was important that something as crucial and personal to people’s lives as religion is not controlled by the government. Money is even more personal and important to people’s lives. In that regard, trying to separate money and state is really the entire ethos of what cryptocurrency is.” * Is Voorhees putting himself out of a job? “I want to be clear that I won’t be out of a job. I won’t have a W-2 paycheck anymore, but my job, my passion, the project I work on when I wake up remains — and will remain — ShapeShift. But there’s just no pay stub from an employer. It’s just a different model. The vision here really is to build a multi-chain, self-custody crypto platform that the whole world can use. There’s not really any of that today. It’s kind of a niche that doesn’t exist. It’s hard engineering because we’re working with multiple blockchains, whereas most DeFi projects exist only on one, primarily Ethereum.” * How decentralized decisions get made: “There are forums and ideas get discussed, and so in that situation, there’s lots of noise. If there’s an idea that people start taking seriously in which there seems to be support for it, and there’s a formal governance process in which a proposal is ultimately made, which details what’s going to be done, what money is going where and those kind of things. Ultimately, a vote happens. The vote is a smart contract that looks at the FOX balance of each person voting at a certain block height in Ethereum and you can vote yay or nay on a proposal. And ultimately, based on the rules that we’ve set up, a simple majority will win that. And then if that occurs, funds will actually move on chains from the DAO to the address specified in the proposal.” * Who gets the last laugh:* “When we were at that conference, Money 20/20 in Vegas in 2012, yeah, we were right next to this huge PayPal booth. I remember the sneers and snickers of the people manning that booth. A couple of them had maybe heard of Bitcoin and they thought it was a joke. We’re just sitting in there. No one was coming up to talk to us. There was no one at that conference interested in Bitcoin or in BitInstant. We just stood there looking silly while all the professional money people of the world gathered and made their deals. And it’s just amazing to see that none of those companies are relevant in the future of decentralized finance. All of them will have to adapt to crypto or they will go the way of Polaroid. And I think a lot of the banks are going to get really caught off guard by this. The fintech companies move a little faster and I think a lot of them will adapt. PayPal accepts Bitcoin now and cryptocurrency, but the banks are too entrenched.”
Highlights
- Polygon’s early struggles: “We all know that Ethereum is very decentralized, secure but has scalability issues. So what Polygon started to do is that we wanted to provide this entire Ethereum development capability on this layer-2, basically. So that’s where we started. And we also were very much focused on building something that gets used and all that. There were a lot of nuances in between. Like it took us a lot of time. We were not from Silicon Valley. We did not have fancy big [venture capitalists] supporting us.”
- High gas fees directed users to Polygon: “Ethereum was seeing the second or third wave of these high gas prices. The first time it happened and then it dipped, people were like, “Okay, it was a one-time phenomenon.” But then it happened the second time, the third time, and people realized something needs to be done. By that time, because of this bottom-up approach, we were fully production-ready. And if you ask me what is the reason for Polygon’s success, because we are production-ready.”
- The case for zero-knowledge technology: “As an enterprise, you really need to derive some value out of these blockchain solutions. It has to be on a public blockchain. Now, you need privacy. You need scalability. Yes, we all are building on it. So I feel in 18 to 24 months, there will be fewer enterprises which will have actual value generating use cases on these blockchains. And most of them then would probably be funded by or kind of being run on some sort of zero-knowledge technology. That’s why we at Polygon also, we have invested so much of our time, energy and resources in the last six months in the zero-knowledge space, and then now we are in a stage where in two to three months you will see Polygon will emerge as the powerhouse of zero-knowledge in the whole industry.”
- India’s crypto brain drain: “Soon, the Indian government has to realize that the brain drain in the blockchain space is so big because you are not building for your local users … I would never want to live out of India. I want to go back to India, work from there to the ecosystem there. But then due to this uncertainty, and I’m not saying there’s anything positive or negative, this uncertainty, nobody knows.”
- India’s crypto ban rumors: “I think most of that is media sensationalism, actually. I’m from India and generally, I would say 95% of any team that is building out of India either know me or I know them and I know what they are doing to reach out to me for the investments and all that. And I’ve not found even a single team which is trying to build some technology-related solution being haggled by the government. Nobody has been touched upon by the government. The government is only trying to curb or kind of trying to figure out how to stop this, speculation or kind of gambling, which nobody can deny that a lot of retail loses their money in this.”
One of Wall Street’s least risky businesses, securities lending, is now also being used by crypto lending companies to provide high yields for hodlers — or long-term crypto holders. But what are the risks to crypto holders?
“If you ask any Wall Street veteran: ‘What is the safest business on Wall Street?’ They’re not going to tell you banking, they’re not going to tell you trading, they’re going to tell you sec lending,” Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky told Forkast.News in a video interview. “That is also the safest business in crypto.”
Securities lending is the loaning of assets such as shares to firms and institutions. Experts agree that the practice is less risky than before, but it’s not entirely risk-free in the traditional finance world.
For crypto finance companies like Celsius Network, a crypto lending platform, the loaned assets are cryptocurrencies. Celsius Network’s securities lending strategy has allowed the platform to provide high-yielding interest rates for investors that choose to deposit their assets into Celsius. It currently offers 6.2% for Bitcoin and 8.88% for stablecoins, at press time.
“When an institutional exchange borrows Bitcoin from us, instead of sec lending, they do digital asset lending and they pay us interest,” Mashinsky said. “No one on Wall Street has ever paid this money, the sec lending income, to their customers — that’s the best-kept secret.”
With Bitcoin’s boom, more services have popped up around the globe to present investors with a variety of options for their chosen interest-bearing crypto accounts.
But like many other aspects of the crypto industry, the new kinds of services have drawn the attention of regulators.
Recently, crypto lending platform BlockFi which also operates trading services and interest-bearing accounts, has the New Jersey Bureau of Securities breathing down its neck, with local authorities claiming BlockFi’s Interest Accounts offers unregistered securities to its users. Texas and Alabama have made similar moves against BlockFi.
According to Mashinsky, the sales aspect could be a sensitive zone for regulators. Celsius users must purchase cryptocurrencies outside of the network, putting Celsius out of regulatory cross hairs — at least for now.
“Even though some may look at Celsius and BlockFi as competitors, they’re really not competing with us on yield,” Mashinski said. “Our job is just to earn that yield for you.”
But with the growth of the company, which Mashinsky says added US$300 million net assets in the same week Bitcoin recently dipped below the key US$30,000 mark, the company has opted to move its headquarters and main operations out of the United Kingdom to the United States, citing increasing regulatory uncertainty in the U.K. and the better business environment across the Atlantic.
“For some of the things we do, we may benefit from being based in the United States,” Mashinsky said. “If we choose to go public or if we choose to do some other financial activities, there’s a big disconnect in valuation.”
Watch Mashinksy’s interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to find out the safety and risks of crypto securities lending, Celsius’ plans for public listing, why he believes Bitcoin will reach US$160,000 this year, and more.
Valkyrie’s application to open a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) has been delayed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But Valkyrie’s chief executive is not surprised. She says a cautious approach is par for the course when it comes to approving any innovative financial product.
“Actually, when we first applied for a Bitcoin ETF back in January, right after VanEck, we had a timeline of about two to three years that we thought the application would be,” Valkyrie CEO Leah Wald told Forkast.News in a video interview. “We moved our timeline up when it seemed as if there was a lot more interest.”
A Bitcoin ETF is a financial instrument that reflects Bitcoin’s price and is traded on traditional exchanges, giving investors with minimal crypto knowledge exposure to the asset without purchasing it directly.
As Bitcoin ETF applications pile up for the SEC’s review — with Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest also recently adding to their number — some say the products should have been approved long ago. One of those voices is that of SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who said that if the SEC’s standards for other products had been applied equally to Bitcoin ETFs, “one or more of them” would already have been approved.
Wald, however, recalled precedents that certain products take longer to obtain SEC approval.
“Even gold took a while,” she said. “Especially esoteric securities that are still being figured out from the rest of the agencies.”
Wald said excessive market volatility could be a concern for the SEC. Not the direct volatility relating to the prices and public sentiment trailing the crypto industry, but the ability of the industry’s infrastructure to handle that volatility.
“I think that the SEC has been pretty clear from the onset of all the Bitcoin ETF applications, even back in 2017, about concerns around custody,” Wald said. “Now, we finally do have true institutional-grade custodians, but there are still stress tests happening in the market.”
Watch Wald’s interview with
Forkast.News
Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the benefits of a Bitcoin ETF compared to over-the-counter trusts and mutual funds, the increasingly crowded field of Bitcoin ETF applicants, Wald’s positive outlook on Bitcoin and its technology, and more.
As Huobi winds down in China, Binance gets put in the regulatory doghouse in the U.K., and Bybit is slapped with enforcement action by, Canadian authorities — cryptocurrency exchanges around the world are feeling the heat of intensifying government scrutiny and crackdowns.
Alexander Höptner, who became CEO of 100x Group — the holding group for crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX’s owner HDR Global Trading Limited — after BitMEX co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed were charged with violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, says that the reason behind the regulatory action is because crypto derivatives are “the next big thing.”
“Most of the regulators are currently working on regulatory regimes on spot trading, brokerage and custody,” Höptner told Forkast.News in a video interview. “The next thing that's coming now is defining and designing a regulatory regime for derivatives.”
Höptner hails from a traditional finance (TradFi) background, having led Germany’s second largest stock exchange Börse Stuttgart to launch one of the European Union’s first regulated digital assets exchange. He also held executive committee roles with the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Deutsche Börse AG.
Unlike Höptner, who has embraced the increasingly digitizing finance industry, other prominent players in the traditional finance space are more skeptical of crypto. “Big Short” investor Michael Burry recently raised hackles by calling the crypto market an overleveraged “bubble.”
But to Höptner, such concerns are overblown.
“When you look at [our] leveraged products, yes, we have 100x, but the majority of the leverage clients are using single-digit,” Höptner said. “When you look at the classical financial markets, yes, the leverage is lower, but the usage of that one is much higher.”
In a recent JPMorgan survey, 49% of investors from across 1,500 institutions shared legendary investor Warren Buffet’s sentiment on Bitcoin, calling it “rat poison” or a temporary fad. The other 51%? They believe that Bitcoin will “become an important asset” and is “here to stay.”
For Bitcoin and crypto to reach new heights and continue to achieve further institutional and professional adoption, some exchanges such as FTX have adopted licensing strategies. But according to Höptner, exchanges will need to pick and choose primary locations to comply with local regulations before global expansion.
“You cannot be in every country in the world, fully regulated. It’s impossible,” Höptner said. “First thing’s first — start with the first fully licensed jurisdictions and then we tackle the next one, and probably the first one is not the U.S.”
Watch Höptner’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about which countries are wooing derivatives exchanges, why crypto is not so different from the traditional finance world, and how to assess the current digital assets market from a long-term perspective.
Back in early May, a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline forced the company to pay the hackers US$5 million in cryptocurrencies. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the FBI had successfully recovered US$2.3 million of the ransom in Bitcoin.
Those who really understood Bitcoin — and blockchain technology’s digital trail of crumbs that led to the crypto’s recovery — were gobsmacked. What could those cybercriminals possibly have been thinking?
Pioneering blockchain lawyer Marta Belcher — general counsel at Protocol Labs and special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group — , says many people still do not realize that Bitcoin is not anonymous — it is pseudonymous.
“You're having a public key recorded permanently on a ledger forever. And anyone can see that,” Belcher explained, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “The authorities can see that. In some ways, it's a shortcut for law enforcement.”
Instead of something very traceable by the government, Belcher says having a truly decentralized device for finance is essential to privacy and civil liberties.
“I like to think about this photo that I saw from the Hong Kong protests. There are these photos where there are these long lines at the subway stations because the protesters wanted to buy their train tickets using cash because they didn't want their electronic purchases to place them at the scene of the protest,” Belcher said. “That really underscores that a cashless society is a surveillance society and the importance of certain technologies that can enable anonymous transactions.”
Belcher told Forkast.News that this is how anonymity can enhance civil liberties, and also why privacy coins — fully private and anonymous — matter.
Nevertheless, the U.S. government and governments around the world are applying similar levels of surveillance to cryptocurrencies as they do to the traditional financial system. The U.S. Department of Justice has named privacy coins “anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies” and insists that they are potentially criminal — this fends off the possibility of people making anonymous transactions through cryptocurrencies.
Belcher views the central bank digital currencymovement in the same way — as a type of government surveillance that could potentially threaten civil liberties. Hypothetically, when CBDCs are given to people as their only financial tool, every action can be traced by the government.
“People really need to understand that financial transactions are a window deep into someone's life, deep into their politics, deep into what they're doing, their location. And that these types of transactions are incredibly sensitive,” Belcher said. “I'm very concerned about the idea of all money being digitally administered by a government.”.
In India, the legal status of crypto and cryptocurrency trading remains a hot and murky topic.
India’s divisions, differences in opinion and all-out tug-of-war over the legality of crypto have been on full display in recent years. First there was a central bank ban on banks doing business with crypto firms. Then the Indian Supreme Court overturned that banking ban. Earlier this year, India’s Parliament upped the ante by drafting a bill that would ban crypto outright.
That crypto ban bill hasn’t gone anywhere — yet. But with that threat in the shadows, what are India’s crypto holders and companies to do?
As India’s crypto community awaits official clarification, many companies are now taking matters into their own hands through a voluntary and self-imposed code of conduct that would make them compliant with reasonable regulations, said Nishcal Shetty, founder of WazirX, in an interview with Forkast.News.
WazirX, which launched just three weeks before the Reserve Bank of India’s issued its ban on crypto banking in 2018 and has since grown into one of the nation's biggest crypto exchanges, recently joined a new collaboration between India's Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council and India's Internet and Mobile Association to develop guidelines for self-regulation among India’s crypto exchanges.
“The idea as an industry was, should we really just wait till the law comes in and just have anyone operate according to their own wishes? Or can we sort of try to build a template and sort of show the government that even on our own, we're still responsible and it's not the Wild West out here,” Shetty said. “I think with that objective, we decided we should all come together, exchanges in the country and adhere to some set of guidelines which we will all follow.”
An entrepreneur at heart, Shetty took a hard look at India’s lagging position in the blockchain and cryptocurrency global ecosystem and realized that creating access was the first step to foster technological innovation and growth in the nation of 1.4 billion. Throughout his journey in the space, Shetty has discovered that among the oscillating government positions, that there are nuances in even hardline stances and a willingness by government officials to learn and understand the disruptive new technology. Shetty also believes the crypto industry can help the hundreds of millions of citizens who do not have access to mainstream financial services, such as having a bank savings account.
“If you look at the whole equity space in India, we have probably 70 million people into it, that's about 4% and that's an industry that has existed for many, many years,” Shetty said. “Now, here you have an industry which sort of in India — I think it's been only four or five years since crypto really became a popular term — if you look at it in isolation, yes, it seems like just 1%. But if you think about it, it's already 25% of the whole equity space in a very short period of time. So that growth trajectory is something which is very, very visible.”
In the blockchain world, all eyes are on Ethereum and the roll-out of ETH 2.0 — which is expected to solve Ethereum’s scalability issues. But others, like Alan Chiu are trying to do the same sooner in a layer 2 race.
Chiu, the founder and CEO of Enya.ai, says scalability in Ethereum is already making headway while the world waits for the next level Ethereum — a project already infamous for its many delays.
“Ethereum has a rather limited capacity for computation and this has been a known problem for several years,” Chiu told Forkast.News in a video interview.
“What happened more recently is, Vitalik and many other Ethereum researchers have come up with an alternative solution rather than trying to do everything in ETH 2.0, scaling both computation and data.”
An approach to scaling is called rollups, which moves transactions off the main Ethereum chain before recording on the main chain. The off-chain transactions can also be executed in layer 2 chains before moving back to layer 1 to store proofs. The aim is to move transactions off-chain for faster throughput of transactions, and potentially reduce transaction fees.
Chiu expressed excitement for the up-and-coming layer 2 developments as examples such as Polygon have been gaining traction while even showing immunity to the recent crypto crash. Enya.ai and OMG Network have also launched the public testnet of OMGX — a layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution which allows off-chain computations.
“By implementing computations on layer 2, moving them off the main chain, we are freeing up the precious blocks on the main chain so that in aggregate we can — as an ecosystem — handle a lot more transactions,” Chiu said. According to Chiu, the layer 2 solutions like rollups will provide lower transaction fees and increase capacity for more transactions without having to wait for ETH 2.0.
While the industry eagerly waits for the final form of ETH 2.0 for better scaling and less network congestion leading to slow and expensive user experience, various layer 2 projects are looking to solve Ethereum’s network clogs.
The Ethereum development team has also scheduled network upgrade EIP-1559 in July, as part of the London hard fork, which looks to further improve the issues related to high transaction fees by introducing and burning a base transaction fee to discourage miners from manipulating gas.
“So, over the next several months, there'll be several layer 2 solutions that will be moving into mainnet and it will be an exciting time,” Chiu said. “We'll see how that changes to gas fees that people have to pay to use these DeFi projects.”
Watch Alan Chiu’s full interview with Forkast.News to learn more about Ethereum scalability, the scalability trilemma, ESG in blockchain, privacy, and more.
After settling a 22-month investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office, Tether growth has exploded – dispelling trust concerns says Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino.
What really happened on crypto’s so-called “Black Wednesday” earlier this month — and what can we learn from it?
On May 19, a day when tweets and headlines criticized Bitcoin’s environmental impact, the crypto market crashed. Bitcoin prices tumbled from euphoric highs of over US$55,000 to under US$40,000 that day, and in the days since continued to plummet, to bottom out at around US$30,800, according to CoinMarketCap data.
But despite that volatility, crypto’s underlying fundamentals and the factors that affect long-term prices have not changed, according to FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
“I don’t think there is anything really fundamental that changed from [May 19] to today,” Bankman-Fried said in an interview with Forkast.News. “I don’t think it’s really caused by economic fundamentals. I think it was 10% of that and 90% was just liquidations.”
As Bankman-Fried suggests, US$7.56 billion worth of Bitcoin long positions were liquidated on the fateful day with FTX contributing US$110 million, according to bybt data.
While crypto still remains a disruptive technology that can revolutionize the finance industry, trading behavior in the blockchain world and the traditional equities has become analogous as a result of prominent figures that now have a platform to — directly or indirectly — impact markets.
“It’s not like both crypto and stocks have their own charismatic guy who when they tweet, the thing goes up — it’s the same guy. Elon Musk in both cases,” Bankman-Fried said.
In the equity market, an asset that has its values driven by social media sentiment rather than company performance is coined “meme stocks”, as popularized by the now-famous GameStop phenomenon.
“All of a sudden for the first time, you had 15 million day traders get together and talk to each other… all of a sudden they each have a thousand dollars to trade. Now they have US$15 billion between them,” Bankman-Fried said.
As the event sparked questions on collusion in meme trading events among retail investors, Bankman-Fried argues that the definition of collusion was never all that clear.
“For instance, it’s totally fine for a bunch of people to get together and have a factual debate about a bunch of companies and just say a lot of true statements with the goal of figuring out the truth,” Bankman-Fried said. “It’s not exactly collusion, that wasn’t the goal of it, but it is an activity that correlates their behavior.”
While social media has been an important contributor to the price fluctuations of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the past, Musk’s ability to send the price of Dogecoin to the moon was a spectacle unto itself.
The Digital Dollar Project — a private sector initiative by the Digital Dollar Foundation and Accenture — recently became a late entrant to the central bank digital currency (CBDC) testing grounds, announcing at least five pilots within the next year.
But the United States Federal Reserve has yet to commit to the launch of a digital dollar, widening the gap between the US and other central banks — including China — in CBDC developments.
Beijing, having already launched numerous pilot projects in various forms for its CBDC, now officially known as the e-CNY, has a seven-year lead against the US in the global CBDC race.
“I would push aside the race analogy, but I would say there’s a contest,” former Commodities Futures Trading Commission chair and founder of the Digital Dollar Foundation, J. Christopher Giancarlo, told Forkast.News in a video interview. “The winner of the contest is the nation that successfully incorporates into a digital currency their societal values.”
Fed chair Jerome Powell also brushes aside the race analogy, voicing the importance of getting a digital dollar “right” rather than “first.” But U.S. dollar dominance is dwindling.
A recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report found that global reserves of the U.S. dollar sunk to a 25-year low of 59%, numbers not seen since 1995. But Giancarlo says that a digital dollar carrying the values of a democratic society could strengthen the dollar’s position as world reserve currency.
“We may see a world in which you’ve got a digital dollar, hopefully — and if we get it right carrying those [democratic] values — competing against currencies of non-democracies that carry different values with them, values of state, surveillance of government, control of financial markets [and] of social credit systems,” Giancarlo said. “The dollar could reemerge once again as — well, it is today, the reserve currency — but even more so because of those democratic values built-in compared to the alternatives.”
Accenture’s senior managing director David Treat discussed some aspects of how the Digital Dollar Project will explore some of these democratic values including benefits distribution. This being a controversial topic in the current U.S. financial structure, highlighted by a perceived lag in issuance of stimulus checks during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Part of what we’re going to explore [are] the various options against a backdrop of not having a national ID system, which is also part of our core societal values,” Treat said. “That ability to actually pair a stablecoin that can embed that business logic into it and to be able to guide what is spent and what is not spent on, paired with a central bank digital currency, we see as a powerful combination and one that's certainly worth exploring.”
As for the current state of the Digital Dollar Project and its five pilots in the coming year, Treat revealed the project is currently selecting appropriate players in the industry to lead the initiatives.
“We’re in the midst of picking the captains for each one of the pilots,” Treat said. “Very intentionally, when you think about the financial inclusion, the unbanked and underbanked, there may be some maybe some really, really important small local players that we announce.”
During the Indian Parliament’s Budget Session two months ago, all eyes were on a proposed bill to ban cryptocurrency trading in the world’s second-most populous country. The well-publicized bill sparked a large-scale campaign within the local industry encouraging the government to establish proper regulatory framework rather than an outright ban. Ultimately, the bill did not pass the parliament, leaving the state of India’s crypto industry uncertain.
In an exclusive interview with Forkast.News, Neeraj Khandelwal,co-founder of Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX, explained that local investors took this as a sign the bill may never pass, and actually laid the groundwork for further – much welcomed – regulation. As a result, the Indian retail and institutional market has been booming in the month since.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are shaking up traditional finance and shifting the tectonic plates of investing, but the technology underlying digital assets — blockchain — may eventually have a bigger impact on the world.
Today, most applications on public chains such as Ethereum are centered around the economic layers of cryptocurrencies, such as decentralized finance (DeFi). But for a country like China, where public chain applications may not always be aligned with local regulations, permissioned chains are presenting corporations an alternative as well as greater protection from the volatility of cryptocurrency prices.
“If we ran an application on a public chain, the revenue must be in cryptocurrency. Then, the cost is in cryptocurrency, the revenue is in cryptocurrency — that makes no sense,” Yifan He, the CEO of Red Date Technology — the company behind state-backed Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) in China — told Forkast.News in a video interview. “Next year, the cost could be more than your revenue.”
As corporations plow billions in Bitcoin, a new business model involving DeFi is attracting more investors, says Alessio Quaglini of Hex Trust.
Thailand’s crypto adoption is often overlooked, but one of its largest commercial banks has been leveraging permissioned blockchain Corda of R3 to digitize trade finance in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“On the blockchain side and the crypto side, I believe they're a leading player globally. They don't probably get as much recognition for all the work that's happening in the ecosystem,” said Amit Ghosh, head of APAC for R3, the blockchain software firm, in an interview with Forkast.News. “But from our experience, they are one of the leading countries — globally, in fact.”
Justin Chow of Cumberland DRW explains why Asia has lagged behind the US in institutional interest in Bitcoin and other crypto—and why that will likely change soon.
“The number of institutional investors that have gone public with their investments in crypto is actually only a fraction of the conversations we're still having,” said Justin Chow, global head of business development and relationship management at Cumberland DRW, in a video interview with Forkast.News.
As Ripple and SEC intensify their legal warfare, attorney John Deaton and his clients want in. Will XRP investors get their day in court?
The Hong Kong government’s proposed legislation to ban crypto trading for retail investors and require virtual asset service platforms (VASPs) to obtain licenses to operate has caused great concern among the territory’s crypto community. Fears are that Hong Kong might cede its position as a regional fintech hub to neighbors such as Singapore, or fall behind other centers in the U.K. or U.S., by unduly stopping retail investors from trading while allowing the wealthy to continue.
HashKey Group COO Angelina Kwan, a former regulator who helped write the laws that crypto firms are subjected to now, explains all.
The new generation of investors are not like those who came before them. Everything is going digital — even valuables like one-of-a-kind art. They won’t be shouting buy orders from the mosh pit of a trading floor; more likely, their investing will happen in a home office or on the living room couch.
Justin Sun, 30, is part of this new generation. After narrowly missing out on buying digital artist Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” non-fungible-token (NFT) collage in a recent US$69 million Christie’s auction, the CEO of TRON and BitTorrent got a consolation prize: a different Beeple NFT artwork — “Ocean Front” — for US$6 million.
Early crypto investor and promoter Roger Ver tells Forkast.News how faster transactions and lower fees are fueling Bitcoin Cash adoption over Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Cash is currently the 13th most popular cryptocurrency in the world, with a US$9.6 billion market capitalization that is just a fraction of Bitcoin’s US$1 trillion. But the transaction volume on the Bitcoin Cash network is outpacing transactions on the Bitcoin network at a 10:1 ratio, according to blockchain analytics engine Blockchair.
From JPM Coin to payments on Ethereum in outer space, JPMorgan’s Onyx division is pushing out the traditional banking world’s blockchain frontiers
For over five years, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has been advancing blockchain technology in the banking sector. Its JPM Coin — a wholesale payment stablecoin that is pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar — is now transacting billions of dollars every day. JPMorgan’s open information sharing network Liink — formerly known as Interbank Information Network — now has over 400 banks. Just last October, after JPMorgan sold Quorum, its blockchain protocol to the Brooklyn-based blockchain software firm ConsenSys, the banking giant established Onyx, its new blockchain unit.
The GameStop saga shows the changing power dynamics between big money and small investors. Here’s why one former banker thinks ‘DeFi is going to absorb traditional finance’ in the next 10 years.
Perianne Boring, president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, discusses the controversial ‘crypto wallet rule’ and how the industry pulled together to force FinCEN to consider more public comments.
The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s (FinCEN) proposed “crypto wallet rule,” which had been championed by former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, is currently on hold so the agency can gather more public comments. But the blockchain, crypto and digital asset industry’s sentiments are already clear.
CasperLabs, a new layer-1 smart contract network that recently joined China’s nationwide blockchain network, announced today that its CSPR token will be open for sale from March 23 to 26 to “accredited investors.”
Casper network is an enterprise-focused layer-1 proof-of-stake blockchain protocol aiming to solve the issues of scalability, security and decentralization that have plagued other smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum. Although Ethereum has launched Ethereum 2.0 in hopes of solving some of these problems, users still complain about Ethereum’s high transaction fees — also known as “gas fees.” Ethereum’s gas fee issues could worsen with the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), most of which continue to rely on Ethereum.
In ancient China, small golden or silver ingots were used as currency. Its weight in taels — a weight measurement unit in regions of East and Southeast Asia — determined its value. Now, bitcoin — which has broken its all-time high record yet again, now exceeding US$56,500 in price and US$1 trillion in market value — is emerging as modern-day “gold 2.0” — especially in Singapore.
Eugene Ng of Gemini, the Winklevoss-backed exchange that recently expanded into Singapore, explains why the Lion City is emerging as the crypto capital of Asia.
There is a transition underway from an “internet of information” to an “internet of value” with blockchain as its foundation, Blockchain Research Institute Executive Chairman Don Tapscott said in an interview with Forkast.News. According to the blockchain think tank’s new report — which outlines recommendations for the Biden administrations on how to approach, regulate and lead blockchain technology — any failure by the U.S. government to embrace and sensibly regulate crypto would sap the nation’s economic strengths and erode its long-term competitive advantages in tech and business innovation.
Buried under headlines of Covid-19, U.S.-China trade war and controversial elections, 2020 also saw journalism under attack around the world. Under threat of misinformation, manipulation and rising distrust in the media, could blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) help bolster legitimate journalism?
Although Microsoft Azure has been gradually closing the gap, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has topped the world’s cloud infrastructure services in market share again in Q4 of 2020 — a peek into the future potential of how CasperLabs can help “morph” China’s Blockchain Service Network into the AWS of the blockchain industry in the Web 3.0 era.
“People watch Netflix all the time,” said CasperLabs CEO Mrinal Manohar in a video interview with Forkast.News. “Almost the entire infrastructure is on AWS [and] you’re using AWS even if you don’t know about it.”
Is crypto use totally anonymous? Think again. The Cubits/Dooga case shows how easy it is to trace crypto transactions compared to fiat.
Comparing nations like Ethiopia to “China in the 80s,” IOHK founder Charles Hoskinson explains Cardano’s Africa strategy and why Fortune 500 companies looking to do more global business in developing countries need cryptocurrencies.
Binance CEO CZ says bitcoin’s advantages over fiat have become, while sharing his thoughts on the future of DeFi and Binance in an interview with Forkast.News.
The U.S. government needs to provide more clarity and guideposts for crypto regulations — and better cross-agency coordination is needed, said U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner Hester Peirce in an exclusive interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau.
“The world we live in today is that the video, the pictures, deep fakes, people in general now understand that technology can make them see things that never happened,” Mance Harmon, CEO and co-founder of DLT developer Hedera Hashgraph, tells Forkast.News.
Here are the hottest blockchain news and trends that dominated Forkast.News headlines over the past 12 months. Let the countdown to 2021 begin!
Other top blockchain and cryptocurrency news: Fine art goes digital with NFTs. Hong Kong in talks to pilot test China’s DCEP digital yuan.
DeFi and cryptocurrency exchanges should take heed of examples such as BitMEX and improve KYC standards, say experts.
blockchainDefiDecentralizedartificial intelligenceKYCAMLCryptoTokensDigital assetes
Ethereum 2.0 has transformed to proof of stake, but sharding, smart contracts and other features will have to wait for Eth2's future phases.
Other top blockchain and cryptocurrency news: S&P Dow Jones to launch crypto index. Walmart leads $700 million investment in Indian payment platform.
Top blockchain and cryptocurrency news: Bank of International Settlements considers stablecoins. China jails PlusToken scam’s ringleaders.
The multibillion dollar sector could go hand in hand with blockchain technology's immutability and transparency says SpaceChain's Jeff Garzik.
As bitcoin break new records, is the party almost over? Trent Barnes of Zerocap says it’s not too late as respected market institutions rather than scammy ICOs are fueling bitcoin’s rise this time.
Top blockchain and cryptocurrency news: Is another CFTC crackdown coming soon? China releases OKEx founder, exchange to resume services.
Reports of India’s potential crypto ban have continuallysurfaced even after the Supreme Court’s reversal of the RBI banking ban in March, and these reports can periodically resurface in upcoming parliamentary sessions.
Other top blockchain and cryptocurrency news: China taps Lakala for DCEP digital yuan’s payment system. Fintech VC in Hong Kong and Indonesia.
Blockchain technology is helping grow carbon credit trading while lowering investment costs so more young people can get involved, says Stefan Rust of Sonic Capital, in a special interview.
“Since we actually finalized our SPAC, did the business combination, we've had three of the world's largest crypto companies approach us and ask how we did it and what sort of process they would have to go through to get those governance standards in place to become a listed company,” Byworth said in an interview with Forkast.News.
Other top blockchain and cryptocurrency news: Will TRUMP crypto losers get second chance? Hong Kong requires cryptocurrency exchanges to be regulated.
"I'm very convinced that 2021 will be the year where you will see more and more people having CBDCs in their wallets or within their businesses," said Charles d'Haussy, director of strategic initiatives at ConsenSys in an interview with Forkast.News.
Listen to the full interview with d'Haussy and Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau as they discuss use cases for CBDCs in China, the value of programmable money, the growing demand for DeFi and more.
Other top blockchain and cryptocurrency news: Bitcoin paper’s 12th anniversary. New Huawei phone has a DCEP wallet. FDA on blockchain and food safety.
Editor's note: Forkast misstated 'food security' with 'food safety' in the FDA segment starting at 12:00. The FDA has recently launched a blueprint for food safety that includes blockchain.
Other top news: OKEx freezes exchange services amid police investigation. Fintech investment in India
Other top news: China accelerates digital currency testing with 50,000 e-RMB red packets; Hong Kong as DCEP’s sandbox. VC in India.
The need for regulatory balance in Europe is necessary to maintain business innovation and keep investment flowing, says Alex Tapscott, co-founder of Toronto-based Blockchain Research Institute.
Listen to the full interview with Tapscott and Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau as they explore how regulations could impact blockchain innovation in Europe as well as the development of DeFi and the challenges as well as opportunities it creates business.
Other top news: Filecoin’s mainnet set to launch. Chinese banks help DCEP digital currency get market-ready. NetEase to preserve email forevermore.
Scammers are going to scam, but there's a real opportunity in DeFi for the financial world at large, says Two Prime CEO Marc Fleury.
Listen to the full interview with Fleury and Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau as they discuss DeFi's challenges and opportunities, yields for investors and more.
Other top news: Ant Group debuts blockchain platform for cross-border trade. China makes Beijing, Hunan and Anhui into special free trade zones.
Chinese authorities may be looking to build their own DeFi network, smart contracts, cryptos and all. The catch? It is tightly controlled.
Find out more about the changing world of DeFi and how China aims to expand its role in the field by watching the full video interview with Finxflo CEO James Gillingham and Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau.
More top news: China’s nationwide blockchain service network launches ‘public permissioned’ chain. Fintech investments in Singapore.
Konstantin Richter, CEO of Blockdaemon explains how blockchain adoption will succeed if more institutions are brought in the fold.
More top news: OKLink offers free cryptocurrency tracker. Trade fair in China introduces blockchain to 20,000 companies.
Using smart contracts to manage companies' interoperations in space could be the future of governance in space, according to Brian Israel, lecturer at UC Berkeley Law.
Decentralized finance may have toppled ICOs in terms of popularity within the crypto industry, but gas issues are a challenge: Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan
In other news: public gets sneak peek at China’s DCEP in flash testing. US-China trade war threatens SMIC and bitcoin mining
Permissionless blockchain protocol Conflux "isn't concerned" about bans on crypto in China, works with government to experiment with DeFi.
Listen to Conflux global managing director Eden Dhaliwal as he shares the details on Conflux's new Open DeFi consortium.
Proof of Work blockchains like ETC have been attacked by hackers numerous times, but ETC Labs CEO Terry Culver says the fight's not over.
Also: Japan’s deputy PM Taro Aso urges greater blockchain cooperation. Inner Mongolia raises bitcoin mining costs. Fintech investments in S. Korea.
JPMorgan's deal with ConsenSys ushers the birth of the "ConsenSys Quorum" brand that offers interoperability with ConsenSys and Ethereum.
Listen to ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin explain to Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau how ConsenSys’ acquisition of JPMorgan’s Quorum will affect the blockchain ecosystem, his expectations of Ethereum 2.0 and the rise of DeFi.
Other top news: $50 billion in cryptocurrency leaves China. Severe flooding in Sichuan destroys bitcoin mining farms.
Other top news: Coinbase offers crypto loans with bitcoin as collateral. Huobi launches Global DeFi Alliance. Investment in crypto custody in Hong Kong.
Teen accused of Twitter hack heads to court. Huobi launches DeFi lab. VC in Singapore and Indonesia.
Other top news: China imposes standards for blockchain companies. Huobi launches digital assets custody business. Blockchain VC in the Middle East.
Diginex CEO Richard Byworth explains how Covid has helped bolster institutional investors' interest in cryptos as a hedge against inflation.
Other top news: China’s blockchain network expands global reach. US lets major banks act as crypto custodians. Investments in India and Singapore.
Other top news: InterContinental uses blockchain to prove hotel cleanliness. Beijing plans blockchain for city services. VC in India and Israel.
Hackers are keeping up to date with new technologies to break through security systems, but blockchain could help protect social media.
China's development of blockchain technology may result in it 'leapfrogging' over other countries' information systems to create a "global blockchain with Chinese characteristics," according to Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger.
Other top stories: Alibaba to help Cosco deploy blockchain technology for Chinese shipping industry. Fintech investment in Saudi Arabia.
The pandemic could either accelerate or decelerate adoption of cryptos, as well as influence the impoverished, said WEF's Sheila Warren
The U.S. is known for being the "gold standard" of financial regulations around the world, but could risk falling behind when it comes to cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain can help out the budding private space industry settle the moon, according to space expert Chris Hadfield.
Other top news: US still dominates blockchain patents globally. First court case in China litigated with blockchain. VC in Indonesia and Singapore.
Lack of regulation and liquidity in India's digital assets sector are "major bottlenecks" preventing decentralized finance (DeFi) from penetrating into the domestic market, according to Siddharth Verma, co-founder of Nuo Network.
Indian regulators should work with digital assets businesses to see the good side of cryptocurrencies, say experts.
Other top news: Chainlink embraced by China’s blockchain network. Could Justin Sun’s infamy outshine TRON 4.0? Fintech in Thailand and Singapore.
Ethical and legal concerns should be baked into AI development, according to expert David Toman, Kellogg College at the University of Oxford.
Other top news: China’s new blockchain cross-border payment platform for Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong. 5G for all in Shenzhen. Fintech VC in India.
Other top news: Chinese high schoolers are cram-studying up on bitcoin mining. Blockchain-powered lotteries. Startups in India, Singapore and UAE.
Also this week: Brave browser brouhaha. China issues new warning against crypto. Startups in Japan and Malaysia.
The Digital Dollar Project could offer the U.S. government a path forward for a central bank digital currency.
More top news: China exploring blockchain to cure gaming addiction. LG joins Hedera Hashgraph. Startups in Japan, Singapore and the Philippines.
Money is part of a nation's financial infrastructure, and the dollar needs a digital upgrade for this changing world, says Christopher Giancarlo of the Digital Dollar Foundation, in an exclusive interview with Forkast.News.
The coronavirus pandemic and China's rapid development on blockchain and digital currency frontiers has been a wake-up call for members of the U.S. Congress, Chamber of Digital Commerce founder Perianne Boring explains.
Central bank digital currencies like China's electronic renminbi could shift control away from U.S. dollar from financial institutions like SWIFT, says Adam Traidman, CEO at BRD.
More top news: China pours billions into blockchain and other infrastructure. Ant Financial’s new smart contracts. VC in Singapore and India.
Central bank digital currencies will become increasingly common in the coming years, but should there be more discussions about protecting users' privacy?
Also: Fintech-friendly policies for the Hong Kong-Shenzhen area. China makes blockchain jobs more respectable. VC in Singapore and South Korea.
China's digital renminbi could be the first stepping stone toward challenging the U.S. dollar's hegemony, but experts doubt it will be soon.
This week: TRON gets Covid bailout. NEAR Protocol: Free Telegram Open Network. China to track tech labor talent in new database. Another endorsement for Ripple.
As China takes steps to release its new digital currency and U.S. lawmakers consider using a digital dollar during the coronavirus crisis, billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper said both will fail.
Other top news: IBM’s Covid medical supply network. Blockchain firms continue to bloom in China. Startups in Japan, India and Singapore.
Other top news: Courier giant YTO forms logistics lab. 224 more blockchain firms get official thumbs up. VC in Singapore, UK and US.
Other top news: Bitcoin halving frenzy. New Huawei tech zone. Blockchain company busted for defective face masks. VC in Hong Kong and Canada.
Covid-19 presents its challenges for the global economy, especially startups, but also opportunities.
Also: Dozens of crypto firms sued in 11 class-action lawsuits. Bitcoin mining company Canaan bleeds red ink. Fintech funding in India, and more.
Bitcoin's tumble amidst the coronavirus pandemic may be an opportunity for investors, says Stack COO Matthew Dibb.
The U.S. government's efforts to stimulate the economy don't include a digital dollar, but a director of the Digital Dollar Project said that a central bank digital currency might be better in the long term for the United States.
In this Current Forkast, we bring you top headlines around the world, including how brand names like IBM and Microsoft are using blockchain as a tool against Covid-19, popular video conferencing app Zoom social distancing itself from Facebook, how the Coronavirus is disabling digital farms, and more!
In this Current Forkast, we bring you top headlines around the world, including Binance buying CoinMarketCap, BMW using blockchain to track auto parts, Nodle launching their own network, the Netherlands using DLT in fight against coronavirus, Toilet Paper Token skunking Bitcoin, and how China is pulling ahead in patent race; blockchain and AI in TV and film.
In this Current Forkast, we bring you top headlines around the world, including how U.S. lawmakers propose creation of digital dollar, Coinbase's legal chief heading U.S. Treasury post, Bitcoin-Red Cross fundraiser in Italy, universal basic income, Steem's hard fork into Hive, and more.
As the coronavirus rampages outside of China with numbers of infected rising each day, some experts are advising individuals not to panic, but to practice social distancing, avoid crowds at supermarkets, wear face masks, and to use anti-microbial wipes to clean your hands as the infection could stay for months to come. Dr. Ariane Davison, a Hong Kong-based viral immunologist and director of Global Health Care Consultants explains.
Compliance to international regulatory standards is becoming standard for cryptocurrency-related startups seeking to legitimize their business. Global blockchain security organization CoolBitX's founder and CEO Michael Ou sat down with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to discuss how compliance with the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) is increasingly important in the cryptocurrency sector.
In this Current Forkast, we bring you top headlines around the world, including how coronavirus batters crypto markets, Covid-19 infiltrating Ethereum events in Europe, Robinhood’s latest woes, Blockchain voting after the stain of Voatz, IOTA limping back after cyber attack, and smart cities and blockchain regulations in China
Asia's blockchain and cryptocurrency projects have more vitality than other regions, according to Cardano Foundation Chairperson Nathan Kaiser.
In this Current Forkast, we bring you top headlines around the world, including India's crypto ban reversal, regulations in South Korea, bitcoin news from France, a new Ethereum protocol and of course, blockchain happenings in China. Read on for the latest on how the coronavirus has affected China’s businesses, as well as Beijing's first blockchain invoice for its citizens and government services.
India's crypto sector saw a major boost after its Supreme Court ruled to lift a ban on crypto trading, paving the way for more blockchain development.
Coronavirus fears are sending markets tumbling. Could tokenized gold, or gold-backed crypto, be the next safe-haven investment in times of economic turmoil?
Welcome to The Current Forkast series with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau and Brian Lio, CEO of blockchain research group Smith + Crown. In this episode we talk about: Lightning Labs raises $10 million in Series A funding and launches Lightning Loop beta, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce proposes token sale safe harbor, and Zcash votes to allocate 20% of mining rewards to development funds.
Public health coins could be used to incentivize people to interact honestly with the health care system in the case of an event such as the coronavirus epidemic.
The Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) is seeking ways to bridge the traditional financial sector to new blockchain-related industries, including ways to open bank accounts said SBA deputy CEO August Benz. Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Benz to learn more.
Welcome to The Current Forkast series with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau and Brian Lio, CEO of blockchain research group Smith + Crown. In this episode we talk about: NBA player Spencer Dinwiddie's token release, SEC's warning on Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs), Bitwise investor bulletin
Distributed ledger technology could used by front-line health care responders dealing with the coronavirus epidemic to submit information in real-time around the world regardless of censorship. HashLog, a dashboard designed to publicly track coronavirus developments via distributed public ledger Hedera Hashgraph could mitigate political influence involved in spreading information, according to Hedera Hashgraph co-founder and CEO Mance Harmon.
The Chamber of Digital Commerce is "gravely concerned" about how the U.S. Government is addressing technological challenges and opportunities posed by blockchain according to founder and president Perianne Boring. The U.S. could be ceding technological leadership as well as the dollar's reserve currency status to other nations including China if it does not revamp policies toward emerging blockchain innovation.
As China's digital currency is said to be "progressing smoothly," Indonesia is also working on releasing their own proof of concept this year according to Indonesian Blockchain Association co-founder Pandu Sastrowardoyo.
As China, Singapore, Canada and other countries develop digital currencies in part to facilitate cross-border transactions, Ripple's managing director of South Asia and EMEA Navin Gupta instead said that such currencies' primary usage would be domestic.
Although Switzerland's Crypto Valley may seek to become a global blockchain hub, its government is too slow to adopt the technology even as Facebook's Libra incorporates in the country according to Trust Square co-founder Daniel Gasteiger.
Identification on a protocol level could help blockchain become mainstream for blue-chip companies like MasterCard, Volvo and Geely as KYC and AML regulations are met. Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau talks to Concordium CEO Lone Fonss Schroder to find out more.
Real-world applications for blockchain outside of cryptocurrency are gaining traction, as startups like SUKU aim to apply the technology to help everyday consumers track where the meat they buy at supermarkets comes from. Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau talks to SUKU CEO Yonathan Lapchik to understand how the company uses a “supply chain as a service” blockchain platform.
Safe cities' level of privacy remains a core concern, as indicated by the recent resignation of Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs' Director of Privacy Ann Cavoukian. The application of blockchain to smart cities can protect user privacy, said Vincent Wang, Chief Innovation Officer of Wanxiang Group.
China's blockchain talent pool is increasingly attracting investment from firms such as Blockchain Global, especially in the wake of endorsement from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Blockchain Global Founder and CEO Sam Lee to learn about how the company is tapping into and incubating blockchain talent and enterprise in China.
Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau has an in depth discussion with NEO Head of Development John deVadoss about how blockchain and decentralization can help machine learning and artificial intelligence problems such as bias.
Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News, spoke with Gibraltarian Minister of Financial Services and Gaming Albert Isola about how his small jurisdiction became a global leader in blockchain regulation. The conversation covered a range of topics, including the possible effect, or lack thereof, of Brexit on Gibraltarian regulation of cryptocurrencies, the growing importance of Asia in the world of blockchain, and how the industry has brought together experts in finance and experts in technology to create an entirely new space for discussion.
Neo is a cross-platform, code-agnostic blockchain revolutionizing the sector starting with distributed storage. Forkast.News' Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Da Hongfei to find out about the technology and how it will affect various industries in China.
Switzerland is positioning itself to become a crucial hub for the global blockchain industry as investment group Crypto Valley Venture Capital (CVVC) reports that the top 50 blockchain-related companies in the country are valued over US$40 billion in 2019. CVVC Founder and CEO Mathias Ruch told Forkast.News that the country's regulation and policies helped to create an environment which attracted blockchain-related startups from around the world.
Cryptocurrencies have become a new target for investors shying away from politically volatile alternatives. As an on-going trade war between the United States and China and the U.K.’s exit from the European Union threatens the stability of conventional markets, more and more traditional investment entities have started experimenting with decentralized assets. Forkast.News’ Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau talks to Mark Bernegger, Founding Member of Crypto Finance AG to learn how the investment space is adapting to cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain-related startups have dealt with a fair share of challenges and skepticism, especially throughout a tumultuous year where volatility in cryptocurrencies has shaken people’s confidence in the industry. However, investments in blockchain projects has seen continued growth, and incubators like LongHash have sought to harness that potential. Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Emma Cui, Founding Partner and CEO of LongHash to find out more.
With Ethereum 2.0’s release just around the corner, co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been busy talking about what to expect from the new system and its use of proof-of-stake validation.
Ethereum 2.0 is meant to address a number of issues that the current system has. It is billed as improving scaling, security, and other issues in order to create an environment that bolsters decentralized applications (DApps) as well as smart contracts. Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Buterin to find out more about how Ethereum 2.0 will change the industry.
Ron Tucker, Founder and Chair of the Australian Digital Commerce Association, describes his long-running involvement in the industry and the reasoning behind his faith in the technology. As the head of a crypto exchange, Tucker has been involved in navigating and advising the regulatory steps that institutions such as FATF are taking. Contrary to concern about these new policies stymying the growth of the industry, Tucker asserts that the regulation is necessary in providing a safe environment for cryptocurrency to grow.
It may be jarring to consider, but there are currently more slaves in the world now than at any other point in history. According to figures from the United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation, there were about 40.3 million people who can be considered modern slaves in 2016. That means that one in 200 people in the world is a slave. Forecast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Mark Blick, Head of Government; Blockchain Technology at Diginex to find out more about how they are using blockchain to address the issue of modern slavery.
As the Managing Director, Global Blockchain Lead at consulting firm Accenture, David Treat spends his days engaging with enterprise leaders across various industries about blockchain, from understanding the topic until implementation. Forkast.News spoke with Treat on the sidelines of OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum to find out how these conversations play out, and how Treat manages to open their minds about this technology.
When one thinks of cryptocurrency hotspots, one’s first thought is not of the Middle East. Joseph Dallago, Co-Founder and CEO of Rain, the first Bahrain-based digital currency exchange, aims to change that. Rain provides people with easy access to the world of cryptocurrencies, promising regulatory safety while offering exciting new investments. It targets the Middle Eastern market by being localized to Arabic, providing customer support, and tailoring registration to Arabic documents. Furthermore, it has received a regulatory licence from the Bank of Bahrain, working with the central bank to introduce cryptocurrency to a larger audience.
Incorruptible. Improved funds flow. Transparency and traceability. These are all promises of blockchain / digital technology to help the modern-day issues of cash-based economies. But should this responsibility be held by companies or governments? David Shrier, author of upcoming book from MIT Press in November 2019, “Trusted Data” dives into the debate of a digital currency, sparked by Facebook’s Libra Project, and how governments are reacting with their own Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)… or is there a third way? Shrier puts on his futurist hat to answer what is a “federated currency” and why this could be a solution of the future.
What is the next big thing? As far as Joseph Lubin, Founder of Consensys, is concerned, we are already experiencing it as you read this. Lubin shares how blockchain is already a killer app, being used globally as a new database technology. He notes cryptocurrency is already enabling cross-border transactions that help facilitate trade and raise money. But how does Lubin respond to questions about governance? In this exclusive one-on-one interview at the OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum in Paris, Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau talks with Lubin about the challenges that blockchain faces still, including scalability – a solution that Lubin hints we could be seeing soon from Ethereum.
In just one year’s time, it appears that global policymakers and regulators have woken up to blockchain in a serious way. Caroline Malcolm, new in her role as Head of OECD Blockchain Policy Center, shares key highlights from this second global blockchain policy forum held by OECD in Paris, Sept. 12-13, 2019. In this candid conversation, Malcolm shares how the hype and fear around cryptocurrencies is fading and now evolving into serious discussions about policy and its impact on innovation. From gov tech, stablecoin, central bank-backed currency, to global adoption, policy responses, and best practices -- governments, industry leaders, academics and regulators gathered to discuss what we may see implemented next year.
In anticipation of China Telecom’s new blockchain SIM card project, Director of its Blockchain Research and Development Departments, David Wei Liang, peaks to Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News, about the reasoning behind embarking on the project, the product’s uses and implications, and the timeline of its adoption.
France’s Minister of Finance Bruno Le Maire made waves last week at OECD’s second annual Global Blockchain Policy Summit Sept. 12, 2019 in his introductory remarks in Paris, targeting Facebook’s Libra project. In no uncertain terms, Le Maire said he wants to block Libra in Europe as he stated that “monetary sovereignty” of nations would be at risk. “In these conditions, we cannot authorize the development of Libra on European soil,” Le Maire said.
Forkast.News gets a more nuanced view on those remarks from Michael Amar, co-host of Paris Blockchain Week Summit and a serial entrepreneur that leads Chain Accelerator, a blockchain hub incubating blockchain talent in France. Amar shares why Le Maire’s remarks is only the beginning of a more negotiated journey for Libra acceptance in Europe, the U.S., and around the world.
The world of insider trading as relates to cryptocurrency -- what are the rules that govern trading crypto, in the eyes of the SEC, CFTC, and the like? Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief, Angie Lau sits down with attorney and partner, Jason Gottlieb, at NY-based Morrison Cohen law firm to discover the in's and out's of trading.
Just earlier this month, China announced that it intends to launch its own cryptocurrency, specifically one that is backed by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) after four to five years of research. Many deemed that this is a response to Libra, a cryptocurrency project spearheaded by Facebook, as central banks around the world have expressed their concerns about the lack of central bank oversight for this specific project.
But what exactly has been going on with PBoC’s cryptocurrency — and other blockchain projects, for that matter — throughout their research period? In order to find out, our Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sat down with Professor He Zhiguo from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business to unpack this issue from the inside.
Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Isabelle Corbett at the OECD Blockchain Policy Forum 2019 in Paris, France.
Isabelle Corbett, R3 Head of Regulatory Affairs and Public Sector Partnerships, says she’s assessing the “tone” of regulators at OECD to understand what is being viewed positively, and what is being viewed with caution, but is not discouraged by Le Maire’s remarks.
Corbett says gov tech is a way governments are applying tokenization from land registries to vehicle registrations.
Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief, Angie Lau, sits down with William Pesek to deep dive on his latest piece on why the East, specifically China, South Korea, and Japan, might be making bold moves in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency.
In its genesis, blockchain was designed with the intention of it being a decentralized peer-to-peer network. However, these networks can either require permission by a controlling entity (a private blockchain) or be truly permissionless and everyone can make modifications (a public blockchain). But when it comes to enterprises and businesses, which one is better? On one hand, a private blockchain is more flexible as the controlling parties are able to mold and amend the network’s rules to ensure optimal workflows. On the other hand, a public blockchain has a higher degree of integrity — multiple parties independently vetting for one piece of information is more reliable than one source dictating what that piece of information means.
Tomaz Levak, Co-Founder of OriginTrail, thinks that enterprises need a bit of both for one simple reason: interoperability.
In this last week, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney made waves in the crypto industry by espousing, as a pillar of traditional banking, an alternative to the very system he heads. At a speech in the U.S., Carney put forward the idea of a “synthetic hegemony currency” - in other words, a central bank-banked cryptocurrency that could replace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.
Michael Every, experienced economist and Head of Financial Markets Research Asia-Pacific at Rabobank, would beg to differ. As a long-time expert on Asian markets, Every does not anticipate that the crucial, closed-off Chinese economy would adhere to the libertarian principles behind blockchain and cryptocurrency.
A month ahead of the launch of Anchor’s stablecoin, its founder and CEO Daniel Popa sits down with our Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to discuss why the world needs a two-token stablecoin pegged to the global economy — not the traditional US dollar peg — especially at a time where recession looms over investors’ heads.
Since 18 months ago, Popa’s team of economists and blockchain developers sought out to create an index named the monetary measurement unit (MMU) to peg the Anchor currency to. The index itself, according to Popa, is a culmination of 190+ countries’ average GDP over the last 25 years, FX indicators, and other factors.
As stablecoins are designed to minimize the volatility of a cryptocurrency price, Popa argues that pegging his cryptocurrency to the global economy growth would not only bypass inflation, but also bypass the upcoming recession by preserving the currency’s value or purchasing power over the volatile period.
At the end of the day, Popa believes that all investors are seeking a safe harbor, whether it is to hedge their current assets or to invest in an unexplored asset class. As governments and crypto-enthusiasts alike are becoming more aware of this class of cryptocurrency, and that this can potentially bring short-term viability to fiat currencies, Popa is hopeful that this is the year of stablecoins.
In this episode of Word on the Block, Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Kevin Kelly of Delphi Digital to explore the recent trends in the market has seen for Bitcoin given monetary policy. Is the global macroeconomic environment creating an opportune moment for cryptocurrency? What does this inflection point look like? From the negative-yielding debt to long-term currency devaluation, Kelly explains why institutional investors might want to start paying attention.
In this episode of In Conversation With, Angie Lau sits down with Steven Nerayoff, a prolific investor and advisor in blockchain as well as chairman of CasperLabs. Nerayoff compares the blockchain revolution to the boom of the Internet. In its rudimentary form, ARPANET, the predecessor the Internet as we know it, didn’t receive much commercialization until the 90s. The advent of Netscape, however, rendered the Internet a visual experience where it quickly began to spread globally. For Nerayoff, blockchain and digital currencies have this same potential, but have yet to experience its own “Netscape.”
GSMA Senior Policy Manager Paul Ulrich sits down with our Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to share his expert opinion on governmental and regulatory telecommunications companies’ attitudes towards cryptocurrencies. As the intermediary between governments and other parties, Ulrich is familiar with the inner workings of international bureaucracies. He balances the potential benefits of blockchain and cryptocurrency adoption with the risks they pose, in context with individual countries’ circumstances.
In an unofficial, behind-the-scenes discussion following the on-stage conversation about the challenges of regulating cryptocurrency at Paris Blockchain Summit Week, our panelists consider how blockchain plays into each of their national or institutional interests, and how those interests relate to each other on a global scale.
In this episode of "In Conversation With...", Editor-in-Chief, Angie Lau, sits down with Yat Siu, musician-turned-Internet-pioneer, who sheds light on the infinite potential of blockchain, especially as expressed through the gaming market, which his company, Animoca Brands, aims to develop and exploit. As one of the first Internet Service Providers in Asia, Siu has ample experience and skill in detecting and growing revolutionary technologies. The next big, world-changing discovery, “much like Internet in ’96 and ’97,” Siu asserts, is blockchain.
Looking back on the impact that Bitcoin and following crypto advancements had on the financial world, a panel of heavy hitters in financial regulation discuss the need for international regulatory cooperation in the interest of facilitating financial innovation.
Panelists congregated in Paris for its inaugural Blockchain Week Summit:
-- Caroline Malcolm, Head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Blockchain Policy Centre
-- Giles Ward, Senior Policy Advisor for International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO)
-- Mike Gill, Chief of Staff and Chief Operating Officer of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
-- Marius Jurgilas, Board Member of the Bank of Lithuania
-- Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief, Forkast.News (Moderator)
France hoped the event would bring together entrepreneurs, investors, and industry specialists to make it “the first G20 country to create a business-friendly environment for [blockchain’s] rapidly growing ecosystem.”
The panelists discuss their roles as regulators in the space, touching on the need for oversight, concerns regarding its implementation, the process of learning regulators must go through to familiarize themselves with new technology, and the challenge of coordinating regulatory efforts across organizations and national borders.
A month after Facebook announced Libra, its new blockchain and eponymous cryptocurrency project, the world has not only had a chance to sit down, research, and process the news, but to form opinions on it and draw lines of defense. William Pesek, award-winning, Tokyo-based journalist and author, breaks down two opposing reactions to Libra.
In April 2012, Stefan Rust bought Bitcoin for the first time, at $5. Now, 7 years later, he is CEO of Bitcoin.com, a company that aims to make Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core alike more accessible to the general public, and that is home to all manner of cryptocurrency services via its eponymous web portal.
In this episode, our Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Rust to talk about the future of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Recent events including the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s hearing on Facebook Libra, President Trump and US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s pessimistic comments, and the Financial Action Task Force’s tightening regulations have been indicative of a global pushback against Facebook Libra and cryptocurrencies at large. Rust argues that this skepticism and distrust of cryptocurrency is a product of the underlying reluctance of government to depart from their traditional regulation of borders and limitations on transfer “of money, of intellectual property, of trade.”
“There is, from an enterprise standpoint, a desire to engage in this new technology and in this ability to move money globally without any barriers at a very efficient cost basis. Speed is what the market is looking for, particularly as we move towards a global organization. Governments are still trying to regulate their own little boundaries and limit the transfer of money, of intellectual property, of trade. And I think that's the barrier that all of us are trying to break down.”
“I think innovation is happening on two folds. One is the consumerization of innovation and the other is the depths of innovation in terms of technology, in terms of the ability to provide the technology in a “non-custodial fashion.” I can either build innovation around custody or around non-custodial services. And blockchain has enabled non-custodial - what does that mean? That basically means the control is in me, the user, and the responsibility lies with me as the individual. Innovation on a non-custodial basis is very hard to attack and diffuse.”
“The value is not in intellectual property, it's in the ecosystem that I have developed that is contributing to the overall blockchain, or Bitcoin.cash, or whatever the underlying algorithm is.”
Taiwan faces an existential threat. It is a nation that is dependent on exports, but like other developed nations, recognizes that in order to survive, it needs to champion high-technology industries as labor-intensive industries leave for nations with cheaper workforces like Vietnam or China. Could blockchain and cryptocurrency be part of the answer?
Jason Hsu is known in Taiwan as the Crypto Congressman (yes, check his business card, it is officially his title). He sees blockchain and cryptocurrency as an opportunity for this small island nation to become a technology force that can drive innovation -- incubate projects in Taiwan, and position the 23-million person nation globally.
Hsu believes China gave Taiwan that opportunity the day it banned ICOs on September 4, 2017. Question is, how will Taiwan position itself to seize it? Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down in this candid conversation with Congressman Jason Hsu in Taipei.
It wasn’t even on the agenda last year. Ling Wu, Founder and CEO of TBCASoft, tells us why blockchain is taking the Shanghai Mobile World Congress 2019 by storm. Wu is the Chairman of the Carrier Blockchain Study Group (CBSG) Consortium, an initiative between TBCASoft and SoftBank to build a cross-carrier blockchain platform with leading global telecom operators. Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Wu to discuss how every telecom company could be a bank and why 5G is critical to mobile blockchain adoption.
Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, is one of the most influential figures in cryptocurrency / blockchain circles. From flipping burgers at McDonald’s to getting his computer science degree at McGill University, to now Founder and CEO of Binance; CZ has built one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. In this unreserved 40-minute conversation, CZ reveals how Binance was forced to be compliant, how he views Facebook Libra, and how a recent $40 million dollar hack was a blessing in disguise. He talks about the future of blockchain and cryptocurrency, and his own future at Binance.
Is Asia gaining ground in the technology race? Edith Yeung, advisor at 500 Startups, partner at Proof of Capital, and author of “China Internet Report” (link to new 2019 report: scmp.com/china-internet-report) shares why Asia is the place to be for blockchain adoption. For a VC who spends half her time in Silicon Valley, she recognizes that there is an economic hunger that drives adoption differently from Hong Kong to Singapore, Mainland China to the rest of the region. The sheer size of populations in China, India, and Southeast Asia means that adoption can reach mass scale quickly, and things can happen here in days and weeks versus months or years.
Edith sits down with Editor-in-Chief, Angie Lau, in this value-rich conversation on the role of China, the impact of technology, and why there may be coordinated focus on blockchain by President Xi Jinping.
In a candid conversation, Co-Founder and CEO of BitMEX Arthur Hayes defends why BitMEX is set up in Seychelles, the promise of blockchain for everyone, why ICOs are not a problem, and why his industry is not a “scam.”
This self-proclaimed “economist-history nerd” and former Deutsche Bank banker, who joined then lost his job at Citi as head trader of Asian ETFs, says that BitMEX as a crypto exchange actually protects investors by limiting the loss to only the amount put into the market. This is different, he says, than the traditional regulated system where investors can lose their entire net worth.
But why crypto?
Hayes says it’s history in the making. Cryptocurrency is permissionless — and that means everyone can use it. It may not be better, but “at least you have a choice.”
It’s a glimpse into why people are “opting out” who created an industry with a market cap of $350 billion. For a man who lost his job at Citibank in 2013, what he and his co-founders built at BitMEX since then has turned this out-of-work banker into a self-made crypto-preneur heading up the biggest crypto margin-trading platform in the world.
In this episode of Word on the Block, Angie Lau speaks with Jason Gottlieb, attorney and partner at Morrison Cohen, on why the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is suing messaging app service Kik for its initial coin offering of Kin Token.
In the latest episode of Word on the Block, Angie speaks with Willie Pesek, Tokyo-based columnist, to discuss the upcoming G20 Summit in Osaka, where the world’s largest economies will discuss the planet’s most pressing political and economic issues. The Osaka meeting is of particular interest because the G20 agreed to initiate dialogue on cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings.
Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News, sits down with Christina Lomazzo of UNICEF to discuss how blockchain can be used for social impact.
How the race to get billions of users onto blockchain has this mathematician thinking about the future of work. Could decentralization be the one thing that actually binds us together. Charles Hoskinson sits down with Angie Lau, in Hong Kong a week after Hong Kong Blockchain Week and shares his vision of how 2019 will be the year of innovation for Cardano, that will lead to scale in 2020.
Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News, sits down with Karim Sabba, Co-Founder of Paris Blockchain Week, to discuss how France is trying to grow its influence in the blockchain industry.
With a rapidly aging population, low birth rate, and shrinking work force, it is hard to imagine Japan will ever recover from its economic slump. However, Blockchain technologies and investment could be precisely what the nation needs in order to stimulate inflation, and quite possibly, revitalize its economic heyday of the 1980s. In this episode of “Word on the Block,” Willie Pesek, Asia watcher and award-winning journalist, speaks with Angie Lau on the current state of the Japanese economy.
Angie Lau sits down with Caroline Malcolm, Head of Blockchain Policy Centre at OECD, at Paris Blockchain Week Summit in April 2019 to talk about recent trends in the regulatory space.
Angie Lau sits down with Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of Delphi Digital, to deep dive on what investors should be on the look out for the upcoming quarter.