CoinMetro’s CEO, Kevin Murcko brings you the most recent crypto market news during the weekly AMA every Friday.
Crypto Market News Highlights
Malta May Become Challenging to Crypto Exchanges (due to “forced” resignation of PM Joseph Muscat)
Kevin has said before that Malta’s embracing of Binance (and other crypto companies) was going to cause them issues. They were hit with some accusations of thin AML policies. The PM was actually shilling Binance for a while, talking about how great it was that they were on the island.
Malta was always a waste of time. A license in Malta, is a license to do business in Malta, not in the European Union. Malta as a whole has a very bad reputation when it comes to regulation. Case in point, what’s happening right now — they were the place to go for gambling licenses, not anymore. They tried to be the place to go for FX licenses, and that blew up in their face.
It’s unfortunate, but anybody who knows the history of Malta when it comes to financial regulations saw this coming. Kevin would expect that since Malta is an EU country under the same EU directives as every other country, they’re going to have to comply with the same rules, regulations and directives. Their three local licenses will be, and are, useless.
Bakkt CEO Kelly Loeffler Appointed to US Senate Seat
This is funny, because she’s appointed — normally, senators are voted in. In certain circumstances where a senator can no longer fulfill their duties, someone can be appointed. It’s good that we have a pro-crypto person in the senate. Might even be three.
A little bit of conflict of interest floating around this woman. Her husband is either the CEO or owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and she’s going to be the one to provide price discovery on Bitcoin to the same institution.
Anyway, having somebody in government who’s pro-crypto, pro-blockchain, pro-DLT is not a bad thing.
US Arrests Ethereum Developer for Training North Koreans to Evade Sanctions
Kevin was actually invited to the same event, but didn’t go as he didn’t feel like going to prison. This guy went however. The title of his presentation was essentially “How to evade sanctions using Ethereum”. Maybe he assumed no one had a cellphone and it wouldn’t get out — well, it did.
It doesn’t even have to be a sanctioned country. Going to any country and telling people how to evade US and OFAC sanctions using a piece of technology, is illegal! And it’s pretty obvious that it’s illegal.
So, going to a country and explaining how to evade sanctions so the government can bring in more money to basically kill people and build weapons of mass destruction… is not that smart.
70 cryptocurrency hedge funds have closed so far this year, investors weary of Bitcoin
It’s not that investors are wary of Bitcoin — the problem is that “cryptocurrency hedge funds” could mean some guy who bought some cryptocurrency and sold it to his friends. In an unregulated environment, and with most of these hedge funds being unregulated, they simply just bought Bitcoin and held it, and then Bitcoin crashed and people got out on the lows. Retail investors sell on lows and buy on highs — they’re really good at it.
These 70 “hedge funds” had no strategy whatsoever, and they aren’t even hedge funds in any way, shape or form that anybody in finance would ever agree with. These are just 70 small little firms that got on the bandwagon.
Well, if you do business with a very highly regulated US firm, expect that you’ll have to follow all pertinent regulations. But if you have dormant accounts that you haven’t paid attention to — so what. Same thing happens to your bank account.
Who are they warning? If someone hasn’t used their account in long enough for the “abandoned property act” to take place, they probably don’t care.
EU Won’t Let Stablecoins Enter Market Until Risks Are Addressed
Kevin doesn’t know how broadly this story means “EU won’t”. There are stablecoins in the EU, and it’s almost impossible to stop their usage. However, if we’re talking about the EU Central Bank, they can make statements all they want. The term stablecoin doesn’t make any sense, they’re not stable. Smart tokens, which is what you call something that is pegged to an underlying asset, is actually more stable.
Having said that, they’re likely examining risks, and putting way too much weight on those risks. They’re looking at how volatile a stablecoin may be, rather than looking at how the market could be more stable by bringing in more liquidity by actually regulating the market the way it should be, so that institutions and other large players can come into this market to stabilize it.
Instead, they’re looking at the risks of an illiquid asset in an unregulated market. That’s halfway their fault, and the other half is from the legislators.
Microsoft Announces Token Collectibles on Ethereum Blockchain (partnership with Enjin)
Putting all these NFTs (non-fungible tokens) on the blockchain makes sense. It’s going to happen, in the medium to long term. Even if physical collectibles still exist, authenticity of physical collectibles has always been a problem. If these “authenticity certificates” go on the blockchain when the collectibles are actually produced, then we have a true certificate of authentication that comes from the actual producer.
Way to go to Microsoft on that, it makes sense.
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Tune in every Friday for “This Week in Crypto” with CoinMetro’s CEO Kevin Murcko on our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/coinmetro
