It’s the end of a new week, but there’s
never an end of news in the crypto space.
As the Wall Street Journal wrote this week,
Facebook’s coin is inching ever closer to life,
with sources now reporting that Visa,
MasterCard, PayPal, and even Uber donating
$10 million dollars EACH
to the secret Libra project.
As one Twitter user said, we just “can't
wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics
of Uber, the censorship resistance of PayPal,
and the centralization of Visa, all tied together
under the proven privacy of Facebook.”
Also this week, since an updated Terms of
Use for Binance means that U.S. customers
will now be blocked from using the exchange,
perhaps angry ex-Binance users could take
solace in the fact that Binance will also
be launching a dedicated exchange for U.S. users,
funny how that works out.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Molly Jane,
and this is your weekly Hodler’s Digest.
Let's take a look
at the latest market updates.
Security-focused platform Fireblocks recently
secured $16 million in a series A Funding round.
Among the investors are heavyweights such
as Fidelity-backed Eight Roads, Tenaya Capital,
Cyberstarts and more.
Fireblocks developed a platform allowing the
safe transmission of funds across exchanges,
OTC desks, hot and cold wallets.
While most security firms have been focusing
on the custody side, not enough attention
has been paid to safeguarding funds in transit,
says Michael Shaulov, CEO at Fireblocks.
After analyzing several high profile hacks,
he concluded that moving digital assets is
still a slow process, highly susceptible to
security breaches.
Defining itself as “the secured
highway of cryptocurrencies,”
Fireblocks removes the hassle of copying and
pasting cryptocurrency addresses,
thus allowing seamless fund transfers.
Fireblocks reportedly implements multi-party
computation, an advanced cryptographic system,
which then would prevent private keys to be hijacked
by deriving them from multiple sources.
Among Fireblocks' clients there is already
a number of big players such as Galaxy Digital
and Genesis Global Trading.
We reached out to Michael Shaulov, CEO at
Fireblocks, and asked him to give us more
details about their product
and on their recent funding round.
So, Michael, can you explain to us in more
detail how Fireblocks works?
In the last two years as we know the most
of the use cases are now around trading, so
moving the assets to the exchanges.
And as we've started to see more and more
use cases around payments, lending, the actual
use cases, that I think everybody were looking
for, was blockchain and digital assets,
as those use cases mature, we need those assets
accessible and we need to move them very quickly
between counterparty to counterparty, between
the different hands, and now we need to find
the solution how to do it.
So we need an infrastructure with hot wallet,
so we need the infrastructure with connectivity,
and we need it secure, because, truth to be
told, most of the hacks and most of the breaches
and issues that happen where funds were
hacked, stolen or compromised were exactly
like, you know, during this chain, when people
were basically sending them funds or when
the funds were online and really accessible.
So this is basically the use case that we
are solving and this is why there is such
a need for our solution in the market.
So how are you planning to use all of the
funds that you've just raised?
So we have a very, I would say, aggressive
roadmap in terms of technological development.
We are going to have an investing R&D, and
we scale up our R&D which is now where 15
engineers, we are going to probably double
our engineering team in the next 12 months.
And in parallel we actually going to increase
our go-to-market team to basically be able
to serve more and more clients within the
segment and also expand the reach.
Gram, the much rumored crypto token developed
by messaging app Telegram, will allegedly
be available for the first time in a public
sale on crypto exchange platform Liquid.
Or at least that is what Liquid claimed in
a press release, stating it entered a partnership
with Gram Asia, allegedly the largest holder
of Grams from Asia, which will make a portion
of its tokens available for sale.
The sale is set to take place on July 10th.
However, sources close to Telegram told Cointelegraph
they have never heard of a company called
Grams Asia and that there is no relation,
official or otherwise, between Telegram and Liquid.
Mike Kayamori, CEO at Liquid, told us the
public sale is the result of an exclusive
agreement between Liquid and Gram Asia,
without any direct involvement from Telegram.
He said:
“Liquid and Gram Asia
always have had a good relationship.
We support the TON community and ecosystem.
In order to expand the community interest
and truly community driven was to offer a
public sale with a limited amount to the global
audience who was not able to participate in
the private sale in the past [...] So everything
is between Gram Asia and Liquid.”
However, according to an anonymous Telegram
investor, Gram token holders don’t have
the right to sell tokens before the official
launch of TON reportedly scheduled for October
this year, and then even for
18 months after that.
This was all included in a very secure token
purchasers agreement that they all signed,
leaving it unclear how Gram Asia plans to
legally carry out this plan with Liquid.
Gram is the token powering TON, Telegram Open
Network, which conducted one of the most profitable
private sales in the history of cryptocurrencies
last year, raising a total of $1.7 billion.
Since then, several websites have been reportedly
faking Gram token sales, taking advantage
of the hype surrounding the upcoming product.
Bitcoin carbon emissions
are equal to 22 megatons per year.
In case the number doesn’t tell you much,
that is equal to the emissions of Jordan,
or Sri Lanka or, in case it is more familiar,
to the metropolitan area of Kansas City.
This amount roughly doubles if we take into
account other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.
These are estimates from a report published
this week by a team of researchers at the
Technical University of Munich and MIT.
The researchers managed to measure the carbon
emission of bitcoin mining by tracking the
locations of the biggest mining pools and
identifying the type of equipment they are using.
This research was based on data
published last year by the three Chinese producers
of mining equipment during their IPOs.
According to the study, efforts should be
made to regulate the regions with the highest
concentration of carbon-intensive mining.
However, not everybody agrees with this research.
A separate report published by blockchain
industry research group CoinShare points out
that growing use of renewable energy in bitcoin
mining is being underestimated.
According to this report, miners are naturally
drawn to region where there’s the cheapest
energy, which often happens to be renewable.
These areas include nearby dams on the
U.S. Pacific Northwest, the hydrothermal plants
in Iceland or the southern Chinese
province of Sichuan.
We reached out to Christopher Bendiksen, head
of research at CoinShares, to give us his
perspective on the issue.
So, Christopher, how serious is the impact
of bitcoin mining and global carbon emissions?
This is not where we need to direct our attention.
If we really want to do something about the
climate, we have bigger fish to fry.
First of all, we can look at the cases where
it's actually wasteful like giant militaries.
I mean, the report came out yesterday that
the US military uses something like $1,200
million tons of carbon emissions every year.
Do you also believe there should be regulations
to limit mining activities in certain regions
of the world?
On the contrary they should do the opposite.
If you put limits on miners being able to
mine in the regions where the cheapest electricity
exists, which is the excess hydro dominated
regions, if you limit mining in those regions
then worst case the miners are going to move
to areas where there is fossil fuels.
Can renewable energy make crypto mining a
sustainable activity, and if yes, how is that possible?
Our argument here is that bitcoin mining can
actually be a positive to this, because bitcoin
mining can come and act as an electricity
by a global electricity buyer of last resort.
Creating cornerstone demand for the cheapest
renewables in the world wherever they are,
because it is such a mobile industry that
can move to essentially anywhere.
A lot of the best solar
is in the middle of the desert.
A lot of the best wind
is in the middle of nowhere.
A lot of the best hydro is up in the mountains,
nobody lives there.
Nobody wants to put a factory up there, because
you can't get your products out, you can't
get your workers.
Let's say that you want to build like a solar
farm in the middle of nowhere, you have to
build it to several gigawatts before it makes
sense to make a proper long distance grid
to connect it to wherever
your closest demand center is.
But that requires you to front load all that
investment cost immediately.
And that is a really-really
difficult thing to do.
What is much easier, in terms of financing,
is to finance it in stages, but then you need
off-takers all the way as you successfully
finance the project.
And this is where we think miners can play
a really interesting role, because miners
will come in.
If you can offer electricity that's cheaper
than anywhere else in the world,
miners will come to you.
Satoshi is not God, because God clearly has
some pretty bad taste in crypto.
Enter Cathio,
a community-oriented crypto project.
It is designed to address the needs of the
Catholic economy by ensuring lower costs,
greater transaction visibility and improved
security for the community.
Security, presumably from
Satan and sex crime lawsuits.
Failed U.S. presidential candidate and all-around
relic of the past Rick Santorum is now a board
member of Cathio.
Santorum, who is anti-gay and strongly opposes
abortion, argued that Cathio will better help
engage the youth.
Santorum is beloved by the youth as much as
he is by the gay community, if you don’t believe me
just Google “Santorum meaning”
to see their noble work.
But why God?
Why this, why now?
Well, you see, Cathio CEO Matthew Marcolini
believes that payment apps like PayPal and
Venmo support one of the greatest threats
to national security -
no, not ISIS, but Planned Parenthood,
an organization of untold evil
that provides reproductive healthcare for
women in need and supports these traditional
payment systems.
Cathio wants to penetrate the market both
ethically and consensually in order to give
the religious right a way to consume and trade
in accordance with scripture.
Sounds great, what’s the catch?
Ah, well there is a 2% transaction fee for
donations and remittances...
Yes, I repeat,
donations and remittances.
For legal reasons
I’m not calling this a grift.
But it gets worse.
One media outlet reported that one of the
backers of this griffff… project is Cameron Chell,
who is both on the board of Cathio
and a co-founder.
Interestingly, all throughout the 90’s he
faced accusations of fraud related to the stock market.
But you know, everyone deserves a second chance.
By the way, if you liked what you found after
Googling Santorum and have a spare $5K,
you may want to take this
cruise with good old Rick.
We spoke to David Gerrard, author of “The
50 Foot Blockchain”,
to get to the bottom of this holy mess.
So, David, in your mind, how sincere are the
motivations behind this project?
It's hard to judge how sincere it is.
I mean, all we can look at is what they're
doing and trying to work out whether it makes sense.
But whether it's a good idea that makes sense
for its customers - that's another matter.
I'm hard pressed to see the selling point
myself, but they think they've got a market here.
And who is this for?
So Cathio marketing is that they think that
this will get young people donating to the church again.
I'm not convinced by this argument, because
I don't think that's how religious communities
really work, particularly not catholic ones.
So maybe it's the case, but I'm pretty sure
it's not a lack of payment options stopping them.
Rick Santorum is a Catholic, he's on the more
conservative side of Catholics.
And that appears to be the marketing that
Cathio is doing.
They got Rick Santorum in, because he was
the CEO's father-in-law, so he's a family member.
So, I assume that the guy is sincere that
ex-Senator Santorum is sincere.
The marketing has been
very much the conservative side.
Oh, PayPal has some unspecified
involvement allowing donations to
Planned Parenthood or whatever.
That sort of marketing like, the American
Catholic surveyed about abortion rights and so on.
They tend to be right in the middle of average
American populace.
It isn't actually a mass Catholic thing.
Can you tell us who Cameron Chell is, and
what ICOx is, and why we should care?
So crypto people will know Cameron Chell as
being the main guy behind ICOx Innovations,
ICOx, who were the company behind KodakCoin.
So the KodakCoin ICO basically failed.
It took $5 million out of a planned $73 million,
there was a lot of talk of having trouble
paying developers and vendors.
I've had vendors and so on, and people who've
dealt with them contact me saying: "How do
I get my money out of these people?"
Cameron Chell's past has
come up in the mainstream press.
He used to be a bit of a hotshot trader back
in Alberta in the 90s.
He got barred from the Alberta Stock Exchange
for five years and fined $25,000.
So I'm presuming that now, 20 years later,
he's learned his lesson and he's all about
compliance and being a better actor.
Fellow crypto news outlet CCN has had quite
a week, first it announced it would shut down.
Then they did a complete 360 and decided to
let all former staff, presumably crying into
their cardboard boxes on the street, shaking
a fist into the sky, back into the building.
CCN is apparently still open for business.
Apparently no one was reading their content
and it was all Google’s fault.
More specifically, Google indexing was hindering
the publication’s online visibility.
CCN claimed that an update to Google’s algorithm
led to a sharp 70% drop in traffic on mobile,
leaving the crypto media outlet with no option
but to shut up shop.
A turn of events in the form of surprise visibility
from their old domain name led executives
at CCN to decide stay open for business, well,
at least not a total shutdown.
CCN Markets director Jonas Borchgrevink gave
some updates:
“While we’ve been working in the dark,
trying to get to the bottom of our massive
visibility drop on Google, a friendly helper
in Google’s forum mentioned that ‘CryptoCoinsNews.com’
— our previous domain — is reappearing
in Google searches,”
Borchgrevink went on to express his surprise
as he “personally requested a domain name
change in 2017 from CryptoCoinsNews.com to
CCN.com.
Since that change, ‘CryptoCoinsNews.com’
was effectively absent on Google.
Now it’s back and is inexplicably using
recent 2019 articles from CCN.com.
This is abrupt and confusing.
Don’t mean to brag, but Cointelegraph’s
traffic was not actually affected by the debacle.
CCN have also claimed to be victims of the
ongoing culture wars whereby conservative
media and commentators are being censored
by Google, who have a perceived left wing
bias, despite lobbying for lower taxes.
There was a rumor amongst the crypto media
that CCN were targeted because of their clickbaity
titles--since the Google update also seemed to take
more than half of the traffic away from the
Daily Mail, a very clickbaity british tabloid.
And another theory is that
CCN was so good at Search Engine Optimization,
that they were taking viewers away from CNN.
CCN, of course, doesn’t just do news on
crypto, this year they switched from just
covering crypto to also include political
stories, like this one, where they call former
refugee, now congress woman,
Ilhan Omar, a pirate.
Thanks for watching, guys.
Please, let us know what you would like to
see more or even less of in this week's Hodler's
Digest in the comments below.
And if you've noticed my shirt and you like
it, you should know that this came from our
Cointelegraph merchant's store, which you
can see in the link below in our description.
And, as always,
remember to like, subscribe and hodl.
