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CRYPTO MARKETS
Bitcoin broke through $11,000 Wednesday and fluctuated around that level the rest of the week, recovering about half of the value it lost during its crash the first week of September. Large buying volumes and the Fed’s commitment to low interest rates helped buoy bitcoin’s price, and business intelligence firm MicroStrategy
Source: Messari. Prices as of 4:00 p.m. on September 18, 2020.
ANOTHER STIMULUS ‘CHECK’
Uniswap, a decentralized exchange on the Ethereum blockchain that has grown in popularity as part of the DeFi boom, launched a governance token called Uni on Wednesday and rewarded its early users with 400 tokens, worth more than $1,200 at a little more than $3 apiece, or roughly the same as another stimulus check for U.S. users.
The reward was distributed to every Ethereum address that used the exchange prior to September 1, and 25% of the $4.25 million in fees Ethereum processes per day comes from Uniswap.
IRS CROWDSOURCES DETECTIVE WORK
The IRS offered up to $625,000 to any aspiring codebreakers who can come up with a way to trace Monero or other anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies. The deadline for submissions was Wednesday night, and it hasn’t yet been announced whether anybody found a satisfactory solution.
“Pilot IRS will appear substantively different from how the government normally buys technology,” an IRS spokesman acknowledged, but it’s another example of how the agency is getting serious about cracking down on crypto-related money laundering and tax evasion.
REGULATION
Wyoming solidified its reputation as the most blockchain-friendly state by granting a first-of-its-kind charter to crypto exchange Kraken, which will allow it to service institutional clients and make payments flow more efficiently for retail customers.
In Washington, the SEC wasn’t so accommodating to crypto, levying a $6.1 million fine on e-sports gambling site Unikrn for an unregistered offering. SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, nicknamed ‘Crypto Mom,’ wrote a dissenting opinion.
ENTERPRISE
The U.S. Dollar Coin, the second largest stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar by volume, expanded onto the Algorand blockchain last week, an upgrade that will allow it to support faster transactions. Coinbase and payments unicorn Circle partnered to develop USDC, which now has a market cap of around $2 billion and was previously only integrated with the Ethereum blockchain.
“Ethereum supports around 15 transactions per second. Algorand enables over 1000 transactions per second, with work underway to increase that ten-fold in the coming months,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire boasted about the new partnership..
BITCOIN FOR DUMMIES
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought millions of millennials back home to work remotely and spend time with mom and dad, and with that has come time for parents to interrogate their kids about the latest trends like TikTok and, yes, bitcoin. Fear no more if you’re either asking or answering the questions: this FAQ covers the basics of what bitcoin is and why it has value.
ELSEWHERE
The $55M Hack That Almost Brought Ethereum Down [CoinDesk]
Are Bitcoin campaign contributions a fad or the future of fundraising? [Palm Beach Post]
Crypto.com Eclipses Tesla With Bitcoin Sweepstakes, Discounts [Bloomberg]