The world’s first fully bitcoin-enabled community is being constructed on the second-largest island in the Grenadines, according to a report from EuroNews.com.
The One Bequia development will sit on 18 square kilometers (about 7 square miles) and be home to 39 luxury villas. It will be the first Caribbean location accepting bitcoin for payment for the properties, along with everyday essentials like groceries, restaurant food, movies and more.
In other news, Square has added a new policy expert in Julie Stitzel, a former vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, CoinDesk reported.
“Julie will advise teams within Cash App on the evolving bitcoin policy sphere, will help Square advance our strategic and long-term thinking on crypto issues and will help drive education and engagement with outside parties who work in this space,” a Square spokesperson said, per CoinDesk.
Stitzel started at her new job Monday (April 24).
Meanwhile, Wealthfront will now allow users to build their own portfolios on the automated investment service firm, according to a company blog post.
The post noted that users could invest in index funds, make a portfolio of socially responsible investments, tweak asset classes and more.
With Wealthfront’s automation, the post stated, users will be able to use automation features like “Tax-Loss Harvesting (which typically generates enough tax savings to more than cover our advisory fee), intelligent dividend reinvestment, and tax-sensitive rebalancing.”
The automation efforts are meant to save time and skip manual trades, according to the post.
Lastly, U.S. officials have arrested Roman Sterlingov, who is allegedly the chief operator of Bitcoin Fog, a money laundering operation, U.S. News reported, citing a filing in federal court.
Sterlingov is a citizen of both Russia and Sweden, and he is alleged to have operated the website, launched in 2011, which was one of the original bitcoin “tumbler” services intended to help users with anonymizing crypto payments, the report stated. It was especially used for drug trafficking or other illicit trades.
