“reHash” — Your Weekly Summary of Everything Important in the Crypto World — issue no. 19

Published in

Wanchain

6 min readJan 27, 2021

reHash issued for January 21st to January 27th

Joe Biden has stopped the federal rulemaking for reviews by his administration, which paused progres on proposed FinCEN rule that would regulate transactions to private crypto wallets. BitMEX happily shares dubious information (which manipulates markets), which understandably makes everyone else a little bit less happy. reHash recounts news of crypto-related events from last week, wheel keeps turning, hope you enjoy!

NOTE:
reHash is not intended to be original journalism. It is intended to be a brief summary of significant articles and events from the past week with links to the original sources. Sources will always be linked and credited. If you know any good newsletters or Twitter accounts which provide news we have been missing, please mention them in the comments!

ADOPTION

Galaxy Digital, a Mike Novogratz crypto investment company, will launch new funds centered around Ethereum; they have $815 million AUM; minimum investment is $250k for onshore fund or $100k for offshore; funds like these are providing exposure to assets, but do not require participants to hold them; “Galaxy Digital believes Ethereum is an emerging substrate for programming and interacting with digital value that will become ubiquitous in the future.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Marathon Patent Group has purchased $150 million worth of Bitcoin (4,812.66 BTC); Marathon is a cryptocurrency mining company; their stock price has reacted positively; overall it is 2,800% higher than it traded last year, they are listed on NASDAQ; “We believe that holding part of our Treasury reserves in Bitcoin will be a better long-term strategy than holding US Dollars,” said CEO of Marathon Merrick Okamoto;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Sberbank has applied to launch “Sbercoin” stablecoin with the Central Bank of Russia; it would be pegged to the Russian ruble; the news were announced on January 21st; “There is a high probability that this project will be launched in the spring.”; “Technologically, the bank is ready to work with such fiat currency”; Sberbank is the largest private bank in Russia, with assets totalling over $475 billion
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Hedera Hashgraph is used to track temperature of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine; vaccine must be kept at between -60°C and -80°C in cold storage; and between 2°C and 8°C in refrigerator (up to five days) to be effective; UK’s South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust is using services of Everyware and Hashgraph to track the temperatures; “Everyware provides asset tracking and monitoring software that can be configured to monitor a number of variables, including temperature, on a 24/7 basis, from anywhere”; meanwhile IOTA has been used in Frankfurt Airport to securely and privately verify COVID-19 test results of patients
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Union Square Ventures will allocate 30% of its new $250 million fund to cryptocurrency-related investments; they are known for their bets on Twitter, Tumblr, Coinbase, they are interested in “holding tokens directly as well as equity in early-stage blockchain-related projects.”; they “believe the opportunity to decentralize systems is still in early stages, seeing adoption tailwinds and with a lot of interesting new activity”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3
Grayscale has seen influx of another $1.276 billion to it’s Bitcoin Trust in a week; this is the highest number so far with $217 million weekly on average in Q4 2020; institutions account for 93% of all capital inflows in Grayscale’s funds; total cryptocurrency ETP market is up 95% since December to $35 billion, Grayscale controls approximately 65% of that amount
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3
Banque de France and blockchain startup SETL has settled over $2.4 million in a CBDC pilot; SETL chairman, Sir David Walker (yes, he’s British) has remarked “The successful completion of a central bank digital currency live experiment with BDF confirms that SETL is uniquely positioned to help transform Financial Markets.”; “CITI and CACEIS acted as the participating commercial banks to purchase CDBC tokens”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

REGULATION

Valkyrie Digital has filed for Bitcoin ETF; “Our executive team has previously launched multiple ETFs, publicly traded funds, and ETPs, including bitcoin funds” says Leah Wald, CEO of Valkyrie Digital; to date no ETFs have been approved in USA; with new administration it seems that companies are trying again considering VanEck has last week re-filed their application for ETF as well
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4
Janet Yellen, the first femal Treasury Secretary in US, was recently quoted a lot in regards to her stance on cryptocurrencies; in her oral testimony she said cryptocurrency related crime was of particular concern; however in her written testimony her views seem to be more open-minded — “it [is] important we consider the benefits of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, and the potential they have to improve the efficiency of the financial system. At the same time, we know they can be used to finance terrorism, facilitate money laundering (…) I intend to work closely with the Federal Reserve Board and the other federal banking and securities regulators on how to implement an effective regulatory framework for these and other fintech innovations.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

DEVELOPMENT

On January 20th a double spend allegation has been tweeted by BitMEX research; thanks BitMEX, we were all worried you might have stopped being involved in dubious activities; a replace by fee (re-sending a transaction so it gets processed faster) transaction is nothing new and happens quite often; just like temporary splits in blockchain (which later get included in the version of blockchain that is accepted by most nodes); if actual double spend occurred it could spell doom for BTC (if someone could figure out how to spend the money twice or more times, obviously he would be able to mint enough BTC to become very rich indeed; unsurprisingly a big sell-off happened including NexTech AR Solutions who sold all their 130 BTC citing “critical flaw called a ‘double spend’ may have occurred, which if true, allows someone to spend the same Bitcoin twice, undermining faith in the system.”; all of the above is why the exchanges and other service providers require X amount of confirmations before crediting funds to the accounts; obviously the double spend never occured, thanks BitMEX;
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

GENERAL UPDATES

There is more than $90 billion assets on Coinbase; over 43 million verified users; last time their report was published Coinbase boasted only (sic) $25 billion in assets, surge is likely driven up by, amongst other factors, MicroStrategy and Ruffer Investment who used Coinbase to make large BTC purchases; Coinbase Custody accounts for more than 50% of those $90 billion total; they also announced addition of Automated Clearing House which will make transfers between USD and USDC easier
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Binance has been taken off of the website blacklist in Russia; the website has been banned since June 2020; Gleb Kostarev, the director of Binance in Russia has remarked “We hope that with the adoption of transparent laws in the field of cryptocurrency regulation in Russia, such incidents will become a thing of the past and regulatory uncertainty will no longer negatively affect the development of cryptocurrency projects in Russia.”
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Privacy-focused cryptocurrency Firo (previously Zcoin) has suffered from a 51% attack; more than 300 blocks have been rolled back; the attack came before ‘chainlocks’ are implemented, which would make the attack much harder since the attacker would need to control 50% of the masternodes in addition to 51% of the mining hashrate; according to the team it was not a coding error, just pure hashrate attack
SOURCE: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Thank you (and thanks BitMEX), as always, for reading and hope to see you next week! We will have news next week too!

About Wanchain

Wanchain is the infrastructure connecting the decentralized financial world. Wanchain’s live cross-blockchain solution is EVM-based, includes optional private transactions, and provides a decentralized, permissionless, and secure approach for interoperability. Wanchain has employees globally with teams in China, the USA, and other team members around the world in Asia, Africa, and Europe.