Decentral Block Post

Australia’s ministerial department of Treasury reached out to the public to seek consultation regarding draft legislation that would exclude cryptocurrencies from being taxed as a foreign currency if passed.

In a press release, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones highlighted the Australian government’s intent to exclude crypto assets from being regarded as a foreign currency for tax purposes. However, the legislation would have no impact on the collection of capital gains taxes on crypto held as investments.

The public has been provided with 25 days, from Sept. 6 to Sept. 30, to share their opinion on the proposed legislation.

If signed into law, the legislation will see the amendment of the existing definition of digital currency in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Act — effectively excluding crypto assets from the definition of foreign currency. GST is a broad-based tax levied on goods, services and items sold or consumed in Australia.

The Treasury noted that the respondent’s personal information, including name and address, will be made public if not proactively opted out from the same.

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain names have surpassed Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) as the most traded asset on NFT marketplace OpenSea over the last seven days — seemingly ahead of the Ethereum Merge. 

According to OpenSea data, the weekly volume of the Ethereum domain NFTs eclipsed 2,249 ETH at the time of writing, beating out RTFKT Clone X (1,992 ETH) and Bored Ape Yacht Club (1,777 ETH).

ENS domains are a distributed, open and expandable naming system on the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to turn a long string of keys for a crypto address into a single ENS domain such as “vitalik.eth.”

This simplifies the complexity of copying and pasting a lengthy wallet address to send and receive crypto, as users only need to share their domain name like any other ordinary address or identification details.

These domain names can be bought, sold and traded between users in the form of NFTs.

The assumption that Ethereum will just transition to a fully functional proof-of-stake (PoS) network after the Merge somewhat ignores the risk and effort necessary to move an asset that has a $193 billion market capitalization and 400 decentralized applications (DApps).

That is precisely why monitoring vital network conditions is essential for anyone willing to trade the event which is scheduled for Sept. 14, according to ethernodes.org. More importantly, traders should be prepared to detect any alarming developments in case things go wrong.

Apart from the $34.2 billion in total value locked in smart contracts, another $5.3 billion in Ether is staked on the Beacon Chain. The network is currently used by many tokens, oracle providers, stablecoins, layer-2 scalability solutions, synthetic assets, nonfungible items (NFT), decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and cross-chain bridges.

This partially explains why the Merge has been postponed multiple times through the years and why it is deemed to be the most significant upgrade in the history of the network.

For this reason, three different testnets have undergone the Merge, with Goerli being the latest on Aug. 11. Curiously, minor issues were presented on all testnet implementations, including Ropsten and Sepolia. For instance, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden noted that “two different terminal blocks and lots of non-updated nodes” slightly slowed the process down.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) price rallied on Sept. 5 on back-to-back positive reports concerning its adoption among crypto miners.

Top mining pool supports Ethereum Classic

On the daily chart, ETC's price surged 14.5% to nearly $37.25 per token. Its massive gains came days after BTC.com, a blockchain explorer and crypto mining pool, launched a specialized Ethereum Classic pool with "zero-fee" mining for three months.

The announcement appeared after "the Merge," a long-awaited network update that would switch Ethereum's energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) protocol to a "cost-efficient" and scalable alternative, the proof-of-stake (PoS) on Sept. 19 or before.

But the switch to PoS will make Ethereum's PoW miners futile. On the other hand, Ethereum Classic, the original version of Ethereum, which still uses PoW, could become a haven for the miners affected by the Merge.

The network is already attracting PoW miners en masse, confirmed by its hashrate, which touched a record high of 41.81 Terrahash per second (TH/s) on Sept. 4. For the unversed, hashrate is the total computational power used to mine and process transactions on a PoW blockchain.