Decentral Block Post

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

Anonymous hacker served with restraining order via NFT

In what’s perhaps an industry first, an anonymous defendant in an exchange-hacking legal case has received a temporary restraining order via NFT. The defendant is part of legal proceedings surrounding the January 2022 LCX exchange hack. Two legal firms served the “service token” NFT to the defendant as a restraining order, with the event touted as the first official NFT usage in the legal world.

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

Anonymous hacker served with restraining order via NFT

In what’s perhaps an industry first, an anonymous defendant in an exchange-hacking legal case has received a temporary restraining order via NFT. The defendant is part of legal proceedings surrounding the January 2022 LCX exchange hack. Two legal firms served the “service token” NFT to the defendant as a restraining order, with the event touted as the first official NFT usage in the legal world.

Automated market makers are a true public good in crypto, enabling genuinely decentralized trading 24/7 and supporting the wider DeFi ecosystems. But they’re not without a host of problems, writes digital economist and academic Christos A. Makridis.

The decentralized finance (DeFi) market has surged since 2021, growing from just over $20 billion to nearly $160 billion as of March 2022, compared with a rise in the total cryptocurrency market from $433 billion to $2.5 trillion over the same period.

While the recent crypto washout in the wake of the collapse of Terra’s LUNA and UST has caused the market value of DeFi to fall almost all the way back down to $60 billion, there is still optimism in the crypto community and the market value will largely return for major crypto assets in the months and years ahead.

Walking into Remote and Digital’s La Casa co-working space on the tropical island of Koh Pha-ngan, you wonder how anybody gets any work done. I sip a cocktail and wait for my burrito as James Brown plays in the background.

There’s a real palm tree growing at the edge of the cafe, and behind it sits shallow crystal blue water stretching off for miles, with Koh Samui’s jungle-covered mountains jutting up in the distance. Adding to the ambiance, kite surfers are getting massive air off small waves, before gently floating back to earth.

30-year-old Belgian blockchain developer Jérôme Van Vlierbergen is one of the regulars at this Ban Tai co-working space and runs his Equinox Launchpad here. He explains Koh Pha-ngan (or Koh Phangan) has a thriving crypto scene, mostly populated by digital nomads like himself.

“There are a bunch of people here that own crypto or they’re doing something with crypto — because when you have money, you like to be somewhere where it’s a nice place to live.”

Ironically, of course, you need very little money to live here. You can rent a desk at La Casa for less than $3 a day, rent a scooter to get around for under $4 a day, and rent a whole house for $500 a month. With beautiful food, postcard-style views and half a dozen other coworking spaces with gigabit internet, it’s no wonder Koh Pha-ngan has become something of a mecca for crypto digital nomads.

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes!

This week, our 6 Questions go to Nikki Farb — an active investor and advisor to technology companies who is currently a venture partner at Headline, a venture capital firm.

I invest in consumer tech (with a real love for marketplaces) and Web3. I’ve invested in Consensys (MetaMask), AfterParty, Fractal, Aloft, Wander, MarketerHire, SudShare and a few others I can’t share just yet. 

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

Fed money printer goes into reverse: What does it mean for crypto?

Over the last two years or so, the United States Federal Reserve has flooded the financial system with excess liquidity — benefiting stocks, crypto and other markets as well. Now, the Fed is going in the opposite direction in order to combat inflation. In addition to raising interest rates, the central bank has begun the process of quantitative tightening (QT). It’s not entirely clear how the crypto markets will respond to the Fed’s QT efforts, but the short-term outlook probably isn’t good for risk assets.

Scott Melker, better known as The Wolf of All Streets, is a trader and crypto advocate who is far more approachable than his online handle might suggest. A former DJ, Melker operates a small crypto advocacy empire spanning YouTube videos, podcasts and a popular newsletter.

Scott Melker is open about his initial intentions in the crypto industry. “I simply came to trade and make money,” he admits, getting involved after hearing friends go on about the gold-paved streets of the blockchain world where 100x weekly returns were common. Being familiar with the more conservative movements of the stock markets since childhood, Melker was lucky to learn proper trading before entering the unregulated crypto casino.

“XRP was like a penny or something then,” he recalls. Crypto was also popular in the DJ community, something Melker attributes to the community’s risk-taking nature. He attributes his success to lucky timing in early 2016, soon cashing out his initial investment to play with his winnings.

“There was this sort of groundswell in the DJ community. They understand technology, and they’re kind of wild and speculative. That’s how I first discovered it.”

The crypto beats stopped soon enough. The 2018 bear market meant that “If you wanted to stick around, you really had to justify it to yourself, and you probably went way further down the rabbit hole to understand the importance of the movement,” Melker explains. He began to truly appreciate Bitcoin’s fundamentals and “understand the purpose of individual altcoins.”

In the precariousness of Web3 open-source code, iterative development and “move fast” ethos, things break. And through breaking, things are also made. A new project allows anyone to create a copy of someone else’s NFT, aptly named “Mimics.”

But how does Mimics work, and what does it mean for the NFT art market to have a new variety of fakes? And will it result in token standards being upgraded and improved?

I met the anonymous founder of Mimics in a “Web3” office that was brimming with software developers writing lines of code as they nodded their heads in time to deep house and sipped cups of tea.

On semi-regular occasions, I drop in to visit some local devs in the blockchain space and learn more about what they are working on. They have always been welcoming and jovial, inviting me to share in their ritualistic Friday afternoon “meme creation hour” and have a go at spinning the in-office DJ decks.

We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes!

This week, our 6 Questions go to Andrew Levine, CEO of Koinos Group, which is focused on accelerating the transition to a more decentralized future by helping entrepreneurial developers, entrepreneurs and enterprises build disruptive blockchain-based solutions.

Andrew leads a team of industry veterans accelerating decentralization through accessible blockchain technology. Their foundational product is Koinos, a feeless blockchain with infinite upgradeability and a proof-of-burn consensus.

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

Andreessen Horowitz closes $4.5 billion crypto fund amid market turmoil

Venture capital player Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, has unveiled a new $4.5 billion cryptocurrency fund. The a16z fund is the fourth of its kind and more than double the amount of its third crypto investment fund. With $3 billion earmarked for venture investments and $1.5 billion for early-seed projects, the fund will look to invest in companies at various stages in their life cycle. Andreessen’s new fund provides a strong indicator that venture capital interest in the crypto market remains high despite evidence of a brutal bear market.

Stablecoins provide a false sense of security. They give the impression to the uninitiated and/or uncaring that a particular coin is pegged to the U.S. dollar, or an equivalent of the dollar in terms of value and stability, and that if you want to convert your stablecoin to dollars, you can do so easily and instantaneously. Yet, they do no such thing, as demonstrated by the recent collapse of Terra and its TerraUSD stablecoin and LUNA token and also made clear in September 2008 by the collapse of the Reserve Primary Fund money market fund during the height of the global financial crisis.

Powers On… is a monthly opinion column from Marc Powers, who spent much of his 40-year legal career working with complex securities-related cases in the United States after a stint with the SEC. He is now an adjunct professor at Florida International University College of Law, where he teaches a course on “Blockchain & the Law.” 

So, I now unequivocally state what is obvious: If you are an owner of or investor in any cryptocurrencies, you need to understand this lack of protection and safeguard the portion of your wealth held in digital assets. You can protect these assets by keeping them in cold digital wallets, on exchanges registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or with another entity regulated by the SEC, CFTC or Treasury. Even entities and exchanges with BitLicenses, such as Coinbase and Gemini, may not provide sufficient protection.