Author: Phil Stafford

Phil is a long-standing Australian journalist with specialised experience in business, finance, travel and popular culture.

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Bitcoin Mining Crypto News

BTC Mining Could Reduce Global Carbon Emissions By +5%

Bitcoin mining could reduce global carbon emissions by 5.32 percent over the next 23 years by aggressively targeting leaked methane, according to a report by New Zealand-based entrepreneur and ESG (environmental, social and governance) analyst Daniel Batten:

Batten claims that bitcoin mining is the only “technologically feasible” method of reducing methane emissions, and says the practice could potentially reduce global warming by up to 0.15 percent by 2045.

In February this year, digital asset management firm CoinShares produced its own report suggesting that bitcoin mining was responsible for less than 0.05 percent of global carbon emissions, a figure CoinShares described as “inconsequential”.

No Need for Carbon Credits or Tax Incentives

Another report released in April showed that power consumption levels associated with bitcoin mining had decreased by 25 percent in the first quarter of 2022, yet Batten’s report maintains that mining remains more effective than leveraging carbon credits.

“Bitcoin mining is the only way to combust leaking methane that is both economically and logistically feasible without carbon credits or the governments of major industrialised nations needing to issue tax incentives and funding in unison,” Batten’s report says.

Bitcoin mining has shown early evidence of being able to scale with an exponential growth rate.

Report by ESG analyst Daniel Batten

“It’s easy to make a premature and superficial assessment based only on energy consumption that bitcoin has a net negative environmental impact,” Batten’s report adds. “Such reasoning is flawed, since net impact can only be established by considering both environmental cost and benefit.”

Earlier in May, the Bitcoin Mining Council issued a stinging letter to the US Environmental Protection Agency in response to proposed increased regulation of bitcoin and proof-of-work consensus mechanisms. It was endorsed by 50 signatories, including Jack Dorsey and Michael Saylor, and pointed to misconceptions in the EPA’s original letter of complaint.

Chief among these was that “bitcoin mining facilities across the US are polluting communities and are making an outsized contribution to greenhouse gas emissions”.

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Crypto News Terra

Terra 2.0 to Relaunch on New Blockchain Without Algorithmic Stablecoin

On the eve of Terraform Labs’ May 27 second coming, to be known as Terra 2.0, trading platforms were said by Terra to be showing “overwhelming” support for the revival of the collapsed network by listing its new token as it completes its crawl from the wreckage.

No Fork for New Chain

The new chain will not be a fork, as previously proposed by Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon. It will be created instead from the genesis block and shares no history with Terra Classic, as the old chain has been dubbed. The new Terra token will be named LU, replacing the old token referred to as Luna Classic (LUNC):

Among the exchanges intending to cooperate with Terraform Labs in its new incarnation are HitBTC and Binance.

Earlier this month, a “heartbroken” Kwon flagged his intention to create a new Terra chain without Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST), suggesting LUNA airdrops across LUNC stakers and holders, UST holders and Terra Classic app developers.

Despite as many as 91 percent of network validators initially voting in favour of the Terra “rebirth” plan, Luna investors last week applied for seizure of Kwon’s property in a class-action lawsuit filed in the hope of offsetting their losses.

Second Vote Records Reduced Approval

Terra’s revival comes after Terraform Labs halted the Terra chain on May 12 following a massive network crash, with the Luna token plummeting as low as 99.7 percent and UST losing its peg to the US dollar. The revival plan is moving forward after a second vote by validators on May 25, this time with a 65 percent approval rating.

The supply of tokens on the new blockchain will be just over 116 million, according to developers. Investors who held over 10,000 LUNA tokens before UST’s implosion will receive the new tokens in instalments to prevent immediate sell-offs.

At the time of writing, LUNA was reportedly up over 6.2 percent in the previous 24 hours.

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Basic Attention Token Crypto News Privacy Solana Tokens

Brave Browser Update Expands Web3 Access to Solana

Privacy-focused browser Brave has partnered with Solana to facilitate Web3 for crypto newbies while also providing a robust suite of Web3 tools for advanced users.

Added Support for dApps

In what Brave describes as its first steps toward full integration with the Solana ecosystem, it will also offer support for Solana’s decentralised applications (dApps), allowing them to run natively within the browser.

Integration to be Completed by July

Addressing the Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Portugal earlier this week, Brave CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich said the browser’s default support for Solana would help provide fast and affordable Web3 access and thus “pave the way for the next billion crypto users”, adding that he expected the integration process to be completed by the end of June.

The partnership brings the Solana blockchain to Brave’s 42 million monthly active users and 1.3 million verified creators. In return, Solana will implement Themis, a privacy-by-design advertising protocol considered a key milestone in the BAT 2.0 roadmap.

The BAT token powers Brave’s advertising ecosystem by allowing advertisers to purchase ad space. Last year, Brave launched its Brave Wallet, incorporating a rewards program that allows users to recoup 20 percent of their swap fees.

Over the past week, the Solana (SOL) token became the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, overtaking Cardano and stablecoin provider Tether.

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Crypto Art Crypto News Hackers NFTs Scams

NFT Artist Beeple’s Twitter Account Hacked, $438k Lost in Phishing Scam

Digital artist and NFT creator Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, has been targeted in a serial phishing expedition that netted scammers a total of US$438,000.

Hackers Railroad Louis Vuitton Raffle

In a series of tweets over the weekend, purportedly from Beeple, links posted to a fake Louis Vuitton NFT raffle were made to capitalise on a recent real collaboration between Beeple and the luxury fashion brand.

Earlier this month, Beeple designed 30 NFTs for LV’s ‘Louis The Game’ mobile game, embedded as rewards to players. Scammers posted phishing links from Beeple’s Twitter account to fake Beeple collections that seduced unsuspecting users with the promise of a free mint for unique NFTs.

The phishing links were up on Beeple’s Twitter for several hours, with the first netting the scammers 36 ETH, or roughly US$73,000 at the time. The second link snared US$365,000 worth of ETH and NFTs, bumping the total value of the scam to about US$438,000.

Beeple later tweeted that he had regained control of his account and reminded his followers that “anything too good to be true IS A F*CKING SCAM”:

Beeple Makes Himself a Scam Magnet

Having created three of the top 10 most expensive NFTs released to date, including one that sold for US$69 million, Beeple has made himself a prime target for hacks. Last November, his installation artwork Human One, paired with an NFT, sold for almost US$29 million at auction. That same month, an admin account on the artist’s Discord channel was hacked, with users losing 38 ETH to a fake NFT drop remarkably similar to the latest exploit.

Earlier this month, Beeple made the news for an entirely different reason, partnering with pop icon Madonna on an explicit NFT collection that possibly raised more eyebrows than it did money.

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Bitcoin Crypto News Cryptocurrencies Investing

Why Bill Gates Won’t Invest in Crypto: ‘It Has No Valuable Output’

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the world’s fourth-richest man, has told a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session why he doesn’t see any point in investing in cryptocurrency.

“The value of companies is based on how they make great products,” Gates said. “The value of crypto is just what some other person decides someone else will pay for it, so it’s not adding to society like other investments.” He prefaced his comments on crypto by saying:

I don’t own any. I like investing in things that have valuable output.

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Gates has previously described crypto as one tech innovation the world would be better off without. As he noted in February last year: “The way cryptocurrency works today allows for certain criminal activities. It’d be good to get rid of that.”

Gates Echoes Warren Buffett

Gates is certainly not the first of the world’s super-rich to shun cryptocurrency. Billionaire Warren Buffett, CEO of American multinational Berkshire Hathaway, told the company’s annual meeting of shareholders in late April:

“Whether [crypto] goes up or down in the next year, or five or 10 years, I don’t know. But the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it doesn’t produce anything,” Buffett said. “It’s got a magic to it and people have attached magics to lots of things.”

Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman Charlie Munger was more scathing, about bitcoin in particular, telling the same meeting: “In my life, I try to avoid things that are stupid and evil and make me look bad … and bitcoin does all three.”

Munger didn’t stop there, either: “In the first place, it’s stupid because it’s still likely to go to zero. It’s evil because it undermines the [US] Federal Reserve System … and third, it makes us look foolish compared to the Communist leader in China [Xi Jinping]. He was smart enough to ban bitcoin in China.”

Never one to hold back, Munger told CNN earlier this year that bitcoin was “akin to a venereal disease”. And not to be outdone, Buffett has previously described crypto as “rat poison squared”.

Other Billionaires Are Bitcoin Fans

Not all billionaires share these extreme opinions, evidently. Several, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, regularly tweet their support of virtual currencies. And last year, Mexico’s third-richest man, Ricardo B. Salinas, invested 10 percent of his personal wealth – a staggering US$1.5 billion – into bitcoin.

As founder and chairman of Grupo Salinas, a group of companies with interests in telecommunications, media, financial services and retail stores, Salinas said bitcoin was “the best thing to put your money into”.

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Bitcoin Crypto News Ethereum Investing Markets Solana Terra

Crypto Retail Investors Drop to 24% of Volume, Indicator Still Showing ‘Extreme Fear’

Retail investors are deserting the crypto market, with just over three-quarters of Q1 2022 trading volume at Coinbase coming from institutional investors, according to the exchange’s most recent letter to shareholders.

Support for BTC, ETH Holds Up Amid Terra Bloodbath

In spite of the past week’s crypto market downturn precipitated by the collapse of Terra’s $LUNA and its UST stablecoin, institutional investors are banking on the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum rival Solana (SOL).

Latest analysis as per Bitcoin’s Fear & Greed Index. Source: alternative.me

According to CoinShares, BTC investment products saw US$45 million in inflows over seven days as assets under management fell to levels “seen during the lows in sentiment at the beginning of the year”.

Negative sentiment towards Ethereum contributed to outflows of US$12.5 million in the same period, bringing ETH outflows year-to-date to US$207 million, or 0.8 percent of assets under management.

Solana’s SOL the Sole Altcoin with ‘Substantial Inflows’

Last week, Ethereum rival Solana’s SOL was the “sole altcoin to see any substantial inflows”, totalling US$1.9 million.

With the price of bitcoin having shrunk more than one-third and the overall crypto market cap down by 38 percent, falling prices have led to unrealised losses for at least 40 percent of bitcoin investors.

Flying in the face of market gloom, the richest bitcoin whale splurged US$90 million on BTC in less than a month. Last week, blockchain intelligence platform IntoTheBlock disclosed that bitcoin whales collectively added to their holdings amid the crypto sell-off, with just over 50 percent of BTC holders still in profit.

Little over a month ago, US$250 billion was wiped from crypto’s market cap amid a welter of leveraged liquidations and general fear and uncertainty. After the storm comes the correction, as witnessed seven months ago when a US$840 million liquidity flush drained nearly US$400 billion from the market.

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Australia Crypto News Cryptocurrency Law Investing Regulation

Portugal’s Crypto Tax Haven Status Set to End, 28% Capital Gains Impost Coming Soon

Portugal’s Finance Minister Fernando Medina has confirmed that the southern European nation will begin taxing cryptocurrencies, reversing a six-year-old tax law that excluded crypto gains on the grounds that they are not legal tender.

The current capital gains tax rate for financial investment in Portugal is 28 percent. However, legislation relating to the introduction of such an impost on crypto could take two or more years to implement, given Portugal’s notoriously slow-moving bureaucracy:

Portugal’s altered tax stance will bring the country into line with many other nations around the globe. Among them are Australia – whose Tax Office earlier this week warned investors of the need to report annual crypto capital gains and losses – the UK and US.

Goodbye ‘Golden Visa’

Until now, Portugal has been seen as a crypto tax haven that offers permanent residency via what is known as the ‘Golden Visa’, because it grants holders special tax exemptions and a path to citizenship. The program was instituted as a means of attracting foreign investors, and in response to the country’s new tax plan, industry observer and cyber security professional Anthony Sassano saw the funny side:

Portugal may wish to take note of the fact that late last month, Panama passed a bill exempting crypto from capital gains tax, making the Central/South American republic a more attractive destination for digital asset investors.

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Crypto News NFTs

Spotify Starts Trialling NFTs on its Platform

Music streaming giant Spotify will soon allow artists to promote their NFTs on the platform, pending the results of a trial rollout.

Starting with a single pilot group of artists, among them American DJ/producer Steve Aoki and English indie band the Wombats, Spotify will test NFTs on the platform on behalf of “selected” US users.

Spotify Won’t Sell NFTs Directly, Nor Take a Cut of Sales

However, Spotify will not sell NFTs directly – users will need to tap through to an external marketplace to make purchases. The streaming platform says it will not take a cut of the sales as part of the test.

According to a Spotify spokesperson:

We routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve artist and fan experiences. Some of those tests end up paving the way for a broader experience and others serve only as an important learning.

Spotify spokesperson

Surveys Meet With Derision on Twitter

Users report that Spotify has also sent out surveys and even offered people compensation for chats with team members about their attitudes toward NFTs and Web3. Some of these survey questions have been met with outright derision on Twitter:

Spotify officially entered the Web3 world earlier this month with the May 3 launch of ‘Spotify Island‘ on Roblox. The move had been flagged back in March when the company posted two job ads related to working with early-stage Web3 projects.

Well might Spotify get on board with Web3, if only to compete with the likes of streaming app Audius, the world’s first fully decentralised music platform. Last year, pop superstar Katy Perry (and others) invested in a US$5 million funding round for the crypto-powered service. Interestingly, one of the other investors happens to be Steve Aoki.

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Australia Crypto News USD Coin Vitalik Buterin

UNSW Sydney Gets $4 Million Crypto Donation from Vitalik Buterin for AI-Powered Research

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has gifted US$4 million worth of USD Coin (USDC) to Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) to support the development of an artificial intelligence-based pandemic detection tool:

Buterin’s donation will underwrite the Shiba Inu Open-Source Intelligence-based EPIWATCH tool, which utilises AI and open-source data to create early pandemic warnings.

It’s all part of what Buterin describes as his “moonshot anti-Covid effort”, in partnership with the Shiba Inu memecoin project and the Crypto Relief fund, which was launched during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India last year.

Tool Scans Online Data for Covid Updates

EPIWATCH is the brainchild of Raina MacIntyre, professor and biosecurity research head at UNSW’s Kirby Institute, based at the university’s Sydney campus. The tool can scan millions of items of publicly available online data, including social media and news reports, to detect any changes that could suggest increasing Covid-related health concerns.

Raina MacIntyre, biosecurity research head, UNSW. Source: sph.med.unsw.edu.au

MacIntyre says the aim was to make the tool accessible at a “grassroots” level and make sure it covers enough languages to reach “villages and small towns around the world”. MacIntyre also eluded that “Imagine if someone had detected Covid-19 before it spread around the world – that is our vision. Using AI and real-time open-source data, EPIWATCH does not depend on people making reports. It is a great equaliser and can overcome weak health systems and censorship.”

Open-Source Approach Accelerates Pandemic Detection

In announcing his donation to the project, Buterin stressed the importance of sharing data in a decentralised and open manner to speed up pandemic detection:

[It’s] an excellent alternative to more intrusive forms of monitoring, which are also often only available to governments and other high bidders but closed to the public. By contrast, an open-source and open-access approach that allows researchers to work collaboratively across the world can be more easily improved and scaled to detect new pandemics wherever they begin.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder

Australian universities are at the forefront of crypto-related research designed to benefit humanity. Earlier this month, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University launched its Green Cryptocurrency Laboratory, which will focus on reducing crypto’s carbon footprint.

And last year, in response to an outbreak of fake Covid-19 vaccine certificates circulating on the web, Australian medical specialists called for a nationwide roll-out of a blockchain-based vaccine certificate system.

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Banking Bitcoin Crypto News Ethereum Trading

Brazil’s Largest Digital Bank Nubank Launches BTC and ETH Trading

Nubank, Brazil’s biggest digital bank by market volume, now allows customers to buy and sell bitcoin and ethereum on its Paxos-supported trading platform, as per a May 11 announcement.

The fintech will allocate one percent of its equity to bitcoin through its parent company, Nu Holdings Inc, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Nubank said the move seeks to “strengthen the company’s conviction in the current and future potential of bitcoin in disrupting financial services”.

Deal Gives BTC Exposure to Warren Buffett

Nubank’s treasury allocation to bitcoin gives indirect BTC exposure to old-school investor and Bitcoin critic Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The US holding company reportedly invested US$500 million in Nubank in June 2021, acquired 30 million shares for another $250 million as it went public in December, and recently doubled-down with a $1 billion investment in Brazilian fintech.

According to Paxos, users will be able to buy and sell crypto with Brazilian reals, but initially won’t be able to withdraw or deposit crypto. Until now, Nubank allowed users to invest in crypto only through exchange-traded funds available through its investment unit, NuInvest.

Brazil Experiencing Major Crypto Adoption Growth

Last month, Brazil edged closer to a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and along with neighbouring South American country Peru is looking to introduce a CBDC this year. And in March, Coinbase was reportedly on the verge of closing a deal to acquire 2TM, owner of Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

There is no doubt that crypto is a growing trend in Latin America, one that we have been following closely and believe will have a transformational impact on the region. Yet the trading experience is still very niche as customers either lack information to feel confident to enter this new market or just get frustrated by complex experiences.

David Vélez, CEO and co-founder, Nubank

In general, Brazil is experiencing major crypto adoption growth. Between January and November of 2021, locals reportedly traded US$11.4 billion in stablecoins, almost triple the amount traded the previous year.

In his capacity as Nubank boss, Vélez is clearly intent on demystifying crypto trading for the average Brazilian bank customer.