Hi everyone. Welcome to unconfirmed the show. That reveals how the Marquee names and crypto are reacting to the week's top headlines. You get the inside scoop on what they see on the horizon. I'm your host Laura Shin a journalist with over two decades of experience, I started covering crypto over five years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. You may have heard about inter pop a super Team Laser focused on the emerging.
In landscape of fandom. They are tapping into the latest Innovations in NF T's to revolutionize gaming, Collectibles and comics on. Tasos, learn more at hello, inter pop dot IO. The crypto.com ad, pays you up to 8.5 percent interest on your Bitcoin, get $25. When you download the crypto.com app with code, Laura, the link is in the description. Near is an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications overcoming
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Today's guest is Dan Finley, co-founder at Madam asked, welcome Dan.
Hey, thanks for having me. I'm Laura
metal mask, just passed a big milestone, five million monthly active users. Congratulations.
Yeah, thanks. It's been a long road and we're really, really proud and excited to have hit this Milestone.
Yeah. It is quite a milestone for an online wallet. It's something that requires a learning curve for people. So the fact that there are that many people who've done that, that is pretty
You saying, one other thing that I found really costing about this Milestone is that it wasn't that long ago. Just in October that metal mask cross 1 million monthly active users. So, how do you think you can tuck quintuple your active user base within the last seven
months? Well, I definitely think that there's been a combination of a few factors all coming together. Of course, everybody knows that nft would have been a really big cultural event and so nft participation I think brought a lot of people in I think it was a use case that people
'well, it was simple enough that it was engaging and and it was fun and you didn't have to like read a white paper to you know, appreciate some art. And then at the same time we're seeing like the rise and emergence of a lot of aetherium compatible, other blockchains side, chains and layer, 2 networks coming about and that's really increasing the scalability of the entire platform. So while during, you know, last summer defy was having a really, really hard
Moment the defy, the defy trading, boom was clearly driven by a much smaller. Number of users that were getting really into, you know, liquidity, providing and derivatives trading and investing in lending in ways that it was very capital-intensive so they could justify really high transaction fees, but that was also kind of ensuring that a long tail of users were not going to come in during that time, but having a use case, that's as accessible as nft. He's at the same time as we
Had scalability Solutions starting to come online. I think was a really perfect storm for a lot of people to get an opportunity to get into it. Have it affordable enough even have a way that anybody could start making money, you know, and ft is as a way for artists to make money immediately, you know, now it's not just people programming solidity, who are doing token sales. You've got, you know, just artists with the following,
Yeah. And what are some examples of the scaling Solutions or products and services that you feel like have lowered Gatsby's enough to drawn many more people?
Well obviously there's a lot of there are some kind of, let's say a more centralized side chains but there's also a varying degrees of of one. So things like mattock and things like, you know, XII are still strong and and we're really looking forward to optimism and
ZK sink and eventually we are very eager to support a more Stark and snark based scaling Solutions like Stark where to but yeah, those ones things like mattock. And next I have definitely been providing a lot of platforms so
far.
Yeah, and Maddock I guess now goes by polygon.
So and so before we dive even further into all this let's just make sure that you know, for any listeners who aren't familiar that they understand what menem ask is. Can you just describe what mad at mask is and what it
does?
Sure, a metal mask started as a browser extension. Now it's also a mobile wallet that let you connect two applications that might have some amount of their logic that lives on a blockchain. And that part of the logic is usually the value sensitive part. So it could be like a token, or it could be an mft or it could be your voting rights in an organization and So Meta. Mask is the thing that lets a user hold their own Keys, which means they're really kind of personally in control of
Our accounts and now they're able to engage with these decentralized applications, that just weren't even a category 5 years
ago.
Yeah, it's quite similar to my either wallet or my crypto for people who are familiar. But yeah, the the fact of it starting as a web extension, I think is sort of how I always think of it.
And so what kind of users does metal mask typically attract?
We actually have a very, very diverse kind of user base. Both across use cases and across like demographics. We actually just completed a partnership with this organization called emerging impact where they did a bunch of user research where they interviewed something like 300 people around the world. They're doing a lot in Indonesia and IG Ria and in South America. And
Because we've been seeing that, for example, what is it? India and Indonesia are both broke into the top five countries but we haven't really been doing any Outreach there so we wanted to better understand like what's driving this in Indonesia and actually we have a seminar coming up on May 5th and you can find that on our Twitter where we're going to be sharing a lot of that research, and talking about the use cases, that that people in Emerging Markets or are finding for metamath, a lot of it was just having access to funds that they
To control over there's different situations, where people don't have access to banking, or that's, that's valuable. But it even aside from the emerging marketing, obviously, defy was a big thing in the summer and that continues to be a big thing. And if T's are thing, they continue to be a big thing. There are people trying out, lots of new organizations and dowse. And you know, I like seeing all these experiments, you know, I got into this largely because I, you know, I think our society has a lot of trust problems, and I don't have
Magic wand for a solution, but I thought we needed a platform where we could iterate on on Creative Solutions. And I think that's part of why it's powerful. And I think that's part of why it's hard to pin down the use case because I think we have a lot of things we're trying to work through and that requires a lot of iteration and experimentation. So so I don't think we can really pin down. A single use case is Domino and not to mention gaming, like there's a whole category of gaming where the Collectibles are portable between games and and auction formats and stuff. So yeah.
Spread around a lot and it is often surprising us. It's not all stuff that we anticipated on and we really worked hard to make sure that our wallet is kind of general purpose enough, that it can serve this kind of constantly evolving, set of use cases, rather than just try to pin down his particular customer segment.
Yeah. And for listeners who are interested, I did interview Robbie Ferguson of immutable X recently or immutable and they launched a layer to solution called immutable X. And I also,
Viewed. Marguerite, take her cell of me and restrict /, blockade games and both of them are in that Block Chain gaming space. So if, you know, just out of curiosity, when you talked about how you haven't done marketing for metal mask in the developing world, and yet enough people are using it there. That now some countries, like India and Indonesia are in the top 5 of users. I mean, granted, of course, India is the second most populated country, the world and Indonesia is the fourth was
Populated, but I was curious. How did you find out how it was that those users had found out about a
mask. Yeah. What it the if I had to put a blanket trend on it it's people introducing each other it's not about yeah I don't know the central exchange or you know somebody going through and Hawking. It's everybody it's it's there's usually somebody who's an early adopter in a community who's doing the research and they may have gotten into it early and they may have had some success and right around now.
Friends are asking them how to get involved too and so I think we're seeing a lot of kind of Grassroots education and I think that that's great and I think we're going to continue trying to Target the Grassroots kind of virality approach. I don't think we will ever be able to serve people, as well as they'll be able to serve each other. So as much as we can just facilitate that kind of activity, I think is the best thing a crypto wallet like us can aspire to
And it, did you see if there was a difference in the type of usage, in the developing World versus and that more developed, or is it what you were saying about just accessing their funds that they
control? Yeah, you know, the use cases weren't as different as a lot of people thought they would be. So, one of the things that I think was interesting as a lot of people have a narrative like, oh, and developing nations. They just want stable currencies, like if they just got access to die, they'd be happy or something like that. But what we saw is people are happy to investigate
Crypto, like they are here for the games to, you know, so they're not trying to not trying to just a pin two things, they're trying to do the research and understand things, but they're trying to make informed decisions in and educate each other and read up. And and so I really do think there's like just kind of this booming. Enthusiasm to learn more make better informed decisions. There was a lot of peer-to-peer educating about avoiding scams and fissures and I think that was a really good healthy sign, you know, we know
Fishers are a serious problem and fissures know that crypto users, you know, you've got money. That's yours and it's digital. Like it's a it's a ripe place to see if people. But fortunately, you know, I think that there's also like a bit of a Grassroots immune system kicking Into Gear 2 and it was really great to see that also happening.
Yeah, clearly some of the Echoes of 2017 are reverberating out into 2021, all right, so in a moment we're going to
Got some of the new features and services of metal mask. But first, a quick word from this one sees make this show possible.
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Back to my conversation with sand Finlay. One of the newer features that many masks adopted was swaps in October. 20 2010 was how that works and what the user uptake has been and what people have been using swaps for
Boom. So swaps is a a tool that we added to the wallet that helps users discover. What's likely the best trade? They can make at any given time given an asset pair of they're trying to exchange. So we scan liquidity sources from a wide variety of dex's and decks aggregators. And what we found is often times were able to find depending on the pear and the depth that the person's trying to trade were often able to find a particular trade route. That, you know, the user wouldn't think of on
Own and then let them make that trade on their own. We are taking a small fee on that and it meant that we've had our first Revenue stream and that's been really, really valuable because it's meant. We've been able to staff up and actually start improving the wallet in ways that we have been a bit more constrained to previously.
And metal mask has been around since May 2016. What have been the pivotal moments for gaining new
users?
Yeah. Well I think it all started with a couple tutorials about how to how to build an application for aetherium and how to connect it to metal mask. There were obviously a lot of experiments people trying to figure out the best use cases. I think that games started really Paving a lot of ground for user experience and watching transactions. A little better when people started doing lending for the first time. I think the landing protocol is like started breaking way to the idea that you
And you can deposit, one token and, and get another one and, you know, so you kind of start to get the beginning of derivatives trading. I continuously love all the work on contract accounts. They're coming along way. A lot of the proliferation of nft is this year which has been a lot of the success is the fact that there's like five viable, nft platform. So, all in hot competition, and they're competing for artists interest in distribution. And I think that, that plays a major role in this particular run for
Sure, I'll indexes, of course, you know, like yeah, like automated market, makers and stuff. Like, like having one, click trading, has been huge and we wouldn't have been able to create our swaps product. If there hadn't been such a rich ecosystem of dex's for us to draw on, you know, it's a kind of product. We couldn't have launched on our own. It's like the culmination of a lot of other people helping.
Yeah, it's pretty meta actually, because I mean sorry, not not to make a funny pun on your
Name. But because if you're not only aggregating the different dex's, but then even the Ducks aggregators, it's just, you know, I can't think of an equivalent because it's not quite kayak, but whatever is above kayak. So anyway, I found that interesting and I just wanted to ask also because NF teas are drawing in quite a different crowd from the typical crypto crowd and I wondered for that crowd. Have you noticed any particular challenges with them and using?
Damask. And if so, how are you either modifying, the wallet in order to accommodate them or how are you trying to get the word out about educating them about, how to use it.
Yeah. So some of the, some of the two biggest short-term problems that we're working hard on addressing right now, are about scalability, so making it easier and easier to use the theorem compatible chains and layer twos and then just security because while you know, users have been able to wield private key.
Safely, you know, new users are the most vulnerable. And so, we're really kind of redoubling and her tumbling, our efforts, to improve our onboarding education and improving in app education, just really, trying to protect users from Fisher's as much as possible. The Fishers are very alive and they're they're coming after all crypto users. I know it's sometimes perceived as just a private key based account issue. But, you know, if you ever have
Control of funds that are digital. People will try to trick you into sending them to you. So I think this is like a critical moment for the internet to start growing up about how people discover information. A lot of the problems stem from people, searching Google for support just things as simple as that. The the habituation towards the search engine so we're fighting a big battle but I think it's I think it's the right fight and I think in the long term if we're going to have digital currency we need people finding the trustworthy.
Getting information for what they're investing in and how they're handling it. So so that's one of our big fights. This this quarter Fishers were coming for you. I hope you've enjoyed the ride
and it when you say that, is it just about the information or you also changing the wallet in some way
or
Yeah, no, no. I mean we've been doing a lot of different research on ways of changing the world for I do. I so, so we're both of course, doing some improved education. We are also continuing our extensibility project which is going to let us integrate more and more account types. So we are interested in facilitating. Let's say multisig multi-factor, type accounts, but partly because there are different kinds of cryptography for different protocols and different scaling Solutions.
There isn't exactly a one-size-fits-all solution to those problems. So we're, you know, working hard to be a kind of wallet that can let users opt into the types of risks that they want to take. So there's a longer story, we're doing this year which is we are working on this extensibility system that we hope will let users lock down their accounts even more. But it's still always starts with education and making sure users aren't you know trusting the wrong
people.
And for listeners. Just a multisig while it is, of course, one where it requires multiple signatures for instance 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 5 but is multi-factor, you know, just like with any web service where you know it's like a password and a code sent to your phone or the password in a yubikey or something. Is that what you mean by that
multi-factor?
Yeah yeah and the cool thing about in crypto is you know, because they're just cryptographic Keys, you can kind of choose your own multi-factor solution, you can pick what devices you want and so you know we start with the user having full control but they can distribute it in whatever way they want. Unlike traditional to factor where you are, still just validating your identity. To a particular server is still kind of a single source of Truth there.
And so earlier you mentioned that swaps have brought in revenue for the first time for you. Can you give us any figures on how much you are pulling in.
So we did publish a dashboard, I don't have it right now but we surpassed a total of 2 billion dollars swapped so that's not Revenue but that's how much has been traded the the math isn't totally trivial to get a revenue because we have made some Partnerships with dex's so that we're not adding a fee to them, but yeah.
And it's been substantial, you know, for the size of team that we are that we are, it's been very encouraging and you know, very motivating. And so we're just we're just going to be doing more
and so other than some of the other improvements that you discussed, what else are you going to do next with metal
mask?
We're doing, we're going to be doing quite a bit, the tip of the iceberg. So I mean, we're working obviously on layer 2 and and I talked a little bit about that the first phase of that is just making it easy to to add and switch between different Ledger's. We are also working on a lot of kind of deep user experience challenges. So we have staffed up and added a lot of designers who are a team. We've been doing a lot of design research and we're working on making sure that not only are we adding all these
Additional Ledger's. But we're making sure that the wallet continues to be coherent and even dare say simple in the context of what's under the hood and increasingly complicated situation, I think we're going to be an increasingly multi chain wallet you know this year and we've got a couple kinds of new variants of the product coming out this year that are going to let us iterate an experiment even faster.
Which I think is going to be really great because this ecosystem has no no end to its appetite for experimentation. So I think we're going to be we're going to be creating a pipeline where we can validate proposals experiment with them and Implement them in the wallet a lot faster. So I think we're going to be kicking in a lot of faster Innovation. A lot of that in service of our extensibility system, our sensibility system is going to let eventually, anyone add new block change to the wallet.
Even ones, we didn't design to and new account types, and like, multi cigs contract accounts and and voting rights in an organization Etc. Hardware wallets. The list is really, really long. So yeah, that's that's kind of what's going on for us. It's actually quite a long road map II. Hope I didn't summarize it to pithily then we're really excited about it. We think that we're going to help turn what's today? A kind of rudimentary.
Photographic way of interacting with applications and we're going to establish kind of the new way of engaging with, you know, untrusted second parties. Like our goal is, you know, look, we're going to we're going to decentralize digital Authority and we want to be the wallet that people use to make deals
and to last quick question. So you've been using this word extensibility, and from the way you're using it, I'm guessing it's kind of like allowing the user to customize
- you know, to turn it into a multisig if they want or to just add more security or is that what you mean by that?
Yeah. Yeah. We've the same way. You know, the ethereum blockchain is interesting because people can deploy new contracts to it. We want our wallet to be the kind of thing where you can deploy new features into it. It's kind of like your own personal blockchain. You can think of it as except it has hooks where it could potentially enhance your user experience. It could maybe add extra security indications when you're interacting with
Things. It could even include your friends recommendations of things you're interacting with. I think that it's really going to be the beginning of a whole new chapter you know extensibility at the blockchain layer is really valuable but it just hasn't really been accessible to the end-user yet. You know there's still like every time a new contract comes out, you're waiting for this long pipeline of people to make an interface for it and then make a wallet integration for it and so on and so forth. We're going to just shorten that bridge and so the pipeline
Innovation to your hands. As like, you know, any any user is going to get really short. And I think we're going to, we're going to answer a time of a, very exciting and interesting creativity.
So, super interesting. And then, when you said you were going to add other block chains, which do you think are at the top of the list
through extensibility, we should be able to support any blockchain. We are working with a variety of different groups. We're working with groups to make sure that we're covering a general use case. Yeah. I
I don't know if we have like any arrangements or commitments. Yet we have been working with file coin, that's actually, that's totally public. We've got to file coin beta. So there's a beta version of metal mask that developers can download today that supports file coin. So that's a good example of one, you know, if if you had file coin in your crypto wallet that can connect applications, then that means you could upload things and pay for things to get persistently hosted in a decentralized network, from your wallet, or you could commit to the hosting, something for someone,
And then writing contracts that relate to file presence and Etc. It kind of opens up another dimension to Smart contracts and you know the more the more other purpose-driven blockchains we had, I think they'll really have compounding effects in the way that they interact with each other.
Well, this is just super fascinating and I'm so glad that we checked in with you and it I look forward to hearing what you guys are up to next. So thank you so much for coming on unconfirmed
cool. Thanks so much for having me.
Don't forget, next up is the Weekly News recap stick around for this week in crypto after this short break did you know nearly three hundred and thirty eight million dollars worth of the NF T's were sent last year and in 2021, that number is growing faster than ever. If you're looking to make your first
Ft check out nears fast. Scalable low-cost open source platform, near is investing 80 million near tokens and Community lead projects over the course of five years to power sustainable, Innovation through its ecosystem with fundraising opportunities, and support for Dows, and daps to engage fans, and reach new audiences come learn. Why near is the infrastructure for Innovation at any a.org?
Thanks for tuning in to this week's news recap first headline.
Bitcoin institutional adoption strengthens as Bitcoin ETF is delayed sources. Tell coin desk that JPMorgan Chase will be offering an actively managed Bitcoin fund to certain clients. As soon as this summer marking, an about-face for the company, led by CEO, Jamie dimon who infamously called Bitcoin, a fraud back in 2017 and ydg. A Bitcoin Cedric investment firm will serve as the funds custody provider
Asian video game publisher necks on a publicly traded company announced, the purchase of roughly 100 million dollars worth of bitcoin. The allocation represents about two percent of its total cash and cash equivalents as of December 2020, the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Delayed its ruling on Van X Bitcoin, ETF, application, extending. The original 45-day decision window to 90 days. The new deadline is set for June 17th, though. It could be further.
Aid to Encompass 240 days, the extension should not come as a surprise. The Securities regulator has delayed other between ETF proposals each ending in rejection.
Next headline, Tesla sold ten percent of its Bitcoin position. A q1 earnings report showed that Tesla generated 100 million dollars in income from the sale of Bitcoin helping boost profits to a quarterly record high to start 2021 the electric vehicle company's original purchase of 1.5 billion dollars in Bitcoin is currently valued a 2.48 billion dollars even with the sale bar stool CEO. Dave, Portnoy acting as a stand-in for crypto day Traders.
And people who don't know how to hottel, tweet it at musk. So, am I understanding this correctly, Elon Musk buys Bitcoin? Then he pumps it, it goes up, then he dumps it and makes a fortune. Listen, I own one Bitcoin but Bitcoin is exactly who we thought it was. Just don't be last one houghtaling, the bag musk responded. No, you do not. I have not sold any of my Bitcoin Tesla sold 10% of its Holdings essentially.
To prove liquidity of the coin, as an alternative to holding cash on balance sheet. Bloomberg columnist, Matt Levine, noted that Tesla's Chief Financial Officer, Zachary Kirk horn, discuss Bitcoin liquidity a lot on the call as Levine put it quote Tesla decided to put a chunk of its corporate cash in a Bitcoin and I guess needed to make sure that its money wasn't trapped a reasonable concern. He then brought up the accounting rules that can be a negative for companies holding
Bitcoin on their balance sheets. He says, quote, when your Bitcoins go up, you don't book a gain, but when they go down, you do book a loss, the only way to book a gain on Bitcoins, is to sell them. The upshot he says, is that quote, if you are Elon Musk and you can make Bitcoin go up by tweeting about it, you almost have an obligation to do it. Perhaps a fiduciary obligation to your shareholders, but at least a sort of
aesthetic obligation to Comedy. If the coin wants musk to manipulate, it must really ought to manipulate it. Speaking of the coin, I recommend to Long reads this week, April 26th was the 10th anniversary of satoshi's last known communication with the Bitcoin community in Bitcoin magazine. Kraken editor-at-large Pete, reso analyzes. The last days of Satoshi when there was Reserve writes quote, a growing belief stronger perhaps
Then any confidence in Satoshi himself that no Bitcoin user could be greater or less than any other that they are were all nodes on the network authors of code individuals responsible, for the software success.
Alex class Dean Chief strategy officer at the human rights Foundation, wrote about the hidden cost of the waning petrodollar and its impact on us, fiscal policy, and political power, the petrodollar, by the way, is a u.s. dollar paid to a petroleum exporter in exchange for oil gladstein believes a transition to a Bitcoin standard from the petrodollar quote plays to the strengths of open societies, does not depend on dictators or fossil fuels and is ultimately run by citizens, not the in
French Elite.
X headline ether reaches a new all-time high after hitting $2,600. For the first time last week, either soared to a new all-time high over 2700 dollars on Wednesday afternoon, coinciding with the all-time high, the European Investment Bank. The eu's Lending arm announcement, used aetherium, to issue 121 million dollars in digital notes. Here's how it works. The eib issues, a series of on tokens on. Ethereum investors purchase.
And pay for the bond tokens and Fiat. The money used to purchase. The bonds has Minted as a CBC on aetherium and then the principal is paid in Fiat at maturity to CBC holders.
Next headline, aetherium 2.0 updates, last Friday, aetherium creator of atollic, butyrin outlined the development roadmap for East 2.0, his plan would see a theory of evolved into a full proof of stake watching. Implement sharding. Strategies to improve throughput and tweak security measures for the better.
On Saturday, etherium 2.0 had its first major incident. When a bug was discovered that prevented a large set of validators from producing blocks validators, our users staking 32, 'if or more on ethereum 2.0 to power, the proof of stake blockchain. The bug was passed after 403 blocks and cause little disruption outside of certain validators losing out on block Rewards.
Next headline, Finance, smart chain Announcement, marred by 50 million dollar, hack and potential violation. Crypto Currency Exchange, Finance plans to launch an mft Marketplace that will run on its etherium competitor. The finance. Marching that announcement was overshadowed by a, by Nance, smart chain, dap, uranium Finance, losing 50 million dollars in a potential rug. Pull several tokens including Bitcoin. And ether were drained from the protocol early Wednesday due to a bug.
That allow the exploiter to use a swap function to steal the funds. Furthermore, by Nance's recent release of stock tokens that track Tesla, coinbase, and microstrategy, stock caught, the ire of Germany's Financial supervisory Authority boffin as being suspicious. The exchange can occur up to six million dollars in fines. 3% of finances, annual revenue Regulators in the UK and law firms. In Hong Kong have already questioned the legitimacy of the stock tokens.
In related news, Brian, Brooks the soon-to-be CEO of Finance. Us has Grand plans to build the exchange as a coin based competitor and Out of The Shadow of its parent company by Nance. He is determined to expand the exchanges, reach across the u.s. Brooks told the block that his quote priority is doing what is necessary to get, what needs to be done on licenses for states were by Nancy. Wes is currently unavailable such as Texas and New York amongst others. Brooks said he believes that if the
Firm quote, just added those days and nothing else. The business would probably devil next headline. Payment platforms, continue to embrace crypto. In an earnings call earlier this week, Visa CEO, Alfred Kelly described the firm as quote extremely well, positioned to achieve its cryptic goals related to a multi-pronged strategy, including Bitcoin, Services, stable coins and cdc's.
MasterCard was revealed as the partner for Gemini's upcoming credit card which will offer rewards and crypto for cardholders. Gemini is the crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins. In a recent profile by Time Magazine. PayPal CEO? Dan Shulman said quote Demand, on the crypto side has been multiple folds, what we initially expected? There's a lot of excitement, paxos the blockchain infrastructure, company powering PayPal and then was crypto offerings raised 300.
Dollars CEO Charles Camilla. Is optimistic about paxos is growth. Telling the block quote, we thought we could add one customer the size of PayPal this year. I think we can add three to five, by the way, for those of you who are interested, I am conducting a chat between a CEO Charles Camilla and Robin Hood. CEO Vlad attentive on Tuesday and I will put the link to that talk in the show notes, so you can register for that. Next headline nft is filled
Otis ISM from our collectors. The New York Times reports old school art, collectors are reticent to join. The blockchain are crazy over concerns about the quality ownership and authenticity of n of t. S critics of entities wonder about the exclusivity of an N of T. Which anyone can see online along with, as one putted the quote enormous unresolved copyright issues. By the way, I do have an episode on that that came out recently. You can also check the show notes for that.
However, the nyt sites artists excited to produce digital content on the blockchain and art galleries, adding entities to exhibits. Positives aside, Tina, Rivers, Ryan of the albright-knox art gallery, said it best quote, the 69 million dollar question is whether this is going to become another hype cycle, like virtual reality wasn't 2016 or like net, art was before the.com bubble burst in 2001.
Next headline, the alleged administrator of Bitcoin fog is arrested. The coin fog was one of the first Bitcoin washing machines. A service designed to help anonymize crypto currency transactions by mixing. Use our funds on Tuesday, us officials arrested Roman Sterling off the alleged administrator of Bitcoin, fog, on money, laundering related charges, the IRS used an analysis of Bitcoin transactions, along with other investigative information to identify Sterling off.
More than 1.2 million. BTC was sent through Bitcoin fog worth 336 million dollars at the time. According to wired at least seventy eight million dollars, pass through the mixer to Illegal Market places such as Silk Road,
All right, time for fun bits. This article was a terrible idea. The financial times published an article titled, a Bitcoin ETF is a terrible idea. Saying that for ETFs quote, the assets need to be liquid to. That could be a problem with Bitcoin, the supply of which is capped at 21 million coins in a market plunge, investors could find themselves locked into the shares.
All I have to say to this is that maybe before publishing something in an international newspaper, it's a good idea to do some research on it. First second fun bits, which is more fun, vacation and using Bitcoin Paradise is on its way, the one back way development, were 39 luxury, villas are set to be built in the Caribbean and tends to become the world's first fully Bitcoin enabled Community. People will be able to pay for property in Bitcoin at while
also using BTC for everyday essentials like groceries, paying it restaurants and movie theaters.
The property owner storm gonzalvez says, the adoption of VDC is more necessity than gimmick. Citing banking, challenges arising from small island nations sending, and receiving money internationally because of de-risking by large International Banks. Okay, well thanks for tuning in. To learn more about Dan and meta mask, be sure to check out the links in the show. Notes follow and change on Twitter ad Unchained underscore pod where you can find all sorts of content ranging from My Weekly Newsletter.
As letter to updates on my upcoming book and a whole lot more on confirmed is produced by me. Laura Shin without from Anthony Yoon, Mark Murdock and Daniel Ness. Thanks for listening.