BitGo: Crypto Water Cooler — May 1
GM. It’s Wednesday, May 1.
Newsmakers
Impact of MiCA Will Unfold in Slow Motion
Hailed as groundbreaking, MiCA — the comprehensive EU-wide crypto regulations approved in June 2023 — has not yet impacted the market. According to the European Securities and Market Authority (ESMA), Euro denominated crypto transactions stand at 10%, where they were before MiCA passage.
The devil, it seems, is in the technical details, which ESMA is working out in three phases over the next eighteen months with the first phases going live in June 2024. One more piece fell into place last week when the European Parliament approved stronger anti-money laundering requirements for crypto.
Platforms will need to gather more user and transaction data, monitor non-custodial wallets more closely, and report suspicious activities to authorities. Privacy tokens and crypto mixers will be banned. The Parliament eliminated a provision putting a 1,000 € ($1,080) transaction limit on self-hosted wallets.
The measure must be adopted by the Council of the European Union and published in the EU Office Journal — and won’t come into effect as a MiCA component for another three years. A new agency, the Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism, has been created to oversee implementation.
Euro denominated crypto activity is anticipated to increase as MiCA goes into full effect. EU banks are already preparing. According to 2023 research, Europe leads the world in crypto-friendly banks — fifty-five of them in comparison to Asia’s twenty-four and North America’s twenty-three — and, with MiCA coming into effect, more are now considering entering the crypto space.
Read more →Crypto.news
Is TPS Past Its Prime? It’s Complicated.
More than any other metric, TPS (transactions per second) is used to compare the merits of various blockchains. Back when crypto aspired to be currency, this measure was all that mattered. With traditional payment networks like Visa claiming a capacity of 65,000+ TPS, getting the Bitcoin network beyond seven transactions per second and Ethereum beyond thirteen was a huge driver of innovation.
Now with newer chains like Solana and Sui claiming throughput of 65,000 TPS and 297,000 TPS respectively, TPS is becoming less relevant and even misleading, argues Felix Ng in Cointelegraph Magazine.
One critique is that TPS claims are often theoretical — in crypto and TradFi alike. For example, Solana’s 65,000 TPS has been achieved during benchmark testing; the network routinely handles less than 3,000 TPS. In reality, even Visa is typically only processing 1,700 transactions per second.
And, not all transactions are created equal. Innovations such as smart contracts, account abstraction, and transaction bundling all require more computing power than voting or moving coins. TPS fails to account for these differences. Looking at the raw TPS number is like “counting the number of bills in your wallet but ignoring that some are singles, some are twenties, and some are hundreds,” says Steven Goldfender, co-founder of Offchain Labs.
That’s led to considerable debate about how TPS is measured. Some within the industry have criticized chains for including voting transactions, which may inflate TPS. For example, Solana Compass, which excludes voting transactions, shows a “true TPS” of around 700.
Eventually, as fast blockchains become ubiquitous, TPS may go the way of dial up internet speeds, becoming something that only developers pay attention to. And, analysts may come up with a more nuanced set of metrics. Until then, it’s best to think of TPS as one measure of performance and not the end all, be all.
Read more →Cointelegraph
Web3 Comes to Health Tracking
Web3 applications are penetrating the $1.8T global wellness market. Products including wearables, NFTs, and more illustrate a range of approaches to data collection and delivering value — many that borrow freely from Web2 playbooks.
Smart rings are having a moment. Fans of Oura, a sleek Finnish-made product that tracks a plethora of health data, are eagerly awaiting a fourth-generation ring. Part of Oura’s strategy includes integrating with Web2 apps like Strava and Therabody, the maker of the Theragun massage device. Oura will soon have competition from Samsung, which plans to launch the Galaxy Ring, a cardiovascular data tracker, in July 2024, and from the Solana-based Cudis ring from BeatBit Wellness Lab.
Cudis CEO Edison Chen says that, unlike traditional smart rings that store health data on company servers where it can readily be monetized, Cudis users’ data is encrypted, indexed on Solana’s blockchain, and stored anonymously on the InterPlanetary File System. Users can feed their data into AI modules in the Cudis ecosystem for customized insights into their physical and mental well-being. Points, which can be converted to tokens, are awarded for sharing data.
WELL3, meanwhile, is a social platform/mobile app that uses blockchain and AI to engage users with personalized recommendations and encouragement. Metrics are tracked through Google Fit, Apple Health, and other Web2 integrations to reward users with its native token, WELL. Users have the ability to manage access to their health data on the platform. Seed rounds and NFT sales netted WELL $5MM in funding; the first public sale generated $55MM in ETH in one day. Another “promising” wellness ecosystem, Live4Well, received a $20MM investment in March 2023; it is unclear what it promises to do.
In the NFT category, STEPN, which bills itself as a Web3 move to earn app, was released in Q4 of 2024 along with 300 collectible digital sneakers on the Solana blockchain. Owners of a STEPN sneaker can sync the app to their smartphone to get rewards for walking, jogging, or running.
Read more →Forbes ($)
News In Brief
Business of Crypto
领英推荐
Regulation and Security
DeFi and Web3
Midweek Market Pulse
Total Market Cap: $2.23T — 7 day change as of Tuesday 4/30/24 12 PM EST: -9.0%
After last week’s ebullient performance, the total crypto market slid by 9.0% to $2.23T despite six Bitcoin (BTC, -8.5%) and Ethereum (ETH, -7.2%) ETFs making their debut in Hong Kong on Tuesday, a first in the Asian market. While their performance was muted, it marks a major milestone for the digital asset space and for Hong Kong, which is vying with Singapore and Dubai for industry leadership in the region.
The Bitcoin ETFs launched saw much smaller day one volumes than their U.S. counterparts — about $11MM in volume, compared to $4.5B in volume for the U.S. ETFs. Adding to Bitcoin’s headwinds, on-chain data shows some Bitcoin miners are liquidating BTC following the halving as they contend with lower rewards and increased operational costs.
The Ethereum ETFs closed the day down, perhaps on negative news that U.S. ETF issuers expect their applications for ETH ETFs to be denied by the SEC based on “discouraging meetings” with the regulator. The SEC will rule on applications from VanEck and ARK Invest on May 23 and May 24 but, until it comes to a definitive decision about whether or not ETH is a security (a question it has been studying since 2018), approval seems unlikely. Hong Kong regulators have already decided that ETH is not a security.
Franklin Templeton, which already has a spot Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) trading, listed its spot ETH ETF, the Franklin Ethereum TR Ethereum ETF (EZET), on the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation website as a placeholder.
Beyond ETFs, market participants will be keeping a close eye on the Fed ahead of today’s FOMC meeting. Many observers still expect the Fed to cut rates later this year ($) but, with inflation rising, the likelihood of an imminent rate cut is looking less likely.
With the two largest digital assets lower, major alt coins, including BNB (BNB, -7.4%), Solana (SOL, -19.2%), XRP (XRP, -9.5%), Cardano (ADA, -16.2%), and Avalanche (AVAX, -14.4%) all trended lower as well.
The Last Word
Account Abstraction
Noun
: A way of setting up a blockchain so that user assets are stored in smart contracts rather than external accounts
/ In addition to preventing the loss of private keys, account abstraction turns several multi-step user processes into seamless ones.
About BitGo
BitGo provides the most secure and scalable solutions for the digital asset economy, offering regulated custody, borrowing and lending, and core infrastructure to investors and builders alike.
Founded in 2013 — the early days of crypto — BitGo pioneered the multi-signature wallet and later built TSS to improve upon other companies’ MPC offerings. Between multi-sig and TSS, BitGo offers the safest technology on the market and safeguards over 600 tokens across a wide variety of blockchains.
Over the years, BitGo has expanded from offering wallets into providing a full-suite solution that lets clients hold assets safely and then put them to work.
BitGo launched BitGo Trust Company in 2018, providing fully regulated, qualified cold storage to complement BitGo Inc’s original hot wallet solution. In 2020, BitGo launched BitGo Prime, which allows its clients to trade, borrow, and lend. Moreover, BitGo also provides access to DeFi, staking, NFT wallets, and beyond, and serves as the world’s sole custodian for WBTC, or wrapped Bitcoin.
Today, BitGo is the leader in digital asset security, custody, and liquidity, providing the operational backbone for more than 1500 institutional clients in over 50 countries — a list that includes many regulated entities and the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms. BitGo also processes approximately 20% of all global Bitcoin transactions by value.
For more information, please visit www.bitgo.com.
?2024 BitGo Inc. (collectively with its affiliates and subsidiaries, “BitGo”). All rights reserved. BitGo Trust Company, Inc., BitGo Inc., and BitGo Prime LLC are separately operated, wholly-owned subsidiaries of BitGo Holdings, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. No legal, tax, investment, or other advice is provided by any BitGo entity. Please consult your legal/tax/investment professional for questions about your specific circumstances. Digital asset holdings involve a high degree of risk, and can fluctuate greatly on any given day. Accordingly, your digital asset holdings may be subject to large swings in value and may even become worthless. The information provided herein is not intended for distribution to, or use by, any person or entity in any jurisdiction or country where such distribution or use would be contrary to law or regulation. BitGo is not directing this information to any person in any jurisdiction where the publication or availability of the information is prohibited, by reason of that person’s citizenship, residence or otherwise.