This is our new format of Staff Picks where we section articles by their topics. We want to give you our picks about news, adoption, top stories and so much more. You always have a chance to let us know what you like to read most on Twitter and Facebook. We’ll check out your suggestions and try to deliver more stories that fit your interests.
March was full of excitement. The SEC vs. Ripple case is gaining new chapters every week. Tax season is here. NFTs are reaching astronomic prices and old school BTC whales are on the move. RippleX is also being very active on Twitch with star guests talking about everything XRP and XRPL.
Read away!
Regulation news
Roslyn Layton breaks down the SEC lawsuit timeline and talks about the inconsistencies in SEC’s case and how it has backfired on the agency. The article contains all the documents and motions that have been filed since and gives a concise overview of the whole case.
As a result of the SEC lawsuit, XRP holders have banded together against the SEC in a class action lawsuit and MoneyGram is also under fire by an investor for falsely representing XRP. After the SEC announced that no determination has been made regarding XRP yet, a twitter trend popped up under the tag #relistXRP which is prompting exchanges to relist and enable trading of XRP.
Tax season is upon us and navigating the waters is still a considerable challenge. The IRS has been making changes to their forms and FAQs so US residents should be extra careful to report their taxes from cryptocurrency correctly. At GateHub we created a blog post with some common sense tips for reporting cryptocurrency related income but still suggest you take extra care and possibly consult a professional to report your cryptocurrency transactions.
The FATF is taking a closer look at regulating DeFi, decentralized exchanges and NFTs as part of guidance that also applies to AML and KYC guidelines for stablecoin issuance.
Institutional adoption
The UK startup Revolut is pulling out of the Canadian market after offering a beta service locally for over a year after difficulties obtaining a licence and strict regulations.
In India, there seems to be agreement between the reserve bank (RBI) and the finance ministry regarding cryptocurrencies and the approaches to adoption.
Jamaica has also jumped on the bandwagon and is expected to pilot a Central bank crypto (CBDC) later this year to work alongside traditional money.
Top stories
An artist from Wisconsin called Beeple sold his NFT for $69,3M. The art piece is a collage of 5,000 digital illustrations titled “Everyday: The First 5,000 Days”. The art piece was sold at an auction hosted by the auction house Christie’s. The achievement is even more impressive when considering the fact that it’s the third-most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction.
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Another NFT linked to the infamous Fyre Festival is also on the market. An evolution of NFTs is already on the horizon with fractionalized NFTs. Learn more about non-fungible tokens or NFTs here.
Transfers of large amounts of Bitcoin have become pretty commonplace. Large movements of BTC that were mined in the pre-GPU era of mining, however, is not that common. Bitcoin.com has been tracking a block reward of 50 BTC from 2010 and an old school whale with 10,000 BTC from 2013 this month to determine what will happen with the huge amount of money held by the two bag holders.
The DOJ has indicted John McAfee on money laundering and fraud charges. The indictment comes as a result of McAfee’s touting of various cryptocurrency projects without disclosing his affiliation with the projects. The CFTC is also looking at bringing in additional charges.
Ups and downs
BTC popped over $60k on March 14 to a new all time high at $61,950 on Binance. The speculation was that the pull back to below $60k was not a reason for concern. A steady influx of stablecoins into exchange accounts was speculated to further fuel the BTC rally that has been in a steep up trend since the end of 2020. There are also speculations that BTC whales are accumulating their BTC in cold storage after nearly $1B worth of BTC left Coinbase in late March.
Hackers exploited a vulnerability on the Paid Network smart contract to mint tokens and created more than $166M worth of tokens at the time. The attack continued with the hacker selling the tokens on Uniswap for ETH and crashing the price of the asset. Paid Network responded shortly after the attack with a postmortem report with a detailed description and way forward for the project.
A study has found that crypto scams have surged 40% in 2020 over the past years and are expected to increase an additional 75%. The main currencies used for scams were Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Chainlink (LINK), with scammers impersonating crypto celebrities like Elon Musk and John McAfee and exchanges like Binance, Coinbase and Gemini.
In case you missed it
Matt Hamilton hosted a podcast about xApps in XUMM, data science on the XRPL, payments via XUMM and “how we got here” on Twitch with a star studded guest line up: Wietse Wind, Shae Wang, Adam Waring and David Schwartz. Check it out on Twitch.
We had our own session with RippleX and the result is this blog. Check out how our company started, how we decided to build on the XRPL and more about our latest on chain service called Wallet Protect. Coinjournal also featured a review of our platform this month.
Ripple announced that they are piloting a private version of the XRPL for central banks and CBDC issuance.
