Staff Picks - October 2020
October was packed full with notable events and interesting developments. We saw the Ripple Swell conference, our one year anniversary with Coil and the launch of our new interview series “What’s for Tech Today?”.
We saw a big month for Ripple with Swell and the decarbonization of the XRP Ledger. ETH gas prices were spiking in September which was felt by ETH miners. DeFi does not come without its drawbacks though as susceptibility to illicit activity and regulatory scrutiny are coming to light. PayPal came out with cryptocurrency support which saw mixed reviews.
From our Product Team
Ripple published their annual Blockchain in Payments Report, which looks at the fintech industry and the increasing role of blockchain in payments. They found that familiarity with blockchain and cryptocurrency has grown from 82 to 94 percent and that the positive sentiment has improved globally to over 70 percent. Check it out!
The month of September was exceptionally successful for ETH miners who hauled in 450,089 ETH as reported by Glassnode. That is a 39% increase from the month before and means that mining ETH is 3 times more profitable than mining BTC at the moment. This is caused by surging DeFi activity that is great for farmers and miners but not for other users of the network.
The Energy Web, Ripple and XRP Ledger Foundation, have announced the decarbonization of the XRP Ledger. Blockchain technology - especially proof-of-work - poses an enormous environmental challenge. The Energy Web is calling on other blockchains to make an effort towards a move to zero-carbon electricity.
PayPal announced its support for cryptocurrency assets and the option to pay merchants in crypto. This announcement has received mixed sentiments after it was revealed that there would be no option to transfer cryptocurrency in or out of the system. The old phrase “not your keys, not your crypto” is being thrown around again.
The pandemic seems to be boosting adoption of cryptocurrency. Brad Garlingouse talks about some of the trends that are seeing being caused by inflation and other economic factors. He also talks about PayPal’s recent move, regulations and clears up some misconceptions about Ripple’s funding and business.
From our Compliance Team
DeFi seems to be posing a significant risk of money laundering as exemplified by last month’s KuCoin hack. The current state of DeFi inherently allows illicit practices due to low regulatory scrutiny. This is very likely to change soon as we’re seeing more and more money locked in DeFi from around $1B in early 2020 to around $10B now.
CipherTrace’s analysis uncovered that 56% of 800 decentralized, centralized, and automated market maker exchanges do not conform to KYC guidelines and AML standards. The analysis uncovered a huge lack of KYC and AML practices by DeFi and DEXes too. The probable scenario is more regulatory pressure for entities with low KYC and AML compliance.
In Case You Missed It
Ripple Swell was held online this year on October 14 and 15.
We celebrated our 1 year anniversary with Coil on October 1 and commemorated this event with a few statistical facts. 90 creators are using GateHub to get paid for their contributions on the web with Web Monetization. All together they earned 35k XRP and 18M packets of value were transferred to GateHub via the ILP.
We also kicked off our new interview series called “What’s for Tech Today?”. Our first guest was Thomas Silkjær of XRP Forensics and xrplorer. A true household name in the world of XRP and AML on the XRP Ledger. Insightful, collected and informative. Check out our interview with Thomas: PART 1 and PART 2