Crypto news
GitHub unbans Tornado Cash repositories following OFAC guidance
Crypto mixer Tornado Cash has returned to the software development platform GitHub after several weeks of being banned on the website. Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon took to Twitter on Thursday to report that GitHub has partly unbanned the Tornado Cash organization and contributors on their platform. The developer suggested that Tornado Cash’s code repositories are now in read-only mode, which means that GitHub is yet to restore full functionality. “But that is progress from an outright ban. I still encourage GitHub to reverse all actions and return the repositories to their former status,” Van Loon stated. According to GitHub data, the latest Tornado Cash repositories updates were made on Aug. 22, or shortly after Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov reported that his account w...
IRS to summon users who don’t report and pay tax on crypto transactions
With the crypto community growing bigger and as trading volumes reach new highs, the United States is also making more effort to ensure that its Internal Revenue Service (IRS) could properly collect cryptocurrency tax. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Hubbert and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig announced that U.S. judge Paul Gardephe authorized the IRS to issue a “John Doe summons,” a term used when the IRS investigates unknown taxpayers. The summons compels the New York-based M.Y. Safra Bank to submit information about taxpayers that might have failed to report and pay taxes on their crypto transactions. According to the announcement, the IRS is specifically looking at users of the crypto exchange SFOX. The IRS believes that even though crypto u...
European stock exchange to list Bitcoin carbon neutral ETP
A subsidiary of DeFi Technologies, Valour, will debut its new Carbon Neutral Bitcoin Exchange Traded Product (ETP) on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Trading of the ETP begins on Sept. 23. The company positions its ETP as a “sustainable and climate-friendly” exposure to Bitcoin with a management fee of 1.49%. The alignment with global environmental goals and Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) is reportedly achieved through funding certified carbon removal and offset initiatives to neutralize the associated BTC carbon footprint. To structure the ETP, Valour partnered with Patch — a platform that provides climate action infrastructure and has previously worked with Andreessen Horowitz and other notable institutional investors. The announcement states: “All carbon emissi...
China accounts for 84% of all blockchain patent applications, but there’s a catch
China accounts for 84% of all blockchain applications filed worldwide, according to the latest data shared by the country’s government official. China has steered clear of the cryptocurrency market. However, the Beijing government has been supportive of the underlying blockchain technology. The country has actively promoted the use of blockchain tech over the years, and thus the high percentage of blockchain patents isn’t surprising. President Xi Jinping has also played a key role in promoting the nascent blockchain technology. In 2019, the President called upon citizens, tech companies and stakeholders of the ecosystem to actively participate and innovate with the nascent tech as it would play a key role in the future of the next industrial revolution. As Cointelegraph reported earlier, C...
Rushing ‘token mapping’ could hurt Aussie crypto space — Finder founder
Australian crypto entrepreneur and investor Fred Schebesta has described the Australian government’s prioritization of token mapping as “wonderful,” but warns that rushing it could lead to detrimental effects on the economy. Schebesta’s comments come after Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers released a statement on Aug. 22 stating that the “treasury will prioritize token mapping work” in 2022 to show how “crypto assets and related services should be regulated.” Speaking to Cointelegraph, Schebesta believes Australia already has a “fledgling” crypto industry but needs to “align with the other major markets and their regulations.” Schebesta added that the “intricacies” of token mapping are not clear, and “things are changing as well.” Schebesta is an Austral...
Many NFT projects lack adequate smart contract testing, says nameless founder
Jimmy McNelis, the founder of Web3 tech firm nameless, says there are too many NFT projects rushing to market without proper smart contract testing — potentially leading to millions lost. Speaking with Cointelegraph, McNelis suggested that a lot of NFT projects often rush to market without fully simulating how its smart contracts will work, even skipping extensive audits in some cases. McNelis said an example of this was observed during the sale of the Akutars NFT collection in February 2021 — featuring 15,000 tokens that went up for sale on Winklevoss-owned NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway. McNelis said while the NFT drop sold out, a major bug saw $33 million worth of Ether (ETH) generated from the sale locked up in a smart contract that the devs have no access to, explaining: “Tha...
Fork, yeah! Cardano Vasil upgrade goes live
After several months of delays, the Cardano Vasil upgrade and hard fork has finally gone live as of Thursday at 9:44 pm UTC, bringing “significant performance and capability” enhancements to the blockchain. The success of the Cardano mainnet hard fork was announced by blockchain company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) on Twitter on Thursday, while others also observed the hard fork tick over in a live Twitter Spaces with Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson. #Vasil mainnet HFC event successful! We’re happy to announce that today, at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, in collaboration with the @CardanoStiftung, successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet via a HFC event, thus deploying new #Vasil features to the chain.1/5 — Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022 IOHK previously stated the...
Rep. Warren Davidson: Stablecoin bill has ‘outside chance’ of finalizing this year
There is a small chance the U.S. House of Representatives could pass the bill to regulate stablecoins by year-end, though it’s more likely it will pass in the first quarter of 2023, says U.S. Congressman Warren Davidson. According to a Thursday report from Kitco, Davidson made the remarks at the Annual Fintech Policy Forum on Sept. 22, where he suggested: “There’s an outside chance we find a way to get to consensus on a stablecoin bill this year.” The “stablecoin bill” seemingly refers to draft legislation aimed at “endogenously collateralized stablecoins” which came to light this week — and would place a two-year ban on new algorithmic stablecoins such as TerraUSD Classic (USTC). However, Davidson went on to say that while “there’s a chance we get...
Get ready for even more incompetence at the IRS in 2023
The Internal Revenue Service is hiring 87,000 new agents, but taxpayers will not feel the pain for another two to three years. That’s how long it will take the agency to hire and train agents. Few have discussed the extent of this pain. Still, it’s something to think about when you consider the majority of coming audits will be conducted by new agents, many of whom will have been hastily hired and operating with minimal supervision. Playing the audit lottery will not be smart in future tax years. Taxpayers should protect themselves now, especially when profiting from statutory gray areas — such as cryptocurrency staking, investing through decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and other decentralized finance (DeFi) products. When I started my career in the mid-2000s, business audits...
Bitcoin’s 60% year-to-date correction looks bad, but many stocks have dropped by even more
Bitcoin’s (BTC) and Ether’s (ETH) agonizing 60% and 66% respective drops in price are drawing a lot of criticism from crypto critics and perhaps this is deserved, but there are also plenty of stocks with similar, if not worse, performances. The sharp volatility witnessed in crypto prices is partially driven by major centralized yield and lending platforms becoming insolvent, Three Arrows Capital’s bankruptcy and a handful of exchanges and mining pools facing liquidity issues. For cryptocurrencies, 2022 has definitely not been a good year, and even Tesla sold 75% of its Bitcoin holdings in Q2 at a loss. The quasi-trillion dollar company still holds a $218 million position, but the news certainly did not help investors’ perception of Bitcoin’s corporate adoption. Cryptocurrencies are n...
Coinbase counters WSJ claim its Risk Solutions group engaged in $100M proprietary trade
The Wall Street Journal and Coinbase are having a difference in definitions. The newspaper published an alleged account of the digital asset exchange’s trading activities earlier this year that it claims amount to proprietary trading. Coinbase responded in a blog post that it had done no such thing. Relying on information supplied by “people at the company,” the WSJ wrote on Thursday that Coinbase made a $100-million transaction that was viewed inside the company as a test trade by the company’s Risk Solutions group, which had been formed for the purpose of proprietary trading. Proprietary trading is the practice by banks and financial institutions of trading their own money for their own gain, rather than doing so to earn a commission from a client. It would not have been illegal for Coin...
Helium migrates its blockchain to Solana following T-Mobile partnership
On Thursday, the Helium Foundation announced that it would be moving its mainnet to the Solana blockchain following a community vote. According to the proposal, proof-of-coverage and Data transfer mechanisms will be moved to Helium Oracles. It’s official! The HIP 70 vote has ended. #Helium will be moving to the @Solana blockchain! pic.twitter.com/V2WIajou7R — Helium (@helium) September 22, 2022 Meanwhile, Helium’s tokens and governance will relocate to that of the Solana blockchain. As told by developers, the benefits of the move would include more of its native token HNT available to subDAO reward pools, more consistent mining, more reliable data transfer, more utility for HNT and subDAO tokens, and more ecosystem support. Helium is a blockchain wireless communications protocol...
