What an interesting time we live in! Bitcoin is making the waves again.

Trump is tweeting about it. FED’s chairman is comparing it to gold, Cypherpunk legends speak to regulators at G20, and just few hours ago US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin hold briefing on cryptocurrencies. All this while Bitcoin itself is experiencing surges in price as well as the amount of daily active addresses.

The last month I had the honour and privilege to sit down in Berlin with the greatest Bitcoin evangelist of all times — Andreas Antonopoulos — to talk about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and crypto industry in general, as well as how his views on various topics have developed in the past years. As always, his responses were very insightful. I loved talking to him. You can read my interview with him here.

Facebook shook the financial world with the announcement of Libra while getting itself in rather unfavourable position where it is being attacked on one side by the regulators from across the world for being too bold, and on the other by crypto community itself for being too centralised. In spite of the fact that Libra is condemned by many, I welcome this move and believe it makes sense from all kinds of perspectives — including Facebook’s, Libra’s members, as well as the FinTech world and the cryptocurrency world. See what the renowned Cypherpunker James Lopp has to say about Libra. What is also interesting to consider is the difference between the price volatility (BTC) vs. systemic volatility (USD, or Libra).

Meanwhile, The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the agency responsible for anti-money laundering enforcement in the United States, released guidance on how the bank secrecy act applies to cryptocurrencies.

Coin Center was quick to release a detailed analysis of the guidance that same day, noting that it specifically excludes software wallet providers, multi-sig providers, decentralised exchanges, and other non-custodial services from regulation as money services businesses.

Facebook is not the only one in war with regulators though. Kik Foundation was accused by SEC to conduct unregistered $100M ICO, and as a reaction it kickstarted the industry-wide initiative to Defend Crypto, which I strongly support. This clash was inevitable. But let’s take a look what else happened in the Cryptoland.

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Bitcoin: 

– Schnorr and Taproot explained by Casa!
– Casa also announced new Sats App
– What are Discreet Log Contracts?
– New evidences suggesting identity of Satoshi
– Watchtowers are coming to the Lightning Network!
– Erlay – a new proposal for Bitcoin network performance improvement
– Statechains – a non-custodial off-chain bitcoin transfers
– Could we have DeFi on Bitcoin? Seems we could!
– Cambridge University came up with Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
– BetterHash: new hashing algorithm for mining poolsEthereum: 

– What is the current state of DAI? See the report.
– Co-founder of Hyperledger showing some serious love to Ethereum
– Good piece on degrees of architectural decentralisation by Circle
– Vitalik on Sidechains vs Plasma vs Sharding
– What DeFi is and what it isn’t
– Update from Ethereum FoundationAltcoins:– How decentralized is Cardano?
– Grin is planning its first hardfork
– Netflix’s competitors raised hundreds of millions in an ICO, then ditched crypto
– Chainlink partnered up with Google
– MIT researchers came up with new cryptocurrency – Algorand
– Monero and Zcash hold their conferences
– Breaking down the most funded stable coin projects
– Edgeware’s unusual Lockdrop
– Tethers mistakenly mints 5 billions USD, then burns it

– Shapeshift introduced their new non-custodial platform
– Crypto lawyers weigh in on new FATF guidance
– CoinCenter argues why FATF might not be the end of crypto
– Great report on capabilities of Zero-knowledge proofsQuality reward for quality readers:

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I will be always happy to read your feedback, and suggestions on possible topics to include to the newsletter. If you would like to share some with me, please do so at stancel@blockchainslovakia.sk.

In case you want to show me some crypto love:

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