The Friday Focus: Issue 32

May 06, 2022

Welcome to our Friday newsletter. Here you find the most exciting crypto content from the previous week - curated for you by us.

If you haven’t already, hit the button below and subscribe to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.

Weekly happenings

The SEC approved Valkyrie's bitcoin futures ETF this week, but there’s still no spot product in sight.

US Democrats wrote a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency calling for stricter bitcoin mining regulation. In response, more than 50 advocates for bitcoin mining, including Michael Saylor and Jack Dorsey, signed a letter written by the Bitcoin Mining Council disputing the claims.

Just one week after the Central African Republic made bitcoin legal tender, the IMF started its usual saber-rattling, using the same arguments as to when El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender.

In Argentina, two of the largest private banks added crypto trading to their platforms, only for the country’s central bank to announce that financial institutions cannot enable their clients to trade digital assets a couple of days later. This decision aligns with the country’s agreement with the IMF to ‘discourage’ crypto usage as part of a March debt restructuring deal.

Kazakhstan creates a legal framework for mining, ordering miners to register with authorities. Their neighbor, Uzbekistan, eager to attract miners to help finance the buildout of renewable energy infrastructure, offers miners tax incentives and other benefits.

Binance continues investing heavily outside the crypto industry, committing $500M for Elon Musk’s $44B takeover of Twitter. Binance also got licensed to operate in France, an important milestone in their plans to get regulated in as many countries as possible. Crypto exchanges sit on massive piles of cash, and OKX uses some of its money in a mega F1 sponsorship deal.

NFT buying frenzies disrupt both Solana and Ethereum. While Solana suffered a seven-hour outage, Ethereum saw an all-time high in transaction fees, with users paying more than $230M in fees last Sunday.

Luna Foundation Guard bought an additional $1.5B in bitcoin to back its UST algorithmic stablecoin, and Tron just launched its copycat stablecoin USDD.