So if you haven't been hiding under a rock this weekend, you've almost certainly been glued to... erm... footage from Glastonbury festival, headlined by Arctic Monkeys, Guns N Roses and Elton John (in what's billed as one of his last ever live performances).
But don't be the crypto equivalent of Lana Del Rey (who turned up late due to hairstyling issues and got cut off with six songs left to play), and be sure to catch up with our own headliners from the past week's news.
Infiltrating the news by proxy this week has been none other than the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which saw a wave of applications for spot Bitcoin ETFs filed that it will (eventually) have to make a judgement on.
First up was investment giant BlackRock, which has an impressive 575:1 record of successes vs failures when it comes to ETF applications with the SEC. Perhaps encouraged by such odds, this was swiftly followed by two more filings, from WisdomTree and Invesco. Here's hoping one of the three can finally gain the regulator's approval.
We also reported on Solana maintaining its position as the busiest blockchain network in terms of transactions, despite being labeled as an unlicensed security by the SEC in its actions against Binance and Coinbase earlier this month.
Big banks continue to make moves in(to) the crypto arena, with JPMorgan expanding its JPM Coin to enable euro-denominated transactions, and several major U.S. institutions launching their very own crypto exchange, EDX Markets. We wonder if they'll have similar issues with the SEC?
Meanwhile, across the pond, France continues to quietly implement common sense crypto regulation, which has seen many major companies set up shop in the country. Companies such as stablecoin issuer, Circle, which has weathered the crypto bear market and is now pushing ahead with new developments.
Fellow stablecoin issuer, Tether, was suspicious at the timing of its brief dollar depeg last week, coming just before CoinDesk published 'damning' evidence of its reserve holdings in Chinese banks... from two years ago. It didn't help that CoinDesk parent company DCG is an investor in Circle.
Elsewhere, Russia seems to be putting the finishing touches to its legislation defining the digital ruble, and the Bank for International Settlements published the results of Project Rosalind, its experiment to develop a ledger-agnostic API to link CBDC back-ends to third-party tools for access and maintenance of accounts.
Finally, for all you techies out there, Uniswap revealed how its 'hooks' feature in V4 will innovate decentralized trading, and the Ethereum community has been discussing a 64-fold increase in its maximum staking limit for validators... which probably hasn't been keeping that many of us up at night.
Unlike Glastonbury.
Members Discussion