Iowa approves pro-blockchain legislation / 29M merchants to accept crypto on PayPal / Fresh Funding for Crypto Projects

Plus: Oakland A's will be selling suite rentals for 1 BTC

Inside.com Part of   Network March 30, 2021

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The global crypto market cap is $1.87T 2.63%▲ with a 24hr market volume of 116.16B 1.06%▲. Bitcoin's dominance is currently 59.06% -0.11%▼. When Lambo? CURRENT PRICES BY MARKET CAP # Name Price 24h % 1 Bitcoin BTC $59,203 2.32% ▲ 2 Ethereum ETH $1,860 1.73% ▲ 3 Binance Coin BNB $310.65 1.73% ▲  4 Cardano ADA $1.23 1.52% ▲ 5 Polkadot DOT $34.12 0.22% ▼ * Prices as of 4 p.m. ET.

The Iowa House of Representatives unanimously approved pro-blockchain legislation. The new law will permit the use of blockchain technology and smart contracts in transactional record keeping. More: The bill was introduced on March 4, passed the Senate (47-0) on March 9, and passed the House of Representatives (94-0) yesterday afternoon. This marks the latest in crypto legislation by the State, with House Bill 255 introduced in 2019 to provide guidance on digital currency taxation. Texas is also currently addressing crypto legislation. House Bill 4474 gained popularity recently, which aims to adapt pre-existing legislation to provide for technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The Wyoming Senate recently approved a bill this month that allows decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to incorporate in the State. The bill must still pass the House.

PayPal has announced a new feature that allows U.S. customers to pay with cryptocurrencies at over 29 million vendors. This new feature expands on PayPal’s October update that allowed users to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies. More: Customers can now have their bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, and litecoin converted fiat currencies at checkout to make purchases. PayPal said it would settle all transactions in fiat currency so that merchants do not have to worry about volatility. PayPal has also doubled its weekly purchase limit, allowing users to buy up to $20K in cryptocurrencies per week. Visa and Crypto.com launched a pilot program yesterday allowing cryptocurrency payments. Visa will enable transactions on the crypto platform with stablecoin USD Coin (USDC), tied to its reference currency, the U.S. Dollar.

FRESH FUNDING Purestake raised $6M ahead of the launch of its Ethereum compatable parachain, Moonbeam. Particpants in the investment round included Coinbase Venture, Signum Capital, Binance Labs, and others. More: The developing team anticipates using the funding to increase hiring, build upon existing integrations for developer tools, and expand into the growing Asian market. Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachain on Polkadot. Users of the product will be able to apply Ethereum Solidity smart contracts and directly interact with Moonbeam using existing Ethereum accounts and keys. Moonbeam is expected to launch in mid-2021, first deploying to Kusama (KSM) before launching on Polkadot later in the year. Liquity raised $6M in Series A round. The DeFi lending company completed the Series A round today, adding to a previous $2.4M funding round in September.  More: The team plans to use the latest funding to expand the Liquity ecosystem and grow its staff. Liquity aims to improve access to on-chain borrowing, remove interest rates, and minimize governance in DeFi. The Liquity Protocol operates on the Ethereum network, providing interest-free borrowing of the Liquidity stablecoin (LUSD).  LUSD is expected to launch Monday.

▲ TOP GAINERS # Name Price 24h % 1 DREP DREP $3.22 9743.36% ▲ 2 Filecoin FIL $147.53 17.62% ▲ 3 Binance Coin BNB $310.75 13.38% ▲ 4 BitTorrent BTT $0.00430 12.40% ▲ 5 IOTA MIOTA $1.57 5.23% ▲ ▼ TOP LOSERS # Name Price 24h % 1 VeChain VET $0.08968 2.15%▼ 2 THETA THETA $12.91 1.81%▼ 3 Kusama KSM $537.04 1.46%▼ 4 Cosmos ATOM $19.87 1.42%▼ 5 Uniswap UNI $28.80 0.94%▼ * Limited to cryptocurrencies with a market cap > $4B. Prices as of 4 p.m. ET.

QUICK HITS: More than 500,000 investors have opened accounts with this fintech platform to automate money management with ease.* Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank (SMTB), in partnership with Securitze, launched Japan’s first a-1 rated asset-backed securities token. In the SEC v. Ripple case, a federal judge has granted XRP tokenholders the right to intervene in the ongoing case to assure that their interests are being adequately represented in the matter. Holders have until April 19 to file their motion to intervene. MLB’s Oakland Athletics will begin to accept and hold bitcoin for full-season suite rentals at the price of 1 BTC. Three months after resigning from the SEC, former chairman Jay Clayton has accepted a new position on an advisory board for crypto investment manager One River Asset Management. A recent document issued by the Candian Securities Administrators (CSA) and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) offers guidance to crypto-asset trading platforms on determining securities laws requirements. Find out how brands like Gymshark use Attest to understand fast-changing consumer habits.* *This is a sponsored post.

Griffin McShane is a J.D. candidate currently living in Portland, Maine. He is a graduate of Providence College, where he studied both computer science and business. Griffin aspires one day to go to the moon and bring some of his altcoins along for the ride. Editor Charlotte Hayes-Clemens is an editor and writer based in Vancouver. She has dabbled in both the fiction and non-fiction world, having worked at HarperCollins Publishers and more recently as a writing coach for new and self-published authors. Proper semi-colon usage is her hill to die on.

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PayPal Launches Crypto Checkout

Also: Tether attests, LBRY sued, NFTs hyped.

What you need to know today in crypto and beyond  March 30, 2021 Sponsored By:     If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.   Send feedback to daniel.kuhn@coindesk.com – we'd love to hear from you! Today's must-reads Top Shelf 'GET PAID': PayPal will allow users to checkout with crypto at any of its 29 million online merchants. The service will automatically convert bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), bitcoin cash (BCH) and litecoin (LTC) to U.S. dollars, so merchants won't actually receive those cryptos. TETHER ATTESTS: Tether can attest to having $35.28 billion in total assets to back that amount of USDT in circulation, according to the company's first review by an outside accounting firm. The largest stablecoin issuer took it upon itself to pay for an attestation of its reserves from Cayman Islands-based accounting firm Moore Cayman in a move to bolster transparency. This snapshot is separate from disclosures Tether is obligated to make to New York State on an ongoing quarterly basis. BY THE BOOK? LBRY, a P2P alternative to YouTube, is accused of selling "millions of dollars worth of unregistered securities to investors" beginning in 2016, in the form of "LBRY Credits (LBC)." The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims LBRY inflated the value of these tokens – advertised as a way to fund development – using a third-party market maker. HOW NIFTY: Nifty Gateway is pledging to go carbon negative amid growing controversy of blockchain environmental impact. Meanwhile, Mark Cuban, Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com) and other well-heeled tech backers participated in NFT platform SuperRare's $9 million Series A.   – Daniel Kuhn Overheard on CoinDesk TV Sound Bite "There is zero concern from my perspective about the ability for protocols like USDC to scale beyond even what centralized card networks can do today. You can see line of sight to blockchains that can support millions of transactions per second in the coming years."   – Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, said on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover." A message from Nexo Your digital assets deserve a savings account in their BEST INTEREST. Leading crypto lender Nexo treats you, your crypto and your fiat to industry-best Crypto & Fiat services, featuring:    * Up to 12% interest on digital assets, paid out daily! * Yields available on BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, XRP, XLM, EOS, TRX, LINK, BNB, PAXG, USDT, USDC, TUSD, PAX, DAI, HUSD, GBP and EUR. * No minimum or maximum limits on funds deposited, offering infinite opportunities to earn. * #ZeroFees on all transactions. * Military-grade wallet security and top-tier insurance on all custodial assets with SOC 2 Type 2 certified crypto custodian BitGo.   Get started at nexo.io A message from CoinDesk CoinDesk's Christine Kim and Consensys' Ben Edgington present a weekly podcast series on the live development of Ethereum 2.0 and its potential impact on the crypto markets.   In each episode, the team discusses major news events related to Eth 2.0 from addressing skepticism to the consequences of node slashing.   Listen to Mapping Out Eth 2.0 every Thursday on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. What others are writing... Off-Chain Signals A 32-year-old Nintendo Game Boy is being used to mine BTC – but very slowly. (Verge) A major selling point of NFTs are recurring royalties paid to artists, but that isn't always the case based on the platform where a token sells. One startup raised money for a new ERC-20 standard for "perpetual, cross-platform royalties." (Cointelegraph) Dalio sees "good probability" bitcoin gets outlawed. (Yahoo)   – D.K. Sponsored Content   BTCS: Proof of Stake: A stake through Proof of Work's heart? Proof of Work (PoW) isn't dead. It isn't even dying. However, it is moving slower, and that's as good a reason as any for a mining operation to shift to another consensus mechanism. Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway Get on With the Future You can't keep Bitcoin down.   That's true in a lot of places around the world, from Belarus to Nigeria, where crypto is a workaround for dissidents and a substitute for unreliable monetary systems.   But it's especially true in India, a market that has lots of cryptocurrency activity (and masses of potential) despite a decade of government confusion, inconsistency and delay.   Just recently, India's Parliament was rumored to be about to pass a bill banning crypto outright only for that body to postpone the measure and go on a three-month holiday.   In 2018, the Reserve Bank of India sought to ban banks from dealing in crypto. Then, last year, the Supreme Court overturned that ban, raising hopes of a boom.   Nobody – even the so-called experts – knows what will happen now. The official government stance has been overwhelmingly negative over the years, but Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently left some wiggle room. "We will allow certain windows for people to do experiments on the blockchain, bitcoins or cryptocurrency," he said.   The consensus speculation is the government may eventually ban payments in crypto but preserve the ability of people to hold crypto as an investment (as long as they pay taxes). India wants to retain power over its money and plans to issue a digital rupee in due course.   But in some fundamental sense, the exact government position may not matter. India's crypto industry is building, whatever the formulation of policy, and that's because demand among India's bulging demographics appears enormous.   As CoinDesk's Anna Baydakova reported yesterday, powerhouses like Coinbase and Binance both have footholds in the market. And tech-savvy Indians with international connections don't want to miss out on the bitcoin boom.   "India is one of the youngest countries in the world, and these 28- to 29-year-olds are people who want to be a part of the revolution," Indian crypto advocate and YouTube influencer Kashif Raza told Baydakova (28 to 29 years old is India's median age).   Younger Indians see bitcoin as an alternative to gold, which traditionally has held special allure. "Gold would be the investment of choice for the older generation. The young generation sees the advantage … to buy bitcoin, because gold became more stable and bitcoin is so fast-moving," said Nischal Shetty, CEO of WazirX, an exchange with 1.8 million users.   Bitcoin has a tendency to show up the weakness of governments in the face of technology. It is something they can deflect and make harder to use. But it has cultural strength that's hard to budge. It is a brand and a movement that's unstoppable.   In fact, all the back-and-forth from Indian officials over the ban only seems to be burnishing BTC's image.   "The rumored ban is stimulating a lot of conversation among the population about cryptocurrency," Shetty said.   While governments vacillate, younger internet users just want to get on with the future.   – Ben Schiller A message from CoinDesk What are bitcoin and ether's value propositions for investors? A new report by CoinDesk Research explains how the two most popular cryptocurrencies by market capitalization behave in the market, how their infrastructure differs, and what on-chain metrics say about them.   Download "Bitcoin + Ether: An Investor's Perspective" from the CoinDesk Research Hub. The Chaser... ATTENTION: Scammers have been sending fraudulent emails with links to sites disguised to look like coindesk.com. If you are in doubt about a link, type https://www.coindesk.com directly into your browser; do not copy and paste. Remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The Node (formerly Blockchain Bites)   A newsletter from CoinDesk   See Previous Editions Copyright © 2021 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.    250 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003, USA You can manage your preferences here or unsubscribe from all CoinDesk email.