PayPal Launches Crypto Checkout

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."

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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.

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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.

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