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Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone, who correctly predicted bitcoin‘s ascent this year to a price above $50,000, says recent market indicators suggest $100,000 could be the next threshold.

McGlone wrote in a March outlook report that a recent drop below zero in the so-called Grayscale premium – a closely watched metric in cryptocurrency markets – could signal that last week’s swift 21% sell-off to about $43,000 might have reset the market for a fresh run. As of Thursday, prices had rebounded to about $50,000.

The Grayscale premium refers to the difference between price of bitcoin as implied by cost of shares in the publicly-traded Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), and the price of bitcoin as traded on cryptocurrency exchanges. Historically, it’s been positive. For a story on the Grayscale premium flipping negative, go here. (Grayscale is a unit of Digital Currency Group, which also owns CoinDesk.)

• “Bitcoin’s end-of-February price disparities on U.S. regulated exchanges portend a firming price foundation, if history is a guide,” McGlone wrote.
• “Indicating capitulation selling, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust closed at its steepest discount ever, while December CME-traded bitcoin futures settled about 20% higher.”
• “Normal maturation and increasing market depth will narrow wide price disparities, and we view the end-of-February extremes as an indication of just how nascent bitcoin still is.”

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Digital asset financial services firm BitGo is coming to New York.

After receiving approval from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) for a New York trust charter, BitGo plans to hold crypto funds in the state and offer custody as a service to large New York-based financial institutions, said Pete Najarian, chief revenue officer at BitGo. Bitgo announced that it had applied for the New York trust charter in August of last year.

“We’re finding that the largest traditional financial institutions are all doing a considerable amount of work to determine what their level of participation will be in the digital asset space,” Najarian said. “For BitGo that can mean collaborative relationships in which we act as a sub-custodian or we work in partnership or we develop white label solutions.”

Related: Bitcoin News Roundup for March 4, 2021

It’s a situation not unlike the similarly chartered Paxos, which has been the backend provider for PayPal’s crypto service since late last year. (BitGo reportedly rebuffed an offer of as much as $750 million to be acquired by PayPal, according to unnamed sources.)

Najarian also espoused a view in an interview with CoinDesk last year that banks should turn to crypto custodians to act as sub-custodians for digital assets instead of doing it themselves. 

Najarian did not comment on whether the New York trust charter was a step towards BitGo pursuing a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as Anchorage did last year.

“We are constantly evaluating the right long-term path here,” Najarian said. “I would expect that over time it will make sense for ourselves and firms like us to continue to evaluate what’s the most seamless path to get to a regulatory designation that allows you to custody assets with every state in the U.S. without ambiguity.”

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A Colombian commercial bank established in 1870 is to trial cryptocurrency services through a sandbox project set up by the country’s financial regulator.

• Banco de Bogotá said Monday that the pilot program begins this month and will allow the bank to explore business models and risks associated with the handling of crypto assets, according to a Portafolio report.
• The sandbox from the Financial Superintendence of Colombia is aimed to provide a “joint test space between the digital ecosystem and the National Government in terms of crypto assets,” the news source said.
• The bank will select a limited group of clients for the pilot, who will be given the option to make cryptocurrency deposits and withdrawals using Banco de Bogotá’s mobile and virtual banking channels.
• As reported by CoinDesk, Colombia saw major growth in cryptocurrency use as a store of wealth as well as for transactional purposes in 2020.
• Peer-to-peer crypto marketplace LocalBitcoins said Colombia accounted for 11.3% of its global volume in 2020, making it one of the firm’s “main markets” alongside Russia and Venezuela.

Read more: La carrera de Colombia por convertirse en un mercado líder de criptomonedas en la región

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Gibraltar’s minister for digital and financial services has become an ambassador for the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC), an industry body that advocates for blockchain technology.

• Announced by the British Overseas Territory’s government Thursday, Albert Isola joins 130 other ambassadors of the group, including other national and international government representatives, business leaders and lawmakers.
• The GBBC’s aim to develop the emerging blockchain industry through education, advocacy and partnership, align with Gibraltar’s “position as one of the leading proponents in the advancement of the technology,” said Isola.
• GBBC was launched at Davos in 2017, with Gibraltar joining in November 2020 as an observing member. 
• Now, over 50 nations are represented in the group, according to its website.

Read more: Twitter CEO Donates $1M to Coin Center

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A large majority of institutional investors don’t plan to invest in or trade cryptocurrency, according to research by JPMorgan.

• Of the 3,400 investors surveyed, 78% said it was unlikely their firm will invest in or offer trading services for crypto, Business Insider reported Wednesday.
• However, 58% of respondents believe that crypto is “here to stay,” compared to 21% calling it a “temporary fad.”
• The respondents represented 1,500 different institutions, with 89% saying saying their firm does not currently invest in or trade crypto.
• Several banking giants have shown growing interest to offering crypto services to clients in recent weeks, with Goldman Sachs announcing Monday the relaunch of its trading desk after a three-year hiatus.
• Another survey released Wednesday by Blind found that 57% of 1,800 tech professionals surveyed currently own some crypto.
• Respondents included employees of JPMorgan along with tech giants like Amazon and Twitter.

See also: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, UBS Are Trading an ETP Tied to Polkadot’s Crypto

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Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm, said Thursday that traders might be prematurely betting that the Federal Reserve will move quickly to unwind the past year’s unprecedented monetary stimulus.

The investment banking giant’s comments could offer relief to bitcoin bulls, some of whom argue that trillions of dollars of money printing by central banks raises the chances of inflation, bolstering the cryptocurrency’s use as an investment hedge.

“The earliest the Fed will start talking about tapering [of bond purchases] is late 2021, with any discussion of interest rate hikes only coming a year after that,” Goldman Sachs’ Andrew Tilton told CNBC. 

Related: Bitcoin News Roundup for March 4, 2021

The market for futures contracts used to bet on Federal Reserve funds now implies that the first interest-rate hike could come as soon as 2022, versus the 2024 lift-off implied about four weeks ago. What’s more, the futures are now pricing multiple rate hikes in 2023. 

“That feels aggressive to us,” Tilton said, adding that the Fed hasn’t even begun tapering its ongoing $120 billion-a-month of bond purchases, a supplemental form of monetary easing once interest rates are cut close to zero, as they were early last year when the pandemic hit.

The Fed said earlier this year that it’s committed to continue buying $120 billion worth of bonds per month until it sees “substantial further progress” in the recovery. The bank has also reiterated that interest rates would remain at record lows for some time after inflation rises above its 2% target. 

A tapering or rate hike could dilute bitcoin’s appeal as an inflation hedge, inviting some selling pressure from momentum funds who bought the cryptocurrency as a store-of-value asset. 

Related: OKCoin Toasts Its Bitcoin Lightning Network Launch With New Developer Grant

The cryptocurrency fell by 20% last week, the biggest single-week decline since March 2020, as U.S. Treasury bond yields rose, indicating that markets were pricing in prospects of an early Fed tightening. 

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Ripple is piloting a private ledger to provide a platform for the issuance of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

• The CBDC Private Ledger will be powered by the same blockchain technology as Ripple’s public XRP Ledger (XRPL).
• This means the ledger will be built both for payments and issuing digital currencies, according to a blog post Wednesday.
• The CBDC ledger will aim to move money at low cost and with the speed and volume demanded by central banks, while also meeting their standards of security.
• Ripple will also need to ensure CBDC products built with XRPL will be interoperable with existing financial infrastructure.
• “The core technology behind this new CBDC Private Ledger has been running for more than 8 years without incident and with billions of dollars of value transacted everyday,” according to Ripple’s post.
• Around 80% of central banks are looking at launching a CBDC, per the post, with the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar being the first to launch and China’s digital yuan thought to be nearing fruition.

See also: PayPal Wants to Be a CBDC Distributor

• Bitcoin News Roundup for March 4, 2021
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Cryptocurrency exchange operator Huobi has been granted a license from Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission.

• British Virgin Islands-incorporated Huobi Technology Holdings announced Thursday that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Huobi Asset Management, had received approval to manage portfolios investing in virtual assets.
• Following the news, Huobi is now launching bitcoin, ethereum and multi-strategy funds, according to Chinese blogger Colin Wu.
• The new funds along with Huobi’s sizable ecosystem could bring more traditional Asian investors into the cryptocurrency space, he said.
• Wu raised as a potential issue that Huobi’s “founder cannot leave China and is under investigation.”
• Indeed, in January, multiple sources told CoinDesk a key executive was in custody with Chinese police due to an investigation related to the exchange’s over-the-counter trading service.

Read more: Huobi Global Connects to European Banking System via UK’s BCB Group

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• OKCoin Toasts Its Bitcoin Lightning Network Launch With New Developer Grant
• CEOs of Coinbase, FTX and Binance Top Blockchain Billionaire’s List
• DeFi and Staking Insurance Startup Unslashed Raises $2M

Bitcoin’s recovery appears to have stalled as caution sets in ahead of expected comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell later on Thursday.

The cryptocurrency is currently nursing losses below $50,000, having bounced from $43,000 to $52,500 in the past four trading days, according to CoinDesk 20 data.

A Q&A between Powell and the Wall Street Journal today will be closely watched by investors as it may influence risk sentiment in the financial markets and set the tone for the next big move in bitcoin. Specifically, what Powell says about bond yields will be of interest, trader and analyst Alex Kruger told CoinDesk.

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According to ING analysts, “comments that [Powell] is monitoring events in the Treasury market might be enough to calm things down, encourage a return to a softer dollar.”

That could bode well for bitcoin and stocks. Both assets have mostly moved in the opposite direction to the dollar index over the past 12 months, as seen below.

However, the rally in yields may accelerate, leading to a stronger dollar and weaker bitcoin, if Powell downplays concerns over rising bond yields, taking cues from his European Central Bank counterparts.

“No such concern [from Powell] would suggest the Fed is happy for Treasury yields to ‘find the right level’ – as our bond strategy colleagues say – potentially triggering another spike in yields and more dollar short-covering,” ING analysts noted.

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At press time, bitcoin is changing hands near $49,010 – down 5% over 24 hours. The 10-year U.S. yield is seen at 1.46%, and the dollar index is hovering above 91, representing a 0.2% gain on the day.

The 10-year yield surged to 12-month highs above 1.6% last week, as traders priced in prospects of an early unwinding of stimulus by the Fed. As such, both stocks and bitcoin faced selling pressure, with the latter falling 20%, the biggest single-week decline in nearly 12 months. Both asset types have benefitted from the Fed’s massive stimulus delivered since the March 2020 crash.

According to Citi analysts, markets are now pricing in an 80% chance of a 25-basis-point Fed rate hike to 0.25% by December 2022. Until a few weeks ago, the first interest rate hike was expected to happen in 2024.

The Dollar Index has already broken out of a falling wedge pattern on the weekly chart, indicating the end of a year-long bearish trend and a reversal higher.

A rising dollar is one of the bigger headwinds for bitcoin’s bullish trend, Kruger said.

If the bullish pattern on the DXY is a guide, the market looks to be pricing in low odds of Powell talking down yields and triggering another risk-on rally in stocks and bitcoin.

Also read: How to Buy Bitcoin at an 80% Premium From Michael Saylor

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100x, the owner of the BitMEX cryptocurrency trading platform, has hired auditing veteran Stephan Lutz as its new chief financial officer.

• According to an announcement Thursday, Lutz will join the group in May to take charge of financial growth, business expansion and profitability.
• The new hire brings to the firm nearly a decade of experience as partner at auditing and consultancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), as well as time advising financial corporations at PwC Europe and PWC Germany before that.
• “[Lutz] joins at precisely the right time for us in our evolution as a company as we enhance the BitMEX platform and look to expand our capabilities further in 2021,” said 100x Group CEO Alex Höptner.
• The addition is the latest in the aftermath of recent legal troubles for the firm and follows the hiring of 100x’s first chief compliance officer.
• In October 2020, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and federal prosecutors charged BitMEX with facilitating unregistered trading and other violations.
• As reported by CoinDesk Wednesday, BitMEX founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes, who is currently in Singapore, could surrender to U.S. authorities next month.

Read more: Crypto Derivatives Exchange BitMEX Says All Users Are Now Verified

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Ripple’s executive chairman has asked a U.S. court to dismiss a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit alleging securities violations relating to sales of the XRP cryptocurrency.

According to a legal letter informing Judge Analisa Torres at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York of a motion to dismiss, lawyers say the SEC’s amended complaint “still fails to state a claim against Mr. Larsen.”

In December, the SEC sued Ripple, CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Larsen alleging they had not registered XRP as a security or sought an exemption, and had sold over $1.3 billion in the cryptocurrency to retail investors.

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The central claim centers on Larsen having “knowingly or recklessly provided substantial assistance to another person in violation of [Section 5]” of the Securities Act 1933, according to the amended complaint filed last month.

See also: Ripple, SEC Say Settlement Unlikely Before Trial Over Alleged Securities Violations

On those grounds, Larsen’s lawyers contend the SEC failed to show that Larsen knew at the time XRP units were securities and Ripple’s activities were inappropriate. They make various points to back this up, including that the Justice Department and FinCEN considered and regulated XRP as a “virtual currency” – a fact inconsistent with it being a security.

“The SEC’s own allegations are not only deficient but affirmatively show it cannot meet this standard,” the letter reads. “At a minimum, the SEC must allege that it was ‘so obvious’ that XRP transactions were securities and Ripple’s conduct was improper that Mr. Larsen ‘must have been aware of it.'”

Related: Bitcoin Hovers Below $50K as Traders Await Fed’s Take on Bond Yields

The lawyers also argue the regulator fails to demonstrate Larsen had provided “substantial assistance” to Ripple in carrying out its sales of XRP, or that Larsen’s XRP transactions were within the U.S. and hence within its jurisdiction.

“This deficiency is fatal to the Section 5 claim against Mr. Larsen,” according to the letter. “To plead a Section 5 violation, the SEC must adequately allege that each sale occurred within the territorial reach of Section 5.”

See also: MoneyGram Faces Lawsuit for Allegedly Misleading Investors About XRP

The letter also alleges the SEC’s claim for monetary relief is time-barred, having gone beyond the allotted period to pursue a claim under Section 5.

“Because the SEC has alleged that the sales of XRP over a multi-year period constituted only one offer … the statute of limitations began to run in 2013 and expired in 2018,” the letter reads.

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Crypto.com is launching a $200 million fund dedicated to investing in crypto startups, CoinDesk can exclusively reveal.

• To lead the effort, the Hong Kong-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange announced the launch of a new venture arm, Crypto.com Capital, on Thursday.
• The firm has earmarked $200 million for the venture arm to invest in crypto startups and projects at seed and Series A stages.
• Crypto.com Capital will lead funding rounds with investments of between $100,000 and $3 million at seed stage and between $3 million and $10 million at Series A.
• According to Bobby Bao, Crypto.com co-founder and the new arm’s chief, startups will rely on Crypto.com Capital to “move fast and provide both capital and access to a global user base.”
• Crypto exchanges having venture arms is far from unusual. Coinbase, Binance and Blockchain.com have all had investment wings for years.

See also: Crypto.com to Burn 70B CRO Tokens Ahead of Full Blockchain Launch Next Month

• Huobi Said to Be Launching Bitcoin, Ether Funds After Being Granted Hong Kong License
• Bitcoin Hovers Below $50K as Traders Await Fed’s Take on Bond Yields
• BitMEX Operator Appoints PwC Partner as Chief Financial Officer
• Ripple’s Chris Larsen Files Motion to Dismiss SEC Case Over XRP Sales

The Associated Press (AP) is auctioning off a non-fungible token (NFT) artwork commemorating the first U.S. election recorded on a blockchain.

According to data from NFT Marketplace OpenSea, the artwork titled “The Associated Press calls the 2020 Presidential Election on Blockchain – A View from Outer Space” will be sold in the next eight days. As of press time, the top bid was for $928 in wrapped ether.

The artwork depicts a visual of the electoral college map from space using election data AP published on-chain at the time. The piece of digital art is considered one-of-a-kind and a 1/1 edition.

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AP used an Ethereum address to declare the winner of the U.S. 2020 Presidential Election via Everipedia’s OraQle software. This marked the first time a U.S. election was called on a blockchain, according to the news agency.

AP’s address acted as a cryptographic signature providing authenticity via metadata that AP included of the “exact date and time that AP called the election,” according to a press release shared with CoinDesk on Thursday.

See also: What Are NFTs and How Do They Work?

AP Director of Data Licensing Dwayne Desaulniers confirmed to CoinDesk that the auction is ongoing.

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“As we continue to test blockchain for revenue models and journalistic use cases, we thought an original and creative NFT would be interesting to test on many levels,” he said via email.

Desaulniers added that the map in the image is based on the election data the AP published on chain in November. “We thought we would use the NFT to mark that milestone,” he said.

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A piece by famous street artist Banksy is to be sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) – after the original was physically burned in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Wednesday.

It’s a first for the art industry as NFTs jump into the mainstream consciousness.

The piece, “Morons,” which pokes fun at art collectors, has been burned by a team of crypto enthusiasts at a discreet Brooklyn location.

Related: Associated Press Auctions NFT in Spirit of 2020 US Election

To be clear, Banksy was not involved. The piece was bought for roughly $100,000, an unnamed source told CoinDesk.

The burning was live-streamed through the Twitter account @BurntBanksy, after which the team created an NFT to represent the artwork on the Ethereum-based OpenSea marketplace.

An auction for the NFT will commence on OpenSea on March 4 with proceeds from the sale going to charity. The winning bidder will receive the official proof of authenticity from Banksy’s authentication agency, Pest Control.

Banksy has destroyed his own artwork in the past, shredding his painting “Girl With Balloon” immediately after its $1.4 million sale at Sotheby’s.

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“I think [Banksy] would appreciate what we are doing since he also promotes creativity and iconoclastic ideas,” the team behind the burn told CoinDesk in a statement.

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Anonymous developers have built two controversial decentralized applications (dapps) on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), a smart contract-based blockchain backed by exchange giant Binance, daring the platform to censor the dapps.  

The developers apparently hope the offensive and sensitive nature of the dapps would force Binance to get rid of them, proving BSC, unlike Ethereum, is not decentralized and can be controlled by a centralized institution, said Jason Wu, CEO and founder of decentralized crypto lending platform DeFiner. He noted that BSC has far fewer nodes than Ethereum.

One dapp with a token is called Tanks of Tiananmen. It appeared on Binance’s blockchain on Thursday. The name refers to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China, which the Chinese government considers a very sensitive topic. The other dapp, Slavery, showed up on BSC on Saturday. It seems to liken the yield farming mechanism to slavery. 

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The two dapps are still on BSC as of press time. 

Some in the Ethereum community have reason to resent BSC. “Binance Smart Blockchain is very similar to Ethereum in a lot of ways,” Wu said. “Some devs might feel [it’s] unfair that an Ethereum copycat is doing so well.” 

The move comes at a time when BSC is gaining traction in hosting decentralized exchanges (DEX), some of which have migrated their business from Ethereum to BSC due to the latter’s lower trading cost. 1inch, one of the most popular DEX aggregators, expanded its businesses to BSC on Feb. 25, citing Ethereum’s high “gas” transaction fees. 

“Transactions per second for Ethereum have reached their peak for a long time and the excessive demand will flow to other blockchains,” said Hongfei Da, founder of decentralized blockchain platform Neo. “BSC’s technical infrastructure and community are well positioned to take in the demand.”  

Related: Banksy Work Physically Burned and Digitized as NFT in Art-World First

High gas fees and transaction speed on Ethereum are not the only reasons why dapps are moving to BSC. The blockchain is backed by crypto exchange giant Binance, so automated market makers (AMMs) could get more liquidity from the exchange while getting more publicity from Binance promoting the DEX’s products, said Aries Wang, co-founder of crypto exchange Bibox. 

“Many dapps, ranging from AMMs to lending platforms, could have a jump-start if they run on BSC with the preferential yield farming models offered by the platform to increase their native tokens to a high level even in these projects’ early stage,” Wang said.   

PancakeSwap, a DEX native to BSC, has been closing in on Ethereum-based UniSwap in terms of total value locked (TVL). On Feb.19, Binance Coin (BNB) saw a 45% increase when PancakeSwap “flippened” Uniswap in 24 hours. 

In a recent tweet, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhou said Ethereum could be its own killer and compared the network to some now-defunct social media companies. 

“Perhaps social media is the best example,” Zhao said in his tweet on Saturday. Friendster and MySpace were hugely popular but couldn’t keep up with the user/demand growth, he said.  

“Demand is growing exponentially, performance of ETH [isn’t],” he said. The Ethereum 2.0 update would take years, while the other solution to Ethereum’s scalability problem, rollups, which are off-chain aggregation of transactions inside an Ethereum smart, is not user friendly, Zhao said.

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Kraken’s co-founder and CEO Jesse Powell says his exchange may seek a public listing “sometime next year” but that there are “no guarantees.”

Appearing on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday, Powell was asked whether he would take his company public at a $10 billion valuation.

“We are certainly on track though $10 billion dollars is a low valuation,” said Powell. “I wouldn’t be interested in issuing shares at that price.” Powell’s statement comes as rival exchange Coinbase is being valued as high as $100 billion.

Related: Associated Press Auctions NFT in Spirit of 2020 US Election

Kraken is in talks to raise new capital in a move that could see the company’s valuation soar to above $10 billion, as CoinDesk previously reported.

However, Powell added there was “no reason” to raise new capital except to accelerate company acquisitions.

Asked where bitcoin was headed and how investors should be looking at its current price, Kraken’s CEO said there was “no reason to sell bitcoin”

“I think a lot of people are just waiting to buy the dip,” said Powell. “I do think if you’re buying into bitcoin based on speculation you should be looking to hold over a five-year period.”

Related: Banksy Work Physically Burned and Digitized as NFT in Art-World First

CoinDesk attempted to contact Powell for additional comment but did not receive a response by press time.

• Controversial Dapps Test Binance Smart Chain’s Decentralization
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A decentralized newcomer to non-fungible token (NFT) investments has raised $1.3 million from a smattering of well-heeled veterans of crypto venture capital.

Yield Guild Games (YGG), the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with a penchant for NFTs, raised the funds from Delphi Digital, Scalar Capital, BlockTower Capital, gumi Cryptos Capital, Ascensive Assets and Youbi Capital.

YGG will use the funds to improve its protocol for distributed investing in the burgeoning NFT scene, the startup said. As a DAO, YGG pools investor assets for the purpose of betting and then profiting on NFTs, sharing the proceeds with backers. Its focus is on NFTs that intersect with the gaming space.

Related: Associated Press Auctions NFT in Spirit of 2020 US Election

“Just like real estate, virtual economic activities of games will occur in virtual lands,” a spokesperson for the project told CoinDesk via email. “As virtual land is scarce, demand for it within blockchain games will increase in value over time.”

DAOs have begun speculating on NFTs as the token type explodes in prominence. FlamingoDAO, a competitor in the space, recently spent 605 ETH ($761,889 at purchase) on a CryptoPunk NFT.

“Scalar invested in YGG because we believe they will bring in a wave of new people from all over the world to crypto through play-to-earn gaming,” Scalar Capital Managing Director Linda Xie said in a statement. “YGG will enable gamers to become investors with the guild purchasing land and tokens in games that they actively participate in.”

The YGG team recently spent $100,000 on virtual land in Axie Infinity.

Related: Banksy Work Physically Burned and Digitized as NFT in Art-World First

“Our mission here at YGG is to bring players into the Metaverse,” the team wrote in a blog post. “Part of that mission involves investing in the economic future of these virtual worlds while helping our guild members earn a living.”

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The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) could be the next federal regulator to dip its feet into crypto-related rules.

Credit unions will want to look at digital assets and blockchain technology, said NCUA Vice Chairman Kyle Hauptman in a speech Wednesday. Speaking to the Credit Union National Association Governmental Affairs Conference, Hauptman said his regulatory agency may consider providing guidance around the treatment of digital assets.

Credit unions are non-profit, member-owned financial institutions that provide similar services to banks in the U.S. While national banks are regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), credit unions are overseen by the NCUA. 

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“NCUA may want to look at the actions taken by another regulator, the OCC. That agency recently provided guidance around custody of digital assets and the use of stablecoins for payments,” Hauptman said during his speech. “Stablecoins, as you may know, are cryptocurrencies designed to minimize price volatility, and the OCC’s guidance moves the U.S. closer to the real-time payment systems already used in other countries.”

The NCUA may not want to recreate every piece of guidance the OCC published, but Hauptman said he looks forward to working with NCUA Chairman Tood Harper to see what can help credit unions innovate. 

Hauptman told CoinDesk prior to his speech that the NCUA is the federal regulator and insurer for the more than 5,000 credit unions in the U.S., which collectively hold some $1.5 trillion in deposits. 

“At some point, we’ll speak with NCUA staff about doing a side-by-side with what the OCC did and see what we do or don’t want to adapt for credit unions. NCUA benefits a bit from ‘somebody else went first,’ so we can, where appropriate, build on the OCC’s experience,” he told CoinDesk. 

Related: Banksy Work Physically Burned and Digitized as NFT in Art-World First

He pointed to ATMs and remote deposits as examples of past innovative tools that credit unions implemented. 

He likened decentralized finance (DeFi) and stablecoins to the introduction of smart phones and mobile banking. 

“Smart phones didn’t exist 20 years ago and thus there weren’t regulations around mobile banking,” he said. “Policymakers then obviously had to provide clarity or risk seeing regulated institutions slowly lose business to new technologies.”

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Decentralized exchange (DEX) SushiSwap is now live on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Fantom, Polygon, xDai Chain and Moonbeam Network, according to the project’s CTO Joseph Delong, in one of the knockoff project’s most notable divergences from Uniswap to date.

SushiSwap, which has some $3.3 billion in liquidity and $300 million in 24 hour volume, was formerly only hosted on the Ethereum blockchain, which is currently suffering under increasingly high transaction fees. Many Ethereum-based projects have been scrambling for scaling solutions, such as Rollups or moving to another blockchain that supports ERC-20 styled digital assets.

The exchange first garnered attention after copying Uniswap’s open source code, adding a token and then diverting liquidity away from Uniswap towards itself with the novel “vampire mining” program. Since then, the project has professionalized, particularly with the addition of Delong.

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Delong said SushiSwap is eyeing an integration with Optimism’s Layer 2 solution, Optimistic Rollups. Optimism – closed a $25 million Series B with Andreessen Horowitz in February – is expected to go live on mainnet later this month.

Not all those blockhains are ready for handling ERC-20 assets, Delong said. BSC and Fantom have “good support,” but the others “will need some work for the end user experience.”

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A recent survey conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional network for tech professionals, found that 50% of professionals trust cryptocurrency and 57% currently own some. 

The data was gathered from a survey of 1,800 respondents over the course of the last couple of days. Respondents included employees of Twitter, Amazon, JPMorgan and a variety of other companies. 

The survey asked respondents whether they trust cryptocurrency, whether they own any and whether they would accept cryptocurrency as payment as part of their total compensation. 

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“The most surprising takeaway from this survey is that only half of survey respondents trust cryptocurrency,” said Fiorella Riccobono, who ran the survey and collected the data. “Given companies like Tesla, PayPal, Square, and Twitter have all shown their exposure to bitcoin, I expected their confidence to trickle into the tech industry and their respective employees more.” 

Interestingly, employees of big banks seemed to trust crypto more than those in tech jobs. 

For example, 90% of professionals at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and 70% of Goldman Sachs professionals say they trust cryptocurrency. This seemingly is in line with a renewed interest in cryptocurrencies by institutional investors during the currency bull run, including Goldman Sachs re-launching of its crypto trading desk on March 1 after a three-year hiatus. Comparably, only 52% of professionals at Amazon and 50% of Apple professionals trust cryptocurrency. 

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Meanwhile, 39% of respondents said they would accept crypto as part of their total compensation, led by 80% of employees at Credit Karma, the credit monitoring company. Just 38% of employees at PayPal, a company that recently entered the crypto fray, said they would accept compensation in crypto. 

While Riccobono was surprisedtrust in crypto wasn’t higher, other respondents employed by companies that have shown familiarity with crypto held bags. For example, 75% of Twitter professionals who responded to the survey own cryptocurrency, and 64% of the Bloomberg respondents said they did. 

Read more: Tesla Invests $1.5B in Bitcoin, Plans to Accept Crypto Payments

Users of Blind can also share posts, or ask questions. A Facebook professional on Blind wrote, “Half my wealth in crypto[.] It’s the future of money, and you’ll probably do it too someday. Is it risky? Yes. But I am highly confident it will pay off.” 

Meanwhile, an Amazon professional posted that one of his or her concerns is that people who don’t understand blockchains generally don’t mentally separate blockchain utilization (e.g., cryptocurrency) from the underlying technology that makes everything possible (the blockchain itself). 

“It’s concerning because if people don’t make that distinction, then the failure of one or more trending cryptos will cause people to mentally write off the benefits or the potential benefits of the underlying technology,” the anonymous professional wrote. “That’s why I’ve been looking at investing in currencies that exist on underlying systems that I think are scalable beyond simple payment ledgers.”

And as one professional at LinkedIn put it:

Just bought around 100K worth of bitcoin. YOLO. Bitcoin to the .

According to Riccobono, Blind decided to run this survey because it is apparent that decentralized finance is likely to impact significantly how banks operate in the future. 

“Users on Blind have begun to recognize the potential to shift the whole financial system at a macroeconomic level,” she said.  

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