Monday, November 8
Infrastructure Bill Passes - Is Crypto Now Illegal ?
Chicago Mercantile Exchange to list ETH Futures
Cult-Classic Pulp Fiction to Auction 7 NFTs
Loopring Fever on Rumors of GameStop Alliance
Twitter Memes of the Week
Infrastructure Bill PASSES - Is Crypto Now Illegal?
Under the cover of night and while crypto-Twitter fandom celebrated NFTs in New York City (see video below)…
…the House of “Representatives” quietly passed the hotly debated Infrastructure Bill.
The question on everyone’s mind is:
Is crypto now illegal?
Sort of. If left unchallenged or unchanged, the nefarious 6050I Amendment within the bill will make crypto illegal in America for certain transactions starting in 2024.
According to University of Virginia School of Law professor Abraham Sutherland which I featured in the previous newsletter, provision 6050i imposes strict KYC reporting requirements for “large” transactions (KYC reporting if >$10,000).
“Know Your Customer” reporting requirements would be on such things as sender’s name, address, social security number, nature of transaction, where they are employed, etc. Make no mistake, this is not about collecting taxes. Nor is this about unrealized capital gains taxes from crypto. This is an eleventh-hour crypto ban by our “representatives” thru nefarious legislation.
Abe Sutherland had this to say:
“This really is not so much about tax, it’s about crime-fighting. The amendment to section 6050I is an affront to the rule of law and to the norms of democratic lawmaking. It was slipped quietly into a 2,700-page spending bill, allegedly as a tax measure to defray the bill’s trillion-dollar price tag even though section 6050I is in fact a costly criminal enforcement provision.”
Other’s on Twitter such as Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of CoinShares, correctly points out that the law is flagrantly unconstitutional, going against everything it means to be an American.
Section 6050I of the tax code was originally created in 1984 as an attempt to combat the war on drugs. It required recipients of large cash transactions or bank transfers in excess of $10,000 to inform and dox the other party within 15 days to the IRS. AND… you would be required by law to hold those documents for no less than 5 years. Failure to comply will not be just a misdemeanor but a penalty of the highest order, a Felony.
The amendment in the new bill might seem innocuous enough with only eight-words changed, but the change in the definition of “cash” to include “any digital asset” has major ramifications.
ETH Futures on Chicago Mercantile Exchange - Dec 6
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group announced last Tuesday its plans to launch a futures derivative based on Ethereum by December 6.
Institutional Investors will finally be able to gain portfolio exposure to the second largest crypto by market cap. The catch-22? Micro-Futures derivative! The ETH-based derivative product will be 1/10 the size of one Ethereum.
In other related news, in an open letter written to the Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, Congressional Blockchain Caucus co-chairs Rep. Tom Emmer and Rep. Darren Soto ask for clarity and an answer to why a spot Bitcoin ETF is not approved yet? With the Bitcoin futures-based exchange-traded funds already in full swing on the market, they argue it simply doesn’t make sense to approve a futures ETF but not a spot ETF that holds actual bitcoin.
Cult-Classic Pulp Fiction to Auction 7 NFTs
Last week, New York City hosed it first annual NFT.NYC conference, something akin to San Diego’s Comic Con. One of the celebs to take the stage was legendary film-maker and screen-writer Quentin Tarantino.
At the event, Tarantino announce that he will be minting SEVEN, never-before-seen scenes from his cult-classic Pulp Fiction. The owners of these NFTs, which will not be any of us, will get exclusive access to a one-of-a-kind artifact. Each NFT will feature an iconic piece of “front cover” art from the film in addition to one of the following: handwritten scripts and notes which were uncut, audio commentary from Tarantino himself, and/or various secrets about the film.
The famed director chose to mint the NFTs on the Secret Network, a network clouded in so much secrecy that I have never heard of it. Nevertheless, as the NFTs will be minted on this Layer 1 privacy-first blockchain, the actual auction is set to take place on OpenSea. Stay tuned. Auction TBD in December.
Loopring Fever on Rumors of GameStop Alliance
Loopring, a layer II Ethereum scaling solution, is up nearly 7x in just 8 days after rumors circulate of a major deal with GameStop. The phenomenon seems to have propagated from the popular social media group, WallStreetBets on Reddit.
LRC is currently trading at $2 a token. This explosive rise start trading at a low of $0.38 per token and reached a fever pitch of $2.49 on November 8.
According to Decrypt, GameStop seems to be branching out into Web3 (the “metaverse”) as it posted several crypto specific job, such as: “Director of Product Marketing - NFT Platform” & “Sr Software Engineer - NFT Platform”. In addition, GitHub — which is a repository of open-source code — made multiple reference to GameStop and the link to Web3 Gaming and NFTs.