States on Friday took action against Celsius Network, accusing the company, which purports to be one of the world's largest cryptocurrency lenders, of offering residents unregistered securities. From a report: Texas filed a notice seeking a hearing to determine whether to issue a cease and desist order against the company. The action means Celsius will have to show why it shouldn't be ordered to stop offering its products to state residents. The hearing is scheduled for February 14. Separately, New Jersey ordered Celsius to stop offering some of its products, which it also described as unregistered securities, effective November 1.

The moves against Celsius come on the heels of similar actions against New Jersey-based competitor BlockFi taken by states including New Jersey, Texas and others in July, and in the week after Coinbase Global Inc. disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission had threatened to sue it if it offered its own yield product to depositors. Celsius had more than $24 billion in "community assets" at the beginning of September, the company said, which would make it one of the world's largest crypto lenders and interest-account providers, if not the largest. The company offers customers a yield of nearly 9% for deposits of U.S.-dollar stablecoins, such as Tether and USD Coin, as much as 6.2% for Bitcoin, and varying rates of interest on other cryptocurrencies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: China's campaign against the cryptocurrency industry is now targeting miners who tried to disguise themselves as data researchers and storage facilities to stay in business, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Inspections intensified this month in several Chinese provinces, targeting illegal mining activities in colleges, research institutions and data centers, said the people who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. Concern over the country's power supplies for the upcoming winter season is one reason for the urgency, they said. The new round of scrutiny could further depress the amount of crypto mining occurring in China, which for years had been the dominant player and as recently as April had a 46% share of the global hash rate, a measure of computing power used in mining and processing, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

In August, AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron said the company will start accepting bitcoin as payment for movie tickets and concessions at all of its U.S. theaters. Now, Aron says he expects the company to also accept Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. In a tweet, Aron said: "Cryptocurrency enthusiasts: you likely know @AMCTheatres has announced we will accept Bitcoin for online ticket and concession payments by year-end 2021. I can confirm today that when we do so, we also expect that we similarly will accept Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash."

Major cryptocurrencies gave back their advances after Walmart denied having an agreement to use Litecoin for purchases. From a report: Litecoin -- which rose as much as 33% at one point -- erased all its gains. Bitcoin, the largest digital asset, was down 2.9% as of 10:24 a.m. in New York after earlier having advance roughly 4% on the news. Other digital assets also retreated, with Bitcoin Cash, Ether and EOS all declining. A Walmart spokesperson said the statement on Litecoin was "inauthentic." Meanwhile, a verified Litecoin Twitter account deleted a tweet that linked to a press release announcing the partnership.

Slashdot has been following El Salvador's pioneering adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender last week.

But by Friday Reuters was reporting that "For a fourth day in a row technical glitches have beset the Salvadoran government's bitcoin digital wallet Chivo, a setback that could discourage residents from signing up to the app promoted by President Nayib Bukele. Problems accessing the wallet, withdrawing money from ATMs, and data verification, as well as the government not depositing the $30 (€25) bonus Bukele promised all Chivo users were the most frequent issues, according to interviews with at least 10 users and user complaints posted on Twitter and Facebook.

Melvin Vasquez, a 30-year-old tattoo artist, downloaded Chivo on Tuesday, when the Bitcoin law went into effect, but has since been unable to use it... User complaints were also stacking up in Apple's App Store and Alphabet's Google Play...

[M]any of the very people sending or receiving dollars to El Salvador are mistrustful of Bitcoin. Some expressed fears of losing money, given the high volatility of the cryptocurrency.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A Long Island man was charged on Wednesday with using his position as an I.T. supervisor for Suffolk County to mine cryptocurrency from government offices, costing the county thousands of dollars in electricity. Prosecutors said that Christopher Naples, 42, of Mattituck, L.I., had hidden 46 specialized devices used to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in six rooms in the Suffolk County Center in Riverhead, including underneath floorboards and inside an unused electrical panel. Mr. Naples was charged with public corruption, grand larceny, computer trespass and official misconduct. If convicted of the top charge, he could face up to 15 years in prison.

Mr. Naples had admitted that the devices belonged to him and that he had been operating them for at least several months before the district attorney's office was alerted to the scheme. Prosecutors said that at least 10 of Mr. Naples's machines had been running since February, costing Suffolk County more than $6,000. [...] [G]iven that 36 more machines had been discovered, it was likely that Mr. Naples had cost the county thousands more. [...] [O]ne room in which Mr. Naples had placed the devices had critically important computer servers and other equipment for the entire county, and that the temperature in that room in which the devices were placed had dropped 20 degrees shortly after they were disabled.

Matt Levine, writing at Bloomberg: Oh, sure, yes, absolutely. The rule in the U.S. is that an "investment contract," meaning "the investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others," is a security, and generally can't be sold to the public without registering it with the Securities and Exchange Commission, delivering a prospectus with audited financial statements, etc. A Bitcoin lending program -- in which (1) a bunch of people pool their Bitcoins, (2) some manager or smart contract lends those Bitcoins to borrowers who pay interest, and (3) some or all of the interest is paid back to the people in the pool -- is pretty straightforwardly an investment contract and thus a security.

I have been saying this for months, though that's only because the SEC has also been saying it for months. But I admit that the SEC hasn't been saying it in a particularly clear way. There's not an SEC press release saying "FYI crypto lending programs are obviously securities." And I gather that there are a lot of crypto lending programs -- they're a staple feature of decentralized finance platforms -- and roughly none of them are registered with the SEC. The SEC and state regulators have brought enforcement actions against a few of them -- we've talked about BitConnect and BlockFi and Blockchain Credit Partners -- but I suppose each of those is distinctive in its own way, and there are about a zillion others that haven't been sued by the SEC. So you could reasonably look around and be like "oh sure we can pool people's Bitcoins and lend them and pass along the interest, that's not a security that should involve the SEC." You'd be wrong, but I get where you're coming from.

[...] Look, I get it. From the perspective of Coinbase, and of its customers, and frankly of most normal people interested in crypto:

People would like to lend their Bitcoins.
It doesn't feel like a security.
It's kind of annoying and archaic that a 1946 Supreme Court case says that it is?

But look at it from the SEC's perspective:

The SEC really doesn't like crypto.
The SEC is a regulatory agency that has a general tendency to want to do more regulating.
Popular tokens like Bitcoin and Ether are not securities and so not subject to SEC regulation, which leaves the SEC feeling antsy.
But crypto lending programs are pretty clearly securities subject to SEC regulation.
So for the SEC to say "crypto lending programs are securities and need to be regulated" serves the dual purposes of (1) expanding SEC jurisdiction over crypto and (2) stopping those programs.
Also it's pretty clearly justified by a 1946 Supreme Court case.

XXongo writes: The Guardian tells the story of the Satoshi, the converted cruise ship that was supposed to be the libertarian paradise, homesteading the high seas off the coast of Panama, free from rules and regulations and (most of all) taxes, with an economy run on cryptocurrency. The ship was even named "Satoshi," after the pseudonym of the nearly-mythical elder who outlined the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

So, what went wrong? Well, turns out that it wasn't quite so simple, and in some ways the "borderless seas" are actually among the most tightly regulated locations on Earth. Even selling the ship for scrap turned out to be hard...

More than 1,000 people marched in El Salvador's capital on Tuesday to protest the adoption of bitcoin as legal tender, amid a bumpy initial rollout of systems to support the digital currency. Reuters reports: The protesters burned a tire and set off fireworks in front of the Supreme Court building around noon local time, as the government deployed heavily militarized police to the site of the protest. "This is a currency that's not going to work for pupusa vendors, bus drivers or shopkeepers," said a San Salvador resident who opposed the adoption of the cryptocurrency. Pupusas are a traditional Salvadoran corn-based food. "This is a currency that's ideal for big investors who want to speculate with their economic resources."

The protest came as El Salvador's government was rushing to iron out technological snags in bitcoin's first-day rollout. Earlier on Tuesday, Salvadorans trying to download the Chivo digital wallet found it was unavailable on popular app stores. Then Bukele tweeted that the government had temporarily unplugged it, in order to connect more servers to deal with demand. A group of people in Chivo tee-shirts at a stall to train people interested in using the app milled around waiting for it to be reconnected. It later appeared on Apple and Huawei's stores, and Bukele used Twitter to ask users to let him know how it was working. El Salvador voted to adopt bitcoin as legal tender in June. Yesterday, one day before the Bitcoin Law was put in effect, the country bought roughly $20.9 million worth of bitcoin, sending the price of the currency above $52,000 for the first time since May.

A 22-year-old Bitcoin millionaire wants Republicans to ditch their iPhones for a low-end handset that he hopes to turn into a political tool. From a report: It was a pitch tuned for a politically polarized audience. Erik Finman, a 22-year-old who called himself the world's youngest Bitcoin millionaire, posted a video on Twitter for a new kind of smartphone that he said would liberate Americans from their "Big Tech overlords." His splashy video, posted in July, had stirring music, American flags and references to former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Donald J. Trump. Conservative pundits hawked Mr. Finman's Freedom Phone, and his video amassed 1.8 million views. Mr. Finman soon had thousands of orders for the $500 device. Then came the hard part: Building and delivering the phones. First, he received bad early reviews for a plan to simply put his software on a cheap Chinese phone. And then there was the unglamorous work of shipping phones, hiring customer-service agents, collecting sales taxes and dealing with regulators.

"I feel like practically I was prepared for anything," he said in a recent interview. "But I guess it's kind of like how you hope for world peace, in the sense you don't think it's going to happen." For even the most lavishly funded start-ups, it is hard to compete with tech industry giants that have a death grip on their markets and are valued in the trillions of dollars. Mr. Finman was part of a growing right-wing tech industry taking on the challenge nonetheless, relying more on their conservative customers' distaste for Silicon Valley than expertise or experience. [...] To make a smartphone, however, he had to rely on Google. The company's Android software already works with millions of apps, and Google makes a free, open version of the software for developers to modify. So Mr. Finman hired engineers to strip it of any sign of Google and load it with apps from conservative social networks and news outlets. Then he uploaded the software on phones he bought from China. To unveil the phone, he recorded an infomercial in which he cast the tech companies as enemies of the American way. "Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg banned MLK or Abraham Lincoln," he said in the video. "The course of history would have been altered forever."

[...] Thousands of people bought the $500 phone. Others, including some conservatives, quickly panned the animated pitch. Quickly, news outlets reported that the Freedom Phone was based on a low-cost handset from Umidigi, a Chinese manufacturer that had used chips shown to be vulnerable to hacks. Mr. Finman, who marketed the device as "the best phone in the world," was on the defensive. In an interview in July, Mr. Finman admitted that Umidigi made the phone but still said he was "100 percent" sure it was more secure than the latest iPhone. Apple has tens of thousands of engineers. Mr. Finman said he employed 15 people in Utah and Idaho.

In advanced economies, cryptocurrencies are viewed by many in the financial world with suspicion -- the domain of zealous "crypto bros" and a speculative and highly volatile fad that can only end badly. Regulators in Europe and the US have issued stark warnings about the dangers of trading crypto. But in the developing world, there are signs that crypto is quietly building deeper roots. Especially in countries which have a history of financial instability or where the barriers to accessing traditional financial products such as bank accounts are high, cryptocurrency use is fast becoming a fact of daily life. Financial Times: "While everyone was paying attention to [Tesla chief executive] Elon Musk's tweets, and which institutional investor or CEO was saying what they thought about bitcoin, there was this entire story unravelling in emerging markets around the world that's really powerful," says Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis, a leading data company in the sector. "There's a massive crypto footprint in many of these countries ... [and] a massive amount of entrepreneurial opportunity." Chainalysis ranks Vietnam first for crypto adoption worldwide -- one of 19 emerging and frontier markets in its top 20, with only the US among advanced economies making an appearance at number eight in 2021. "It's very striking this year, [adoption] is a story of emerging and frontier markets," adds Grauer. Separate data from UsefulTulips.org, tracking bitcoin transactions on the world's two biggest peer-to-peer crypto trading platforms, show that in the past few weeks, sub-Saharan Africa has overtaken North America to become the geographical region with the highest volume of this kind of crypto activity.

[...] Emerging markets are fertile ground for cryptocurrencies, often because their own are failing to do their job. As a store of value, as a means of exchange and as a unit of account, national currencies in some developing countries too often fall short. Unpredictable inflation and fast-moving exchange rates, clunky and expensive banking systems, financial restrictions and regulatory uncertainty, especially the existence or threat of capital controls, all undermine their appeal. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is a case in point. Its impatient, youthful population has to contend daily with high unemployment, the vagaries of black market currency exchanges and capital controls. As the price of oil, the country's main export, dropped during the pandemic and further squeezed dollar supply, many businesses were unable to pay foreign suppliers and lenders, almost leading to the default of a World Bank-backed power plant that provides a tenth of Nigeria's electricity. For individuals sending or receiving remittances or billing customers, the lack of dollars is a constant headache.

El Salvador bought roughly $20.9 million worth of bitcoin, one day before it formally adopts the world's most popular cryptocurrency as legal tender. From a report: In a series of tweets Monday, President Nayib Bukele revealed that the country had purchased a total of 400 bitcoin, the first step in a larger push to add the digital currency to its balance sheet. The tweets were posted a few hours apart. Based on the bitcoin price at the time of the tweets, the amount of the digital coin purchased totaled roughly $20.9 million. "Our brokers will be buying a lot more as the deadline approaches," he wrote. The price of bitcoin rose following the tweets and was trading at around $52,681.85 at 12:16 a.m. ET Tuesday. The posts came hours before El Salvador's bitcoin law, which was passed in June, took effect Tuesday. El Salvador is the first country to accept bitcoin as legal currency, which will work alongside the U.S. dollar. Proponents and critics around the world will be watching to see how this unprecedented experiment plays out.

This week the Guardian reported that a "tumultuous few weeks" awaits El Salvador as it prepares to become the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender on Tuesday. In August a research note by Bank of America enthused about the new law's ability to reduce the cost of cross-border transactions (remittances account for 20% of El Salvador's GDP), increase digital penetration in a country where 70% of people still do not use banks, and attract foreign investment as a first mover in cryptocurrency adoption. Since then, however, the verdict from international financial organisations — and El Salvadorans themselves — has turned decidedly pessimistic. "The law was adopted extremely quickly, without a technical study or a public debate," says Ricardo Castañeda, a local economist. "I don't think the president has fully understood the implications of the law, its potential to cause serious macroeconomic problems and convert the country into a haven for money laundering."

The regulatory framework for adoption has yet to be published and there are rumours of delays to the Chivo app. Bankers in the capital say they have received calls from anxious clients threatening to withdraw their deposits rather than risk exposure to the volatile cryptocurrency markets. The ratings agency Moody's downgraded El Salvadoran debt over fears of "weakened governance" evidenced by the new law, and the IMF — with which the government is negotiating a $1bn loan — published a blogpost highlighting the risks of adopting crypto as national currency. "The shift from euphoria to scepticism has been very fast," says Castañeda.

The potential benefits identified by the Bank of America are probably overstated. A paper by Johns Hopkins University says the cost of remittances via Bitcoin will be higher than traditional methods, and a July survey found that nearly two-thirds of El Salvadorans would not be open to accepting payment in Bitcoin. Eric Grill, CEO of Chainbytes, which produces Bitcoin ATMs, told the Guardian that his plan to relocate manufacturing to El Salvador had faced serious challenges in sourcing parts. Local geothermal energy experts say Bukele's plan to power energy-intensive Bitcoin mining activities from the country's volcanoes are wildly optimistic.
Reuters offered an update on Thursday. "In the main handicraft market of El Salvador's capital, traders complain that with a week to go before bitcoin becomes legal tender, no officials have come to explain how it will work or what benefits it may bring."

Twitter's latest beta update introduces support for providing content creators with Bitcoin tips using the "Tip Jar" feature that Twitter introduced earlier this year. MacRumors reports: Bitcoin isn't yet available to select as a tip option for beta users, but code in the beta suggests that Twitter is in the process of rolling it out. When the Tip Jar was first introduced, Twitter allowed users to add Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo links to their Twitter profile, but soon, there will be a Bitcoin option.

Details in the latest Twitter beta indicate that users will be directed through a Bitcoin tutorial that includes details on the Bitcoin Lightning Network and custodial and non-custodial Bitcoin wallets. Twitter gives Strike, Blue Wallet and Wallet of Satoshi as examples of custodial wallets and Muun, Breez, Phoenix and Zap as examples of non-custodial wallets. Twitter also informs users that a Strike account is required. "We use Strike to generate Bitcoin Lightning invoices so you'll need to connect your account to accept Bitcoin tips" reads the text.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Fast Company, written by Michael Grothaus: One of the biggest movers on the cryptocurrency market in the past 24 hours is Solana. As of the time of this writing, Solana is up almost 20% over the past day, according to Coinbase. In the past week, it's up over 58%, and in the past month, it's up 275%. As for the past year, Solana has surged over 2,348%.

What is Solana? Solana is a decentralized blockchain platform. It facilitates the transactions of the SOL coin as well as digital assets like non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Is Solana a bitcoin competitor? Sure, because it's another cryptocurrency. But it's more apt to liken Solana to Ethereum since both are blockchain platforms that handle smart contracts.

Why is Solana surging? This is always a hard question to answer. Though Solana is holding some kind of mysterious "Ignition" event today. Nasdaq speculates that Solana might announce that it will "burn" tokens. That's when a certain number of coins are removed from supply, making the remaining ones more scarce and thus more valuable. Alternately, Solana could be set to announce new smart contract features.

Business Insider reports: Jack Dorsey, one of bitcoin's biggest advocates, is planning to build an open platform to create a decentralized exchange for bitcoin through TBD, his new business venture, according to his tweet Friday.

A decentralized exchange is a type of cryptocurrency exchange that allows peer-to-peer transactions without the need for an intermediary. Dorsey retweeted an original tweet by TBD project leader Mike Brock, who offered some direction on where the unit is headed... First, Brock said his team believes that bitcoin will be the native currency of the internet. But the problem, he noted, is how trading bitcoin often involves exchanging fiat at a centralized and custodial service... "While there are many projects to help make the internet more decentralized, our focus is solely on a sound global monetary system for all...."

His team wants to make it easy to fund non-custodial wallets globally through a platform that builds on- and off-ramps into bitcoin. Think of it as a decentralized exchange for fiat, he added, one that is "bitcoin-native, top to bottom.... this platform will be entirely developed in public, open-source, open-protocol, and any wallet will be able to use," Brock said. "No foundation or governance model that TBD controls. Permissionless or bust."

"When residents of an affluent estate community in Alberta started hearing noise from a nearby power plant, they didn't expect their complaints of sleepless nights would lead to a months-long investigation that would find a bitcoin mining operation had set up shop without approval," reports the CBC: Now, Link Global, the company behind the site, is being ordered by the province's utility commission to shut down two plants until it can prove it's allowed to operate — a move the company says will cost jobs and cause the oil and gas infrastructure in which it operates to sit dormant....

Vancouver-based Link Global had set up four 1.25 MW gas generators at the site, pulling power from a dormant natural gas well owned by Calgary-based company MAGA Energy. The natural gas powers thousands of computer servers that run programs to "mine" digital currency... Work on the plant began in August 2020, and by fall — when neighbours started to get annoyed — it was operating at full capacity. There was just one problem: The company hadn't notified neighbours of its plans. Or the county. Or the provincial utilities commission — which allows power plants to be set up without approval if they meet several conditions, including only generating power for the company's own use and proving the plant has no adverse effects on people or the environment...

Alberta is littered with nearly 200,000 dormant or abandoned oil and gas wells, often because they're no longer economically viable. It has raised the spectre that landowners and taxpayers could be on the hook for the cleanup costs, which the province estimates could be up to $30 billion, as well as prompted a push to find other uses for the facilities, such as powering cryptocurrency operations. Stephen Jenkins, Link Global's CEO, said some of that abandoned energy infrastructure, is at risk of leaking methane — a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. "We look at, OK, what can we do to use this in a beneficial way ... I don't want to say we're in the business of methane destruction, but we're in the business of beneficial use of that potential methane-generating source. You combust it properly. You don't flare it, and you control those emissions," Jenkins said...

And though the facility employs only four people, Jenkins said it's important to him to employ locally and give former oil and gas workers a path into other careers. The Sturgeon County plant's supervisor is a former pipefitter; he's now a bitcoin pro and an expert at keeping the plant online, Jenkins said. "It's a perfect use of people's skills," he said.

Of course, it's not all altruism. The company has said for every 10 MW of power, it can generate about 1.2 bitcoins per day.
Last Friday the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) ruled that the plant had indeed been violating their regulatory requirements, and would now also have to suffer a financial penalty which the CBC reported as "a $50,000 to $75,000 fine, reduced by up to 50% because Link Global admitted to breaking the rules..."

"More penalties could be on the way. The AUC will now review whether specific sanctions should be imposed against Link Global for operating without approval — a decision on that is expected this fall."

The CBC adds that another Link Global plant was also found to be "set up without the AUC's prior approval."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Charlie Osborne: The parents of two teenagers allegedly responsible for stealing $1 million in Bitcoin are being sued. According to court documents obtained by Brian Krebs, Andrew Schober lost 16.4552 in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2018 after his computer was infected with malware, allegedly the creation of two teenagers in the United Kingdom. The complaint (.PDF), filed in Colorado, accuses Benedict Thompson and Oliver Read, who were minors at the time, of creating clipboard malware. The malicious software, designed to monitor cryptocurrency wallet addresses, was downloaded and unwittingly executed by Schober after he clicked on a link, posted to Reddit, to install the Electrum Atom cryptocurrency application.

During a transfer of Bitcoin from one account to another, the malware triggered a Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attack, apparently replacing the address with one controlled by the teenagers and thereby diverting the coins into their wallets. According to court documents, this amount represented 95% of the victim's net wealth at the time of the theft. At today's price, the stolen Bitcoin is worth approximately $777,000. "Mr. Schober was planning to use the proceeds from his eventual sale of the cryptocurrency to help finance a home and support his family," the complaint reads. The pair, tracked down during an investigation paid for by Schober, are now adults and are studying computer science at UK universities. The mothers and fathers of Thompson and Read are named in the complaint. Emails were sent to the parents prior to the complaint requesting that the teenagers return the stolen cryptocurrency to prevent legal action from being taken. However, the requests, sent in 2018 and 2019, were met with silence.

Schober's complaint claims that the parents "knew or reasonably should have known" what their children were up to, and that they also failed to take "reasonable steps" in preventing further harm. In response (.PDF), the defendants do not argue the charge, but rather have requested a motion to dismiss based on two- and three-year statutes of limitation. "Despite his knowledge of his injury and the general cause thereof, Plaintiff waited to file his lawsuit beyond the two and three years required of him by the applicable statutes of limitations," court documents say. "For this reason, Plaintiff's claims against Defendants should be dismissed." However, Schober's legal team has argued (.PDF) that the teenagers were not immediately traced, and roughly a year passed between separately identifying Read and Thompson. Schober's lawyers have requested that the motion to dismiss is denied.

Digital currency company Circle says it's changing the makeup of its dollar-pegged stablecoin's reserves to just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds. CNBC reports: Digital currency company Circle had claimed its stablecoin, USD Coin, was backed 1:1 by actual dollars in a bank account. In July, it was revealed this was no longer the case, with Circle disclosing in an "attestation" from auditors Grant Thornton that cash made up just over 60% of USD Coin's reserves. The other 40% was backed by various forms of debt securities and bonds. Now, Circle says it's changing the makeup of USD Coin's reserves once again, with just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds underpinning the stablecoin.

Centre, a consortium founded by Circle and crypto exchange Coinbase which developed the stablecoin, unveiled the change on Sunday. "Mindful of community sentiment, our commitment to trust and transparency, and an evolving regulatory landscape, Circle, with the support of Centre and Coinbase, has announced that it will now hold the USDC reserve entirely in cash and short duration US Treasuries," Centre said in a blog post. "These changes are being implemented expeditiously and will be reflected in future attestations by Grant Thornton."

Payments technology company Visa announced Monday that it has bought a CryptoPunk as it enters into the world of non-fungible token (NFT) commerce. The Block reports: Visa bought CryptoPunk 7610, one of 3,840 female punks, for around $150,000 last week. CryptoPunks are considered the original NFTs, launched in 2017 by Larva Labs. These are a collection of 10,000 pixel art images of misfits and eccentrics. Each CryptoPunk has its own personality and unique combination of features. "We felt that CryptoPunks would be a great addition to our collection of artifacts that can chart and celebrate the past, present, and future of commerce," Visa's head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, told The Block in an interview.

When asked why Visa added a CryptoPunk to the collection, Sheffield said CryptoPunks "pioneered the NFT technology and wave of NFT commerce," so Visa wanted to own a punk. He said the decision was less about the individual punk but more about CryptoPunks in general, given that it is a historical NFT project. Visa worked with Anchorage Digital to buy the CryptoPunk, meaning Anchorage facilitated the transaction and is custodying the NFT for Visa, said Sheffield. "We purchased it from Anchorage using fiat," he said. Visa first partnered with Anchorage earlier this year to settle payments in the USDC stablecoin on Ethereum.

Visa believes NFTs will play an important role in the future of commerce. NFTs can help individual content creators and small and medium-sized businesses in new ways, said Sheffield. "NFTs are an intersection of culture and commerce," he added. Sheffield compared NFTs with the early days of e-commerce, saying that e-commerce made it possible for a small business to sell online and reach customers worldwide. But they still have to produce and ship physical goods, which can have high upfront costs. So NFTs allow a small business to harness a public blockchain to create digital goods, which can be delivered instantly to a crypto wallet anywhere in the world, said Sheffield. "We can envision a future where a crypto address becomes as important as your mailing address," he said.