A roundup of the week’s crypto news, with the latest on Cardano’s Vasil fork, Kraken talking tough against the SEC, and Craig Wright’s latest arguingments.
The week’s top stories
This week’s big news sees Cardano’s Vasil hard fork successfully deployed. The non-contentious fork makes it possible to write smart contracts on Cardano with less code, resulting in even cheaper and faster transactions for users of Cardano apps in the future. Now it’s just a case of actually attracting some killer apps to build on Cardano.
Also, the code base for the blacklisted Tornado Cash coin mixer is back on Github. The move by Githib to restore the code to their site comes after the U.S Treasury confirmed that the ban is on using the application, not on interacting with the code itself.
Regulation news
In regulation news, the UK announced a new anti-fraud bill that will give law enforcement greater powers to “seize, freeze and recover crypto assets” and “ensure agencies can keep pace with the rapid technological change” in crypto. The bill, which comes after economic sanctions on Russian oligarchs, also takes aim at traditional white collar crime and “foreign kleptocrats treating the UK as a safe deposit box”.
The centralized cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, one of the largest in crypto, has boldly stated that they have no plans to delist tokens that have been declared “securities” by the SEC, nor to register with the agency as a market intermediary. The stance comes too late for Monero (XMR) though, which the company delisted last year at the behest of the UK government.
This week in Web3
In Web3 news, the fantasy sports NFT project Sorare has partnered with Liverpool Football Club to create Web3 experiences for the club’s fans, such as stadium visits and exclusive content prizes. Sorare players buy and trade licensed NFT sports cards which can be used to form teams that compete against other players.
And the Helium community have voted 81% in favour of moving to the Solana blockchain. The move is expected to increase the performance of the Helium network, which previously existed on its own bespoke chain, and will also provide Helium with the liquidity and utility of other Solana-based projects.
And finally…
And finally… Craig Wright, who publicly claimed to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto in 2016, has now claimed (during one of his many lawsuits) that he stomped on the hard drive containing the Satoshi wallet keys (and access to 1.1 million BTC) because he didn’t want to be forced to prove his identity cryptographically.
Hmmkay.
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