Credit Saison launches $50M blockchain fund, deepening push into emerging markets

The Philippines Forging Crypto Reg. Path US Could Learn FromThe Philippines has demonstrated best practice in operating a sensible regulatory framework relative to cryptocurrency while the United States has erred by engaging in regulation via enforcement while responding after the horse has bolted in relation to a string of crypto company collapses. That’s according to Robert De Guzman, Head of Legal Compliance at Philippines-based cryptocurrency exchange Coins.ph.©Unsplash/C BuezaIn an opinion piece published in Forkcast News on Tuesday, De Guzman lays out his view as to what’s required in terms of regulation, while drawing comparisons between the application of regulation relative to crypto in both jurisdictions.The need for “sensible” regulationDe Guzman believes that the crypto industry’s recent failures are a wake-up call for the whole sector. Losses of billions of dollars affected Celsius Network, BlockFi, Voyager Digital, Genesis, and FTX, and led to Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and Signature banks’ collapse in a week. To maintain consumers’ trust, he believes that sensible regulation is necessary for the crypto exchanges dealing with digital assets.The legal compliance expert cites the FTX collapse. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire was among the largest collapses. FTX pretended to support regulation, but its true nature was an offshore exchange for global clients. Nonetheless, some businesses act on their regulation support by acquiring licenses and complying with central bank audits in the countries of operation.State-level and industry-level regulationThe crypto industry being open to self regulation is one element of the solution, he says. Regulators must proactively protect their consumers from scams and business failures, not just clean up the mess after millions of people have been harmed.Regulatory failuresDe Guzman points the finger at reactionary regulatory action. Regulators filed charges against crypto industry founders after their collapse. Previously, they missed the problems of the largest companies. FTX, based in the Bahamas, was mismanaged, and American regulators only responded after customer issues. Regulations by enforcement, preferred in several countries, wait for failure to happen before taking action. Over-regulation through enforcement pushes platforms offshore, where Wild West-type environments thrive, with clear consequences.Regulators in some countries focus on surface-level questions, like which tokens should be considered securities, while others, like in the Philippines, prioritize execution-level details to protect consumers. Anti-money laundering measures and custody are core issues, with the G-7’s Financial Action Task Force’s Travel Rule likely to be more strictly applied. Active regulation and audits are needed to ensure financial platforms act responsibly with customer deposits. Basic rules need to be put in place through a licensing regime, followed by regulation of market practices like commingling of assets, self-dealing, and trading against customers.The Philippines sensible approach to regulationThe Coins.ph legal guru holds out his home country as exemplary in terms of its approach to regulation. The Philippines’ regulatory regime requires a virtual asset service provider (VASP) license to operate a crypto exchange, as well as additional licenses for other services. The country’s central bank, BSP, directly regulates all crypto exchanges and expands its crypto regulations to adapt to market needs. KYC processes in the Philippines require recognition of valid ID documents from across 82 provinces.Additionally, the BSP expects the industry to cooperate in quarterly audits where they share balance sheet information and disclose digital assets in hot and cold wallets. Regulators in the Philippines are proactive and knowledgeable about the crypto space, which sets a sensible framework based on customer protection.

OmniBOLT to Support BRC-20 Tokens on LightningSingapore’s OmniBOLT, a project that’s developing technological solutions within bitcoin’s layer two network environment, has outlined that it will support BRC-20 tokens on Lightning Network.Before we consider precisely what OnmiBOLT's decision to support BRC-20 tokens means, let’s cover the backstory.Photo by Sander Weeteling on UnsplashBRC-20BRC-20 is an experimental token standard which was created by an anonymous developer with the handle “Domo”, and username ‘@domodata’ on Twitter. A token standard governs how and where a cryptocurrency can be used. The approach has been pioneered by developers on the Ethereum blockchain who created the ERC-20 standard a number of years ago, relative to the Ethereum network.A bitcoin evolutionIn this instance, BRC-20 is a fungible token standard designed for the bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin development is very slow and conservative, and deliberately so, in an effort to put network security first. However, it has had two major upgrades over the course of the last few years, namely SegWit and Taproot.Many in crypto have been critical of the bitcoin project on the basis of it being a pet rock that lacked features and the flexibility to use it in other ways aside from as a store of value or means of exchange. However, those protocol upgrades have led to further development that is expanding bitcoin’s use case and versatility.SegWit and Taproot enabled the development of Bitcoin Ordinals in January 2023. Ordinals provide a means to create Bitcoin non-fungible tokens (NFTs), by attaching data to individual satoshis, the smallest denomination of Bitcoin. NFTs created this way are immutable as they’re not created on side chains but on the bitcoin blockchain itself.In a fast moving scenario, the development of Ordinals led two months later to the emergence of the BRC-20 standard. BRC-20 tokens can be stored on the bitcoin base-chain, built with the assistance of Ordinals. BRC-20 is an exciting development as it stands to enable smart contract capabilities relative to bitcoin.Solving the bitcoin fee issueMany see this development as a solution for the longer term fees issue that the bitcoin blockchain will have to overcome. Bitcoin miners are compensated in mining rewards but the level of rewards is being cut in half every four years. The concern is that in the longer term, there may not be enough revenue for miners to continue to secure the network effectively.With the development of Bitcoin Ordinals, more fees are generated, and so this is seen as a means through which the network can sustain itself over the longer term.Mempool backlogSo what’s not to like? The issue that has arisen over the past few days is that bitcoin transaction fees have hit a two year high. Over the past few days, there have been in excess of 400,000 unconfirmed bitcoin network transactions sitting in the mempool. The mempool is a mechanism within the bitcoin protocol that stores the data relative to a queue of transactions that are waiting to be confirmed.Relieving pressure on bitcoinThat brings us back to the significance of the Singaporean team of developers at OmniBOLT deciding to support BRC-20 tokens on the lightning network. That move can relieve the pressure on the bitcoin mainnet. The project is being backed by Waterdrip Capital, Danhua Capital, Redline DAO and others.Bitcoin has been a boring protocol and many have celebrated that fact as a feature and benefit for a network that serves a couple of vitally important use cases exceptionally well. However, development never stops and it’s fascinating to see another side to the protocol unfold, and all the while, it’s not entirely clear where it will end.

Sun Flags Unjust Token Profits of Huobi Founder’s BrotherJustin Sun, Founder of the Tron blockchain and stakeholder in Seychelles-based global crypto exchange Huobi, has stated that the younger brother of the founder of the exchange, Li Wei, has received millions of Huobi tokens ($HT) when he shouldn’t have.Taking to Twitter, Sun wrote:“Li Lin’s younger brother Li Wei has repeatedly acquired a large amount of zero-cost HT through abnormal means. He has sold it on the Huobi platform many times in history, and has withdrawn huge amounts of cash”.Negotiating a refund and token burnSun went on to outline the action that he is in favor of taking in unison with decisions taken by the Huobi Global Advisory Committee (HGAC). “In order to protect people’s interests, the [HGAC] and the HT DAO community decided to recover and destroy the HT obtained by Li Wei at zero cost,” he wrote. “The HT destruction will be announced in the HT community. Such behavior will not be condoned,” he added.Sun complained that not only were the tokens wrongly allocated to Li Wei, he had been dumping the tokens on the market, selling them off for fiat money. In addition to the tokens being burnt, Sun says that he alongside the HGAC will “negotiate a refund” by engaging directly with Li Wei relative to the fiat money that he has already extracted through selling off the token.The Tron founder added that he doesn’t think it equitable that Wei should benefit from the token allocation as he hasn’t made any contribution to the Huobi community, stating that “fairness and the importance of rewarding those who genuinely contribute to the growth and development of HT DAO” are important.Double standardsSome in the crypto community would call double standards on Sun’s claims of a lack of fairness. At the time of the collapse of the FTX exchange in November of last year, Sun offered to help, collaborating with FTX’s Sam Bankman Fried to allow assets related to Sun’s crypto projects (TRX, BTT, JST, SUN, and HT) held by FTX customers on the exchange to be traded out of the exchange into external wallets.Trading in these assets recommenced for a time, with the price within the exchange being exorbitant relative to the regular market price outside of FTX. Many FTX customers ended up buying these tokens at excessive prices, without being able to extract them from the exchange like Sun had promised. To cap it off, those customers then had the newly installed FTX Debtor under the guidance of John J. Ray III, record their loss at the time the exchange officially went bankrupt at the normal market price for these tokens.Although originally a China-based exchange, Huobi moved out of the Chinese market due to adverse regulation, re-establishing itself in the Seychelles. The firm maintains offices in South Korea, the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong, where it has had a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2018.The $HT token has proven to be very volatile both in intraday trading on Tuesday and over the course of the past seven days. In both instances, it has hit high points in excess of $3.00 and low points of $2.70. At the time of publication, the token was trading at $2.90.Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash