CoinDesk Crypto

Curv, a company that provides increased secrecy when it comes to holding crypto assets, has closed a $23 million Series A funding round. 

Announced Wednesday, the crypto custody tech provider, which uses a technique called multi-party computation (MPC), received investment from CommerzVentures, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group (DCG), Team8 and Digital Garage Lab Fund.

Curv closed a $6.5 million seed round in February of last year, which makes the total raised so far almost $30 million. Backing from the likes of CommerzVentures (the venture arm of German banking powerhouse Commerzbank and the main investor in the Series A) and Coinbase Ventures suggests MPC is popular with both the traditional and crypto space. 

Related: This Startup Is Forking Compound to Make Hiring More Efficient

“We are now one of the highest-funded custody technology companies, and have the largest funding to date for MPC,” said Curv CEO Itay Malinger. “It’s a strong signal that the market is looking at MPC, and that there’s still a lot of innovation to be made in the custody and security space.”

Read more: Custody Startup Curv Follows Crypto Demand Into Asia With New Hong Kong Office

Stepping back, blockchains are based on public key infrastructure (PKI), which means your identity is determined by a set of digits called a public key that allows you to receive funds. That public key is a mathematical function of another set of digits, a private key, which must be known in order to send funds.  

Instead of a single private key, MPC involves several parties each with different strings of numbers that interact using a protocol. The process creates a public key to receive funds, and a way to sign transactions in order to send funds. This latter part is kept distributed and separate at all times. 

Related: How Public Key Infrastructure Will Revolutionize Custody and Fund Management

“There is not any point in time or space where there will actually be a private key,” said Malinger. “MPC breaks that paradigm, so you don’t have additional layers of security like guards or cameras or World War II bunkers that can take 24 hours to get at.”

Curv is not alone in employing MPC. Other firms specializing in digital asset custody and using some form of the technology include GK8 out of Israel and Libra Association member Anchorage.

Malinger pointed out some other MPC custody firms in the market make use of hardware security modules (HSMs), while Curv would rather trust mathematics.

“Our approach is that trusting math is better than trusting an engineered piece of hardware,” Malinger said. “Math is the foundation of cryptography; hardware is an engineering effort, not a mathematical effort.”

Onerous service level agreements (SLAs) that come with some cold storage solutions may not be ideal for the fast-paced trading world. Curv has two models, explained Malinger, one in which the MPC secrets are online, and one where they are offline. This means the customer can decide how difficult it should be to move assets around. 

“You can say there must be 15 employees to approve a transaction, or you can say I want this hot wallet machine to approve transactions of up to $10,000. So you get much more flexibility and the ability to dictate how difficult it should be to move assets around,” Malinger said.

New York-based Curv, which has about 30 staff and an office in Tel Aviv, said the funding will partly go towards tX, an elite group of cryptographers and engineers who will use Curv’s keyless technology to push international growth.

Read more: Munich Re Insures Curv’s Crypto Wallet To the Tune of $50 Million

“Few areas within fintech are as exciting as digital assets. Tokens and coins are increasingly finding their way into asset managers’ books,” CommerzVentures managing partner Stefan Tirtey said in a statement. “Curv is unlocking this market with [its] industry-leading technology and we are happy and excited to partner with Itay, Dan [Yadlin] and their impressive team.”

Existing Curv customers include investment firm Franklin Templeton, trading platform eToro and Genesis Trading, owned by CoinDesk parent DCG. Asked if Coinbase might be the next exchange to start using Curv’s MPC tech, Malinger politely declined to comment.

“We are speaking to exchanges, and are also in advanced conversations with players on Wall Street and across the globe,” he said.

• Polychain Capital, Square Crypto’s Steve Lee Invest in Bitcoin Broker’s $5.7M Seed Round
• This Liechtenstein Bank Can Now Custody Crypto

Credit-card lender and wallet provider Crypto.com’s Chain (CRO) token surged 33% in June, dominating digital-asset markets as bitcoin, ether and XRP from Ripple all declined.

The CRO token’s gains made it the top performer during the month among digital assets with a market value of at least $1 billion, according to the data provider Messari.

You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can subscribe here.

Related: Blockchain Bites: Digital Dollars, Ethereum’s Gas and ASX’s Blockchain ‘Lacks Clarity’

The second-best performer, Unus Sed Leo (LEO), rose 6.4% in June, followed by Chainlink (LINK) with a 4.6% price increase. The worst performer was bitcoin SV (BSV), which tumbled 21%.   

Crypto.com has raised its profile partly through a “tremendous wave of marketing over the past several months,” John Todaro, head of currency research at the digital-asset firm TradeBlock, told First Mover in an email. 

Bitcoin (BTC), the oldest cryptocurrency and the largest by market value, fell 10% during the month, shaving its year-to-date return to 27%, as price volatility narrowed amid ongoing uncertainty about the future of the coronavirus and related stimulus packages.

Ether (ETH), the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, slid 9.3%, while XRP from Ripple lost 17%. 

Related: First Mover: Bitwise Calls $50K Bitcoin Price When Market Calm Finally Breaks

For the second quarter of 2020, bitcoin rose 42%, more than double the 18% gain during the period for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was the stock index’s best performance in more than three decades.  

Hong Kong-based Crypto.com raised $26.7 million in 2017 through a sale of its MCO tokens, which are paid out as rewards to credit-card customers.

The CRO tokens, airdropped to MCO holders starting in December 2018 and now traded on more than 20 exchanges, can be used for “cross-asset intermediary currency settlement for the native Crypto.com Chain,” according to the company’s website. 

Of course, smaller digital assets like CRO can be volatile. The token has a market capitalization of $2.2 billion, compared with bitcoin’s $169 billion and ethereum’s $25 billion, according to Messari. 

Crypto.com press officials didn’t comment for this story. 

Headed by CEO Kris Marszalek, the company launched a beta version of its own cryptocurrency exchange in November, following the shipping of the MCO Visa cards earlier in 2019. Crypto.com announced in May 2020 that it had started shipping credit cards in Europe.  

The company also has a payments app and cryptocurrency wallet (launched last month), and customers can earn interest-like rewards by staking bitcoin and other digital assets on its platform. 

“The company has aggressively pursued various lines of business which have attracted users, which then bleeds into its token,” Todaro wrote. 

Last month, Crypto.com sponsored a portion of CoinDesk’s Consensus 2020 virtual conference. And on Tuesday, the company’s website was advertising a “BTC Anniversary Special,” featuring bitcoin “at 50% off, with $2 million allocation!” (The promotion was due to end early Wednesday.)  

Earlier in June, the company announced it had obtained its own emoji on Twitter, which appears automatically when the #CRO hashtag is inserted into a tweet. The publication CoinTelegraph noted at the time that such branded hashtag services have reportedly cost upwards of $1 million. 

“The official Twitter handle does frequent giveaways, which draws in more followers and retail traders of its token,” Todaro said.

BTC: Price: $9,157 (BPI) | 24-Hr High: $9,196 | 24-Hr Low: $9,064

Trend: Bitcoin is moving in a tight price range, a sign a breakout – bullish or bearish – could be fast approaching.

• Since early May, bitcoin has traded strictly between $9,000 to $10,000. Attempts to move out of this price range have all but failed.
• After dipping to $9,000 last week, bitcoin has held at the $9,100 mark. Bitcoin’s price, unusually, has barely tracked $100 since Monday.
• Bitcoin’s volatility has fallen precipitously. Its ATR value – a price volatility metric – has dropped 50 points to 315 – the lowest since January.
• The market has seen this before. In December and early January, bitcoin was squeezed ever more tightly. It then jumped out of its $100 price range and ultimately peaked at over $10,000 by mid-February.
• While the market should expect an imminent breakout once more, there are few signs whether it will move above or below the current range.

• Bitcoin Still Up 27% This Year Despite Dismal June Performance
• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Traders Expect Big Move as Volatility Plummets

Cryptocurrency market data aggregator CoinGecko has updated its trust metric for exchanges, with Binance keeping its top slot in the rankings.

• The Singapore-based crypto firm said in a blog post Wednesday its new cybersecurity metric now forms 20% of its Trust Score for trading platforms.
• The Trust Score combines an exchange’s liquidity, web traffic, scale of operations, and now cybersecurity, together with its trading volume.
• The cybersecurity metric comes from Ukrainian security group Hacken. CEO Dyma Budorin said a growing number of “black hat hackers” targeted crypto exchanges.
• The top five exchanges as ranked by the firm’s algorithm are now: Binance, Coinbase Pro, Bithumb, Kraken and Bitstamp.
• CoinGecko first released its Trust Score in May 2019 and Binance has long ranked first. The new metric keeps it in pole position.
• CoinGecko COO, Bobby Ong told CoinDesk: “Binance was ranked first as it had the largest liquidity in many of the trading pairs amongst all the exchanges. Binance scores relatively well in this measure as well thus keeping its top position.”
• Rival crypto market data site CoinMarketCap was accused of bias earlier this year after it gave its new owner Binance a perfect score under its new exchange ranking system.
• CoinGecko will add additional metrics to its Trust Score, Ong said.

• BitMEX Owner HDR Appoints Former Bank of China Exec to Board
• To His Own Surprise, Crypto Volume Pumper’s Business Is Still Thriving
• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Traders Expect Big Move as Volatility Plummets
• Chinese Bitcoin Miner Producer Ebang Is Launching an Offshore Exchange

New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG) raised $190 million from 24 investors for another bitcoin fund.

• The round of funding for the NYDIG Institututional Bitcoin Fund was disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Tuesday.
• NYDIG started raising for the Bitcoin Fund in 2018, according to the disclosure filing.
• The New York-based asset manager did not disclose the fund’s proposed net asset value or any other details.
• Last month, NYDIG raised $140 million for a similar investment vehicle, the Bitcoin Yield Enhancement Fund.
• The asset manager has held a New York BitLicense since 2018.
• Benjamin Lawsky, the former financial regulator who created New York’s BitLicense in 2015, joined NYDIG nearly a year before the bitcoin fund manager applied for, and received, that license.

• Vanguard Ran Its Digital Asset-Backed Securities Pilot in 40 Minutes
• Novogratz: Galaxy Digital Will ‘Suck’ if Bitcoin Fails to Become an Institutional Asset
• Binance Launching Crypto Exchange in the UK
• Custody Battle Pits Institutional Boomers Against Crypto Upstarts

Lawyers working within the jurisdiction of Washington, D.C., can now accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment for legal services.

• As reported by Bloomberg Law on Wednesday, cryptocurrency can now be used to pay for legal services as long as the fee agreement is fair and is only permissible if the lawyer is able to safely store the payment, the District of Columbia Bar said in an ethics opinion.
• “[Attorneys] cannot hold back the tides of change even if they would like to, and cryptocurrency is increasingly accepted as a payment method by vendors and service providers, including lawyers,” the organization said.
• The committee acknowledged the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies and added that fairness to the client should be considered in fee arrangements.
• The organization did say clients of District lawyers are allowed to confer with outside legal counsel on any crypto-payment deal, and attorneys must have written consent regarding the fee agreement from clients.
• Lawyers also must be competent in blockchain, the underlying technology of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, in order to ensure the safety and protection of all advance fees, the group said. The bar “requires lawyers to understand and safeguard against the many ways cryptocurrency can be stolen or lost.”
• Bar associations in other jurisdictions, such as North Carolina, Nebraska and New York City, have previously approved accepting cryptocurrency as payment.

• Wirecard Fallout: Auditor EY Accused of Not Flagging $2.1B Black Hole Sooner
• Australia Post Now Lets Customers Pay for Bitcoin at Over 3,500 Outlets
• EU Creating a Regulatory Regime for Cryptocurrencies, Says Economic Chief
• Kraken Pledges $150K for Development of Open-Source BTCPay Server

Lawyers working in the jurisdiction of Washington, D.C., can now begin accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment for legal services.

• As reported by Bloomberg Law on Wednesday, cryptocurrency can now be used to pay for legal services as long as the fee agreement is fair and is only permissible if the lawyer is able to safely store the payment, the District of Columbia Bar said in an ethics opinion.
• “[Attorneys] cannot hold back the tides of change even if they would like to, and cryptocurrency is increasingly accepted as a payment method by vendors and service providers, including lawyers,” the organization said.
• The committee acknowledged the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies and added that fairness to the client should be considered in fee arrangements.
• The organization did say clients of D.C. lawyers are allowed to confer with outside legal counsel on any crypto-payment deal, and attorneys must have written consent regarding the fee agreement from clients.
• Lawyers also must be competent in blockchain, the underlying technology of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, in order to ensure the safety and protection of all advance fees, the group said. The bar “requires lawyers to understand and safeguard against the many ways cryptocurrency can be stolen or lost.”
• Bars in other jurisdictions, such as North Carolina, Nebraska and New York City, have previously approved accepting cryptocurrency as payment.

• Wirecard Fallout: Auditor EY Accused of Not Flagging $2.1B Black Hole Sooner
• Australia Post Now Lets Customers Pay for Bitcoin at Over 3,500 Outlets
• EU Creating a Regulatory Regime for Cryptocurrencies, Says Economic Chief
• Kraken Pledges $150K for Development of Open-Source BTCPay Server

Japanese financial firm SBI Holdings has agreed to take a $30 million minority stake in institutional cryptocurrency trading platform B2C2.

• The deal also sees the two entities launch a new strategic partnership, under which B2C2 will provide crypto liquidity for SBI, which is planning to grow its crypto offering to “millions of existing customers,” per an announcement Wednesday.
• B2C2 is launching an electronic prime brokerage based on its single dealer platform. This would benefit from SBI’s distribution network and financial muscle, B2C2 said.
• The trading firm also plans in coming weeks to launch an automated financing facility to provide “competitive two-way prices in the funding market.”
• The move primes U.K.-headquartered B2C2 to become the next big prime broker in the crypto space, with its new Japanese partner being able provide support for lending and custody services.
• “B2C2 will benefit from SBI’s balance sheet, which is far larger than anything committed to the crypto market to date. It will complement our asset liability management framework … to deliver an execution platform that will not only be a game changer in crypto, but also positions us to expand across asset classes as we set our sights on the $20bn-a-year prime brokerage market,” B2C2 founder Max Boonen said.
• The crypto prime brokerage space is heating up, with companies such as Coinbase, BitGo and Genesis Trading all recently announcing plans to enter the space. Prime brokers finance and facilitate trades for institutions.
• SBI Holdings is involved in a number of cryptocurrency initiatives, having launched a banking app in partnership with Ripple.
• SBO Holdings recently announced it would launch a crypto fund, with XRP comprising 50% of its portfolio. The financial firm further has a joint venture with blockchain software provider R3.

• To His Own Surprise, Crypto Volume Pumper’s Business Is Still Thriving
• FTX Is Building Lots of Sophisticated Markets Few Traders Use
• Bitfinex Spin-Out Says Funds Are Lining Up for Its New Decentralized Exchange
• Behind ‘Prime Broker’ Buzzword Lies a Complex Strategy Game for Crypto Firms

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty just posted the smallest percentage change in 10 years.

The bitcoin network adjusted its difficulty level at 01:18 UTC on July 1 to 15.7842 trillion – down a mere 0.0033% from the previous level of 15.7847 trillion set June 17. The percentage change is small enough that it is rounded up to a zero, data from BTC.com shows.

Bitcoin mining difficulty measures how hard it is to compete for block rewards on the network. The measure is designed to adjust every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, based on the total computing power that’s participating in the mining game.

Related: Consumer Watchdog Moves to Block Canadian Bitcoin Miner From US Power Grid

The negligible adjustment on Wednesday means the total average computing power connected to Bitcoin over the past 14 days has barely changed, either due to the lack of new mining devices plugging in or any newly added computing power being offset by those that are squeezed out after Bitcoin’s halving.

Historically, difficulty remaining steady at the initial level of 1 for a year after the genesis block was mined, before starting to rise in early 2010. The last time the measure posted a 0% change was in March 2010.

Since then, there have been only eight instances where the difficulty change, both negative and positive, was below 0.1%, with today’s being the smallest adjustment.

All told, while the total mining power on the Bitcoin network has largely recovered from the deep drop following the network’s halving event in May, it’s still to surpass an all-time high was recorded in early March.

Related: Bitmain Co-Founder Offers Share Buyback at $4B Valuation to End Power Struggle

Read more: The Last Time Volatility Was This Low Bitcoin Went On to Rally by $2K

Today’s small change comes at a time of extremely low volatility, with the cryptocurrency having traded in the range of $9,000 to $10,000 for the last two months.

The latest difficulty adjustment also comes amid recent news of shipment issues regarding the latest equipment from major bitcoin miner manufacturers.

An internal power struggle between the two co-founders at Beijing-based Bitmain, the world’s largest bitcoin miner maker, has affected the company’s shipment logistics as well as its mining chip supply chain. Some customers indicated they were hesitant to bulk purchase miners from Bitmain before the situation settled.

Read more: Bitmain’s Power Struggle Takes Toll on Customers as Co-Founder Halts Shipments

Although Bitmain did publish an article on June 23 in an effort to reassure customers that a tentative deal had been reached to resolve the shipment issue, the article was deleted within four hours.

That didn’t stop some from buying machines from Bitmain, though. Core Scientific, a U.S.-based bitcoin mining hosting provider, said in a recent announcement that it has bought 17,595 units of Bitmain’s latest AntMiner S19 on behalf of its clients. These machines are to be delivered and deployed in the next four months.

• Bitcoin Miner Maker Ebang Estimates $2.5M Loss for Q1 in IPO Prospectus Update
• Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Makes Biggest Jump in 29 Months

The Swiss government is encouraging blockchain startups to set up shop with new laws that lower legal barriers to such businesses while leaving favorable tax laws untouched.

The National Council, Switzerland’s equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives, unanimously passed a legislative package changing about a dozen financial laws on June 17. The changes, proposed by the Swiss Federal Council, are intended to remove legal barriers to applications of blockchain and distributed ledger technology. 

On June 19, the Federal Council acknowledged a report prepared by the Federal Department of Finance that concluded there was no need to make special amendments to existing tax laws with regard to blockchain. The report was commissioned by the Federal Council in 2018 when the government decided to examine existing tax laws and assess any need for amendments. 

Related: South Korean Government Turns to Blockchain Tech to More Securely Store Clinical Diabetes Data

Switzerland has long been a blockchain startup magnet. The city of Zug, in particular, was a popular location for token-funded projects during the initial coin offering (ICO) boom of 2017, earning it the nickname Crypto Valley. 

While ICOs have faded, Switzerland’s enthusiasm for blockchain technology has not. 

“It’s known that Switzerland is very much trying to encourage blockchain business. It’s a political objective,” said Rolf H. Weber, professor of financial market law and chair of the working group for regulatory issues at the Swiss Blockchain Federation.

The changes were largely based on a Federal Council proposal filed last year, and will now be passed on to the upper chamber, the Council of States, for a final vote this fall. 

Related: Mapping the Future of the SEC (There’s a Nonzero Chance Hester Peirce Takes Over)

Through communications specialist Joel Weibel, the Swiss Federal Tax Administration said that Swiss laws must guarantee legal certainty and the openness of authorities to new technologies.

As it exists now, Swiss law is cumbersome, particularly when applied to the transfer of security tokens, Weber said. All transfers must be done in writing, like the traditional exchange of hands of a bond. But the new legislation will make the transfer of security tokens easier, Weber said. 

“In my opinion, the most important changes are in company and securities law,” Weber said. 

Unlike any digital asset before it, a token has the same characteristics of a piece of paper, or written agreement, said Christian Meisser, CEO of Swiss blockchain legal consultancy fim LEXR AG.

“Why not give it the same properties as a piece of paper? If you transfer a token, you also transfer any right of ownership linked to it. That is the revolutionary aspect of the new Swiss law,” Meisser said.

According to Weber, as soon as the law is enacted, owners will be able to freely register and transfer their security tokens within distributed electronic ledgers, and providers of ledger technology will be allowed to offer those services without legal ramifications.

New provisions made to bankruptcy laws would allow owners to appeal to authorities to reclaim their assets. 

“This is not possible today with digital tokens because with tokens you don’t have proof of ownership. It’s similar to cash. You can never extract or withdraw cash from a bankrupt estate,” Weber said. 

The new laws also contain eight provisions describing how providers of digital ledger technology and trading platforms can obtain a license from the financial authority. 

Even though the legislative package passed without opposition, according to Meisser, left-leaning politicians raised concerns that the new laws failed to address the environmental impact of bitcoin mining, a process that requires large quantities of energy and resources.

Instead of proactively regulating new financial instruments, lawmakers in Switzerland typically try first to apply existing laws, said Luzius Meisser, founder of Bitcoin Association Switzerland 

“Once that doesn’t work anymore, then we create a new law,” Luzius said. 

In his view, Switzerland does not look at blockchain technology or crypto assets as unique entities, but as extensions of existing instruments.

According to Weber, the new laws would change the broader framework to improve conditions for owners and providers of crypto assets.  

“You may say this is a ‘blockchain law’ because all changes relate to blockchain business models. But in contrast to a few other countries like Malta or the Principality of Liechtenstein, Switzerland is not going to implement blockchain law in a narrow sense,” Weber said. 

Two days after the National Council vote on June 17, the Federal Council decided that prevailing Swiss tax laws will not need to be amended to include special considerations for blockchain technology. 

As things stand in Switzerland, bitcoin mining is exempt from Value Added Tax (VAT) while some security tokens are exempt from withholding tax, and there is no capital gains tax on investments. 

According to Luzius, Switzerland has a withholding tax placed on dividends earned from traditional securities such as bonds or shares. Weibel from the tax authority said that this tax also applies to “shares in tokenized form” to ensure all investors are treated equally.

“But current Swiss law also allows participation in the company’s profit without levying the withholding tax on the income related to this profit. This option is now also available in the attractive form of tradable participation tokens,” Weibel said. 

In simpler terms, there are certain special taxes in Switzerland that do not apply to security tokens but apply for securities, Luzius said.  

“Lawmakers say they are okay with not filling this gap for now because the market for security tokens is still very small,” Luzius said. 

To encourage earnings through investment, the country does not tax capital gains on any investment, and the Department of Finance report assessing the need for new tax laws concluded that there was no need to start with crypto. 

“This is very good news for the crypto space because it means less taxes at least for now,” Luzius said.

• New York Regulator Adds 3-Strike Rule for BitLicense Applicants
• EU Creating a Regulatory Regime for Cryptocurrencies, Says Economic Chief

Deutsche Boerse has listed an exchange-traded product (ETP) that tracks the value of bitcoin.

21Shares, a Swiss-based product provider formerly known as Amun, said its bitcoin ETP had been officially accepted Wednesday to list on Xetra, Deutsche Boerse’s electronic trading venue.

“The listing on Xetra not only strengthens our current position in Germany but also opens up institutional-grade crypto products to the wider European and international markets,” said Laurent Kssis, 21Shares’ managing director, in a statement.

Related: Forget Bitcoin’s Volatility, BoA Says Unstable UK Pound Like an Emerging Market Currency

Deutsche Boerse Group has two trading venues: Xetra, and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Together, they count as the third-largest trading platform in Europe, just behind the London Stock Exchange and Euronext.

Deutsche Boerse’s data shows more than €150 billion worth of equities and derivative products changed hands at Xetra in May. In December last year, the exchange handled approximately €300 billion in volume.

The London-based investment firm ETC Group listed a bitcoin-backed security on Xetra, earlier this month.

Bitcoin ETPs provide exposure to bitcoin in a regulated asset-class. In contrast to the U.S., where regulators have been loathe to sign off on bitcoin ETF applications, there are already three to four entities offering crypto-backed products across Europe.

Related: Bitcoin News Roundup for June 10, 2020

21Shares launched its first Bitcoin ETP at the end of 2018 on the SIX Swiss Exchange, the largest in Switzerland. The company has since launched products that track other cryptos, some track multiple digital assets. It released a “Short Bitcoin” ETP which inversely tracks bitcoin’s price in February.

See also: Asset Manager Wilshire Phoenix Files to Launch New Bitcoin Investment Trust

WisdomTree, the world’s largest product provider, launched a physically-backed bitcoin ETP on SIX last December.

21Shares’ products already listed seven of its ETPs on retail-orientated Boerse Stuttgart – Germany’s second-largest exchange – in January.

Kssis told CoinDesk the firm wanted to increase exposure in Europe’s institutional market.

“Most institutions do not have easy access to Stuttgart as it’s a regional exchange,” he said.

Swiss institutions currently hold up to 80% of 21Shares’ assets under management, according to Kssis. Listing on Xetra, which has a greater international reach, will make 21Shares’ Bitcoin ETP accessible not to investors based around the world.

Investors will be able to begin trading the Bitcoin ETP on Xetra from Thursday.

• Deutsche Borse Exchange to List New Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Product
• ‘Short Bitcoin’ ETP Available to Investors on Germany’s Second-Largest Exchange

Not every U.S. lawmaker is on board with the idea of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or digital dollar, but no one explicitly rejected it during a hearing of the powerful Senate Banking Committee Tuesday.

That’s probably the biggest takeaway from Tuesday’s hearing, where the panel heard from former regulator turned CBDC evangelist Chris Giancarlo, Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla and Duke Law professor Nakita Cuttino as expert witnesses. 

The lawmakers present asked questions about financial inclusion, including what potential regulations or laws might make digitization easier and more accessible to the unbanked.

Related: BIS Plans New Central Banking Fintech Research Hubs in Europe, North America

“The U.S. needs a digital dollar,” said Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). “The U.S. dollar has to keep earning that place in the global payments system. It has to be better than bitcoin … it has to be better than a digital yuan.”

Other highlights of the hearing:

• Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) noted some traditional financial systems may be limited in how accessible they are, citing the need for pre-existing bank accounts. Fintech solutions such as stablecoins can provide an alternative, Crapo said, though there are concerns around the oversight of some of these coins, which unlike most cryptocurrencies are designed to hold their value relative to fiat.
• Ranking Member Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) warned that tech companies have made large promises about disrupting existing industries. He pointed to ridesharing and social media services, saying they promised to “build a more just and equal country,” but instead the companies essentially found ways to “pay themselves.”
• While only eight senators asked questions, out of 25 on the committee, every question was relevant to the topic of digitizing payments, which you can’t always count on (recall last year’s off-the-rails Facebook grillings).
• Cuttino called for open access to real-time payments: “In the absence of public policy addressing open access payments and real-time payments, low-income and moderate-income Americans will continue to have limited resources needed, whether by traditional fringe services like payday loans or some novel fringe service.”
• The current accounts-based payment architecture in use today is “slow and exclusionary,” Giancarlo said. While a token-based architecture is not a “panacea,” it can help provide broader access.
• Cascarilla said a federal framework toward regulating crypto companies could be beneficial, though he noted that his company operates nationwide despite operating under the New York Department of Financial Services’ limited-purpose trust charter.

• Witnesses Will Vouch for Stablecoins, Digital Dollars in US Senate Hearing Tuesday
• Blockchain Bites: Rethinking Libra, Craig Wright and Something Smells Fishy in Blockchain
• CBDC Issuance Is ‘Not a Reaction’ to Libra, Says Central Bank Body

Spain’s National Police on Sunday arrested 33 people who allegedly sold illegal medications online and laundered at least part of their €3 million ($3.37 million) profit in virtual currency.

• The busts, conducted against two separate organizations, resulted in the seizure of over 70,000 erectile dysfunction tablets and other drugs that Spain’s health regulators have not approved.
• Police claim that one of the organizations’ vendors moved the drugs from a factory in India through Singapore and the United Kingdom before importing them to a Murica garage for distribution.  
• In documenting the suspects’ attempts to cover their digital tracks, police said the “purchase of virtual currency stands out.”
• The Murica organization netted vendors at least 3 million euros, authorities said. They alleged the criminals laundered some of those funds through virtual currency, but did not disclose which cryptocurrency.

• AML Bitcoin Founder Claims DC Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, US Government Are ‘Extorting’ Him
• Bitcoin ATM Growth May Be a Boon for Money Launderers
• Spain’s Crypto Firms to Face New Registration Requirements Under EU-Driven Bill
• New Zealand Police Seize $90M Linked to Alleged BTC-e Exchange Operator

Zimbabwe’s central bank, seeking to block attempts to avoid the country’s hyperinflation, halted all transactions conducted by “mobile money agents” this week, and limited payment sizes through other processors.

• This impacts potentially up to 85% of all transactions.
• Residents with money stored in one of these mobile providers will need to visit a local bank to withdraw their funds.
• In a statement, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe said the move is necessary to “[p]rotect consumers on mobile money platforms which have been abused by unscrupulous and nonpartisan individuals and entities to create instability and inefficiencies in the economy.”

• Bitcoin News Roundup for June 30, 2020
• World’s Oldest Central Bank Reviews Possible Digital Currency With Mixed Results
• Canada’s Central Bank Is Serious About Designing a CBDC, Job Posting Reveals
• S. Korea’s Central Bank Forms Legal Panel to Advise on Possible Digital Currency Launch

Quiet is the best word to describe the bitcoin market. Tuesday’s trading stayed within the same price range maintained over the past several weeks, with bitcoin remaining inside a tight $200 range for much of the day. 

• Bitcoin stays in a tight range above $9,000
• Ether up less than 1%
• Bitcoin volatility continues to drop
• Market in “wait and see” phase

The leading cryptocurrency only briefly dipped below $9,050 Tuesday afternoon and did not break above $9,250, according to Bitstamp. Bitcoin was trading hands around $9,140 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET).

Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, dropped 1.2% from its Tuesday open, trading around $225 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET), according to Bitstamp. 

Related: UCSF Hospital Paid $1.14M in Bitcoin After Ransomware Attack

Some traders are growing tired of this range as expectations for a breakout in either direction are crushed. “Every breakout in the last six weeks has revealed to be a false one, taking many traders to the woodshed in just a few hours,” said David Lifchitz, partner at quantitative trading firm ExoAlpha. 

See also: Bitcoin Still Up 27% This Year Despite Dismal June Performance

Even liquidated contracts on BitMEX, the largest bitcoin derivatives exchange by open interest, show how stagnant bitcoin’s price action has become. Total daily liquidations on the exchange have not passed even $4 million for three consecutive days, according to Skew. 

Traders are getting “mixed messages” from the bitcoin markets, Denis Vinokourov, head of research at prime broker Bequant, told CoinDesk. “On the one hand, the futures curve is in contango (upward sloping), which is indicative of leverage interest. But, yet at the same time, the options market continues to point to downside price protection demand, with front-end (shorter-dated one-month [expirations]) skew much higher relative to the rest of the curve and also when compared to Ethereum,” said Vinokourov.

Related: Coin Metrics Offers More Rigorous Measure of Crypto Market Supply

As its price stands still, bitcoin’s volatility plummets. Its 30-day volatility, for example, is reaching its lowest level since late February, according to Coin Metrics. 

When bitcoin will finally pick a direction – up or down – for a new trend is anyone’s guess. “We’re still in a ‘wait-and-see’ phase,” Lifchitz told CoinDesk. The market, he added is “definitely in need of a catalyst to break above $10,000 on heavy volume or below $8,000.”

If the price drops, however, some traders expect bulls to capitalize on the opportunity and buy more. “Dip buyers,” a name for investors who increase their position sizes when an asset price declines, will “aggressively” buy any substantial drops in the bitcoin price, said Alistair Milne, chief investment officer at Altana Digital Currency Fund. 

See also: Crypto Long & Short: What Trends in Volatility Could Mean for Bitcoin

Taking to Twitter, Milne said traders are “still underestimating” the amount of bitcoin that has been accumulated and removed from the market by long-term, often ideological investors. The exact amount of bitcoins held off the market is roughly 73%, according to Glassnode. Also taking to Twitter, CTO Rafael Schultze-Kraft noted that approximately 13.5 million bitcoins have not moved since the start of 2020, signally bitcoin investors’ commitment to hold through an uncertain market.  

Tuesday cryptocurrency gains included a variety of decentralized finance assets, according to Messari. Nexo (NEXO) gained 4.2%. Also up was kyber network (KNC) by 2.8%. All price changes were as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).

In commodities, Tuesday was a good day for gold bulls as the yellow metal gained 1.25% from its daily low at $1,764. Silver gained more than 2% from its daily open Tuesday. 

Meanwhile, gains from the S&P 500 pushed most other major stock indices down on Tuesday.

See also: A Key Thesis for Bitcoin’s Long-Term Bull Market Just Got a Knock

The S&P 500 gained 1.5% Tuesday, trading at 3038 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). 

The FTSE 100 index in Europe dropped roughly 1.5% from its daily open. Nikkei 225 also dipped Tuesday, down 0.25% from its daily open.

• First Mover: Bitwise Calls $50K Bitcoin Price When Market Calm Finally Breaks
• Bitcoin Still Up 27% This Year Despite Dismal June Performance

According to a recent report by BBC News, University of California San Francisco paid hackers $1.14 million in bitcoin after a ransomware attack earlier this month. 

• The Netwalker ransomware group is believed to be behind the attack which encrypted data on the School of Medicine’s servers, making it temporarily inaccessible. While the hackers first demanded $3 million, after negotiations on the dark web with UCSF they agreed to a ransom of $1.14 million. 
• After the university transferred 116.4 bitcoins to Netwalker’s electronic wallets, it was given a decryption tool to unlock the data blocked by the attack. 
• While the university did not specify what data was affected, a statement released on its website said it does not currently believe that patient medical records were exposed. The incident also did not affect patient care delivery operations or COVID-19 related work, according to the university. 
• UCSF told BBC News that it was now assisting the FBI in its investigation, while also working to restore the data that was taken down. The Netwalker group has also been linked to ransomware attacks on two other universities over the last couple of months. 

• Market Wrap: Crypto Market Eerily Quiet as Bitcoin Stuck Near $9K
• Coin Metrics Offers More Rigorous Measure of Crypto Market Supply
• First Mover: Bitwise Calls $50K Bitcoin Price When Market Calm Finally Breaks
• Bitcoin Still Up 27% This Year Despite Dismal June Performance

The daily distribution of the Compound protocol’s COMP token will soon change dramatically.

Compound governance proposal #11 passed today at 18:37 UTC. It will go into effect in two days, after the cooling-off period passes. When that happens, it’s very likely yield farmers will exit the riskiest markets of basic attention token (BAT) and 0x (ZRX) and move their activity into safer assets, stablecoins such as USDC and DAI.

A week ago, the Compound team put forward a proposal to shift how COMP gets distributed to liquidity providers and borrowers on Compound, the premiere collateralized lending application in decentralized finance (DeFi). 

Related: DeFi’s ‘Agricultural Revolution’ Has Ethereum Users Turning to Decentralized Exchanges

“When the Compound token distribution began, no one really knew what to expect,” Robert Leshner, Compound’s founder, told CoinDesk. “Our team was surprised by how powerful the impact of the distribution was on incentives, and so was the community.” Compound staff wrote the proposal but Leshner said they abstained from voting.

The vote closed Tuesday with 771,804 COMP staked in favor and less than one COMP staked against; that is the equivalent of 26% of all liquid COMP voting in favor of the change, based on CoinGecko statistics. A total of 115 wallet addresses participated with only four voting against the motion.  

Compound started distributing COMP tokens on June 15 following the announcement of the distribution mechanism on CoinDesk.

COMP changes

Related: Blockchain Project Kyber Unveils Date for Planned ‘Katalyst’ Protocol Upgrade

Under the original rules, users are given COMP based on the amount of interest they earn or the amount of interest they pay (or both, in most cases).

The theory in designing it that way, Leshner said, was that “if you are paying a lot in interest or earning a lot of interest you have skin in the game [for governing the protocol].”

Read more: Compound’s Approach to DeFi Governance Starts With Giving Away COMP Tokens

The hope had been the system would favor the most fervent users with an actual need for Compound’s services, but no one expected the gap between the cost of yield farming COMP and the price of COMP on the market to diverge so dramatically. 

This became very attractive for investors looking to find ways to game the system, and they did.

There was a dramatic shift in the usage patterns on Compound and markets that had not been very popular before saw a spike in activity. BAT offers the starkest example. 

On June 15, total supply of BAT on Compound was just under $2 million. As of this writing, it is $333 million.

What will happen?

Every day, 2,880 COMP are distributed to users. That’s not changing. But under the new rules, which go into effect Thursday, users will simply earn COMP on the dollar value of assets they have put in or borrowed from the system.

By simply allocating COMP based on dollars in the system, stakeholders say the overall interest in COMP yield is unlikely to drop, but the assets will almost certainly shift to different markets. 

“By distributing on the basis of total borrow, the incentive to self-deal in niche asset pools largely dries up, and we’re likely to see much of this capital (particularly the BAT market) flow out of the protocol,” Brendan Forster of Dharma, which uses the Compound protocol to offer stablecoin “savings” accounts, told CoinDesk in an email.

Read more: Some Numbers That Show Why Yield Farming COMP Is So Seductive

“The goal of the COMP distribution is to allocate COMP to users who are generating value for the protocol, whether by supplying capital or by paying interest on borrow,” Forster continued. “The change to the distribution mechanism, in my opinion, better achieves this goal.”

Sowmay Jain, a co-founder of Instadapp, which has tools to help investors maximize their COMP yields, expressed support for the newly passed proposal to CoinDesk in an email. He wrote, “This will incentivize the genuine user of the protocol and make it harder to game the system.”

One group that’s nervous about the change is MakerDAO. Cyrus Younessi from MakerDAO’s risk team wrote a post on the project’s forum that the change could cause a spike in demand for dai. (MakerDAO has not responded to a request for comment.)

“My expectation is that the two most popular farming assets will be USDC and Dai due to the shapes of their (attractive) interest rate curves,” he wrote. “There is a chance (likelihood, even) that we see an unprecedented demand for Dai. Much of the natural supply for Dai could also be locked up in COMP farming, thinning out sell-side order books.”

That said, there’s an additional advantage for an investor to extend their yield farming to dai: By focusing on stablecoins, they are much less exposed to underlying volatility in their investments (far less than what might be expected yield farming with ZRX or BAT).

On that note, Forster wrote, “This change de-risks the protocol, and so should increase demand for COMP.”

Read more: Compound Tops MakerDAO, Now Has the Most Value Staked in DeFi

Dai aside, if the change works out as planned, longtime Compound users should start earning more COMP each day, which has the potential to put upward pressure on COMP’s price as proportionately less gets sold on exchanges, as Forster explained.

“The current ‘yield-harvesters’ or ‘yield-farmers’ aren’t really interested in COMP as a governance asset, only the economic gains they get from the distribution. They are likely selling off COMP on a regular basis,” Forster wrote. “This change will likely result in COMP being distributed to users who are more likely to be long-term believers, and therefore more likely to be COMP hodlers.”

There is currently $977 million in assets supplied to Compound as of this writing and $361 million borrowed, making it the largest DeFi protocol in terms of total value locked. The price of COMP is $215, down from an all-time high of $373 on June 21.

• Hacker Drains $500K From DeFi Liquidity Provider Balancer
• DeFi Platform Opyn Launches Put Options on Compound Token

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are seeing more action than ever thanks to a surge in decentralized finance (DeFi) activity.

The chief benefit of DEXs compared to the Coinbases of the world? They allow users to hold their crypto until they make a trade, without trusting anyone besides the counterparty of each sale.

“Most people don’t want self-custody,” pseudonymous DeFi gadfly Defione said this week in the DeFi Telegram channel. “For sure not in dollars, and even in crypto people don’t want self-custody. Isn’t that obvious?” 

Related: Compound Changes COMP Distribution Rules Following ‘Yield Farming’ Frenzy

In this context, DEX protocol maker 0x is launching Matcha today, a DEX aggregator that helps people find the best price for whatever Ethereum-based token they want. 

Read more: First Mover: 0x’s ZRX Token Surged 67% in May to Become Month’s Top Performer

This isn’t a new use case in crypto, but 0x believes it can stand out on user experience, which is not always the industry’s strength. 

“DEXs are traditionally very unintuitive from a UX perspective and don’t include necessary info to make informed trades,” 0x marketing lead Matt Taylor told CoinDesk in an email. “We redesigned the DEX trading experience from the ground up with the goal of reaching feature-parity of centralized exchanges.”

Related: Blockchain Project Kyber Unveils Date for Planned ‘Katalyst’ Protocol Upgrade

0x was one of the early initial coin offerings (ICOs). It raised $24 million in August 2017, selling the ZRX token in order to build a protocol that would enable DEXs on Ethereum. Earlier this month 0x co-founder Will Warren announced 0x Labs on Medium, a new business to enter into the DEX industry. 

There’s already proof of demand for the DEX aggregator use case. 1inch.exchange has seen steady growth over the last year and sharp growth in June, according to data collated using Dune Analytics. In May, 1inch had about $75 million in trading volume. As June ends, it’s showing slightly over $300 million. 

The 1inch stats page also reports numbers for new versus old users, and this month has seen far more new users than old ones. Last month was roughly equal at about 1,400 returning and new users, whereas this month has seen 2,500 new ones as opposed to 1,900 returning ones.

As the “yield farming” surge has taken hold of the crypto space, it has been easy to see its impact on automated market makers (AMMs), one particular kind of DEX, in which users provide the smart contract with liquidity in order to earn fees and traders make trades with those pools.

Two of the leaders in this area, Curve and Uniswap, have had a dramatic uptick in volume. 

Read more: COMP’s Sudden Growth Has Swamped a DEX Dealing Only in Stablecoins

Compound Labs started distributing the COMP token to the credit protocol’s users on June 15. Every single day on Curve, an AMM specializing in stablecoins, since June 15 has had more volume than any other day prior. 

Its best day was June 21, when volume broke $54 million. Only as of June 28 has volume started to level off.

Meanwhile, on the premier AMM, Uniswap, volume has been ticking up as well since the COMP debut. It has yet to top its best day ever, which was $40 million on March 13, but the general trading volumes are up. 

Uniswap is really two AMMs right now, version 1 (which routes all trades through ETH) and version 2 (which supports direct trades between any two ERC-20 tokens that someone is willing to bootstrap liquidity for). 

Read more: Uniswap V2 Launches With More Token-Swap Pairs, Oracle Service, Flash Loans

So far, the best day since the launch of version 2 has been June 19, which saw $25 million in volume across the two versions. Still, overall volume made a step change on June 15. Prior to the launch of COMP, version 2’s best day had been June 11, with $6 million in volume. Every day since June 15 has been better than that. In fact, from June 19 to June 28, every single day has seen more than twice as much volume.

The most dramatic spike has occurred on Balancer, an app that lets users make self-rebalancing token portfolios that also happens to work as an AMM when needed. 

Balancer allowed users to yield farm its governance token last week and volume immediately went up.

Read more: Following COMP’s Surge, DeFi Platform Balancer Begins Distribution of BAL Tokens

Before the distribution, volume had generally been under $2 million. Since the distribution, it has generally been around $4 million. But on Sunday, June 28, volume shot up to $14 million, though this aberrant growth likely relates to an unexpected attack on Balancer using non-standard ERC-20 tokens on Sunday.

Nevertheless, usage on the new app is up sharply.

It is easier to maximize interest spurred by Compound and Balancer by remaining in the DeFi ecosystem, rather than toggling back to centralized (or “CeFi”) options like custodial exchanges.

Ben Forman of Parafi Capital, an alternative investment firm, argues DeFi products are just outperforming the centralized options in more ways all the time. 

“Compound sparked the beginning of a new agricultural revolution where so-called yield farmers are siphoning volume through AMMs instead of centralized exchanges. This isn’t ideological behavior – it’s the same CeFi users now shifting to DeFi because it’s more efficient and profit-maximizing,” Forman said via email. 

Will Foxley contributed reporting.

• Hacker Drains $500K From DeFi Liquidity Provider Balancer
• DeFi Platform Opyn Launches Put Options on Compound Token

Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead and 10T Holdings cofounder Dan Tapiero traded conflicting views of the economic recovery at the Real Vision virtual crypto summit Tuesday.

• The crypto space investment chiefs, both “die-hard macro guys,” disagreed on where COVID-19 is leading the economy, with Morehead projecting a “lingering” recession and Tapiero saying he hasn’t been this bullish since 2012.
• They both agreed, however, that this environment will be good for bitcoin.
• Central bankers’ unrelenting money printing may well boost fixed quantity assets, said Morehead. “It just seems inevitable that the global macro tsunami of paper money is gonna float a lot of boats,” he said. 
• Both said Paul Tudor Jones’ recent bitcoin advocacy signaled a strong investment opportunity to the markets. Even so, Tapiero said the legendary macro trader still has a ways to go before he grasps bitcoin’s systemic value.
• “We’ve just got to wait until more people adopt [bitcoin] and the network effect increases, and we’re at a good spot to take advantage,” said Tapiero.

• Unlimited QE and Why Markets Can’t Price In COVID-19

Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead and 10T Holdings cofounder Dan Tapiero traded conflicting views of the economic recovery at the Real Vision virtual crypto summit Tuesday.

• The crypto space investment chiefs, both “die-hard macro guys,” disagreed on where COVID is leading the economy, with Morehead projecting a “lingering” recession and Tapiero saying he hasn’t been this bullish since 2012.
• They both agreed, however, that this environment will be good for bitcoin.
• Central bankers’ unrelenting money-printing may well boost fixed quantity assets, said Morehead. “It just seems inevitable that the global macro tsunami of paper money is gonna float a lot of boats,” he said. 
• Both said that Paul Tudor Jones’ recent bitcoin advocacy signaled a strong investment opportunity to the markets. Even so, Tapiero said the legendary macro trader still has a ways to go before he grasps bitcoin’s systemic value.
• “We’ve just got to wait until more people adopt [bitcoin] and the network effect increases, and we’re at a good spot to take advantage,” said Tapiero.

• Unlimited QE and Why Markets Can’t Price In COVID-19

So many users are dependent on Ethereum client Geth that a bug could temporarily freeze the network – something blockchains aren’t supposed to do, ever. In light of this, Ethereum Core developers decided Friday to postpone work on the Berlin hard fork until at least August in an effort to give other clients a chance to increase their share of the network.

Geth makes up only one of 11 client specifications, but 79% of Ethereum nodes run on it, according to Ether Nodes. That percentage is also up 5% since December. Developers worry that a serious bug could break Ethereum – particularly as rolling updates to Eth 1.x continue before the network transitions to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm under Eth 2.0.

“Geth is the majority of the network,” Geth team leader Péter Szilágyi said in last Friday’s All Core Developers group call. “It’s super important that we are correct because we cannot afford to not be correct.”

Related: Coinbase Ventures Invests in $5M Token Sale for Ethereum Data Firm ‘The Graph’

Having a diversity of clients is good for the network. It allows different projects to join Ethereum’s developer community – from the tiniest startup to JPMorgan. Ethereum had eight languages in various levels of completeness one year after its 2015 launch. The Ethereum Foundation currently lists clients in five languages including Go, Solidity, Java, JavaScript and Python. 

Read more: The Zcash Privacy Tech Underlying Ethereum’s Transition to Eth 2.0

Yet, like the human tongue, every programming language has its nuances and therefore implementation drawbacks. When Ethereum developers conduct updates those nuances can turn into nasty bugs.

“The main reason [to postpone Berlin] would be to reduce dependency on Geth and allow it to fail without bringing down the whole network,” said independent developer Alexey Akhunov in a private chat. “Currently the burden is too high since Geth correctness is so critical, and they end up doing most of the work on ensuring everything works correctly.”

Related: Ethereum Developers Consider New Fee Model as Gas Costs Climb

This has been accelerated by the deprecation of the Parity Ethereum client as announced by Parity Technologies in December 2019. “Parity is increasingly unable to dedicate the level of resources required for even simple maintenance of this project,” the Parity team wrote in a blog post at the time.

That project’s codebase was handed off to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) of developers funded by ConsenSys spinout Gnosis. It now operates under the name “Open Ethereum.” Since December, the client has lost nearly 60% of its nodes, according to the Web Archive. (Note: Geth has lost some 14% of its nodes since December as well.)

“In an ideal world we would have multiple clients with no client having a higher market share than 33%,” Gnosis founder Martin Köppelmann said in a private message. “While it is true that Open Ethereum has not reached the number of nodes running [that] the Parity client had, we don’t see that as a decline. Quite the opposite. When Gnosis effectively took over the responsibility for Open Ethereum we started at a market share of 0.”

Szilágyi’s concerns remain valid regardless of Köppelmann’s enthusiasm, however. Getting individuals, exchanges or clients to run anything but Geth has been difficult and that dependency would be fatally exposed if Geth ever encounters technical issues.

This dependency is the very reason Eth 2.0 is so slow to launch. Eth 2.0 researchers have agreed to wait until a diversity of clients can launch in concert to prevent any hiccups if one or more goes down.

Comparatively, Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies don’t hard fork as often or have as many applications running on them. Etheruem faces something of a bind: loads of projects depending on it for 100% uptime but rolling hard forks every six to 12 months. 

Moreover, how to get other clients to catch Geth’s lead remains an open question.

Ethereum developer Greg Colvin said in the developer call that it has become a business question and one unlikely to be resolved by developer initiatives. Projects will choose to work with a minority client because they have acute needs that Geth cannot address, such as code not being open-sourced. That being said, Colvin said Geth should hire more staff, if possible.

Suspension of testing Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) slated for Berlin was one option the developers settled on. Still, Szilágyi concluded that the 24/7 responsibility of keeping the “world computer” turning is burning out his team.

“If we are wrong, and for example, [Ethereum client] Nethermind is correct, then it doesn’t matter that Nethermind’s code was correct and ours was wrong, because the network went off on the wrong chain,” he said.

• Many Bitcoin Developers Are Choosing to Use Pseudonyms – For Good Reason
• Summer 2020 Is Funding Season for Open-Source Bitcoin Development