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⚖️SEC Chair Gensler Says Crypto Is Centralized Despite Founding Principles⚖️
Crypto may have been "founded on the idea of decentralization," says Gensler, but that hasn't stopped centralization from emerging in the market.
October 25, 2022
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Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, took yet another shot at the crypto industry in a speech Monday, critiquing what he perceives to be the disproportionate power wielded in the sector by centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. 

Gensler’s comments, made on Monday before the annual meeting of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association—a prominent trade group representing securities firms, banks, and asset managers—focused primarily on promoting competition among equity market makers. But the SEC chair, while cautioning about the danger of centralization in traditional finance, also made a point to take a passing swipe at the crypto industry. 

“We’ve even seen centralization in the crypto market, which was founded on the idea of decentralization,” Gensler said. “This field actually has significant concentration among intermediaries in the middle of the market.”

Gensler used the analogy of sand flowing through an hourglass to articulate how financial intermediaries—sitting at the neck of the hourglass, as they process trillions of dollars worth of transactions—can disproportionately capture profits, given their advantageous position. 

He then said that he believes a number of cryptocurrency exchanges function in this problematic manner, though he did not single out any particular exchanges by name. 

“There’s a tendency for central intermediaries to benefit from scale, network effects, and access to valuable data,” Gensler said of these self-enriching financial middlemen. 

The SEC chair then added, in an apparent allusion to blockchain technology, that though novel technologies can often assist in creating new forms of economic competition and unseating entrenched winners, centralization quickly finds a way to re-establish itself in novel sectors. 

“Though technological innovations repeatedly disrupt incumbent business models, centralization still tends to reemerge,” Gensler said. 

Gensler’s comments, particularly his critique of the rise of centralization in the supposedly decentralized crypto ecosystem, are of particular note given the actions taken in recent months by federal agencies to curtail certain decentralized components of crypto and DeFi. 

In August, The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctioned Ethereum coin-mixing tool Tornado Cash and blacklisted numerous wallet addresses associated with the service; Tornado Cash allowed users to keep their crypto transactions private by obfuscating otherwise publicly available transaction data. The Treasury claims that the service was facilitating money laundering and aiding terrorist groups. 

Many privacy advocates took the move as an indication that the federal government has determined anonymity—a founding tenet of crypto, along with decentralization—to be a fundamentally unacceptable component of the crypto market.

The episode also deepened a rift between centralized crypto companies and decentralized projects and their advocates. Certain crypto firms, particularly larger, centralized ones, immediately took steps to preemptively comply with the Tornado Cash sanctions, due to the risk posed by attracting the federal government’s ire. Decentralized organizations, meanwhile, doubled down on their hostility toward the American government and their commitment to user privacy

Circle, the company behind stablecoin USDC, was one such centralized firm that actively complied—without being asked by federal authorities—with the Tornado Cash sanctions, freezing all USDC present in wallets blacklisted by OFAC. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire, later bemoaned in a blog post that he felt the federal government had forced his hand and made Circle a less decentralized company against its will.

“[Complying with Tornado Cash sanctions] compromised our belief in the value of open software on the Internet and our belief that the presumption and preservation of privacy should be enshrined as a design principle in the issuance and circulation of dollar digital currencies,” Allaire said at the time. 

The Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), meanwhile, is entrenched in an ongoing, novel lawsuit against a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), that would see the DAO’s entire membership held liable for the consequences of all DAO-wide votes. The suit, if successful, could see DAOs—the organizational cornerstone of crypto’s decentralization push—derailed as an alternative to a centralized company structure for crypto projects. 

Attorneys for venture capital firm Paradigm wrote in a filing last week that the CFTC’s “theory of liability would ensare countless unwary technology users and seriously threaten the viability of DAOs in the United States.”

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The Pyth Networks Booth At Suifest 🚀
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🔗 Crypto Donations👇
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US Dept of Commerce to publish GDP data on blockchain

On Tuesday during a televised White House cabinet meeting, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced the intention to publish GDP statistics on blockchains. Today Chainlink and Pyth said they were selected as the decentralized oracles to distribute the data.

Lutnick said, “The Department of Commerce is going to start issuing its statistics on the blockchain because you are the crypto President. And we are going to put out GDP on the blockchain, so people can use the blockchain for data distribution. And then we’re going to make that available to the entire government. So, all of you can do it. We’re just ironing out all the details.”

The data includes Real GDP and the PCE Price Index, which reflects changes in the prices of domestic consumer goods and services. The statistics are released monthly and quarterly. The biggest initial use will likely be by on-chain prediction markets. But as more data comes online, such as broader inflation data or interest rates from the Federal Reserve, it could be used to automate various financial instruments. Apart from using the data in smart contracts, sources of tamperproof data 👉will become increasingly important for generative AI.

While it would be possible to procure the data from third parties, it is always ideal to get it from the source to ensure its accuracy. Getting data directly from government sources makes it tamperproof, provided the original data feed has not been manipulated before it reaches the oracle.

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XDC: xdcc2C02203C4f91375889d7AfADB09E207Edf809A6

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List Of Cardano Wallets

Well-known and actively maintained wallets supporting the Cardano Blockchain are EternlTyphonVesprYoroiLaceADAliteNuFiDaedalusGeroLodeWalletCoin WalletADAWalletAtomicGem WalletTrust and Exodus.

Note that in case of issues, usually only queries relating to official wallets can be answered in Cardano groups across telegram/forum. You may need to consult with specific wallet support teams for third party wallets.

Tips

  • Its is important to ensure that you're in sole control of your wallet keys, and that the keys used can be restored via alternate wallet providers if a particular one is non-functional. Hence, put extra attention to Non-Custodial and Compatibility fields.
  • The score column below is strictly a count of checks against each feature listed, the impact of specific feature (and thus, score) is up to reader's descretion.
  • The table represents current state on mainnet network, any future roadmap activities are out-of-scope.
  • Info on individual fields can be found towards the end of the page.
  • Any field that shows partial support (eg: open-source field) does not score the point for that field.

Brief info on fields above

  • Non-Custodial: are wallets where payment as well as stake keys are not shared/reused by wallet provider, and funds can be transparently verified on explorer
  • Compatibility: If the wallet mnemonics/keys can easily (for non-technical user) be used outside of specific wallet provider in major other wallets
  • Stake Control: Freedom to elect stake pool for user to delegate to (in user-friendly way)
  • Transparent Support: Easy approachability of a public interactive - eg: discord/telegram - group (with non-anonymous users) who can help out with support. Twitter/Email supports do not count for a check
  • Voting: Ability to participate in Catalyst voting process
  • Hardware Wallet: Integration with atleast Ledger Nano device
  • Native Assets: Ability to view native assets that belong to wallet
  • dApp Integration: Ability to interact with dApps
  • Stability: represents whether there have been large number of users reporting missing tokens/balance due to wallet backend being out of sync
  • Testnets Support: Ability to easily (for end-user) open wallets in atleast one of the cardano testnet networks
  • Custom Backend Support: Ability to elect a custom backend URL for selecting alternate way to submit transactions transactions created on client machines
  • Single/Multi Address Mode: Ability to use/import Single as well as Multiple Address modes for a wallet
  • Mobile App: Availability on atleast one of the popular mobile platforms
  • Desktop (app,extension,web): Ways to open wallet app on desktop PCs
  • Open Source: Whether the complete wallet (all components) are open source and can be run independently.

Source

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💳 PayPal: 
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🔗 Crypto
XRP: r9pid4yrQgs6XSFWhMZ8NkxW3gkydWNyQX
XLM: GDMJF2OCHN3NNNX4T4F6POPBTXK23GTNSNQWUMIVKESTHMQM7XDYAIZT
XDC: xdcc2C02203C4f91375889d7AfADB09E207Edf809A6

 

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