BitGo: Crypto Water Cooler — Mar 27

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GM. It’s Wednesday, March 27.

Newsmakers

Political, Regulatory Uncertainty Could Interrupt Indonesia’s Crypto Plans

Crypto adoption in Indonesia is on a tear, and the government has made progress against ambitious goals for digital asset leadership in recent years. Now, a change of regime and shifting regulatory concerns are clouding the picture.

Crypto investing in the country is legal but using it for payment is not. Nonetheless, the country jumped from twentieth place in 2022 to seventh in 2023, according to Chainalysis. Last month, user numbers increased to nineteen million — up 170,000 from January and about half a million more than the 2023 monthly average. Transactions totalled 30T Indonesian rupiah (IDR), about $1.92B USD. Given the current bull market and Bitcoin halving, Tirta Karma Senjaya, the Head of Bappebti (the country’s Bureau of Development and Development of Commodity Futures Trading) has set a 2024 goal of 859.4T IDR ($51.28B USD) — a level last seen in 2021.

A contested presidential election, a change of regulating body, and a review of crypto taxes could complicate matters. In February, Prabowo Subianto, whose running mate touted crypto acceleration, won the presidential election. Last week, however, Ganjar Pranowo — the losing presidential candidate who made no mention of crypto in his campaign — petitioned the Constitutional Court for a recount, alleging widespread fraud.

Meanwhile, the regulatory authority is shifting from Bappebti, which had created fairly comprehensive crypto rules, to the Financial Services Authority (Otoritas Jasa Keuangan or OJK) effective January 2025. In February, the OJK collaborated with Malaysia, Singapore, and Dubai to develop a framework for Indonesia’s crypto policies under its watch.

Taxation could also change; Bappebti has asked the Ministry of Finance for a reassessment.
For the past two years, users have been taxed at 0.10% for capital gains and 0.11% for value-added. Exchanges are currently taxed at 0.02% per transaction.

Read more →Indonesia Crypto Network

Putting the Fun Back In GameFi

GameFi has yet to achieve its goal of onboarding a billion users, but 2023 saw interest grow. After AI, GameFi was the second most popular narrative of 2023. Active gamers increased by 54.7% in January 2024 as compared to the 2023 monthly average. Plus, the industry is slowly progressing in three key areas: funding, technology, and fun. Play to earn gaming hasn’t proven to be the path to capturing the hearts and minds of the larger gaming audience. So, making games easier to access and more fun to play is now a development focus.

More than $1.4B was raised ($) between May and November. Among the notable deals: the $100MM Inevitable Games Fund, a joint venture between developer platform Immutable, venture capital firm King River Capital, and Polygon Labs. Immutable and Polygon will source investment opportunities while King River will deploy capital and oversee investments. And, renowned Japanese gaming publisher, Square Enix, has invested an undisclosed amount into HyperPlay to expand their game store. In Q2 2024, HyperPlay will integrate with Amazon to allow Prime users to access games through the HyperPlay platform.

Fun loving developers will have some new tools at their disposal. Google Cloud continues to add options fand has also inked a new partnership with Sequence, a platform for Horizon Blockchain Games. Meanwhile, Japanese gaming company Saga has announced a new division — Saga Origins — said to be the first Web3 platform to create a dedicated team to collaborate with developers and publish games.

Read more →CCN

Beyond Bitcoin: Aptos Focuses on Financial Access in Emerging Markets

One of the ideals of crypto is democratizing access to the financial system, and that is the focus of Aptos, a proof-of-stake layer-1 blockchain steadily building a presence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Aptos is one of two projects tracing its roots to Facebook’s now-shuttered Diem project. (Sui, profiled here earlier this year, is the other.)

Like Sui, Aptos uses a variation of the Move language created by Diem developers, and it has leveraged its pedigree to attract significant funding and partnerships. In March 2022, Aptos Labs announced a $200MM funding round led by a16z. In July of the same year, it completed a $150MM Series A financing round which valued it at $2B+. Aptos launched its mainnet in October 2022 and has since partnered on projects with Microsoft, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, SK Telecom (South Korea’s largest mobile provider), and game developers like Ready Games.

But while Sui has focused on speed, the goal of Aptos co-founders Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching is fulfilling “the vision of bringing fair access to decentralization to all through a safe, upgradeable, and scalable blockchain network.”

JamboPhone, a collaboration between Aptos and Congolese super-app startup Jambo is a prime example. While Solana’s $1,000 Saga phone aims for the higher end of the market, the $99 JamboPhone, which comes pre-loaded with Aptos’ Petra wallet, is aimed at users in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America where many people do not have bank accounts and mobile phones are already widely used to transmit money.

In Asia, Aptos has hosted frequent Spaces in Mandarin Chinese. It is hosting Aptos DeFi Days in Hong Kong in early April and is participating in the BUIDL Asia conference in Seoul today and tomorrow.

The results to date: as of March 23, Aptos has 2.4M monthly active addresses and 240,000 daily active addresses. Its native token, APT, is up over 70% year to date, and its $7.4B market cap places it just outside the top twenty cryptocurrencies. Its total value locked is up 281% year to date. And, in October 2023, Graffio, Aptos’ first decentralized social application, launched with a blank, on-chain canvas and invited people worldwide to contribute to it. More than 600,000 users from 173 countries around the world contributed to the piece of art, a sign of Aptos’ worldwide reach.

Read more →TechCrunch

News In Brief

Business of Crypto

• London Stock Exchange to Launch BTC, ETH Exchange Traded Notes — CoinDesk
• BlackRock Begins Asset Tokenization on Ethereum Network — CoinDesk
• FTX to Sell $844B in Anthropic Shares — Bloomberg ($)

Regulation and Security

• U.S. SEC Probes Ethereum Foundation — Bloomberg ($)
• U.S. DoJ Charges KuCoin, Founders With Money Laundering — CoinDesk
• U.S. SEC Seeks $195B Fine in Judgement Against Ripple — CoinDesk

DeFi and Web3

• Modular Infrastructure Startup 0G Labs Raises $35MM Pre-Seed Round — CoinTelegraph
• Wyoming Passes Legal Framework for DAOs — The Defiant
• TON Plans 30MM In Developer Rewards to Get Telegram Users On Chain — The Defiant

Midweek Market Pulse

Total Market Cap: $2.65T — 7 day change as of Tuesday 3/26/24 12 PM EST: +9.5%

Chart and quotes via CoinMarketCap

After stumbling last week, Bitcoin (BTC, +9.9%) found its footing on Monday, reclaiming the $70,000 mark and rallying the crypto market. The total crypto market cap bounced back to $2.65T, a 9.5% gain from last week.

Bitcoin ETFs continue to drive performance. Net outflows of $887.6MM, after seven straight weeks of inflows, sent the market lower last week. The five day outflow streak snapped on Monday with $15.4MM of net inflows. Ethereum (ETH, +8.7%) joined Bitcoin with a strong weekly gain despite reports that the U.S. SEC is investigating the Ethereum Foundation.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH, +27.0%) is rallying ahead of its own halving, the network’s third, which is slated for April 4. Internet Computer (ICP, +64.6%) hit its highest level in two years amidst growing network activity and excitement over the unveiling of AI-based smart contracts on its testnet.

The Last Word

Modular Blockchain

Noun

: Modular blockchains specialize in managing a few specialized tasks.

/ Monolithic blockchains handle all functions; newer modular blockchains distribute functions among different layers.

About BitGo

BitGo provides the most secure and scalable solutions for the digital asset economy, offering regulated custody, borrowing and lending, and core infrastructure to investors and builders alike.

Founded in 2013 — the early days of crypto — BitGo pioneered the multi-signature wallet and later built TSS to improve upon other companies’ MPC offerings. Between multi-sig and TSS, BitGo offers the safest technology on the market and safeguards over 600 tokens across a wide variety of blockchains.

Over the years, BitGo has expanded from offering wallets into providing a full-suite solution that lets clients hold assets safely and then put them to work.

BitGo launched BitGo Trust Company in 2018, providing fully regulated, qualified cold storage to complement BitGo Inc’s original hot wallet solution. In 2020, BitGo launched BitGo Prime, which allows its clients to trade, borrow, and lend. Moreover, BitGo also provides access to DeFi, staking, NFT wallets, and beyond, and serves as the world’s sole custodian for WBTC, or wrapped Bitcoin.

Today, BitGo is the leader in digital asset security, custody, and liquidity, providing the operational backbone for more than 1500 institutional clients in over 50 countries — a list that includes many regulated entities and the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms. BitGo also processes approximately 20% of all global Bitcoin transactions by value.

For more information, please visit www.bitgo.com.

©2024 BitGo Inc. (collectively with its affiliates and subsidiaries, “BitGo”). All rights reserved. BitGo Trust Company, Inc., BitGo Inc., and BitGo Prime LLC are separately operated, wholly-owned subsidiaries of BitGo Holdings, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. No legal, tax, investment, or other advice is provided by any BitGo entity. Please consult your legal/tax/investment professional for questions about your specific circumstances. Digital asset holdings involve a high degree of risk, and can fluctuate greatly on any given day. Accordingly, your digital asset holdings may be subject to large swings in value and may even become worthless. The information provided herein is not intended for distribution to, or use by, any person or entity in any jurisdiction or country where such distribution or use would be contrary to law or regulation. BitGo is not directing this information to any person in any jurisdiction where the publication or availability of the information is prohibited, by reason of that person’s citizenship, residence or otherwise.