Dorsey Quits Twitter. What It Means for Bitcoin

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

Nov. 29, 2021

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Today's must-reads

Top Shelf

DORSEY & BITCOIN: Jack Dorsey, who once said he'd be working on Bitcoin full time if he wasn't running Twitter and Square, is stepping down as CEO of Twitter. The bitcoin-friendly technologist has pushed the social media juggernaut to explore Web 3 applications including BTC lightning payments, NFTs and a decentralized architecture called Blue Sky in recent years. Twitter's chief technology officer Parag Agrawal will step up as chief executive, and Dorsey will remain a member of Twitter's board of directors until his term expires in the middle of 2022.

NO BITCOIN, YES CBDC: The Indian government does not plan to recognize bitcoin as a currency and will not collect data on bitcoin transactions, Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharam said on Monday. The Reserve Bank of India is also working on a phased implementation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The Indian parliament will discuss a highly-anticipated bill for cryptocurrencies in its winter session, where word has it the government will (again) look to ban all private cryptocurrencies, only allowing some to promote the underlying technology.

FOLLOWING SUIT: Tanzania is preparing to launch a digital form of its local currency, the Tanzanian shilling, the governor of the Bank of Tanzania, Florence Luoga, said. The country will follow Nigeria, which launched its eNaira in October, making it the first African state to issue its own digital money. Luoga said the move to launch a CBDC will ensure that Tanzania is not left behind in the digital economy. At the same event, Luoga said Tanzania remains wary of cryptocurrencies and advises the public to be cautious.

LIQUID: Some $5 billion of crypto changes hands in Russia every year, the country's central bank said in a report. It does not give details on the kinds of transactions or how banks identify those that are crypto related. But the growing interest for crypto could become a risk for Russia's financial stability, the regulator said, even though right now that risk seems low because transactions are mostly isolated from the mainstream financial system, the report said.

RESOLVED: Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Monday it has resolved technical issues with its dogecoin wallet that resulted in users' accounts being frozen. The reason for the more than two-week long debacle was an unfortunate coincidence of events, "not quite the shady circumstances that some had suggested," the exchange wrote in a blog post. Earlier this month, the exchange implemented a software update for the popular meme coin, which triggered a glitch.

–Helene Braun

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Overheard on CoinDesk TV...

Sound Bites

"I don't want [Meta, formerly Facebook] to take and claim the whole metaverse when it can be much more fun and diverse experience."

–The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget, on "First Mover."

What others are writing...

Off-Chain Signals

Seeking crypto millionaires: Thailand targets group to boost tourism (Bloomberg)
Stablecoins might be on the hot seat but are integral for crypto innovation (Forbes)
Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb hasn't sold XRP in three months, one of his longest breaks (Protos)
New German government cites crypto in coalition agreement (Cointelegraph)
Axie Infinity is a sexy new blockchain-based model of gaming – but it's facing the same old crypto pitfalls (Fortune)

A message from Horizen

You are invited to Horizen's Zendoo mainnet launch party! There will be ZEN and swag giveaways!

Horizen is the zero-knowledge network of blockchains powered by the largest and most decentralized node system. Its blockchain deployment protocol, Zendoo, is launching on mainnet on Dec 1st, 2021!

Zendoo enables developers and businesses to deploy private and public blockchains with unmet scalability, flexibility, and throughput to support any real-world needs.

Consensus 2022, the must-attend crypto and blockchain experience of the year, is heading to Austin, Texas, from June 9-12, 2022. This is the only festival showcasing and celebrating all sides of the blockchain and crypto ecosystems, and their wide-reaching effect on commerce, culture and communities. Register now for the lowest price.

Putting the news in perspective

The Takeaway

Planet of the Ape (NFTs)

Hi, Will Gottsegen writing today. The tech behind NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, hasn't changed all that much since the development of the ERC-721 standard – the coding framework on which most popular crypto collectibles are built.

That's because until 2021, NFTs were mostly a niche curiosity for crypto enthusiasts. Even with the rise of CryptoKitties in 2017, NFTs didn't immediately conjure up any cultural or aesthetic reference points beyond the broader crypto ecosystem – despite becoming a media hang-up.

With the success of Bored Ape Yacht Club – the collection of crude, cartoonish, monkey-themed images that's birthed a rising media empire over the past year – those dynamics have started to shift.

When the digital artist Beeple helped kick off the current mania around NFTs last winter, most of the popular NFTs on marketplaces like Nifty Gateway and SuperRare nodded to the standard crypto meme lexicon: bitcoins, rocket ships, "bulls" and Pepe the Frog. Things started to shift when CryptoPunks started popping up on physical billboards across America, and at Christie's.

Now we're in what you might call the "Bored Ape Yacht Club Era" of NFT art history. The success of BAYC gave rise to other animal-themed "10k" NFT collections (so named for their limited supply of 10,000 procedurally generated images), which took the formula and ran with it; Lazy Lions, Cool Cats, Pudgy Penguins and the Doge Pound are some of the pricier projects in this vein.

Visually, they're all strikingly similar: portraits at a three-quarter angle, from the shoulders up. They often double as headshot-style profile pictures on social media sites.

Post Malone, Jimmy Fallon, Lil Bab and Steph Curry are among today's most prominent ape owners, thanks to clever celebrity outreach programs from crypto platforms like MoonPay.

This past weekend, the rapper Future picked up a Bored Ape (also through MoonPay) and was gifted a "Doodle" NFT by one of the collection's founders. He even dropped a tweet to go along with it: "WAGMI," or we're all gonna make it, a common crypto rallying cry.

For now, this is what NFTs are, culturally. Mainstream consumers with a peripheral knowledge of NFTs aren't thinking about Folia's generative art experiments, or Hic et Nunc's relatively diverse digital art collection, or even Meebits, the 3D NFT project from the creators of CryptoPunks that riffs on digital minimalism. Bored Apes, with their overwhelming aesthetic sameness and their all-important community aspect, are the blueprint, as they have been for the better part of this year.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether BAYC will remain on top. The crypto market tends to move in cycles; if everything suddenly crashes, new NFT paradigms may emerge.

There's also the fact that Bored Ape-style NFTs are almost universally unappealing to look at (Lazy Lions, especially – Cool Cats get a pass, I think they're kind of sweet). A Bored Ape spin-off collection called Mutant Ape Yacht Club takes those uncanny visuals to a grotesque extreme. It's as if they're daring you to mock them, to question how anyone could spend so much on these images.

That the BAYC template has created real cultural impact beyond crypto is why it remains immensely successful, and it will always have a place in the canon for that reason. But there's no reason it needs to continue to dominate to the exclusion of everything else.

–Will Gottsegen

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