Last Week in Review: Jack Dorsey pushes for BTC in Africa, and CoinDesk lists crypto’s most influential

by Team Luno
· 3 minute read
Mengenal Apa itu Bitcoin Classic (BXC)?

The highlights from last week’s headline grabbers. All the important news, numbers and events from the crypto industry in easy-to-read, digestible news bites. 

News from the block

Jack Dorsey invests in African Bitcoin mining company 

  • Jack Dorsey’s payments company, Block, led a $2 million investment round into Gridless, a Bitcoin mining company in Kenya. 
  • Gridless builds and runs Bitcoin mining sites next to renewable energy producers in Africa, utilising excess energy that would otherwise go to waste. 
  • “Gridless represents a close strategic alignment with our vision of ensuring the bitcoin network increasingly leverages clean energy, in combination with bitcoin computational centres around the world,” said Thomas Templeton, Lead for Bitcoin mining and wallet at Block. 

CoinDesk’s most influential people in crypto

  • CoinDesk, a leading cryptocurrency news publication, has compiled a list of the 50 most influential people in crypto in 2022. It’s in the same vein as the Time100 list put together by Time magazine. 
  • Notable folk include Binance’s Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, crypto fraud investigator ZachXBT, and, of course, Jerome Powell, for his role as Chair of the Federal Reserve in the US. 
  • Inclusion in the list is based on a person’s ability to move the needle in the industry, for better or worse. 

UK pushes for investment in cryptocurrency businesses as part of reforms

  • A new package of 30 regulatory financial reforms in the UK, known as the Edinburgh Reforms, includes investment into the development of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.
  • The Investment Management Exemption in the package makes mention of crypto assets, which if developed, says the government, will see more overseas investment flowing into the sector. 
  • “The government has recommitted to establishing the Financial Markets Infrastructure Sandbox in 2023, allowing firms and regulators to safely test, adopt and scale new technologies that could transform financial markets,” according to a press release. 

Chainlink fills staking pool in two days 

  • Stakers committed about $170 million to the cryptocurrency network’s staking pool, filling the allotment in two days. 
  • A network that uses proof-of-stake as its consensus mechanism requires validators to stake cryptocurrency. By contributing to staking, validators are actively putting their cryptocurrency to work in helping secure the network, and are rewarded for their efforts. 
  • The Chainlink protocol serves as a data bridge between traditional and cryptocurrency networks. 

TL;Did read

While Chainlink is minted on the Ethereum network, its use case for developers building decentralised applications is completely different. Learn more about what Chainlik does HERE.

Crunching the numbers

467 – The number of times Bitcoin has died over the years, according to the media. 99 Bitcoins, a crypto educational site keeps track of how many times the media has called Bitcoin’s demise over the years. 

3 hours 40 minutes – The length of a new cryptocurrency course available on MasterClass, the wildly popular streaming platform. 

15,884 – The number of Bitcoin wallets holding more than 100 Bitcoin, worth around $1.69 million. 

50 – Analysts are expecting the Federal Reserve Bank, the central bank in the US, to raise interest rates this week by another 50 basis points,  equal to 0.5%. 

The crypto time capsule

Crypto happens fast. 

Crypto trivia

What is the difference between an ERC-20 and an ERC-721 token?

We’re diving a bit deeper into crypto geekery here, but the easy answer is that an ERC-20 token is a cryptocurrency minted on the Ethereum blockchain, and an ERC-721 token is what’s more widely known as an non-fungible token, an NFT, which also lives on Ethereum. 

The one is a cryptocurrency that is identical to other coins belonging to the same currency, it’s fungible, in other words, while the other is one of a kind, meaning that it’s non-fungible. 

Worth a watch 

Richard Hammond from Top Gear fame follows James Howells as he appeals to the local council for permission to dig up a landfil, where the harddrive containing the password to his Bitcoin wallet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is buried. True story. Check it out, HERE. 

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