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It would be almost impossible for President Trump to implement a bitcoin ban.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
CRYPTO MARKETS
Bitcoin had another calm week despite the expiration of nearly $1 billion worth of bitcoin options on Friday. Millennials remain confident that it will be a useful investment in the near term, with 44% of them in one survey saying they’re likely to buy bitcoin in the next five years and 47% trusting it more than big banks. But traditional investors like Jim Rogers are more reserved, believing that governments will not allow cryptocurrencies to survive and bitcoin’s value will “eventually become zero.”
Source: Messari. Prices as of 4:00 p.m. on June 26, 2020.
CAN TRUMP BAN BITCOIN?
Donald Trump’s distaste for bitcoin is no secret, but banning it would be harder than President Roosevelt’s undertaking when he banned gold in 1933, allowing the government to seize citizens’ gold holdings during the Great Depression and requiring them to exchange the precious metal for cash.
Bitcoin proponents like to point out its similarities with gold, but they’re lucky in this context it has some obvious differences, too. Its online decentralization makes it easy to transfer around the globe instantaneously, and transactions off exchanges can be untraceable. “Bottom line: it would be nearly impossible to censor bitcoin transactions,” says early bitcoiner Marshall Hayner.
PAYPAL OPENING FOR BUSINESS
PayPal PYPL and its subsidiary Venmo are reportedly gearing up to enable more than 300 million users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies directly from their platform in the next three months. The move would mark another reversal for PayPal after it backed out of Facebook’s Libra Foundation last fall. Its competitor Square’s Cash App already offers crypto transactions and has seen record downloads during the pandemic.
Other places to buy bitcoin now include 7-Eleven, CVS and Rite Aid RAD . And bitcoin ATM operator LibertyX finished rolling out a buying option this week that will make purchases available at 20,000 retail locations in the U.S.
UP NEXT IN WASHINGTON
This Tuesday, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee will hold a virtual hearing titled “The Digitization of Money and Payments.” Chris Giancarlo, former chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the founder of the Digital Dollar Project, will be testifying about the importance of tokenized financial products.
Plus, all eyes will be on President Trump’s next nominee for the head of the SEC and its stance on crypto as the current chair, Jay Clayton, awaits Senate confirmation to become the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
FINDING 100% YIELDS
A growing number of crypto investors on social media have taken up “yield farming,” the act of leveraging decentralized finance products and protocols to generate high rates of return. The practice comes with risk, but users have been able to compound returns on high-yield interest income by using leverage to gain additional exposure to assets, in some cases generating annualized yields exceeding 100%.
Lending startup Compound dove into this space, and its governance token comp, which was listed on Coinbase on Monday, has quadrupled in value since last week.
ELSEWHERE
DOJ Indicts Founder of Anti-Money Laundering Bitcoin Project for Money Laundering [CoinDesk]
Crypto Push by Republic Investment Platform Sparked by New Token [Bloomberg]
Blackballed by PayPal, Scientific-Paper Pirate Takes Bitcoin Donations [CoinDesk]