More Than 1.3B People Just Got Invited Into Crypto
Plus changes afoot at Libra and shifts in the world of enterprise blockchain
Happy Wednesday, Blockfolians
The Lede
HUGE news out of the world’s second biggest country. In 2018, the Reserve Bank of India banned local financial institutions from providing banking services to crypto exchanges. After two years of legal battles, the Indian Supreme Court has sided with those exchanges and overturned the ban, creating incredible excitement within that country’s crypto community and around the world.
Highly Relevant Reading
💸Big changes afoot for Libra | News broke yesterday that, in addition to supporting Libra, Facebook would also be launching fiat-pegged digital currencies as well. These digital fiat stablecoins are slated to go live at the same time as the Calibra wallet.
🏬Microsoft, EY and ConsenSys team up | Signaling a change in corporate attitudes to public vs. private blockchains, a new collaboration is designed to enable companies to connect to the Ethereum mainnet for internal resource planning without spinning up their own private solutions.
🤯Run a bitcoin full node with your router | Now THIS is rad. HTC has just announced the Exodus 5G Hub, which is a blockchain router that allows users to run a full bitcoin node in their house and integrates with privacy apps like Protonmail, Brave and VPN Incognito.
Community Commentary
Markets are up significantly today on the basis of Bernie Sanders underperforming in yesterday’s Super Tuesday primaries. Nathaniel Whittemore asked Crypto Twitter who they thought would be best for bitcoin, with interesting results:
It IS a little wild how little crypto markets are reacting right now to major news items.
A Really Big Number You Should Be Paying Attention To
$300,000,000
That’s the valuation sought by Bitmain spinoff Matrixport in its latest fundraising round - another indicator of continued strength of private funding markets around crypto.
Final Thought
Bloomberg has dropped out of the presidential race after spending somewhere between $500 to $600m. Man, that could have bought a lot of bitcoin.