DeFi Tops $100B

Also: Mastercard plots CBDC future, NYSE's parent sold Coinbase, mining crackdown in Beijing

What you need to know today in crypto and beyond  April 30, 2021 Sponsored By:     If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.   Send feedback to daniel.kuhn@coindesk.com – we'd love to hear from you! Today's must-reads Top Shelf MILESTONE: DeFi is now a $100 billion sector, by at least two measures, and likely tops 1 million real users. Though talking about the value of assets people deposit in financial applications doesn't always line up with what's happening in DeFi. MASTER PLAN? Mastercard is aiming to help governments evaluate the utility of CBDCs outside of just payments, CEO Michael Miebach said on the company's first-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. The company is exploring applications that can exist on top of yet-to-launch CBDCs, including ones powered by smart contracts. BAKKT OUT: Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, sold its 1.4% stake in newly listed Coinbase earlier this month for $1.2 billion to pay down debt. CRYPTO CRACKDOWN: Data centers in Beijing are now required to report the amount and share of power used by crypto mining, according to an emergency notice sent Tuesday by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology. SPEZIAL FUNDS: New German legislation will allow Spezialfonds, a special type of fund managers, to invest up to 20% of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. This could theoretically reap $425 billion in fresh capital for crypto markets.   – Daniel Kuhn A message from Nexo Your digital assets deserve a savings account in their BEST INTEREST. 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This CoinDesk Research report looks at the data behind the most common critiques and shows that, while Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, the mix is evolving toward renewables. Bitcoin also incentivizes investment in clean energy sources, can convert pollution into value, and redistributes wasted power production. Download the free report. What others are writing... Off-Chain Signals CME eyes 'much wider potential customer base' with next week's micro bitcoin futures launch (The Block) Who Disrupts the Disrupters? Aggregators, Web3 and Disruption Theory (Not Boring) Is inflation coming? Will bitcoin benefit? Who knows, but here's the contours of that debate. (Fortune) NY courts drop securities suits against 5 crypto firms, Binance and Tron still active (Protos) - D.K. A message from NEAR Protocol NEAR is an open-source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications. Developers can overcome high fees and slow speeds by building on NEAR's fast, scalable and low-cost blockchain protocol. With a suite of climate neutral solutions, creators and communities can now thrive. NEAR.org - Infrastructure for innovation. Introducing Unlocked 101 at Consensus by CoinDesk 2021 New to crypto? Here's a crash course. Unlocked 101 is a free educational series of sessions designed to give you the tools to navigate crypto. Sessions will be hosted May 4–20 to prepare you for Consensus by CoinDesk 2021, our virtual big-tent event.   Register for Unlocked 101 this May. Introducing CoinDesk Indexes TradeBlock, the leader in providing crypto asset indexes to financial institutions, is taking the CoinDesk name.   Introducing CoinDesk Indexes, the industry standard for institutional-grade digital currency price references, with billions of dollars in monthly trading volume quoted against them.   Underlying new brand names, TradeBlock's index methodology will continue to adhere to the standards of integrity and reliability that have always differentiated its indexes.   Read more about CoinDesk Indexes, the industry standard in crypto benchmarks. Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway Without permission, without favor The next time someone smugly tells you there is "no legitimate use case" for cryptocurrency, or asserts that it has "no redeeming social value," shove this story in his or her face:   Meduza, a Russian news outlet, is soliciting donations in cryptocurrency (along with traditional payment methods) after the government labeled it a "foreign agent," CoinDesk's on-the-ground correspondent, Anna Baydakova, reported Thursday.   Readers in the West should understand that this designation has more serious consequences for Meduza than Donald Trump's insults ("fake news," "enemy of the people," "the failing New York Times") had for its U.S. counterparts. Meduza is now required by law to post a notice of its "foreign agent" status in a typeface bigger than the text of its articles.   As a result of this "scarlet letter," Meduza lost many of its advertisers and is running out of money, the team behind the publication said. Apparently, it hasn't been deplatformed by traditional financial institutions because it is also taking donations by bank card and PayPal. But the reasons Meduza gave for including the crypto option were telling.   "If people are afraid to send us money from their bank accounts, and they might well be, they can send us crypto," said Meduza's editor-in-chief, Ivan Kolpakov.   A skeptic might note that donors who send bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), or BNB to Meduza would leave a permanent record of their actions on the blockchains, or public ledgers, of these assets. But such a record would show only the address, a random-seeming string of numbers and letters, that sent the money, not the person behind it. An address may or may not be tied to donors' real-world identity, depending on how they acquired the crypto and what steps they took to protect their privacy, whereas their bank and PayPal accounts definitely are.   Financial censorship is a thing   Further, if recent history teaches us anything it is that financial intermediaries cannot be relied upon to stand with dissident or unpopular voices.   We saw this more than a decade ago with the blockade of WikiLeaks by PayPal and other large financial institutions that caved to extra-legal pressure from U.S. politicians.   We see it today when payment processors and crowdfunding sites boot content creators, fundraisers or pariah-friendly internet platforms, not because they are breaking any laws but because their speech offends activists. I, too, find the content in many of these cases unsavory. But I don't mind that it exists, and I don't want to prevent those who want to read, watch or hear it from doing so. That's a basic "small-l liberal" principle. Or was.   To quote a locked Twitter account, whom I will not name out of respect for the person's privacy: "If I cover my ears because I don't want to hear from you, it's not censorship. If I cover your mouth or someone else's ears because people want to hear you, it's censorship."   I can already hear the bien pensants say, "It's only censorship when the government does it." But even if you accept only that narrow legal definition of the word, it surely describes what the Russian government – the very regime whose influence in the U.S. many of those same bien pensants spent the last four years hyperventilating about – is trying to do to Meduza.   Crypto might thwart that attempt, or at least hinder it, by enabling individuals to transfer money to a publisher without permission from third parties that can be strong-armed or politicized.   Downsides   By all means, let's talk about the copious amounts of electricity required to secure Bitcoin and other proof-of-stake networks – although describing this intensive computation as "wasteful" is a subjective value judgment. (TikTok and hair dryers are wasteful, in my book. Should those things be banned?)   By all means, let's acknowledge that cryptocurrency's openness to all comers makes it attractive to criminals – although the blockchain's trail of crumbs also helps law enforcement catch the crooks who use these systems.   By all means, let's pay attention to how terrorists, foreign or now, we're told, domestic, might take advantage of this technology. But if we're going to blame anyone or anything other than the terrorists for their actions, remember it was not Satoshi Nakamoto who destabilized the Middle East or hollowed out Middle America.   When tallying the social costs of censorship-resistant money, do not ignore the benefits for the Meduzas of the world.   – Marc Hochstein The Chaser... ATTENTION: Scammers have been sending fraudulent emails with links to sites disguised to look like coindesk.com. If you are in doubt about a link, type https://www.coindesk.com directly into your browser; do not copy and paste. Remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The Node   A newsletter from CoinDesk   See Previous Editions Copyright © 2021 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.    250 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003, USA You can manage your preferences here or unsubscribe from all CoinDesk email.