“Fundamental Clash Between Regulations and Crypto”, Ethereum Devs Patch Testnet Bug, Bank of Japan to Launch CBDC Pilot in April

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Regulatory news

• It’s “a fundamental clash between traditional banking regulatory approaches and the crypto world,” argued Tobias Adrian, financial advisor and director of the money and capital markets department in The International Monetary Fund (IMF). He explained that while institutions need to be able to ensure that what is happening is legal, that is “very difficult to do in a world where transactions are fundamentally anonymous.” What regulators want and need to do, he believed, is fundamentally at odds with the design of crypto.

Ethereum news

• Marius VanDerWijden, a core developer at Ethereum (ETH)its upcoming Shanghai-Capella upgrade, reported a bug on the Zhejiang test grid on Thursday and said it had been fixed. He wrote: “The last 4 and a half stressful hours of troubleshooting culminated in this amazing bug fix. We received reports that geth nodes would not sync the Zhejiang devnet correctly. The problem was that if a block body was empty (no tx, no withdrawal) we wouldn’t initialize it properly.” Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko added that “everyone felt confident that they could patch it quickly.”

CBDC news

• The Bank of Japan announced plans to roll out a new pilot for the central bank’s digital currency (CBDC) program in April. There will be no real transactions between participating users, only “simulated transactions,” Japan’s central bank explained. “The goal of the pilot program is twofold: First, to test the technical feasibility that is not fully covered by the PoCs [Proof of Concept]and second, to leverage the skills and insights of private enterprises in terms of technology and operations to design a CBDC ecosystem in the event of social implementation, it said.

Stablecoin news

• USDT Issuer Tether said that “in light of recent regulatory headwinds that have caused problems for BUSD and to a lesser extent USDC, USDT currently represents about half of the total stablecoin market.” The announcement added that Tether settled more value in 2022 than ever before and that the total settlement of Tether passed $18.2 trillion “which was more than both MasterCard or Visa“, it claimed. The USDT is now backed by over 81% of cash and cash equivalents with no exposure to certificates, which includes over $39 billion in direct exposure to US Treasuries, with the remainder made up of money market funds, reverse repos, and cash and bank deposits , it said.

DeFi news

• Ethereum scaling solution zkSync Era announced its Fair Onboarding Alpha, saying that “the first zkEVM on Ethereum finally lifts the gates to allow registered projects to be distributed on the mainnet.” The team also announced that zkSync Era is now fully open source with the freedom to view, modify and share the code, as well as that zkSync 2.0 has been renamed zkSync Era, and zkSync 1.0 is now zkSync Lite. The team will soon update the protocol’s roadmap and publish an overview of the next milestones.

Investment news

• The Cornell SC Johnson College of Business announced the US-based startup Ripple as the newest sponsor of Fintech at Cornell initiative. According to the press release, Fintech at Cornell prepares students for the digital age by engaging them with faculty members, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, industry leaders and policy makers in discussion and debate about the socioeconomic implications and applications of AI, big data, blockchain, digital assets, digitization and more .
• Web3 security company Stela announced a $6 million funding round led by a16z crypto with the participation of Capital in the first round, Opensea Ventures, Chain forest, BoxGroup, Pear, Home brewed, Louis Beryl, Sabrina Hahn, Dylan Field, Dan Romero, Gokul Rajaram, Lenny Rachitsky and others. Stelo aims to expand the reach of its tools to make transactions on the blockchain easy and secure, it said. Stelo also announced the Stelo v2 extension, the developer API to enable dapps and wallets to use the Stelo Transaction Engine, and approvals.xyz, an approval experience for users to understand their wallet health and keep it safe, it added.

Mining news

• Bitcoin miner CleanSpark announced a purchase of 20,000 brand new Antminer S19j Pro+ units for $43.6 million. After coupons, the company expects to pay $32.3 million, for a 25% discount or a total price per terrahash of about $13.25. The Pro+ is more power efficient and 22% more productive than the Antminer S19j Pro model and will be shipped in batches, with deliveries starting as early as next month and lasting until the end of May, the company said. CleanSpark plans to deploy the fleet of new machines at its wholly-owned bitcoin mining sites in the United States.

Career news

• While 2022 saw crypto market giants announcing mass layoffs, the crypto payment ecosystem was Coins Paid announced plans to hire new talent and reach over 300 team members by 2023, a press release said. “In 2022, amidst the market turmoil, we increased our team up to 65% and reached 200+ employees. And we are now ready to expand our team of experts to polish internal systems, improve the company’s growth while in the flat market, and further achieve better results, it said.