Finance ministers from the G20 nations met in Brazil this week to discuss (among other things) plans for a global minimum tax on the world's 2,756 known billionaires, collectively believed to be worth around $13 trillion.
Currently, through a combination of avoidance schemes and 'tax-friendly' jurisdictions, the hyper-wealthy can often pay proportionately less tax than those with significantly lower means. However, a proposal for an annual levy of 2% on the wealth of the world's richest men and women could raise an estimated $250 billion per year.
The plan builds on global legislation to impose a 15% minimum tax rate on multinational companies, which came into effect in January after a decade of development.
But who has paid their fair share in the crypto world this week? And who has been avoiding their dues? Read on to find out.
The man who has long been trying to get his dues for (according to him) inventing Bitcoin, Craig Wright, came up against a double dose of email-related resistance to his quest. First, correspondence between Satoshi Nakamoto and early Bitcoin developers was shown in court to contradict Wright's earlier claims about 'his' process of creation. Then, Wright was called back to the witness stand to explain emails his wife produced earlier in proceedings, which his former legal representation claimed had been doctored.
Renowned tax minimiser and world's richest man, Elon Musk, sued Open AI and Worldcoin supremo, Sam Altman, causing a drop in the value of WLD tokens. We asked whether the global identity network's Altman-link was a help or a hindrance. Meanwhile, Worldcoin competitor Humanity Protocol concluded a funding round for its palm-print-based ID system, which attracted investment from Polygon and the CEO of Animoca Brands.
Staker rewards seem to be the flavor of the week, following Uniswap's token-price-boosting proposal of such measures last Saturday. The first to follow suit was lending platform Frax Finance, which proposed the reintroduction of a revenue-sharing model that was previously canceled by a community vote in 2022. Frax was swiftly followed by a similar proposal for the Lido staking platform, although this suggestion was put forward by a community member and received significant pushback from the official development team.
Telegram's Notcoin 'game' has attracted over 25 million players, who have been tapping away at their screens and collecting trillions of 'non-existent' tokens, hoping that Notcoin may at some point become something, rather than nothing. The development team has been playing along with the mystery, making no promises as to any higher meaning, while at the same time threatening to burn tokens in non-active wallets, which must be for something, right?
Decentralized social media platform Lens Protocol opened its 'social graph' to the general public this week, after an invitation-only beta phase. The gloves are off to see who will prevail in the DeSoc sphere and whether Lens Protocol, Farcaster or any other blockchain-based platform can take the fight to the Web2 social media giants. We also Observed MetaStates, a proposal to digitally represent emotions and other attributes within the Industrial Metaverse, potentially turning employee management into something more akin to The Sims video game.
Web3 also saw the launch of a new 'royalties-enforcing' NFT marketplace from Yuga Labs and Magic Eden, although it remains to be seen whether this can capture a significant portion of the market. And in Ethereum L2 news, we Observed Blast launch on mainnet and Starkware unveil an open-source zk-prover.
It wasn't all good news for Blast this week, as RiskOnBlast appeared to provide the network with its first rug-pull, which we covered along with the Microstrategy SIM swap attack that saw the Bitcoin-hodler temporarily lose control of its X account. The Bitforex exchange also looks increasingly likely to have rug-pulled, following the removal of $56 million from its hot wallets, the cessation of withdrawals, and complete radio silence in the week since.
There was good news for Circle though, as its USDC stablecoin was hailed as resurgent in a new report. Admittedly the report came from Circle-stakeholder Coinbase, but the figures do suggest that USDC might be poised to take a bite out of Tether's majority market share. Also resurgent this week has been Bitcoin, which saw its token price jump from around $51,000 to over $63,000 at one stage before leveling off. A key driver of this surge has been spot bitcoin ETFs, which continue to attract record-breaking inflows on an almost daily basis.
Nigeria seems intent on continuing its anti-crypto crusade (rather than actually doing something useful to fix its economy), as this week it reportedly detained two Binance executives, fined the company $10 billion, and told local telecoms providers to block access to all crypto exchanges. The Nigerian government later denied that it had imposed the $10 billion fine, saying that no decision had yet been made.
Finally, our Banking and CBDC Roundup looked at e-CNY and digital dollar developments in Hong Kong, a U.S. banking gold rush into spot bitcoin ETF territory, and some IMF advice on digital currencies for the Pacific island nations.
Now, we're off to work out how to become a billionaire before the G20 spoils it for all 2,757 of us...
