The heirs of the late Silvio Berlusconi have been wondering what to do with the former Italian Prime Minister's collection of over 25,000 largely worthless pieces of art. According to the BBC, "Woodworms have already destroyed part of the collection. In some cases, the cost of exterminating the pests exceeds the value of the paintings."
This week also saw a new record holder for the world's hottest chilli pepper, as Pepper X took the title from the Carolina Reaper, which has held it for the last decade. But what's hot and what isn't worth exterminating the bugs for in the crypto world this week? Read on to find out.
FTX appeared to propose an incredibly generous customer compensation plan this week, which seemed almost too good to be true... and then we took a closer look and realized that the actual truth was very different than that being widely reported. The exchange's ex-CEO and alleged former chief truth bender, Sam Bankman-Fried, finished up his third week in court, which proved a huge disappointment to the trial judge.
China continued to push its e-CNY CBDC as an international currency, despite the fact that it hasn't even had a full rollout within the confines of China yet. Meanwhile, the ECB progressed to the 'Preparation Phase' with its digital euro project, although any decision on issuance is still at least two years away.
Staying in the EU, the bloc's latest crypto tax law gets tough on terrorism by promising to share a cross-border database of financial information on individuals and companies. Sounds pretty tough on user privacy in general to us. We then took a trip across the Atlantic Ocean to look at the diversity of crypto regulation, adoption, assets and exchange preferences across the Latin American nations.
In a case of the media making the news, Cointelegraph caused quite a stir this week when it tweeted (or Xed if you must) an unverified report that the SEC had finally approved a spot bitcoin ETF. It transpired that the SEC hadn't, and smugly took to the platform to let everyone know.
Crypto's least favorite regulator wasn't so smug when it asked the court to dismiss its long-standing case against Ripple's co-founders. However, it was too early to start the celebrations in earnest, as blockchain-based video-sharing service LBRY finally succumbed to the relentless pressure of its own SEC court action.
Circle stepped up to become a 'friend of the court' in the ongoing SEC vs Binance litigation, although only to insist that its USDC stablecoin was definitely not a security. The main parties had trouble agreeing on anything else though. Binance.US also announced that it would henceforth be a crypto-only exchange, as USD deposits and withdrawals were stopped, and Binance stopped onboarding new users in the U.K. due to new crypto marketing regulations.
On to DeFi, and after an Ethereum slashing event disclosed by Lido Finance, we took a look at how this functionality works to secure proof of stake blockchains. Uniswap token holders were up in arms this week as a new fee structure was introduced and the UNI price dropped 5%. We were impressed by MakerDAO's Spark lending protocol, but it has a long way to go to unseat the current market leaders.
Lightning Labs unveiled its Taproot Assets functionality, enabling the creation of stablecoins on the Bitcoin blockchain, for all those BTC maximalists who still won't accept that "other blockchains are available."
And finally, Ferrari has started accepting Bitcoin, Ether and USDC as payment for new supercars and hypercars. The initiative is already live in the U.S. and is planned for rollout to Europe and other regions next year. Now that's hot... but is it Pepper X hot?
