Cryptocurrency

Welcome to The Daily Forkast, January 3rd, 2022, presented by Angie Lau. For the latest in blockchain & crypto news. On today's show: 00:00 Coming Up 00:28 Indian crypto businesses raided 02:02 Bitcoin at 13 03:42 Raising capital on the blockchain --- New Year's raids by India's tax authorities on companies including the Unicorns, Coin Switch, Uber and Coin, as well as exchanges, BuyUcoin and Unicorn uncovered over nine point three million U.S. dollars worth of alleged tax evasion, with just four million of that total recovered. And authorities say Binance owned Wazir X appears to have evaded five point five million U.S. dollars in tax in a December 30th raid. In that case, authorities managed to recover, they say, six point five million U.S. dollars, covering both the tax loss as well as interest and penalties incurred. Over in Japan. Square Enix, the game developer behind the wildly popular Final Fantasy franchise, says the company is now exploring cloud technologies and blockchain gaming in line with trends in NFT and the Metaverse. In his New Year's letter, company president Yosuke Matsuda acknowledged that while some fans are skeptical, the company believes that blockchain gaming geared with its own token economy, holds the key to self-sustaining game growth. Meanwhile, bitcoin has hit the age of 13. Since its whitepaper in 2008, bitcoin has confronted skepticism over whether a digital currency could coexist with fiat currencies. Experienced extreme volatility and crashed spectacularly in 2018. However, investors who bought bitcoin in early 2009 and held onto it have seen a total return of 5.2 million percent. In comparison, Amazon stock has returned just 68000 percent since its listing in 1997. However, Ben Emons of Medley Global Advisors said that such astronomical results are unlikely to be repeated. Competition to become the digital reserve currency is heating up. According to the Atlantic Council, nine countries have fully launched a digital currency already, with many more working on similar projects. But Emmons also sees wider adoption of bitcoin continuing in 2022 and with a clear regulatory framework pending in the US. Cities and states could move ahead with adopting bitcoin as a means of payment for salaries, services and goods. Direct listings and special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have become popular alternatives to a traditional IPO when raising capital of late. However, they aren't the only options blockchain based alternative would be to tokenized equity and to make those tokens available to a company's user base. Henry Chong, CEO of Kung Fu Seng, aims to reshape investment markets with blockchain technology. Angie Lau: How does raising capital on the blockchain in this specific way work? Henry Chong: Capital raising in the blockchain today is largely focused around ICOs, issuing utility tokens, and I think that's been a great proof of concept. It's shown that you can build alternative value networks around companies and communities where you can both fundraise from that community and also find a way to grow that community for their participation. I think the time now is to for us to move to what I call Crypto 2.0 using security tokens that can merge the best of tokenization with all the underlying benefits of a real security share upon the funds so that we can actually turn all of the stakeholders of these communities into shareholders. Angie Lau: What are the key advantages here going public in this way? How does it offer both companies and investors a different proposition? Or is there anything to be wary of? Henry Chong: STOs have all the natural rights and obligations and investor protections of traditional equity, but with all the benefits of being in token form. And I think that's very, very important because, you know, once I'm a shareholder of a company, the company can just choose to issue dividends to half of the shareholders, and they don't need to specify that M&A. But once you combine that with the benefits of tokenization, they said, we can really rethink what it means to turn communities, stakeholders, shareholders. And there's a lot of talk right now about crypto companies going public on traditional exchanges. Companies like Coinbase and OpenSea have gotten a lot of attention for some of these plans. They want to sell real equity so that people can become shareholders of these companies that drive your shareholders not going away. I think that they're planning to list in the wrong place, and it's strange to have Crypto companies wanting to issue paper based shares listing on traditional exchanges with their own equal. The basin community can't really or easily access their own equity. --- #Crypto #Blockchain #BlockchainTechnology #DigitalAssets #Cryptocurrency #DeFi #Bitcoin #Gaming #SquareEnix #Tokenization #IPO #NFT #Metaverse #Tax #Capital