Gate.io Podcast | Ruble Crash，Crypto War，EU Bitcoin Not Banned

Introduction:

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Welcome back to the Gate.io Podcasts. I’m Peter, this is the show to get a neutral perspective on some of the latest headlines in DeFi, Metaverse, NFTs, and Big Tech. Today’s episode is sponsored by Astar Network and brought to you by Gate.io, a centralized exchange with a neutral stance on current events.

Before we get in, the information presented in this podcast is to help you stay up-to-date on the latest happening in the crypto space, and nothing presented hereby is financial advice. The news that I cover in this podcast will have the original source at your discretion. Stick by this podcast as I show you how to stay vigilant and learn to do your own research.

But, before jumping in, make sure to subscribe to this podcast or youtube channel and don’t forget to turn on the notification bell so you’ll not miss any info about the crypto space!

Now, without further ado.

In today’s headlines

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- Bitcoin Surpassed The Russian Ruble: Gained The 14th Place As Largest Currency Worldwide.
- FLOKI INU Partnership With ALFA ROMEO F1 Team.
- South Korea Invests $187M To Build Its Own Metaverse.
- Hillary Clinton Against Crypto Exchanges’s Refusal To Block Russian Addresses.
- “Bitcoin Ban” No Longer In EU’s Plans Of Crypto Regulations.
- Crypto As A New War Weapon In The Russia-Ukraine Conflict.

News Updates：

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Bitcoin Surpassed The Russian Ruble: Gained The 14th Place As Largest Currency Worldwide

Bitcoin reached a value of $44,000 on 1st March.
On Monday 28th of February, Bitcoin experienced a remarkable growth, reaching $41,000, before surpassing the $44,000 threshold on the next day.

Just as a result of the pump and inflation that the ruble was undergoing, the most famous cryptocurrency in the world reached the 14th place in the rank of CoinMarketCap.

On Monday, the BTC began to undergo an unexpected rally, with the first movements starting after the opening of the Wall Street stock exchange. A Pump probably related to the movements linked to the sanctions on Russia and therefore to the increasing inflation of the Russian currency.

In fact, last week, Nikolai Arefiev, Vice-Chairman of the Duma’s Committee on Economic Policy, declared that in the event of an economic collapse, Russia would have confiscated the rubles from its citizens.

Following this statement, already during the last weekend of February, huge queues were recorded at Russian ATMs, with people trying to secure their savings.

It cannot be excluded that the increase in the price of the BTC was also due to the continuous demand for digital currencies by Ukrainians and Russians, frightened by the future repercussions on the economy of their respective countries.

Bitcoin reached a Market Cap Of Over $800 Billion.
And it is just at the beginning of the first week of March that the BTC managed to earn a market capitalization worth $852 Billion, more precisely on the first day of the month.

The opposite happened to the Ruble, the national currency of Russia, which collapsed, placing itself 17 in the ranking of CoinMarketCap that compares the BTC to fiat currencies.

Russia had, on the 1st of March, a market cap of $632 Billion, preceded by the Mexican Peso.

It seemed that the BTC enjoyed considerable growth. In fact, the rally started following the liquidation of short positions worth a total of over $300M.

Uncertainty Is Still In The Air.
There are still many uncertainties about the unexpected growth of the cryptocurrency, in fact several analysts claim to remain cautious about the performance of Bitcoin in the days to come, given the risky situation that is plaguing Eastern Europe.

Source:
https://blockworks.co/market-wrap-bitcoin-eth-see-massive-pump-as-russian-ruble-crumbles/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-climbs-to-41k-and-flippens-the-russian-ruble

FLOKI INU Partnership With ALFA ROMEO F1 Team

Floki Inu Jumps Into F1 Driving Competition.
Floki Inu, one of the most popular meme-coins and direct competitor of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, has signed a partnership agreement with Alfa Romeo F1 Team Orlen.

On 24th February, Floki Inu’s Twitter Official Account announced the strategic agreement between the two companies.

As pointed out by Floki Inu, the goal of the company is not only to spread brand awareness in the racing world but also to support the debut of the first Chinese Formula 1 driver, Guanyu Zhou, while also supporting his team-mate Valtteri Bottas and the whole team.

Floki Inu’s Marketing Strategy.
In addition, the meme coin stated that it wanted to join the racing world because it would guarantee the company a remarkable expansion, given the popularity and success of the driving competition.

Floki Inu said this was a huge opportunity because it would ensure the project would reach an audience of 1.5 billion people, considering that the competition is broadcasted in over 170 countries with an average of 87 million Tv viewers.

Numbers that should not be underestimated, given the fact that Formula 1 is one of the most important sports globally.

Certainly, the main goal remains the Chinese market, in fact, the meme-coin considers the debut of Guanyu Zhou a fundamental element in the marketing strategy of the company, considering it as an opportunity to more easily reach the Chinese audience, based on the current cryptocurrencies restrictions in the country.

In fact, in September 2021, the People’s Bank of China banned all cryptocurrency operations in the country. The Chinese central bank considers cryptocurrencies as a financial crime that puts at risk China’s monetary system by also promoting high volatile operations. Beside that, China sees cryptocurrencies as a threat to the environment because of the high energy consumption of the mining activities. These are the reasons for why, now, It’s hard to promote crypto services in the country.

Who Will Take The First Place?
Of course, there is no denying that the marketing strategy can generate great profits and further spread the brand awareness of Floki-Inu to an audience outside the cryptocurrency world. Surely, if the team gets positive results, this will affect even more the popularity of the meme-coin.

It is not to be excluded that in the future we can also see other crypto projects join the Formula 1, and why not, see competing dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Floki Inu for the first place.

Source:
Floki Inu Twitter Account.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/what-s-behind-china-s-cryptocurrency-ban/

South Korea Invests $186M To Build Its Own Metaverse

South Korea’s Metaverse Initiative.
It isn’t certainly new that South Korea invests in technology and openly supports the development and the growth of the domain.

The government of the Asian nation has decided to join the world of cryptocurrencies and more precisely the Metaverse space: deciding to invest about $186M to finance the development of its digital world, with the goal of using the virtual space as an ecosystem where national businesses can thrive.

On February 27th, the Ministry of ICT, Science and Future Planning of the Country said it’s going to invest KRW 223.7 billion (about $186M) to build a national Metaverse whose main objective is to support the growth of companies and contribute to digital content development.

This decision is a development strategy contained in the Digital New Deal, a set of policies that aims to contribute to the digital growth of the country: financing Metaverse initiatives and artificial intelligence.

South Korean Metaverse’s Opportunities.
In fact, there are several main objectives that will characterize the ecosystem called "Expanded Virtual World". The world presents itself as a platform that guarantees virtual industrial development of cities, enhancing education and media growth.

Park Yuangyu, the Minister of Communication and Policy, said that the initiative aims to create 1.5 million jobs and prepare over 40,000 experts for the Metaverse.

South Korea’s Goal For 2026.
The goal of the South Korean government is to create a digital world where citizens can live a life similar to the real one: offering users the opportunity to travel, meet each other, work and learn.

In order to encourage users to join the project, the Ministry has announced that it’s going to support creative activities oriented to the creation of a community, as well as organize a competition for developers of the virtual world, hoping to become by 2026 the largest country in the world in the Metaverse.

Source:
https://blockworks.co/south-korea-to-pour-187m-into-world-class-metaverse-ecosystem/

Hillary Clinton Against Crypto Exchanges’s Refusal To Block Russian Addresses

Ukraine’s request to crypto exchanges
Ukraine’s Vice-Prime Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, on February 27th, shared on Twitter a request to the world’s largest crypto exchanges. His proposal was to block addresses of all Russians and Belarusians, not only targeting politicians but also normal users, which may further add stress to the two countries' economies.

Hillary Clinton Disappointed By Crypto Exchange’s Decision
Immediately, several controversies broke out, some crypto exchanges joined the initiative, others refused, claiming that the proposal would have also damaged people outside the political decisions. Many people were upset by this statement, one of them being Hillary Clinton, former US presidential candidate, who said she was disappointed by some crypto exchanges who refused to block Russian accounts, adding that this was also one of the reasons why regulation of digital assets should be voted on.

Hillary Clinton criticized Biden’s administration and European government institutions for not imposing themselves against the crypto exchange’s decision over the stop of Russian transactions, accusing the companies of having used libertarian motives as an excuse instead of trying to contribute to find a way to economically isolate Russia from the rest of the world.

She also approached regulators advising them to find a way to stop Russia from finding some way out through the cryptocurrency market, establishing harsh sanctions both from a governmental point of view and from that of private transactions that take place outside or inside the country.

Clinton’s stance on cryptocurrencies is certainly not new. Last November, she said that the adoption of digital currencies can destabilize and damage the economy of countries.

US & EU Calling For Crypto Regulators.
She isn’t the only one that considers cryptocurrencies a national problem. In Europe, the situation seems to move faster, where not only Christine Lagarde calls for measures to regulate cryptocurrencies, but also countries such as Italy, Germany and Spain.

Source:
https://cryptopotato.com/hillary-clinton-is-disappointed-that-some-crypto-exchanges-refused-to-stop-servicing-russians/
https://news.bitcoin.com/hillary-clinton-urges-biden-administration-to-pressure-crypto-exchanges-to-block-russian-users/

“Bitcoin Ban” No Longer In EU’s Plans Of Crypto Regulations

The “Bitcoin Ban” language has been eliminated by the EU lawmakers.
As you know, a few days ago, more precisely on Monday 28th February, the European Parliament should have made an initial vote on what could have been a ban on mining Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies that rely on PoW.

However, the vote was postponed because Stefan Berger, a Member of the European Parliament, argued that there were still too many doubts about what the PoW was, about possible damages to the environment, as well as the need to clarify misunderstandings that could transpire from the draft proposed in the Parliament.

The misunderstandings over the EU’s crypto regulations proposal.
In fact, the main doubts concerned one particular paragraph: paragraph 61 (9C), which has been completely removed, with the consequent need to establish a further voting session.

This decision was made following crypto supporters' concerns over some sentences written in the paragraph, which stated that starting from 2025, people would not be able to develop, sell or trade any digital assets based on the PoW consensus mechanism, because of their environmental impact.

The paragraph also stated that cryptocurrencies that wanted to avoid the ban must lower their mining costs in order for emissions to respect the minimum environmental sustainability standards.

From these sentences emerged many doubts and concerns, especially from the crypto supporters who understood the proposal as a total ban on Bitcoin and Ethereum mining operations across Europe, as well as banning the use of cryptocurrencies based on the energy-intensive mining mechanism.

So, to put an end to misunderstandings the language has been completely eliminated.

Eliminating the language doesn’t mean to put an end to the PoW environmental impact.
The damages caused by cryptocurrencies to the environment remains, however, one of the most important concerns for the European Union that, through MiCA (The Markets in Crypto-Assets framework), a proposed regulation in the EU law, aims to clarify everything about cryptocurrencies and digital assets. A type of regulation that the USA has been trying to establish and to promote for years, but, currently hasn’t obtained the results it has hoped for.

Source:
https://decrypt.co/94157/eu-lawmakers-drop-bitcoin-ban-draft-crypto-regulations

Sponsor Summary

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Before I continue with a deep dive on how crypto has become a new ground for warfare, I must tell you about today’s sponsor, Alephium.

The scalability issue is of great importance in the field of cryptocurrency.

Alephium has been created to address the challenges of accessibility, scalability, and security encountered by decentralized applications today from its technical design to its interfaces.

Cheng Wang, an scholar in cryptography and distributed computing, started building Alephium in 2018 with the idea to deliver a “scalable Bitcoin” with a reliable and powerful DeFi solution.

He proposed the first ever linear time asynchronous Byzantine consensus algorithm back in 2015, and later also conceived the BlockFlow sharding algorithm, which is used by the Alephium platform.

The lightweight BlockFlow algorithm is at the heart of the Alephium blockchain, it is an improvement of the well-known blockchain technology. The most unique aspect of BlockFlow is its support for single-step cross-shard transactions, which improves the system throughput dramatically. With blockFlow, it is possible to handle a thousand times of the transaction throughputs compared to traditional blockchain algorithms.

Furthermore, while believing that sharding + PoW is still the most robust and decentralized way to build a scalable blockchain, Alephium’s consensus algorithm is a clever combination of physical work and token economics, coined “Proof of Less Work”, which ensures a reduced energy footprint when compared to standard PoW protocols. Given the same network conditions, Alephium only uses ⅛ of the energy compared to Bitcoin.

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Alephium has been live and fully functional since November 8th, 2021. Its mainnet, around which lives a thriving ecosystem of wallets, mining pools & software, explorers & dApps is maturing rapidly. The focus of the next few months will be on bridges, DeFi and NFT’s primitives, while expanding its community of developers, miners and users.

On Jan 12, 2022, Gate.io became the first exchange to list Alephium’s token: ALPH. It is now traded at the price of $0.33. The token supply on Alephium is limited to 1 billion (HardCap) with the initial supply amounts to 140M tokens (14% of the HardCap).

On the 15th of February 2022, Gate.io hosted an AMA with Alephium in their English Telegram-group. The tran_script_ from that event can be found in de_script_ion to help you guys do your own research.

Deep Dive

Crypto As A New War Weapon In The Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Intro: Are Cryptocurrencies The New Modern War Weapon?
In the last couple of days, cryptocurrencies have started to gain more and more popularity, as well as becoming central within the Ukraine-Russia conflict, this is because countries are slowly realizing how many opportunities a digital currency has to offer to people and to the stability of a country: by being borderless and permissionless.

Many have been the articles that consider the Ukraine-Russia conflict as the first crypto war in the world.

But is it correct to give a similar title to this war or is it just now that people are actually realizing the characteristics of a cryptocurrency?

A cryptocurrency, as well as a weapon, can be used by both sides. They can be used to protect themselves economically: by financing arms procurement, buying vehicles to escape war, avoiding international sanctions, helping charities and more.

Therefore allowing people to take a clear side within a conflict.

These are some of the reasons why, recently, there have been many fears and satisfactions that have fueled the popularity of cryptocurrencies.

Main: How Countries Are Using Cryptocurrencies During The Conflict.
Ukraine has received millions of dollars in crypto donations, while Russia seems to look at digital currencies as a way of evading the sanctions imposed by international organizations, following the outbreak of war.

This situation is considered very likely to happen, given the concerns of the European Union and especially of Christine Lagarde who calls for measures to be taken to limit the mining of digital currencies: trying to prevent Russia from protecting its economy.

Another example is the Vice-Prime Minister of Ukraine who asked crypto exchanges to block all addresses of Russian and Belarusian users, in order to indirectly attack the economy of their respective countries.

Some exchanges refused to freeze accounts, claiming that they would have harmed innocent people and that action would have gone against the principles for which cryptocurrencies were invented: decentralized, permissionless, bounderless.

In any case, the actual crypto influence in the conflict remains uncertain.
If on the one hand donations to Ukraine can do nothing but good, one can still not be sure that Russia can avoid sanctions using cryptocurrencies.

Some analysts argue that Putin’s country is not able to avoid sanctions through cryptocurrency, because there are methods that allow institutions to trace wallets by finding the direct owner, in addition to the need to find a buyer for the huge transactions.

Others, instead, argue the opposite: considering the international sanctions against Russia unnecessary, because there aren’t any chances to counter and stop Ledger technologies.

Conclusion: Fighting For A Cause: Crypto Neutrality.
In fact, the situation we are experiencing now, with users opposing the decision to block cryptocurrency transactions and others supporting the proposal, seems to highlight how there are still many doubts and misunderstandings about the reasons for why a cryptocurrency like, Bitcoin, has been developed.

Cryptocurrency should not be used as a means to identify good and evil and should not serve as pretext to justify or accuse the actions of individuals.

In fact, unlike a traditional national currency, which depends on the actions of the government and it’s based on the economical and political stability, a currency like Bitcoin is a currency based on the decisions of the individual and not of an institution.

Therefore, even if digital currencies can be used for political purposes and many governmental institutions try to restrict their use or to completely ban their adoption, we should continue to fight to ensure and defend their neutral middle status, as it has been for years with the internet, competing with those that want to gain full control of it. To conclude, I would like to highlight Vitalik Buterin’s quote “Ethereum is neutral, but I am not”.

Source:
https://decrypt.co/93898/ukraine-bitcoin-war
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/1/crypto-will-not-save-russia-from


Listen the whole episode：
1: Ruble Crash, Crypto War, EU Bitcoin Ban Backlash
2: Ruble Crash, Crypto War, EU Bitcoin Ban Backlash

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