Crypto market rebound as investors go green; Indonesia plans CBDC | The Daily Forkast

Transcript

Welcome to The Daily Forkast, May 26, 2021. I’m Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News. Let’s get you up to speed from Asia to the world.

In Asia, the crypto market rebound continued today with a lot of green across the board. Bitcoin ending the day in Asia above the key US$40,000 mark, trading up 3.8% at the close of trading hours, Hong Kong time. And in the top 10 for cryptocurrencies Cardano and Polkadot, which some have called green alternatives to BTC, both have had a good day. Cardano up nearly 13% and Polkadot up 8.7%.

It’s that idea of a greener alternative that may be one reason behind this recovery. Ironically, it’s one of the same reasons for the sell-off we saw last week. I’m talking, of course, about the environmental concern over crypto mining. But news of a push to green the industry by Elon Musk and Michael Saylor has many investors seeing green.

Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Sonic Capital, says the ability for innovation is what will drive developers to give users the environmentally friendly products that they demand.

“Generation that’s really got bought into Bitcoin and the people that are super passionate about it are equally super passionate about the environment. It’s that generation, and they’re the first users of Bitcoin, so they believe that all of a sudden with their voting power, e.g. the trade ability and the exchange of currency, they can actually influence the decision making.”

Hong Kong-based Max Song is the co-founder of the Sustainable Bitcoin Standard, which is developing a certificate to verify coins that have been mined using renewable energy. He sees the market moves as a sign that investors are taking the environmental concerns seriously.

“From what I’ve seen, there’s actually a surge of a lot of solution proposers because of the last two days. So you see the resilience of the Bitcoin community. I think the institutional guys are starting to understand that there actually could be pathways for Bitcoin to be green, and that’s giving them reassurance.”

Meanwhile, in Inner Mongolia, as the government attempts to meet China’s carbon neutrality goal, crypto mining is all but banned. Officials there are out with a detailed list of what could soon be deemed illegal as they move to fully shut down any operations.

The draft guideline includes eight specific measures to cut the whole crypto mining industry chain in Inner Mongolia, from landlords who rent mining sites to electricity providers. Companies and individuals involved in any section of crypto mining in the region will be charged fines or have business operation licenses revoked. In addition, the new guidelines extend beyond the mining firms: data centers, cloud computing firms, internet companies, even internet cafes will soon be monitored and prohibited from conducting mining activities or offer services to crypto miners. The draft list will go through a public consultation period through June 1st before it takes effect.

And Indonesia plans to launch a CBDC according to Central Bank Governor Perry Warjiyo. The country has seen huge growth in digital banking and transactions recently. In April, the value of transactions surged 46%, according to Reuters. Crypto is legally traded but not accepted as a payment method right now in Indonesia. Now, Governor Warjiyo says the Rupiah will remain the only legally accepted currency for payment and that it will be regulated as bank notes and card-based transactions.

And finally, NFTs continue to keep growing with artists, content creators, celebrities, gaming companies, sport franchises, you name it. Everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon. But are your NFT’s really forever? Well, not necessarily.

“When you mint on NFT, you pointed to a metadata URL, just like a website that you would visit. The issue is that if the metadata URL goes down, as in linked to a standard website, your NFT doesn’t really have value anymore because you can’t access the content.”

India-based Polygon, one of the fastest growing Ethereum layer 2 solutions and Alpeh.im are partnering together to offer a solution to that problem. A decentralized storage for NFT’s on the Polygon Network to protect your NFTs and dapps in the Polygon Network from disappearing. Shreyansh Singh from Polygon told Forkast.News that NFT’s in gaming and metaverses will only grow, which is why they’re in this space right now.

“I feel 80 to 90% NFT-related use cases haven’t been discovered yet. There are still certain solutions that some teams are working on, but I think we’ll see a lot of exciting things in the coming days.”

Still early days yet, and that’s The Daily Forkast from our vantage point right here in Asia. For more visit Forkast.News, I’m Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau. Until the next time.