Bitcoin Pizza Day in 2023 🍕, Biden rejects debt deal 🙅, MetaMask holds back crypto 💰

Daily Crypto, Blockchain & Web3 Update 2023-05-22

CRYPTOCURRENCY

Biden won’t accept debt deal protecting crypto traders (2 min read)

United States President Joe Biden has expressed opposition to a debt ceiling deal that he says would benefit “wealthy tax cheats and crypto traders” while putting food assistance programs at risk.

Attending the Group of Seven (G7) Summit in Hiroshima, Japan on May 21, Biden called the Republicans’ proposed terms “unacceptable” during a press conference.

Bitcoin set to ‘tick, tick, tick’ by the end of 2023: DeFi exec (3 min read)

Fedi's CEO predicts that Bitcoin will become the top cryptocurrency by the end of 2023 due to its apparent superiority in all aspects.

During the Bitcoin 2023 event in Miami, Cointelegraph reporter Joe Hall interviewed Obi Nwosu, the CEO and co-founder of Fedi, which is a Bitcoin community custody protocol offering an alternat’t trust centralized exchanges.

Nwosu emphasized during the interview that it is becoming “increasingly hard to deny” that Bitcoin has the “fastest, cheapest, easiest, most decentralized and secure” ecosystem.

US presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to accept Bitcoin for campaign donations (2 min read)

Vivek Ramaswamy becomes the second 2024 presidential candidate in the United States to officially accept Bitcoin donations for his campaign.

“Give $1,” said Ramaswamy while announcing that he accepts Bitcoin donations. The revelation came just two days after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the first presidential candidate in United States history to accept campaign donations in Bitcoin. Speaking on stage at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami, Florida, Ramaswamy stated, “Let’s make the 2024 election a referendum on fiat currency.”

Wife finds husband’s Bitcoin stash amid divorce proceedings (1 min read)

A forensic accountant assisted a New York couple's divorce case by locating the husband's 12 Bitcoin assets that he wished to conceal from his spouse.

The couple in question were married for 10 years, but the man’s wife suspected that her husband did not reveal all his assets, which would get split between the two following their divorce. Sarita told CNBC that her husband's annual income was $3 million, but his declared assets did not match up to this amount.

Sarita hired a forensic accountant who discovered that her husband failed to report 12 Bitcoin worth around $500,000 kept in an undisclosed digital wallet.

Bitcoin Pizza Day 2023: Community celebrates anniversary of first known BTC transaction (2 min read)

Members of the crypto community celebrated the anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day; the first notable exchange of Bitcoin into physical goods. 

On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz made the first documented purchase of a good with BTC. The exchange involved 10,000 BTC — worth $41 at the time — and two pizzas from a local restaurant in Florida. The milestone turned into an annual celebration for the crypto space as community members reminisced on how far the industry has come since the transaction.

BLOCKCHAIN

Here’s how to use DeFi on Bitcoin without ‘polluting’ the blockchain (6 min read)

Bitcoin ordinals or stamps have failed to provide an answer to Bitcoin’s DeFi problems.

Launched in November 2021, the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade was an important step in adding extra functionality to the base layer of Bitcoin. Among other benefits, including cheaper and more efficient transactions, the Taproot upgrade also introduced rudimentary smart contracts — the backbone of DeFi — to Bitcoin for the first time.

Ordinals sends LTC and DOGE network activity surging for 3 straight weeks (2 min read)

Move over Bitcoin, Ordinals on Litecoin and Dogecoin have unleashed a frenzy of transactions.

What began with developer Casey Rodarmor creating the Ordinals protocol to “inscribe” text and imagery on the Bitcoin network has now made its way to Litecoin and Dogecoin, sending transaction volume on thosechains surging for the better part of a month. 

BUSINESS

Hotbit exchange halts operations, urges users to withdraw funds (2 min read)

Crypto exchange Hotbit announced that it would be halting operations as of May 22. The exchange asked its users to withdraw funds before June 21, at 4:00 am UTC.

Hotbit said that centralized exchanges are becoming more cumbersome and highlighted that it is “unlikely to meet long-term trends.“

In addition, Hotbit also cited various incidents within the crypto space as contributors to its decline.

Tornado Cash attacker to potentially give back governance control, proposal reveals (2 min read)

An attacker who sparked community-wide panic by hijacking the Tornado Cash governance is now proposing to undo their hack — and while not everyone feels the hacker can be trusted, they apparently have little choice in the matter.

With total control over the governance of the decentralized crypto mixer, the attacker was in a position to inflict massive losses, considering they could withdraw all of the locked votes, drain all of the tokens in the governance contract and brick the router.

Is MetaMask withholding customers’ crypto for taxes? No, it’s not (2 min read)

ConsenSys, the company behind the crypto wallet MetaMask, has hosed down rumors that it collects taxes from cryptocurrency users. 

The company told their 270K Twitter followers on May 22 that the rumors were false due to a misreading of MetaMask's terms of service.

The company stated that their tax terms only apply to products and paid plans, and not to on-chain crypto transactions.

NFTs

Influencer served settlement demand via NFT following $7M token presale (3 min read)

An NFT influencer received a settlement demand via an NFT that accused them of wire fraud and demanded payment for a $7 million token presale. The NFT used profanity.

On May 20, Mike Kanovitz, a partner at law firm Loevy & Loevy, stated in a tweet that a settlement demand letter had been served as an NFT to the wallet address associated with the influencer known as Ben.eth, whose real identity remains undisclosed.