  What you need to know today in crypto and beyond July 28, 2021 Sponsored By:  Welcome to The Node.
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Today's must-reads Top Shelf  NEW LEADER: Binance is looking for someone with a strong regulatory background to become its new chief executive, the current chief executive Changpeng "CZ" Zhao said at a press conference Tuesday. The company has been lashed by a series of regulatory actions across a number of jurisdictions, including the U.K. and Japan. Zhao said that there was no timeline for his succession and that he would not be stepping down right away.
CRYPTO INCUBATOR: Mastercard is adding a cryptocurrency and blockchain track to its incubator program for later-stage startups. The Start Path program offers experts and technology partnerships with other financial services firms in the program in exchange for adding more innovative companies to its client roster. Visa has a similar program called Fast Track.
MONEY FLOWS: Genesis Digital Assets has raised $125 million in equity funding to fuel its expansion plans in the U.S. and the Nordic region. Crypto cashback app StormX has secured $9 million in funding to develop a debit card. Lolli closed a $10 million Series A. Biconomy raised $9 million to make building on Web 3.0 easier. And Andreessen Horowitz is backing Valora, a wallet spun out of Celo parent company cLabs.
PRIVATE SWAPS: The privacy-oriented Secret Network is launching private on-chain governance for SecretSwap, its automated market maker. The launch of the governance tool means that holders of SecretSwap's SEFI token can vote in a system that is private by default.
STILL SKEPTICAL: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is urging the government yet again to form a regulatory strategy to "mitigate the growing risks that cryptocurrencies pose to the financial system." In an open letter to the U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Warren urged the Financial Stability Oversight Council to bring about a "coordinated and holistic" response to the risks of crypto.
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Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway  The IMF's case against bitcoin as legal tender is just as weak as expected In June, I wrote that El Salvador's decision to adopt bitcoin as legal tender was "the most significant single development in the history of cryptocurrency so far." If anything, that was confirmed when the International Monetary Fund, a global development bank closely tied to the world's richest countries, quickly declared that the move raised "a number of macroeconomic, financial and legal issues." The statement amounted to a veiled threat, because El Salvador was in negotiations for a $1 billion loan from the IMF. But the IMF at the time didn't provide any real detail about what "issues" it saw with the national adoption of bitcoin.
This week, we got more insight into what those issues might be.
Well, not really.
What we did get is an IMF blog post titled "Cryptoassets as National Currency? A Step Too Far" that amounts to a laundry list of boilerplate high-level critiques of cryptocurrency. It includes little nuance about their purported weakness as a national currency, though, and is even less specific about El Salvador's plan. Though it does include some significant points, most of the statement could have been cribbed from a Peter Schiff Twitter rant: Its main arguments include cryptocurrency's volatility, use for money laundering and electricity demand, which range from irrelevant to outright false.
In fairness, this is an informal blog post meant for a broad audience. But the lack of subtlety from an entity that has huge sway over the well-being of many of the world's most vulnerable people is disappointing, if not outright frightening. It would seem to reinforce the sense that the IMF's objection to Bitcoinization is less about the stability of economies daring to innovate, than about maintaining the IMF's own position of power over them.
Fake Crypto Problems
I'll dispense briefly with several of the points made in the IMF post. One is that the volatility of cryptocurrencies makes them untenable for long-term debt obligations, or even for short-term applications like business pricing, with disruptive economic effects. This is a reasonable argument against adopting bitcoin as the sole currency of a sovereign nation today.
But it doesn't address the actual proposal in El Salvador, which would maintain the country's current currency for day-to-day pricing, payments and debts, while adding bitcoin as an option for both payments and government reserves. This could be seen as a transitional phase: The long game here would theoretically see bitcoin (or another crypto asset) adopted by a growing number of countries, which would eventually increase its stability against other currencies. Given crypto's track record over the past decade, it's not a scenario to bet against.
The second of the IMF's specious claims is that crypto adoption would create money-laundering risk. Again, there are two rebuttals here. First and foremost, it is becoming increasingly clear that cryptocurrency has limited utility for money laundering, because while it's impossible to stop, it's also easily traced. Criminals themselves know this: Criminal activity on crypto networks declined 57% from 2019 to 2020 – from a miniscule $4.5 billion to an even more miniscule $1.9 billion, according to CipherTrace – while the value of cryptos as a whole more than doubled.
The second rebuttal, to engage in some whataboutism, is that normal banks handle demand for money laundering just fine. The United Nations estimates that $800 billion to $2 trillion of criminal proceeds is cleaned and hidden each year – at the top end, 33% more than the total circulating supply of all cryptocurrency in existence today.
The IMF also waves the flag of environmentalism by citing critiques of cryptocurrency's electrical demand. The debate around Bitcoin and fossil fuel emissions is certainly knotty and important, and lower-impact crypto should be an industry goal. But the critique borders on offensive when it's being used as a bludgeon to discipline developing countries: The advanced economies that control the IMF spent decades creating the climate mess we find ourselves in. For them to turn around and use their own sins as a cudgel to keep smaller, less developed and mostly vastly less polluting countries from making their own monetary decisions crosses the line from illogical to sadistic.
Real Crypto Problems
The IMF does cite two genuine issues with the use of crypto as a national currency – though even one of those is irrelevant to the case of El Salvador, which triggered all the hand-wringing in the first place.
The IMF rightly points out that adopting a global cryptocurrency as a national currency would remove a nation's ability to set its own monetary policy. A normal national currency supply is expanded according to the needs of the economy, which is often important to maintaining economic growth.
But El Salvador hasn't had control of its money supply for decades. Since 2001, its primary national currency has been the U.S. dollar. Seven other countries also use the dollar as their official currency, most either very small or struggling with a legacy of political instability. The list includes not only El Salvador, but also Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Guam, East Timor, Palau, the Marshall Islands and Panama. In theory, the dollar represents even greater risk to third-party adopters than bitcoin does, because the dollar can be weaponized in various ways for the benefit of the U.S. No less a crypto critic than Frances Coppola has argued (in these pages) that transitioning to a neutral currency like bitcoin could be a stability upgrade for dollarized nations.
The second valid argument mooted by the IMF is simply that individuals need access to the internet to use crypto, and that access is quite limited worldwide. Only about 60% of the world's population has mobile or hardwired internet access, and that's significantly lower in the very same developing or unstable nations most likely to benefit from the adoption of a dollar alternative.
Again, though, this doesn't particularly apply to El Salvador, because it's keeping dollars in circulation alongside bitcoin, solving the daily payments problem. Broadly, such a dual-currency system could mean bitcoin would be used only semi-regularly, for remittances or international payments, by everyday citizens. This is even more true of the possible use of bitcoin as a national reserve, because that's the province of central banks that probably have decent broadband.
But it is nonetheless true that access limitations mean adoption of a purely digital currency system wouldn't be equitable in most countries. So maybe one valid argument out of five isn't so bad.
What's Really Going on Here?
It may seem puzzling that the IMF would throw so much ill-considered rhetorical spaghetti at the wall, as if only to see what sticks. In the most generous interpretation, it's a deeply conservative institution whose knee-jerk opposition to change may play some helpful role in moderating an ill-considered rush into national adoption of cryptocurrencies.
But to play that role credibly, the IMF will have to strive for a lot more subtlety in its critiques. For now, its opposition to the growth of an alternative financial system has so little substance that it seems like nothing more than a very powerful institution defending its turf.
–David Z. Morris
 Crypto State 2021: Middle East Even though many countries in the Middle East restrict or outright ban activities related to blockchain technology, the region is having its crypto moment. From Dubai's first-of-its-kind Bitcoin Fund listing to the Bank of Israel's trial of a digital shekel, interest is picking up in the region as crypto companies work closely with regulators in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to gain some clarity about oversight of digital currencies.
Join us as we jet-set through the Middle East on our #CryptoState2021 virtual tour and explore how different markets are thinking about crypto, their roadblocks and challenges, and crypto's impact on the region. Register for the Crypto State: Middle East virtual tour on Aug. 11.
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