  The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day Dec. 13, 2021 If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here. Sponsored by  Welcome to The Node.
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Today's must-reads Top Shelf  NO LICENSE: Binance's Singapore entity plans to withdraw its application for a crypto license in the city-state, and will stop offering services there by early next year, the exchange said on Monday. Binance Asia Services (BAS), the exchange's local affiliate, is one of approximately 170 crypto firms that had applied for a Digital Payment Token License in Singapore, which would allow them to offer digital assets services to local users.
BITCOIN MARCHES ON: More than 90% of all bitcoins have been mined as of Monday morning. Some 18.89 million bitcoins, out of a 21 million maximum, are now on the open market. That comes as investors resumed accumulating the cryptocurrency, a sign they expect the price to rise, after U.S. stock markets overcame concerns about the economy to post their strongest gains in 10 months last week. Meanwhile, two prominent Bitcoin Core contributors have announced departures. Veteran open-source Bitcoin developer John Newbery and Bitcoin Core maintainer Samuel Dobson will step down from their roles.
FOREIGN TRANSACTIONS: Myanmar's shadow government, the National Unity Government (NUG), made up of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi's supporters has recognized stablecoin tether (USDT) as its official currency. NUG's Finance Minister Tin Tun Naing said in a Facebook post that the NUG will now accept the dollar proxy, USDT, for "domestic use to make it easy and speed up the current trade, services and payment systems."
TOUGH LOVE? U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler said crypto fits into the "broad remit" of the agency in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Gensler said that crypto exchanges are "doing a lot more than just trading," given that they also hold crypto tokens and sometimes trade against their customer base. U.S. regulation does not just affect users in the states, it has a global effect as can be witnessed in CoinDesk's latest feature on Latvia-based exchange Chatex.
BIG BANKS: Wells Fargo and HSBC Bank said on Monday that they will use a blockchain-based product for settling matched foreign exchange transactions. The two banking giants agreed to use a shared settlement ledger to process U.S. dollar, Canadian dollar, pound and euro transactions, with plans to expand the process to other currencies in the future.
–Helene Braun
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What others are writing...
Off-Chain Signals
- Her Instagram handle was "metaverse." Last month, it vanished. (New York Times)
- What happened at Congress (Substack)
- I gave my mom a crypto wallet (Wall Street Journal)
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How crypto is changing media and entertainment – and forging its own culture. Follow along with our continuing coverage here.
Rapper Latashá on NFTs and Inclusivity in Tech
The way the hip-hop artist and Zora community manager sees it, NFTs' benefits are well worth the gas fees.
Infinite Games: How Crypto Is 'LARPing'
Crypto communities are playing a big series of "live action role playing games," and they're changing how we organize and interact across digital and physical spaces.
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Putting the news in perspective
The Takeaway
Rapper Latashá on NFTs and Inclusivity in Tech
Latashá Alcindor still has a day job, but it's a lot more fun than the last few.
Like many of the artists now intimately involved with NFTs, Alcindor – better known as the mononymous rapper Latashá – began the year without much of an interest in crypto. She'd already found a kind of underground success in her native Brooklyn, with a series of independent albums and singles released over the the past few years.
Music had been a side hustle before she started making real money from it; stints at companies like Urban Outfitters and JPMorgan helped pay the bills. "I was doing three shows a week, while also working my nine-to-five," she said. Sustained collaborations with two prominent New York performance spaces, National Sawdust and The Shed, helped raise her profile, but the songs themselves were never her primary source of income.
It was Alcindor's partner, the artist Jahmel Reynolds, who got her hooked on non-fungible tokens back in February.
"It was right during the [coronavirus] pandemic, we were both trying to figure out supplemental income," she explained. "Couldn't really perform, couldn't really do anything. And then Jah came to me one day and was like, 'Yo, you ever heard of this thing?'"
Alcindor said she didn't pay much attention until Reynolds started to generate income from his NFTs. It was a sign of a clear momentum at a moment when cash was scarce – and money has a way of melting away some of that initial skepticism. She minted her first token (tied to one of her music videos) on a protocol called Zora, and one of the site's co-founders snapped it up for $1000.
"Since then," quipped Alcindor, "I was hitting the ground running."
Zora hired her as the company's head of community programming in June, and she's been promoting the brand ever since. At this year's Art Basel, in Miami, Alcindor hosted Zoratopia IRL – a day-long event focused around the intersection of culture and crypto, with an emphasis on Black NFT creators.
NFTs remain relatively inaccessible, thanks to crypto's technical barrier to entry (interacting with these systems is exceedingly complicated) and consistently high fees. Putting art on the blockchain is far more expensive than just uploading it to Instagram.
The way Alcindor sees it, the potential benefits are well worth the price of entry; you won't find music videos selling for thousands of dollars on Instagram.
"We're trying to encourage marginalized communities to come on board," she said. "It's beautiful to see people see other people's stories and be like, 'I could do that too.'"
Read the full interview here.
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