If you’re an Apple App Store user, then you’re probably aware of the recent legal drama surrounding the updates to the App Store guidelines. It’s a reasonably open secret that the App Store is designed to be at its core, more difficult for app developers to deploy their apps on than competitors' offerings, pushing for a “quality over quantity” environment to protect its user base. With this push by Apple, we have just witnessed with the hammer coming down on the conservative social media app Parler following in the footsteps of Twitter and Facebook permanently banning former-U.S. President Donald Trump …

A new partisan bill introduced by Democrats in Hawaii's House of Representatives on Monday is advocating a targeted strategy for studying and supporting the use of blockchain technology by individuals, firms and state agencies. Hawaii House Bill 622 calls for the passage of an act that would require the state's economic development agency, the Hawaii Technology Development Corporation, to create a blockchain working group that would both recommend a definition for blockchain and offer recommendations for the adoption of the technology. The introduction to HB622 states: “The legislature recognizes that the distributed ledger format that blockchain technology functions as can …

Ripple Labs spent $690,000 on lobbying in the United States in 2020, which still didn't save the firm from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Per legally mandated disclosures for 2020, Ripple's lobbying program dwarfed those of other firms in the crypto industry. Coinbase, which looks to become the first American crypto exchange to issue public shares, spent $230,000 over the same year, while other exchanges like Binance.US, Gemini and Kraken did not report any spending on lobbying. Ripple's spending on lobbying is, however, relatively paltry compared with the giants of Big Tech. Facebook, for example, spent well over $5 million …

ConsenSys, one of the world’s largest blockchain software companies, has partnered with the Blockchain-based Service Network, a Chinese government-backed nationwide blockchain project, As part of the partnership, ConsenSys’ Ethereum-based distributed ledger protocol, ConsenSys Quorum, will be featured in the BSN ecosystem, the firm announced on Monday. The protocol will be available in 80 different cities through the BSN’s public city nodes across mainland China. ConsenSys director Charles d’Haussy told Cointelegraph that ConsenSys Quorum will be available in all major cities and provinces, including Beijing, Xiong’an and Hangzhou. ConsenSys’ GoQuorum — an open-source Ethereum client and part of ConsenSys Quorum — …

Against great pushback from the crypto industry and as the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has reached new all-time highs several times during the last couple of months, the United States has updated its cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism laws. Related: COVID-19 pandemic spurs crypto law updates in J5 countries The Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 and the Corporate Transparency Act Last December, the Senate approved the National Defense Authorization Act and, as part of that legislation, passed the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 and the Corporate Transparency Act. Related: EU amends AML laws for crypto trading as US …

Often touted as a store of value or hedge asset, Bitcoin (BTC) has gained significant mainstream adoption over the past several months. Kenneth Rogoff, a public policy and economics professor at Harvard University, doubts the asset’s success, however. "I can see Bitcoin being used in failed states,” Rogoff said in a Bloomberg interview on Thursday, adding: “It's conceivable, you know, it could have some use in a dystopian future, but I think the governments are not going to allow pseudonymous transactions on a big scale. They're just not going to allow it. The regulation will come in. The government will …

Reserve currency is money held by central banks or treasuries usually for international transactions. Argentina is not going to be able to purchase a Boeing 737 MAX passenger jet, for example, with its highly inflationary peso; it will have to pay with U.S. dollars, which is why Argentina keeps dollars on hand — i.e., in “reserve.” A second basic function is to support the value of a national currency. If the Brazilian real, for instance, plummets during an economic contraction, Brazil’s central bank could bid it up again by purchasing reals with dollars that it holds in reserve. Could Bitcoin …

Russia adopted its cryptocurrency law in January, but this legislation does not provide a direct answer to some questions, including how local officials should deal with their crypto holdings. There are at least two other legal initiatives requiring Russian public officials to declare or even get rid of their cryptocurrency holdings entirely in 2021. On Dec. 10, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree obliging some public officials to disclose their crypto holdings by June 30. The decree was adopted as part of the country’s law “On Digital Financial Assets,” or DFA, which was made effective on Jan. 1. …

Heath Tarbert is no longer the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, but he will remain one of its five commissioner In a CFTC announcement on Thursday afternoon, Tarbert followed through with his resignation, which he announced at the beginning of December. However, it was not clear at the time whether he would remain on the commission at all. Today's announcement confirmed that Tarbert would stay on as a commissioner, with a term that formally expires on April 13, 2024. In listing accomplishments during his 18-month run as chairman of the commission, crypto took on a leading role, with …

New York's financial regulator is asking for new tools to gather real-time financial data. On Thursday, the New York Department of Financial Services announced new details of its coming "techsprint" competition: "The objective of the techsprint is to achieve creative and collaborative prototyping as a step toward smarter regulatory reporting in virtual currency." Namely, the DFS is using the two-week competition to get better access to data from crypto companies in real time. It's first question reads: "How can DFS achieve real-time or more frequent access to company financial data from virtual currency licensees and receive early warning signs of …

The website of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, is no longer formally blacklisted in Russia, according to a new court ruling. According to a Jan. 21 report by Russian news agency Kommersant, the Arkhangelsk Regional Court has annulled a previous decision to blacklist the Binance website in Russia. Gleb Kostarev, Binance’s head of operations for Russia and the CIS, confirmed the news to Cointelegraph, stating that the court hearing took place on Jan. 20. The latest court decision reverts a previous ruling made in 2020. In September, Binance announced that its website came on the list of prohibited websites …

This is the third article in a three-part series based on Gary Gensler's extensive prior public statements on crypto. Here are parts 1 and 2. Cointelegraph has been busily digging through a treasure trove of likely future Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler’s thoughts on crypto, especially from a series of lectures he gave at MIT in the fall of 2018. One especially notable element of Gensler’s thinking is his obvious respect for Bitcoin’s mechanism of internal governance and his obvious interest in seeing that decentralization elsewhere in finance. 12 years out from BTC’s genesis block, there …