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Approximately 182 Individuals Globally Now Own Crypto Worth at Least $100,000,000, According to a New Study

Approximately 182 Individuals Globally Now Own Crypto Worth at Least 0,000,000, According to a New Study

New data reveals that over 180 individuals around the world now own at least $100 million worth of crypto assets. According to a new study by financial advisement group Henley and Partners, dozens of global crypto entrepreneurs are now centi-millionaires, almost half of them either obtaining their wealth from holding or trading Bitcoin (BTC), the […]

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Ripple Teams Up With Research and Development Firm To Run CBDC and Crypto Experiments

Ripple Teams Up With Research and Development Firm To Run CBDC and Crypto Experiments

Ripple Labs is teaming up with a Northern Europe-based research and development firm to run experiments centered on crypto assets and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In a new company blog post, Ripple says it will be collaborating with SUPER HOW?, a private blockchain technology research lab based in Latvia to work on the Axiology […]

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Coinbase expands to Australia with focus on institutions in ‘months to come’

With an expanded Australian offering, Coinbase’s VP of international and business development said the exchange faced “tough questions” from regulators and policymakers about its services.

United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase will expand its services in Australia, launching a local entity and an updated suite of services for retail crypto traders, hinting that institutional products are soon to follow.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Nana Murugesan, Coinbase’s VP of international and business development, said building during bear markets has “paid off big time during the bull run” and he’s confident in what he sees in the local market.

The “baseline signals” Murugesan explains such as the local awareness of crypto and people who view it as the future of finance are “kind of on par or even better” in Australia compared to the U.S. and other markets.

“Australia definitely punches way, way over its weight in the APAC region, certainly at a global level too and from a revenue contribution standpoint, I feel pretty good about what it's going to do.”

Murugesan explains it started with building a localized infrastructure, incorporating a local entity, Coinbase Australia Pty Ltd, and obtaining registration to provide digital currency exchange services with the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), the country’s financial intelligence agency.

“We've been very impressed with the open door that we’ve received in Canberra and with different policymakers,” Murugesan says, adding the exchange has received “tough questions” regarding its platform and token listings.

“Given the token mapping exercise that's going on, there are a lot of technical questions that we are getting from the Treasury and other departments […] deep technical questions is another thing that we are seeing in Australia at a level deeper than some other countries.”

Initially, Coinbase is providing Australian crypto traders with new “fast payments” for local bank accounts, access to its advance trading platform and 24/7 chat support which Murugesan says “opens the door” for the company to launch its full range of institutional and development products.

While he didn’t have a specific timeline on when the products will become available, Murugesan added he knows Australian institutions will want to “do everything locally” and added that Coinbase will be “very much focused on institutions” in the coming months.

The exchange will also collaborate with RMIT University’s Blockchain Innovation Hub to assess Web3 opportunities in the country, Murugesan adds it's working with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and others to create related courses and assist in research programs.

Related: Rushing ‘token mapping’ could hurt Aussie crypto space — Finder founder

Murugesan says as Coinbase looks to further expand into Asia, he sees regulation as a business enabler as “resources are limited, especially during a bear market.”

With some countries in the region having unclear crypto policies, it's likely it will focus “more towards markets that have clarity or are going towards clarity," he said. 

He mentioned the high level of interest G20 nations have in crypto and how blockchain and digital currencies fit into the future of finance, expecting it to be a “hot topic” among G20 member nations by next year, adding:

“There's a lot of interest among Australian policymakers to take a leadership role in those type of discussions, too.”

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Crypto Exchange Giant Coinbase Announces Launch of New Crypto-Focused Think Tank

Crypto Exchange Giant Coinbase Announces Launch of New Crypto-Focused Think Tank

The leading US-based crypto exchange is announcing the launch of the Coinbase Institute, a new global think tank created to debate and advance the future of crypto and Web 3.0 protocols. According to a new Coinbase blog post, the think tank is launching with the purpose of bringing together academics, policymakers, and prominent figures within […]

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Columbia Uni professor heads up a16z’s new crypto research unit

Following his appointment as head of research, Tim Roughgarden stated that a16z’s funding into crypto research will grow by “many multiples of the next couple of years.”

Theoretical computer scientist and Columbia University professor Tim Roughgarden has been appointed the head of Andreessen Horowitz's (a16z) new crypto research unit.

Roughgarden’s resume includes more than three years as a professor of computer science at Columbia University in New York, along with a 14-year stint at Stanford. He has also served as a research partner at a16z since February last year.

a16z is one of the most active venture capital firms in crypto, with its funds reportedly worth around $9 billion. Partly guided by the firm’s new unit which was announced earlier today, Roughgarden has stated that its funding into crypto research will grow by “many multiples of the next couple of years.”

“We’re currently in a particular moment in time, witnessing a new multidisciplinary field (spurred by web3) blossom before our eyes. There are enormous opportunities to shape this field through research and education.”

The firm highlighted Roughgarden’s experience in computer science, research and economics, along with his crypto and blockchain course at Columbia as one of the “best and most popular” introductions to crypto online. Roughgarden was one of the first to provide a formal analysis on the fee mechanism for Ethereum’s EIP-1559 upgrade.

According to a16z, the research team will form a multidisciplinary lab that will work with the companies in its portfolio and others to solve “the important problems in the space,” increase user adoption and advance Web3 science and technology.

Stanford University professor of computer science and electrical engineering Dan Boneh will also be joining Roughgarden as the senior research advisor. Boneh has worked with a16z for the past four years as a portfolio research advisor and also teaches applied cryptography at the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research.

The firm noted that “new entrepreneurial idea for a Web3 application or protocol tends to uncover fresh research challenges” that are extremely important to solve in order to solidify the future of blockchain and crypto.

Such challenges include the scaling and development of infrastructure, tokenomics that benefit all participants, and methods to build token economies in Web3 applications such as social media and gaming.

“With the advent of Ethereum and other blockchains that are fully programmable, web3 has unlocked an extremely rich design space for innovation. It’s a space that we’ve only just begun to explore.”

Related: a16z’s Chris Dixon tops ‘Midas List’ by turning $350M into $6B in 2021

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Meaningless and weak: Debunking the ‘Bitcoiners are psychopaths’ study

An expert psychologist has said the way the results were gathered were “pretty much uninformative” and the connection between psychopathy and buying crypto was “very weak”.

A study claiming that psychopaths and others with ‘Dark Tetrad’ personality traits are drawn to crypto has been criticized as "meaningless" for showing very weak correlativity by a psychology expert from The University of Otago.

Researchers with backgrounds predominately in marketing and advertising from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) surveyed 566 people on their attitudes toward crypto and correlated the results with four specific personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.

The findings were first shared by The U.S. Sun, and were widely syndicated by the mainstream media, with the New York Post headline screaming “Bitcoin fans are psychopaths who don't care about anyone,” and Salon asserting that “Impulsive psychopaths like crypto”.

But speaking to Cointelegraph, Professor Martin Sellbom from The University of Otago’s Psychology Department — an international expert on personality disorders and personality assessment — criticized the results of the study as essentially meaningless.

“The effects they report, for example, the strength of relationships between these so-called ‘dark tetrad’ traits and attitude and intention to buy cryptocurrency are very weak, pretty much meaningless, in my opinion."

The widely used Short Dark Triad (SD-3) personality test which rates the traits of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism out of a maximum score of 5 was used to assess participants’ personalities.

The results of the study show that participant's scores for psychopathy and narcissism were below the average levels as determined by psychometric assessment group OpenPsychometrics. The participants scored 2% below the average for psychopathy and 16.7% below average for narcissism, however the scores for Machievellism were 3.6% higher.

But Professor Sellbom said that in any case this line of research is “uninformative about psychopathy and narcissism,” adding:

“The measurement devices used in this literature do not capture the full manifestations of these disorders.”

The authors expanded on their results in an article for The Conversation, stating that narcissists like crypto “because of their great faith in the future”, and because of a “confidence their own lives will improve”.

Related: Crypto critics: Can FUD ever be useful?

Psychopaths were drawn to crypto apparently, because they “fear missing out on investing rewards that others are experiencing,”and Machiavellians like crypto because “they distrust politicians and government agencies.”

Other traits, like positivity, and belief in conspiracy theories were also measured as traits that “might connect the dark tetrad judgements about crypto”.

Of those surveyed only 26% owned cryptocurrency, and of those who didn’t nearly 64% said they would be “interested” in investing.

Sellbom said the methodology to link traits such as FOMO to psychopathy was flawed as collecting a sample of both the level of interest in crypto and psychometric results at the same time, from the same person only once, is “pretty much uninformative”, adding the conclusions the researchers reached “cannot be supported in the simple way that they are presenting.”

“Looking at the same results, my interpretation would be the relationship between dark tetrad traits and attitudes towards and buying intention of cryptocurrency is weak, and it is unlikely that these traits will provide much understanding of those who do engage in purchasing cryptocurrency.”

It should be noted the researchers themselves stated in the report that they aren’t out to propose that Bitcoiners are psychopaths, in the way some media outlets were quick to declare.

“We are not suggesting all crypto buyers exhibit Dark Tetrad traits. Instead, we are studying a subset of people interested in crypto who do have these traits.”

Discussing the limitations of their work, the researchers said that whilst they gauged participant interest in investing in stocks, bonds or crypto, the study could have set a control variable by measuring their intention of engaging in those types of investments.

“Many experts on psychopathy and narcissism question this so-called dark personality literature,” said Professor Sellbom, “because the researchers are not really studying these personality disorders, which are far more complex than what the measures used would suggest.”

The authors of the study are Brett Martin, Professor of Marketing QUT; Dr. Di Wang, Senior Lecturer at the QUT School of Advertising and Marketing; Jun Yao, Senior Lecturer in Marketing Macquarie University; Carolyn Strong, Professor of Marketing and Strategy Cardiff University; and Polymeros Chrysochou, Professor of Marketing Aarhus University.

Given the authors' background in marketing and advertising, it seems possible they would understand how to frame the results of a study in a way to appeal to the mass media.

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Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance Launches Digital Assets Research Project With 16 Banks

Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance Launches Digital Assets Research Project With 16 BanksOn Tuesday, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at Cambridge Judge Business School announced a new research initiative focused on the “growing digital asset ecosystem.” According to CCAF, the newly launched collaborative effort involves 16 financial institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Accenture, EY, Goldman Sachs, and more. CCAF Launches 2-Year Research […]

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Bank of America’s Crypto Research Debuts: Digital Assets Are ‘Too Large to Ignore’

Bank of America’s Crypto Research Debuts: Digital Assets Are ‘Too Large to Ignore’Bank of America’s Global Research has begun covering crypto, debuting with a report stating that “digital assets are too large to ignore.” Noting that digital assets are “creating a whole ecosystem of new companies, new opportunities, and new applications,” the bank said, “This is growing, this is mainstream, and it’s not just bitcoin.” Bank of […]

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Cryptojacking Activity Decreased for the First Time Since 2018, Says Intelligence Report

Cryptojacking Activity Decreased for the First Time Since 2018, Says Intelligence ReportCryptojacking activity seems to be losing momentum, specifically types that mine monero, as a recent report unveiled a slowdown in the illicit crypto-mining activities in the cloud. A threat intelligence firm compiled the results. Report Focused on Cryptojacking Incidents With Monero According to Unit 42 in their “Cloud Thread Report,” cryptojacking attacks have been decreasing […]

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Study Finds Cryptocurrency Scams Surged 40% in 2020, Forecasts an Increase of 75% in 2021

Study Finds Cryptocurrency Scams Surged 40% in 2020, Forecasts an Increase of 75% in 2021A new study revealed that cryptocurrency-related scams almost doubled over the last year. However, forecasts are not optimistic going forward, as the report forecasts another significant increase in the number of cases in 2021. Research Scanned Over 300 Million Websites According to the “Cryptocurrency Scam Report” published by fraud prevention company Bolster and shared with […]

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