Bitcoin ‘far larger’ than Binance or Coinbase, says Jan3 CEO: BTC Prague 2023

June 14, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Binance

Troubled exchanges like Binance and Coinbase might not be the biggest trading venues for Bitcoin, Samson Mow hinted.

Amid the panic over lawsuits against major cryptocurrency exchanges, one Bitcoin (BTC) advocate argued that the BTC market is much bigger than the one tracked by exchanges.

The total Bitcoin market is not limited to Binance, Coinbase or any other crypto exchange, Jan3 CEO Samson Mow told Cointelegraph at the BTC Prague conference on June 9.

“Whereas I think for Bitcoin, it's much harder to quantify how much of the market it is. It's because a lot of Bitcoin trades are block trades,” Mow said.

In mentioning Bitcoin block trades, Mow referred to private trading channels which allow investors to privately negotiate and proceed with large BTC buy or sell orders. Some of such channels include peer-to-peer (P2P) or over-the-counter (OTC) deals, he noted, adding:

“You kind of have this black box around Bitcoin. You don't really know how much the market is total. If Bitcoin functions as P2P, you're not going to quantifiably measure how much Bitcoin is traded.”

Indeed, private Bitcoin trading channels like P2P or OTC are not included in total BTC trading volumes on major crypto tracking websites like CoinGecko. That means that Bitcoin’s daily trading volume is actually bigger than $9.6 billion recorded at the time of writing.

“CoinGecko only tracks trades happening on crypto exchanges and does not track trades happening on P2P platforms and brokerages,” CoinGecko co-founder and chief operating officer Bobby Ong told Cointelegraph.

“P2P platforms include places such as Binance P2P, Huobi P2P, Paxful, Remitano and so on,” the executive noted. CoinGecko has no plans to track such platforms in the near future, Ong noted.

Apart from P2P, CoinGecko also doesn’t record institutional trades on OTC, Ong said, adding:

“Institutional trades that happen on exchanges that we track are recorded. OTC trades are not recorded as it's like a P2P trade but between large entities.”

The new remarks from Jan3 CEO may imply that cryptocurrency exchange moguls like Binance or Coinbase might not dominate the Bitcoin market as much as some might think.

In January 2023, the Norwegian crypto research firm K33 Research — formerly known as Arcane Research — said that Binance handled 92% of the Bitcoin spot market in 2022. “No matter how you look at it in terms of trading activity, Binance is the crypto market,” the firm wrote at the time.

Magazine: Bitcoin is on a collision course with ‘Net Zero’ promises

Bitcoin will survive failure of ‘any giant’ in crypto, Samson Mow says

November 22, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Binance

Bitcoin cannot be destroyed by the fall of cryptocurrency giants like FTX or, hypothetically, other big exchanges, according to Samson Mow.

The collapse of FTX has triggered a notable drop in the price of Bitcoin (BTC), but that in no case means that BTC can be destroyed by failing cryptocurrency firms, according to Bitcoin proponent Samson Mow.

The cryptocurrency industry is still seeing the wave of FTX contagion playing out, and it is likely to face more similar crashes in the near future, Mow said in an interview with Cointelegraph.

According to the executive, FTX contagion could be part of the Terra ecosystem collapse, which caused a domino effect on the industry, including major crypto lenders like Celsius and Voyager.

“More things like this will continue to happen in the crypto space because all of these projects are worthless houses of cards,” Mow predicted. He added that FTX’s failure was “easy to see coming” due to FTX’s relationship with Alameda.

“A general rule of thumb is if a company prints a token out of thin air and either sells it to retail, or relies on it as an asset, you should expect them to collapse eventually,” JAN3 CEO stated.

Mow also argued that industry's efforts to prove credibility — including exchanges increasingly releasing proof-of-reserves — don’t mean much unless they prove liabilities. “Any system that can be gamed, will be gamed,” declared, referring to players faking their reserves by shuffling funds between each other just before producing a proof.

“Then you have to factor in the fiat side — which would require an audit, but that may not be useful either as FTX also had an auditor,” he noted.

As FTX contagion continues to spread across the industry, one can expect the worst scenarios for some of the world’s largest crypto firms. Addressing the question of whether Bitcoin would survive a hypothetical event where crypto giants like Tether or Binance collapse, Mow expressed confidence that Bitcoin is designed to defeat any issue, stating:

“Bitcoin will overcome any issue simply due to its design and the irrefutable need for sound money in human civilization. The failure of any giant would only be a temporary setback, just as Mt. Gox’s impact is no longer of relevance.”

Despite likely setting the crypto industry back a few years, FTX collapse has done “wonders” for the Bitcoin industry in terms of growing adoption of self-custody and hardware wallets, Mow emphasized. “Unfortunately, most people cannot learn from the mistakes of others, only from their own suffering,” he added.

The exec also suggested that Bitcoin newcomers are likely to make the same mistakes in the future despite the industry showing the biggest vulnerabilities of centralized exchanges during Bitcoin’s very first crash back in 2011. He stated:

“Then things will settle down over the next few years, and newcomers in five or six years will make the same mistakes again and lose their funds. Rinse and repeat.”

Former chief strategy officer at Blockstream, Mow is a major Bitcoin advocate and founder of the game development company Pixelmatic. He is also CEO of the Bitcoin technology firm JAN3, which is focused on promoting Bitcoin and accelerating hyperbitcoinization. In April 2022, the firm signed an agreement with the government of El Salvador and president Nayib Bukele to assist the country in developing digital infrastructure and establishing Bitcoin City.

Bitcoin proponent Samson Mow highlights centralization aspect of the Merge

September 7, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Mow claims a few node operators have the power to change, delay or even cancel the upcoming Ethereum Merge.

Samson Mow, a well-known Bitcoin proponent, recently took to social media to talk about the centralization aspects of the upcoming Merge, which he claimed isn’t widely known.

Ethereum is in the countdown mode after the completion of the Bellatrix upgrade on Sept. 6 and is all set for the official transition between Sept.13-15, depending on the hashrate (computer power) input on the network. The Merge is slated to be triggered by a difficulty threshold called the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) at a value of 58750000000000000000000.

Mow claimed that while everyone thinks that the Merge will be triggered by pre-set threshold difficulty, there is one aspect that not many people have paid attention to. He said node operators have the power to overwrite the TTD value by a single line of code.

Mow cited a Galaxy blog post highlighting the key centralization issue with the Merge and claimed that Ethereum has knowingly suppressed this fact.

So how does the MeRgE actually get triggered? I was curious so I did some digging. I thought it may be set with a fixed mechanism or readiness threshold, but no. Someone, probably Vitalik, will just say “go” and then it happens. The complex charade is to mask the centralization. pic.twitter.com/PmxcTMU8J5
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) September 7, 2022

He noted that with few nodes that matter, “so those in charge can simply “feed the actual value” for activation time whenever they feel like it. What’s hilarious is they then make tracker sites to “predict” when it will happen.”

Cointelegraph reached out to Mow to get his perspective on the upcoming Merge and the centralization debate looming around Ethereum’s upcoming transition. Mow told Cointelegraph that with a move to proof-of-stake (PoS), the “centralization aspect of Ethereum would become permanent.”

He added that in a PoS system, node operators are solely responsible for decision making which is clear from the TTD override example. He said:

“If Ethereans really wanted to have something energy efficient, scalable, and cheaper, they would be doing R&D on Bitcoin second layer technologies like Lightning and Liquid.”

Ethereum’s transition to a PoS network started out as a strategy to address its scalability woes but soon became a case for energy efficiency amid growing scrutiny around the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption. The Merge would mark the completion of the second phase of the three-phase transition process, and the majority of key benefits, including cheaper gas fees and faster transaction throughput, will arrive with the completion of the third phase.

Finance Redefined: Samson Mow’s DeFi question, Fireblocks expands to institutional and more

April 30, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Blockstream

In this week's DeFi newsletter we bring you an exclusive research report on Terra, Samson Mow's shocking comment on DeFi and Fireblock's latest DeFi institutional offering.

The week was filled with several new project developments and key updates from leading decentralized applications (DApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Fireblocks has expanded its institutional access to Terra’s DeFi ecosystem and Solana partnered with the Notifi network to improve the abysmal participation rates in governance votes.

We will also look into the Cointelegraph research into the Terra ecosystem’s future and see if it can sustain the current growth. Samson Mow, the former executive at Blockstream, questions the decentralized aspect of the DeFi ecosystem.

Top DeFi tokens saw another week of bearish price action despite several new developments and barring a few, the majority of the tokens in the top-100 registered double-digit losses over the past week.

Fireblocks expands institutional access to Terra’s DeFi ecosystem

Fireblocks, a digital asset custody platform, announced that it has enabled institutional decentralized finance access to Terra, the second-largest DeFi protocol by total value locked (TVL). As per the announcement, Fireblocks users can now securely access all the decentralized applications built on the Terra blockchain.

The launch is in response to Fireblocks’ early access program users, who invested over $250 million into the Terra DeFi ecosystem within the first 72 hours of its integration going live.

Continue reading

‘DeFi is not decentralized at all,’ says former Blockstream executive

Samson Mow, former chief strategy officer at Blockstream and founder of JAN3, is convinced that most decentralized finance protocols can’t compete with Bitcoin (BTC) when it comes to providing an effective monetary network because of their lack of decentralization.

As Mow pointed out, DeFi projects are governed by entities that can modify the protocol at will.

“Bitcoin, at the fundamental level, is money, and it should be immutable,” explained Mow. “If you can change it at will, then you’re no better than a fiat currency governed by the Fed.”

Continue reading

Solana DAOs can now bug you to vote with phone calls and texts

The Notifi Network is banking on this concept to help improve the abysmal participation rates in governance votes. Launching with Solana decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, it combines popular centralized methods used by the Web3 community such as Telegram and Discord pings with more traditional and harder to ignore notifications like phone calls, text messages or emails.

Backed by crypto venture capital firms Race Capital and Hashed, on April 24, Notifi applied its notification service to all DAOs that launched on the Solana Realms DAO platform.

Continue reading

Can Terra blockchain sustain its growth? Research report digs deeper

Cointelegraph Research fundamentally evaluates Terra in its 50-page report to provide an in-depth analysis of its recent updates, including Columbus-5, the Bitcoin acquisition and others.

Decentralized algorithmic stablecoins, blockchain integration in real-world payments and 20% annual percentage yields (APYs) on DeFi protocols — what is all of this, and is it really doing this? The team of experienced cryptoanalysts from the Big Four and the best universities worldwide dives deep into the blockchain’s ecosystem, community and underlying technology, assessing the potential regulatory, market and technological risks.

Continue reading

DeFi market overview

Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked dipped by one billion dollars, falling to $123.08 billion. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView reveals that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization registered a week filled with volatile price action and constant bearish pressure.

Majority of the DeFi tokens in the top-100 ranking by market cap traded in red, barring a few. Kyber Network Crystal v2 (KNC) was the biggest gainer with a 25% rise over the past week, followed by Kava (KAVA) at 17% and Curve DAO Token (CRV) at 8%.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us again next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.

Samson Mow’s new company JAN3 helping build Bitcoin City in El Salvador

April 8, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Bitcoin Industry

Bitcoin entrepreneur Samson Mow has launched a new company called JAN3, reportedly raising $21M in funding at a $100M valuation.

Samson Mow, former chief strategy officer of Blockstream and founder of Pixelmatic, said on Thursday that he has started a new company called JAN3 which will focus on accelerating Bitcoin adoption.

The Chinese-Canadian Bitcoin entrepreneur told Reuters that JAN3 has already signed a memorandum of understanding to assist in developing digital infrastructure in El Salvador.

"It's a general MOU that says we'll work together to build digital infrastructure for the country and for Bitcoin City.”

Mow added that making the decision for JAN3 to work with El Salvador was an easy choice, "I just set up my company and I said 'do you want to work together?' and they said 'sure.’”

Mow and his new firm will work alongside El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, and its government to assist in the establishment of Bitcoin City, a development that will reportedly use geothermal power from nearby volcanoes to power Bitcoin mining as well as the city‘s infrastructure.

According JAN3’s recently established Twitter account, which boasts a rapidly growing follower count of 3,300, the company has reportedly raised $21 million in funding at a valuation of $100 million.

The funding round was led by Alistair Milne, the CIO of Atlanta Digital Currency Fund, Chun Wang, the co-founder of crypto mining firm F2Pool, as well as El Zonte Capital, a new investment fund founded by prominent Bitcoin bull Max Keiser and his wife, Stacy Herbert.

The news comes as Mow spoke at the Bitcoin 2022 Conference, where he announced that two new jurisdictions — The Caribbean island of Roatán and Madeira, an autonomous region of Portugal — would be adopting Bitcoin as legal tender. Mow also mentioned Mexico, however the country is still considering the idea.

The name “JAN3” is a reference to Jan. 3rd, 2009, which is the day that Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block — also known as the “genesis block” — of Bitcoin. Playing on this namesake, the company’s first tweet was a not-so-cryptic reference to The Times’ headline on that day.

El Salvador postpones Bitcoin bonds to September: Report

March 23, 2022 Coin Telegraph

bonds

Apart from delaying the issuance of Bitcoin bonds, the Salvadoran government has apparently slowed down the pace of buying new BTC as well.

The government of El Salvador has reportedly decided to postpone the issue of a Bitcoin (BTC)-backed bond due to the unfavorable market conditions fueled by the geopolitical crisis.

El Salvador’s “Volcano Bond” will not go live in March as the Salvadoran government expected previously, finance minister Alejandro Zelaya said in an interview with a local TV channel.

Zelaya claimed that the delay was due to the volatile prices of BTC fueled by the Russia-Ukraine crisis. He added that the government of El Salvador decided to wait for favorable conditions in the financial market, expecting September at the latest, stating:

“Now is not the time to issue the bond [...] In May or June the market variants are a little different. At the latest in September. After September, if you go out to the international market, it is difficult to raise capital.”

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $42,236, up around 10% over the past 30 days, according to data from CoinGecko. The cryptocurrency has lost nearly 50% of value since the Salvadoran government initially announced plans for its Bitcoin bonds in November.

*Bitcoin 180-day price chart. Source: CoinGecko*

Zelaya hinted at a potential delay of El Salvador’s Bitcoin bond last week, citing the unstable political situation in the world as one of the biggest reasons for the postponement.

As previously reported, the $1 billion bond was originally scheduled for launch in mid-March. El Salvador congressman William Soriano took to Twitter in early February to declare that the Bitcoin bond was expected to go live by the second or the third week of March.

#BitcoinBonds will be available by the second and third week of march.#Bitcoin https://t.co/e2wL1iBTHr
— William Soriano (@WilliamSorianoH) February 9, 2022

El Salvador president Nayib Bukele originally announced plans for the bond in November 2021. The bond is reportedly marketed with a 6.5% coupon and a Bitcoin dividend of 50% of the gain in the price of the cryptocurrency after five years. Half of the $1 billion expected proceeds from the issuance are set to go toward the construction of the “Bitcoin City,” a development dedicated to geothermal energy-powered Bitcoin mining using nearby volcanoes. The rest $500 million is set to be invested directly into Bitcoin.

El Salvador’s delay of the Bitcoin bond launch comes amid the government apparently slowing down the pace of buying new BTC as well. Previously reporting consecutive Bitcoin purchases at least each month, the Salvadoran government has not announced a new buy since January 2022.

Samson Mow leaves Blockstream, plans to focus on ‘nation-state Bitcoin adoption’

March 1, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Adoption

“Now is a pivotal point in Bitcoin’s evolution — we’re on the verge of mass adoption, and I think that I can make it happen faster,” said Samson Mow.

Blockstream chief strategy officer Samson Mow has announced he will be leaving the blockchain firm after five years.

In a Tuesday Twitter thread, Mow said he would continue to be a “#BlockstreamSpy” following his departure from the Canada-based firm where he had worked since April 2017. He said he would stay on as CEO of game development company Pixelmatic, a position in which more “attention is being demanded,” but planned to focus on “nation-state Bitcoin adoption” in the future.

”With everything happening at light speed in El Salvador, and more and more countries interested in adopting #Bitcoin, I found my time each day just no longer enough anymore,” said Mow. “So with @Blockstream in a very good place and well capitalized after a successful B round, it was the right time to move on. It also feels like now is a pivotal point in #Bitcoin’s evolution — we’re on the verge of mass adoption, and I think that I can make it happen faster.”

Today is my last day with @Blockstream. It's been a grand adventure working with @adam3us for the last 5 years and together we've accomplished a great deal from sidechains, to mining, to satellites. So what’s next? I plan to focus on nation-state #Bitcoin adoption!
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) March 1, 2022

Mow has been involved in plans to build a Bitcoin City in El Salvador. The project aims to use geothermal energy from the country’s Conchagua volcano to power Bitcoin (BTC) mining in the innovative city, which will be built at the foot of the mountain. According to the Pixelmatic CEO, a $1 million BTC price could help make the Latin American nation “the financial center of the world.”

The now-former Blockstream chief strategy officer added he would continue to “support and advocate” for Blockstream’s sidechain-based settlement network, Liquid, as “It has an important role to play in the reformation of the legacy financial system.” He previously worked as the chief operating officer of BTCC, the crypto exchange behind one of the largest mining pools in the world at the time, and as the director of production and executive producer at Ubisoft.

An advocate of Bitcoin for many years, Mow also recently made the Cointelegraph Top 100 for his work at Pixelmatic, Blockstream, the El Salvador project and more. The full list of some of the most influential in crypto and blockchain is now available.

Boston Fed President Says the ‘Exponential Growth’ of Stablecoins Could ‘Disrupt’ Money Markets

June 27, 2021 Bitcoin.com

World Bank refuses El Salvador’s request for help on BTC transition

June 17, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Anthony Pompliano

The World Bank has refused to support El Salvador’s request for help in the transition to use Bitcoin as legal tender.

The World Bank has refused El Salvador’s request for help on the country’s transition to adopting Bitcoin as legal tender.

It cited issues with Bitcoin’s environmental impact and transparency as reasons why it will not support El Salvador move to adopt Bitcoin as an officially accepted currency .

"While the government did approach us for assistance on Bitcoin, this is not something the World Bank can support given the environmental and transparency shortcomings, " a World Bank spokesperson said.

The World Bank did note however that it can help El Salvador in other ways, including “currency transparency and regulatory processes."

Earlier on Wednesday, Salvadoran Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya said the Central America country had sought technical assistance from Banco Mundial (the World Bank).

"I want to announce that we have requested technical assistance from @BancoMundial, so that like @BCIE_Org, they can accompany El Salvador in the implementation and regularization of #Bitcoin as legal tender."

Prominent Bitcoiners weren’t pleased with the World Bank's refusal, but nor were they particularly surprised.

Bitcoin proponent Anthony Pompliano tweeted in response to the news that the “World Bank hasn’t figured out how to make money off Bitcoin.”

Samson Mow the CSO of blockchain development firm Blockstream, and creator of blockchain game Infinite Fleet, was irritated by the news — and called for The World Bank to be made obsolete.

BREAKING: WORLD BANK CANNOT HELP EL SALVADOR MAKE WORLD BANK OBSOLETE. pic.twitter.com/gLReCZXC4r
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) June 17, 2021

While President Nayib Bukele’s Bitcoin law has sparked a lot of excitement from Bitcoin proponents across the globe, it has also received a lot of criticism. Yesterday, economist Steve Hanke said that El Salvador using Bitcoin as a legal tender may “completely collapse the economy.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is also not keen on El Salvador's embrace of Bitcoin. Cointelegraph reported on June 11 that it may hamper negotiations with the IMF over a $1B loan to support the country’s economy.

IMF spokesman Gerry Rice noted the adoption of Bitcoin presents a number of financial, legal and macroeconomic concerns that require a “very careful analysis''

30 foreign business leaders coming to visit Bitcoin Beach tomorrow -to see how they can invest in El Salvador. Just this morning had 2 companies tell us they already have lawyers setting up their legal business entities. @nayibbukele has opened the jobs floodgates #Bitcoin
— Bitcoin Beach (@Bitcoinbeach) June 16, 2021

But some companies are rushing to help. Athena Bitcoin indicated it would move quickly to provide Bitcoin ATMs across El Salvador. On Twitter today, the firm asked Bukele if “1000 ATMs '' were enough, with the President replying in jest “1,000? How about 1,500?”

Yesterday, El Salvador’s Minister of Labor and Social Welfare Rolando Castro denied claims that ministry had begun discussing the option to use Bitcoin for employee salary payments, noting that it was “too premature to talk about wages.”

Samson Mow

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