“The Terrorist Financing Prevention Act of 2023, introduced by the Senators, aims to prevent Foreign Terrorist Organizations and their financial enablers, including those using digital assets, from accessing U.S. financial institutions, imposing sanctions and strict regulations to counteract these activities,” the bill reads.

“The 2023 bitcoin rally unfolded in five phases: starting with a reaction to inflation trends, followed by a banking crisis response, a surge due to BlackRock’s ETF filing, a boost from Federal Reserve policy shifts, and finally, developments in SEC regulations regarding bitcoin ETFs, “Markus Thielen, Matrixport’s head of research, wrote in a new report.

“We have to decide if there’s a place for a smart wallet, a much cheaper version that an iPhone user could use as a secondary device. We haven’t seen a ton of signal whether that’s a compelling enough thing to sell 50,000 units,” he said, saying that this was the magic number to determine the success of the phone.

“It’s nothing short of embarrassing that Gary Gensler, the SEC chair, couldn’t even confirm in front of Congress whether Ethereum is a regulated security,” Ramaswamy said. “This is another example of the administrative state going too far.”

“Looking ahead as we approach 2024, we envision a transformative impact where compliant blockchain-based operations by institutions will drastically increase in volume – and this is what we have been preparing since the inception of Flowdesk,” Guilhem Chaumont, CEO and co-founder of Flowdesk, said in a release.

Institutional traders and whales, or large holders of bitcoin, were skeptical about altcoins, the report says, with the data showing a general decline in altcoin holdings among traders despite a brief rise in May. A notable decrease started in August, particularly among institutions, reflecting a cautious stance towards these more volatile assets.

“Bitcoin ordinals is not only a breakthrough for bitcoin utility, but also a hub that brings communities together,” he said in an interview by email. “Communities like Stacks, BSV, Rootstock, and even Starkware, which don’t usually interact with each other, are all exploring ways to get involved and build on Ordinals Protocol – everyone found a common ground and wants a piece of it.”

The problem with ICOs, however, is that the majority, under current interpretations of the law, were flagrant violations of securities rules.

Hong Kong and Singapore are the usual destinations for crypto fund headquarters in Asia.

Jason Fang, managing partner and co-founder at Sora Ventures, disagrees, picking Taipei as the place to open a new office and run the fund from and host the next iteration of its Sora Summit conference, which takes place on Dec. 16 during the Taiwan Blockchain Week.

Fang says that the only crypto companies that really only need to be in these cities are exchanges, because of the legal clarity. It’s not the case for venture capital firms.

“A lot of these exchanges looked into areas like Hong Kong and Singapore, where regulation is a lot more black and white, which actually protects the exchange,” he said.

Taiwan doesn’t have the same sort of strict regulations and licensing.

“In Taiwan, we don’t have any restrictions in terms of any exchanges. So, you can have anything you want. There are no restrictions, and you don’t need a VPN to run anything,” he continued.

Fang says this is important because, as a VC, he is working on the bleeding edge of tech and exploring new segments that aren’t yet regulated. If he were licensed under Hong Kong or Singapore’s law there would be plenty of restrictions on what he can invest in, or say.

“Sora Ventures invests in forward-thinking, innovative areas often beyond current regulatory scope – ventures that are ahead of their time and not yet on regulators’ radar,” he said.

Fang has plenty of experience in Hong Kong.

Way back in 2018 – an eon ago in crypto years – Sora Ventures hosted its inaugural Sora Summit in Macau, a Chinese autonomous territory best known for its casinos.

A young Sam Bankman-Fried was in attendance, and the conference left such a positive impression on him he canceled his return ticket to the U.S. and stayed in nearby Hong Kong to plot how to bring Alameda Research (and later FTX) to Asia, eventually opening an office for this hedge fund in the city, so he recalled in his trial.

Crypto of the current year looks much different than in 2018. Beijing’s attitude towards it has changed, and running a digital assets fund in Shanghai isn’t the best idea from a compliance perspective.

Central to crypto’s thesis is revolutionizing finance through decentralization, taking out rent-seeking intermediaries. DeFi, or decentralized finance, with all its flaws and epic hacks, is the synthesis of this, linking up parties and counterparties with efficiency that only smart contracts can provide.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, are like the corporations of DeFi – a series of smart contracts that emulate an organization with roles, titles, and rewards.

But what if these DAOs could be used to do more than create the next pepecoin?

One incarnation might include DeSci – or decentralized science – hacking together answers to medical problems by building drugs via DAOs and not big pharma.

“Another category that we’re extremely bullish on, but again, a very, very early narrative, is decentralized science,” Fang said. “Science, in general, is a much larger industry that can be disrupted.”

Fang’s vision is to reduce the obstacles in drug development over time. Through DeSci he says the community can better reward scientists who make meaningful, real-world contributions, rather NFTs of frogs and monkeys.

The idea, he says, is over the course of the coming years, and the goal is to be able to shrink a bottleneck for drug development while compensating scientists well for their time.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is also a believer in DeSci and will be keynoting Sora Summit to promote ResearchHub, a platform he co-founded that rewards researchers with cryptocurrency for sharing their work and advancing science.

Sora’s DeSci ambitions, like everything else it is investing in, are based on the Bitcoin blockchain.

There’s a whole DeSci universe out there, and Sora isn’t the first to make moves in this space.

But it’s the first to do it completely on Bitcoin.

Fang views centralization in the crypto industry as a significant risk, particularly in its potential to stifle innovation and create vulnerabilities in blockchain projects.

“Solana, for example, has a Solana Ventures or the Solana Foundation,” he said. “The majority of their development that’s going on is basically invested by these two companies, which is basically a centralized entity.”

“If one of those two things vanishes, they’re f—d,” he continued.

Bitcoin, he says, will walk a very different path because miners – as decentralized as you can get – are the ones benefiting from development in bitcoin utility thanks to the higher fees and are, in turn, funding it.

And a strong mining industry strengthens the decentralization and security of the network, like a sort of flywheel.

“Miners are way richer than Solana Foundation,” he says.