The celebrated Winklevii, unsatisfied with having invented both The Facebook and the dollar, have now incorporated an insurance platform into Gemini, their regulator-backed exchange. A group of “leading insurers” will offer premiums on assets in Gemini’s custody. It follows the Winklevii's announcement last month of their stablecoin--thus adding another notch to the pair's bedpost of becoming the trusted gateway for investors into the space.
Another story from the normal thing + blockchain thing toolkit: Pak Won-soon, the mayor of Seoul, has announced plans to funnel 123.3 billion Korean won ($108 million) into updating 14 public services with blockchain technology, including labor welfare, voting, and “certification issuance,” presumably meaning drivers licenses and some such. That makes Seoul the, what, third “smart city” to be built on blockchain? But so far, crypto developers have barely managed to build a successful digital cat-trading platform. Let’s not try and run before we can mew.
Meanwhile, Coindesk has a new investigation, titled: ”Good Money's Master Plan: A Stealth Bid to Get Celebs Promoting Crypto Exposed,” about a $22 million ICO promising to channel crypto funds into charitable donations. But the company, says Coindesk, has been light on details, and has been stealthily using celebrities as a pulpit for its slightly inscrutable message.
But Coindesk fails to really expose anything. That “stealth bid” to ride on the celebrity power of such media heavyweights as “Wellness Mama” and “Michelle Tam” to sell its wares? Good Money proudly advertised that “stealth bid,” quite publicly, at the World Blockchain Forum. How sneaky.
Meanwhile, Venezuela is now forcing its citizens to renew their passports by paying for them in Petro, an oil-backed cryptocurrency that most likely doesn’t exist. Buying a new passport, at two petro (around $200, or 7,200 bolivars), costs four times more than minimum-wage Venezuelan workers reportedly earn in a month. That’s a lot of money for the 5,000 people fleeing Venezuela every day, according to data from the U.N.
Is there a disturbingly familiar pattern to all this endless sludge of stories? Redditor u/arbobmehmood seems to think so. His post, presumably leaked by a Coindesk whistleblower, reveals the SEC-approved buzzwords (”Central bank of,” “endorses,” “ERC-721”) that our heartless editors force us, usually at gunpoint, to arbitrarily stitch together into some semblance of a narrative, day in, day out.
The result? Such tantalising concoctions as: “Royal bank of Tajikistan lobbying for world’s first quantum resistant 23 percent airdrop.” Or how about: “Hedge fund from Uruguay introduces revolutionary gaming-backed asset-backed loans.”? Or: see the above roundup.
Read Next: Dumb contract. October 5, 2018