🔴 Bitcoin Boosts Democracy? | This Week in Crypto – May 22, 2023

A hardware wallet takes some heat for weakening customer privacy, Tether will buy Bitcoin, and OpenAI’s creator is now focused on a new altcoin. These stories and more, this week in crypto.

Ledger Defends New Recovery Feature

The world’s leading hardware wallet maker, Ledger, came under fire for its new recovery feature. Ledger Recover will store encrypted user seed phrases with a third-party custodian, which critics argue undermines Ledger’s stated commitment to privacy and security. Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier responded by saying that this is the way millions of people will onboard to crypto in the future.

Tether Will Buy Bitcoin

Tether, the company behind the largest stablecoin, USDT, announced that starting in May, the company will regularly allocate as much as 15% of its net realized operating profits in Bitcoin. Tether now joins other large corporations which add BTC to their balance sheet, to enhance the performance of the portfolio, and to align themselves with transformative technology.

Coinbase Introduces Zero-Fee Trading

America’s largest crypto exchange, Coinbase, introduced Coinbase One, a membership account that offers zero trading fees, boosted staking rewards and a dedicated support team. The subscription costs $30 a month and also includes exclusive benefits from partners. The company is trying to increase its customer base with the lure of zero-fee trading.

$1M Raised for Bitcoin Developers

Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital Holdings and Brink, a nonprofit striving to support open-source Bitcoin development, recently revealed their collaboration to generate up to $1 million in funding for Bitcoin developers. Bitcoin Developers are currently under pressure to make changes to Bitcoin’s underlying code in order to prevent the use of Ordinals, which have congested the network.

Robert Kennedy Jr Accepts Bitcoin

Bitcoin is an “exercise in democracy” said Robert Kennedy Jr who announced this week that he was accepting Bitcoin for campaign donations. Before taking the stage at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami, the U.S. presidential hopeful said that if elected president, he pledged to ensure the United States remains the global hub of bitcoin.

UK: Crypto Should Be Treated as Gambling

In a new report, a cross-party Committee of MPs in the United Kingdom have claimed that cryptocurrencies serve no useful social purpose, and are being used by criminals in scams, fraud and money laundering. As a result, the UK’s Treasury Committee has called for consumer trading in unbacked crypto to be regulated as gambling.

Old Game Boy Consoles as Hardware Wallets

A small team of developers at crypto startup Keyp, is revamping original Nintendo Game Boy handheld consoles, and optimizing them to store cryptocurrency offline. The Game Wallet uses gamification to generate users’ seed phrases through random quests and interactions with characters, and will be able to store any cryptocurrency that uses BIP-32 seed phrases, like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

OpenAI Creator is Focused on Worldcoin

Investors are excited by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s crypto project, Worldcoin, which has kept a lower profile relative to ChatGPT. Altman is close to securing about $100 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund, and his plan is to use iris-scanning technology to create a secure global cryptocurrency.

That’s what’s happened this week in crypto, see you next week.