04/21/2018 - Venture capitalists and law firms lobby SEC to protect cryptocurrencies from securities categorization, Coinbase blocks payments to the WikiLeaks shop

                                            

A  group of investors and lawyers, assembled by venture capital firm  Andreessen Horowitz, has recently met with the SEC and proposed a ”safe  harbor” for some virtual currencies; this comes as regulators are  reportedly considering whether virtual currencies, such as Ether, should  be categorized as a security - Link                

Coinbase  blocks payments to the WikiLeaks shop; as a response to the block,  WikiLeaks is planning to boycott Coinbase next week, and champion the  view that Coinbase is ”an unfit member of the crypto community” - Link                

Russian  Supreme Court ruling orders the St. Petersburg City Court to consider  an appeal to the ban of RAPSI; RAPSI, or the Russian Legal Information  Agency, is a cryptocurrency information website; in July of 2017, a St.  Petersburg court moved to block 40 websites ”aiding the growth of the  shadow economy” - Link                

Co-founder  of crypto financial services startup Centra Tech has been arrested; the  man, Raymond Trapani, is charged with securities fraud of more than  $25M, together with the two other co-founders; Centra Tech’s main  product was the ”Centra Card”, a debit card that allowed users to  convert crypto to fiat currency - Link                

South  Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb to conduct ICO in  Switzerland; according to an interview with News1, the ”Bithumb Coin”  would be released in two parts or types; also, the ICO would not be  public; rather, it will supposedly be a token sale targeted at  investment firms - Link                

Belgium  donates $2.4M to a project by the World Food Programme; the  contribution will be used to expand research on the use of blockchain  solutions; this comes as the UN already was exploring the Ethereum  blockchain technology last year - Link                

New  data on the Bitcoin Cash network prior to the fork scheduled for May  15th has surfaced; it is due to an overnight software update of the  crawler cashnodes.io uses to provide more accurate results; so far, 54%  of Bitcoin ABS nodes are running software compatible with the May 15th  Network Upgrade - Link