Here are some of the major developments from the world of crypto over the past few days
Australian cryptocurrency exchange Swyftx is introducing a new “Earn and Learn” crypto education platform with the goal of paying its users for passing courses on various crypto scams. It said it had identified a rise in demand for crypto education during the bear market, and accordingly launched the course.
The debut of the new instructional platform on September 6, 2023 coincides with increased awareness of cryptocurrency-related frauds in Australia.
Tom Matthews, head of corporate relations at Swyftx, said that the goal is to better inform the public before the industry is fully regulated. Additionally, it would make individuals more aware of the cryptocurrency market and less vulnerable to swindling coins.
According to Matthews, the platform will assist users in recognising a variety of frauds, including those using phony tokens, pig slaughtering and other social media ruses, and pump-and-dump schemes.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has acknowledged that one of the main issues facing the Ethereum network is the centralisation of nodes, adding that the same should be fixed by making the running nodes less expensive and less complicated.
He, however, said that the perfect solution may not come for another 20 years.
Many experts have said that the bulk of the 5,901 active Ethereum nodes are now being run through centralised Web service providers, such as Amazon Web Services, which exposes the Ethereum Blockchain to a single point of failure.
Buterin, however, said that the node issue was a “big piece of the puzzle” to guarantee the Ethereum network remained decentralised over the long term. Buterin listed six critical issues in his speech at Korea Blockchain Week that needs to be resolved to solve centralisation.
“One of those six things is making it technically easier for people to run nodes and statelessness is one of the really important technologies in doing that right. Today, it takes hundreds of gigabytes of data to run a node. With stateless clients, you can run a node on basically zero,” he said.
Christine Kim, a law professor at Yeshiva University and a Harvard legal expert, has said that income and wealth in the metaverse should be subject to immediate taxation.
In a recently-issued study titled “Taxing the Metaverse”, Kim outlined the justifications for taxing the metaverse and using it as “a laboratory for experimenting with cutting-edge policy.” She said that users of the metaverse are free to produce and accumulate wealth only inside its ecosystem, and so the tax code should govern this expanding wealth sector:
“Because economic activity within the Metaverse satisfies the Haig-Simons and Glenshaw Glass definitions of income, its exclusion will create a tax haven,” she said.
According to the paper, the ability of the metaverse to “record all digital activity and track individual wealth” enables governments to monitor and tax income as soon as it is received. Kim said this could also upend current US tax law.
Kim also suggested modifying the way taxes are collected. According to the research, users of the metaverse in the US would now only be subject to taxation upon realisation or the occurrence of a taxable event, such as a withdrawal.