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Bitcoin Gets Political as US Government Mulls Airdrops
Last week’s Bitcoin Nashville conference dominated cryptocurrency news headlines, largely due to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign speech (and his many promises), as well as Senator Cynthia Lummis’ call for a national “strategic Bitcoin reserve.” (We bill)
We walked around the event for four days, scrambling to cover all the news, and took tons of photos. Bitcoin LARP, anyone?
U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, holds a copy of her bitcoin reserve bill at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Saturday, July 27. (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)
RESERVING JUDGMENT: Details on last weekend’s Republican demands for a “national strategic bitcoin reserve.” Trump, the party’s presidential nominee, has suggested using the government’s current reserves, amounting to just over 200,000 BTC, as the “core” of a new reserve. Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has proposed going even further, perhaps building it up to 1 million BTCwhich is approximately 5% of the cryptocurrency’s maximum supply.
Lummis said on stage at Bitcoin Nashville that the plan could eventually “eliminate” the national debt — $27 trillion, at the last check! – but he didn’t really explain how it would work, “other than the basic math that increasing the wealth of the U.S. government would generally equate to reducing debt,” as CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton said soQuestions have arisen on social media as to whether the government… had the right to maintain the existing treasurymostly obtained through seizures and confiscations associated with criminal activities; in other words, all stolen property may at some point have to be returned to its rightful owners.
There was also considerable speculation about what exactly did Lummis mean? when he said, “We will convert excess reserves at our 12 Federal Reserve banks in bitcoin in over five years,” or whether the economics or legality of anything remotely like that were even feasible. George Selgin, an economist at the conservative Cato Institute, wrote on X that he had “heard from someone in Senator Lummis’ office” who had clarified that the plan was actually just to buy about $64 billion in bitcoin using balances simply created Gold Revaluation at Fort Knox. CoinDesk got a bill which effectively outlines a plan to revalue the Federal Reserve’s gold certificates, while setting aside $6 billion from any net profits the U.S. central bank might generate over the next five fiscal years – with the giant caveat that, lately, the Fed has been losing money at a record rate.
Fun fact: The draft bill includes a provision on how the U.S. government would handle any tokens launched via airdrop.
Taking things from a high level, the The Wall Street Journal editorial board has concluded that “if cryptocurrencies are truly a libertarian tool for investing without political constraints, then they should be traded autonomously, without government help.”
Bitcoin Conference Nashville in Pictures: Orange Athena, Pink Dresses, Polymarket Gadgets, Trump Song
Lightning Protocol Engineer Lisa Neigut leads an educational game called “Bitcoin LARP” at the Bitcoin Nashville conference last week (Bradley Keoun)
Check out our Photo blog from last week’s Bitcoin Nashville Conference: “Surreal doesn’t begin to describe the combination of images gathered at last week’s festival-style gathering in homage to the world’s oldest and largest cryptocurrency, punctuated by former US President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto campaign speech to an adoring crowd.”
Featuring, in order of appearance: David Tse, Lisa Neigut (above), Adrián Eidelman, Fred Thiel, Justin Sun (not really, but sort of), Robin Linus, Jeremy Rubin, Liam Eagen, Weikeng Chen, Andrew Poelstra, Casey Rodarmor, Erin Redwing, Cathie Wood, Michael Saylor, Ron Paul, Donald Trump.
Last week’s top picks from Our Protocol Village column highlighting the main innovations and technological updates of blockchain.
The Irys project will include both permanent data storage and “forward data registries” (Irys)
1. Irisdescribing himself as a layer of origin for data storage, announced that it will move to a new layer-1 network with the launch of a “programmatic datachain that combines data storage and execution.” According to the team: “Through IrysVM, which is fully compatible with EVM, developers can leverage efficient and cost-effective real-time data manipulation. This approach simplifies development processes, improves scalability, and ensures stable and predictable pricing for data transactions and storage. Ecosystem partners that are building on Irys Layer 1 include Berachain, Eclipse, Injective Labs, Livepeer, Linea, IoTeX, Gateway.fmLit Protocol, NodeKit, Olas, Snapchain, BeraLand, and YEET.” Founded in 2021, Irys started its journey as Bundlr, a scalable solution for persistent data storage on Plot of Ar.
2. Router protocola project built using Cosmos blockchain technology, said Tuesday it has launched the mainnet of a new blockchain designed for “chain abstraction” – a concept embraced by many protocols with the goal of making blockchain user experiences more seamless. To make the new Router Chain more seamless in cross-chain interactions, it will focus on “lowering development barriers and simplifying the development of dApps that can seamlessly interact with multiple blockchains and aggregate liquidity from any chain,” according to a press release shared with CoinDesk.
3. Blackbird Labsthe restaurant loyalty platform founded by Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, has announced the Blackbird Pay launcha system that will allow participating restaurants to accept cryptocurrency payments. The new payment platform expands on Blackbird’s mission by allowing consumers to pay for their meals using the $FLY cryptocurrency. Tokens can be earned as loyalty points for dining at participating restaurants or purchased in the Blackbird app using the popular USDC Stablecoin.
4. The developers of Theorydescribed as a “base layer of the AI agent,” has released its official project whitepaperintroducing key aspects of its network and outlining its benefits for developing advanced AI agent collectives. According to the team: “Using a decentralized model, Theoriq will leverage smart contracts to ensure transparency and accountability, while maintaining flexibility to ensure its network continues to adapt as AI continues to advance in complexity.”
5. HyphenA cryptocurrency project focused on paymentsis launching the Evolution update on July 29, described as “its most significant update” to date, with a new sidechain. According to the team, the project aims to “enable indexed decentralized storage and decentralized applications.” According to a blog postThe sidechain “is managed by EvoNodes, which also secures the legacy Dash chain. It uses the account-based model (individual addresses have balances), as opposed to the UTXO model (multiple addresses hold coins, or UTXOs) of the Core chain. It uses a heavily modified derivative of the Tendermint (Cosmos) consensus called Tenderdash. The main differences between Tenderdash and Tendermint are that the Dash version runs in the same block, meaning you don’t have to wait for the next block after writing new data to be able to query it.”
Hyperbolic CEO Jasper Zhang and co-founder Yuchen Jin (Hyperbolic)
The reference point CoinDesk Index 20 blue-chip digital assets returned 3.3% for the month through July 30, in line with gold’s July returns but slightly outperforming the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of U.S. stocks.
MTD returns until July 30. (Tracy Stephens/CoinDesk Indices)
Exchange rate riskThe token used in the XRP Ledger developed by Ripple Labs, led the month’s big gainers, up 32%, followed by Solana’s SOL at 20%. Bitcoin was the only other cryptocurrency to gain, up 3.8% month-to-date.
MTD returns until July 30. (Tracy Stephens/CoinDesk Indices)