Bitcoin 2022: What’s the Deal?

Today is the final day of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami Beach, and while Bitcoin maximalists will have no shortage of meetups and parties to attend this evening and tomorrow, the end of the event will mark an end to formalities. 

There have been plenty of highlights from the conference – including dozens of announcements from crypto and fintech companies in the space. Here are some of the announcements that major players made:

⚡ Strike expands horizons for Bitcoin payments on Lightning: Strike CEO Jack Mallers announced that Strike has created a Shopify integration for Bitcoin Lightning payments. However, they didn’t just stop there – Strike also struck a deal with NCR, opening up Bitcoin payments at major merchants such as McDonald’s.

🎰 Ledger rolls out new crypto hardware product: One of the foremost figures in the crypto hardware space, Ledger, finally rolled out its new product this week. The Ledger Nano S Plus is a $79 hardware wallet for the crypto-enthused, which has many of the high-powered features of their Nano X hardware wallet.

👛 Robinhood announces to integrate the Lightning Network in its wallet: This announcement doesn’t really have a lot of “wow factor”, but it’s a Bitcoin conference! The brokerage giant has been slowly but surely rolling out its long-awaited crypto wallets feature over the last few weeks, but has made its hefty waitlist of users eligible to start using the new feature immediately – and they put time on the conference calendar to share that they’d support Bitcoin’s fast and cheap layer 2, Lightning Network. 

💸 SoFi announces crypto paychecks (again):  SoFi users are likely already well-acquainted with the company’s latest crypto-focused feature, crypto paychecks. In short: you can send a portion of your direct deposit into your favorite crypto. This product has been out for a hot sec, but given its novelty,  it makes sense why they emphasized and underlined it at the conference.

That’s just a short list of announcements that should garner interest to the maxis and crypto-curious alike – but naturally, as a shortlist, it excludes dozens of other announcements which added flavor to the conference. We’ll be touching on some of the others over the coming weeks.

The European Union will prohibit deposits to crypto wallets, in addition to the sale of banknotes and transferable securities denominated in any official currencies of EU members to Russia. 

The move comes after the West levied back-to-back sanctions on Russia, which are squarely aimed at destabilizing Russia’s war machine. However, politicos voiced concerns that Russia will soon turn to the comfort of cryptocurrency – or worse, China – to escape the blows to its economy. 

Though crypto exchanges in the  EU have been required to comply with sanctions barring transactions from targeted individuals, these new sanctions aim to close remaining loopholes – namely by gathering personal information when their customers transfer crypto to external wallets.  

“The European Commission welcomes today’s agreement by the Council to adopt a fifth package of restrictive measures against Putin’s regime in response to its brutal aggression against Ukraine and its people,” as per the European Commission’s website. 

However, most of these new sanctions might just be positioning – but little evidence exists to support that crypto is actually helping Russia.

If it was, though, it would be ironic: Russia proposed banning crypto mining, and now this ban on crypto wallets will end the hopes of many living in the country. It is getting murkier every day, causing the common person to suffer the most.

Many people seem to believe that crypto will replace traditional banking, so some platforms are trying to merge the two. One such platform is  Pure. which is an ecosystem that connects banking, crypto, trading, and investment services under one platform. To learn more about the platform, we spoke with CEO Daniele Casamassima:

ST: There are already many crypto companies offering different services. What makes Pure. different?

DC: We are an ecosystem that integrates crypto. It has crypto businesses, crypto payments, crypto storage, and crypto cards included. Yet, we are a banking, trading, and portfolio management system, which is different from standard banking solutions. And, as I said above, crypto is included. So that’s why we are different — because we are not a crypto app,  and we will never be one. We are an ecosystem, a banking investment solution.

ST: Building a company like Pure. is a long and complicated process. What was the biggest challenge for you?

DC: What we are doing is a complicated process — it takes a lot of time, skills, and work with the regulators. The latest one is the biggest challenge — it takes a lot of effort to work with six different regulators in Europe and make them operate together in one single ecosystem, causing few to zero problems and questions for the customer. We want our service to be user-friendly but still compliant with different regulators in Europe. This is the most difficult thing to conceive in this ecosystem.

ST: How can the traditional banking system and crypto payment work together with the current European framework and regulation?

DC: Right now, Europe still has no unified regulators for crypto. Hence,  the only way to let crypto and banking work together is to rejoin the licenses: one crypto license and one banking license. The first one can make an email compliance check for the crypto transactions, and the other can ensure the email compliance check for the standard fiat transactions. 

Maybe a year from now, there will be a clearer picture of how the regulators will want to move on. Probably, there will be one single type of license for banking and virtual asset services. But right now, there is the only way to make it work — to combine different entities having different licenses.

ST:  Some people believe that crypto services will replace traditional banking systems. Meanwhile, we see how both have collaborated to bring new products to the market. How do you see it, and what should we expect?

DC: I don’t think that crypto will ever substitute the traditional banking system for the full scale. In my opinion, it will rather stay an alternative. Both these systems will co-exist and keep on integrating. I suppose there will always be a demand for storing money in the bank, while, when it comes to transferring funds and making online payments, safer and cheaper digital alternatives will have a place to step in. 

ST: Vitalik Buterin has recently said that “crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong.” Do you agree with him? What are the necessary steps for making crypto adoption beneficial for the world’s economy?

DC: We are living in an era where crypto has the power to improve payment and contracting solutions, taking us to a fully new level of transparency. Yet, there is a clear critique for NFT and metaverses alike — they are still not tangible, and they are not backed by anything physical and real. A single picture can cause a lot of hype, and there are cases of money laundering with NFT pictures. It is clear the problem is not the technology but how this technology has been used over the last years — not to bring real value but just to create and exchange intangible assets.