Last week, lawmakers in India introduced a bill in the Parliament that would ban private cryptocurrencies and instead create a national cryptocurrency. The proposed Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill will "create a facilitative framework for creation of the official digital currency to be issued by the Reserve Bank of India." The far-reaching bill would also prohibit all private coins in the country, except for instances promoting blockchain technology uses.
The proposal is supported by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's conservative Bhartiya Janata Party, meaning the chance of the bill's passage is high. The bill comes after an Indian regulatory panel in 2018 recommended banning all private cryptos with a sentence of up to 10 years for lawbreakers. Since India is the world's fifth largest economy with growing foreign direct investment, a total ban on cryptos would likely hurt the crypto space.
Here is the rest of the week in review:
Harvard, Yale, and other U.S. universities have been quietly buying cryptocurrency for the past year via accounts held at Coinbase and other exchanges, CoinDesk reported Monday. Several Ivy League and other top universities' endowments have been purchasing crypto directly on exchanges: "A lot of endowments are allocating a little bit to crypto at the moment." The report says some funds may have held accounts at Coinbase for 18 months, since mid-2019, meaning the endowments are enjoying some outsized returns right now.
Harvard's endowment is the largest with over $40 billion in assets, and Yale has over $30 billion. It is currently unknown how much each fund has allocated in crypto as a percent of their total assets. The report also claims that defined benefit pension plans in the U.S. are "getting close to making allocations." U.S. public pensions own trillions in assets, and their entrance into crypto could spark a further rally.
The Ethereum Foundation and Reddit are partnering to develop blockchain scaling tools, the social media platform announced Wednesday. Reddit said it is expanding its work with the Ethereum Foundation to provide development resources to scaling tools. Reddit said the partnership boosts its commitment to blockchain technology and emphasizes its "decentralized ethos."
Reddit stated: "Our intention is to help accelerate the progress being made on scaling and develop the technology needed to launch large-scale applications like Community Points on Ethereum." The team-up could result in Reddit's creating layer-2 scaling tools or pushing projects from prototype stage to production.
The firm reiterated its commitment to transparency: "The scaling technology developed through this partnership will be open-sourced and publicly available for anyone to use." Reddit added it has several job openings for engineers on its Crypto team, which will lead the scaling efforts. The aim is to scale projects up to Reddit's over 50 million daily users.
Crypto prices rose to $976 billion this week, thanks to the GameStop
The author owns a small amount of BTC.
