24 Million Bank Customers Will Soon Be Able to Buy Bitcoin

July 1, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

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• The US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) named virtual currencies in its “National Priorities” list.

• The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) fined Robinhood $70M for “supervisory failures” (not related to its cryptocurrency platform).

• Blockware Mining, a North American mining firm, announced a raise of $25M.

• Coinbase is looking to build a “crypto app store.”

• NFT of the original source code for the World Wide Web sold for $5.4M in an auction at Sotheby’s. 

• Twitter is handing out 140 Ethereum NFTs on Rarible.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

24 million customers across 650 banks will soon be able to access and trade Bitcoin on their mobile devices.

Michael Del Castillo of Forbes broke the story early yesterday morning. He reports that the enterprise payment giant NCR and digital asset manager NYDIG are partnering with community banks and credit unions across the country to give clients access to cryptocurrency trading services directly through mobile applications.

As part of the deal, financial institutions do not have to directly hold cryptocurrency, and, therefore, go through the subsequent regulatory hoops. Instead, institutions can opt to have NYDIG as their crypto custody provider.

NYDIG has been very active in recent weeks, announcing collaborations with several financial service providers, including FIS, Fiserv, Q2, and Alkami. The digital asset firm’s reach is impressive:

• 24 million customers will be enabled to trade cryptocurrency through NYDIG’s NCR collaboration.

• Customers of FIS will have direct access to purchase Bitcoin via FIS’s Digital One Mobile application.

• Patrick Sells, head of bank solutions at NYDIG, told The Block that Fiserv reaches 40% of all financial institutions, touching nearly every household in America.

• Through Q2, NYDIG estimates that it will bring 18.3 million more users the ability to buy, sell, and hold bitcoin. Sells says that Q2 provides digital banking to 10% of Americans and 30 out of the top 100 banks in the U.S.

• Alkami clients can now interact with Bitcoin through the Alkami Platform.

Recommended Reads

• Patrick Rivera breaks down the different types of crypto tokens:

• CoinShare’s Meltem Demiror’s live-tweeted the House Financial Services Committee’s hearing on cryptocurrencies:

• Messari’s Ryan Selkis outlined a two-day DeFi/Web3 crash course… and I really want to try it:

On The Pod…

Ethereum’s EIP-1559 Will Solve Some Problems But Big Ones Will Remain

Taylor Monahan, CEO of MyCrypto, and Tim Beiko, Ethereum Foundation core-dev facilitator, discuss the upcoming upgrade to the Ethereum network, EIP 1559. Show highlights:

• why Tim believes EIP 1559 is necessary

• what narrative is driving EIP 1559

• what problems the network upgrade will solve

• how Ethereum transactions/fees work

• whether gas prices are correlated with ETH/USD

• the 3 main protocol changes that EIP 1559 proposes

• why Taylor, as the CEO of a wallet provider, is wary of EIP 1559

• how EIP 1559 will affect Ethereum’s block size

• what changes wallet providers are considering due to EIP 1559

• whether ‘Black Swan’ events will be more or less likely after the network upgrade

• how EIP 1559 will affect miners

• whether Tim or Taylor believes that miners could fork Ethereum to stop EIP 1559

• how EIP 1559 will change the state of miner extractable value (MEV)

• how Taylor and Tim feel about the Ethereum as sound money narrative in light of EIP 1559

• when EIP 1559 will go live

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians