The US House Financial Services Committee is exerting pressure on Meta, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg, to disclose its plans regarding five cryptocurrency and Blockchain-related trademark applications the company had filed in March 2022.
Maxine Waters, the committee’s ranking member, highlighted in a letter that these applications suggest Meta’s ongoing interest in expanding its involvement in the digital assets ecosystem, despite earlier claims by the tech giant that there was no ongoing digital assets work.
The trademark filings cover various services related to crypto and Blockchain assets, including trading, exchange, payments, transfers, wallets, and associated hardware and software infrastructure.
Waters posed specific questions to Meta, seeking information on how the company intends to respond to the Notices of Allowance (NOAs) sent for each filing, as well as inquiring about potential plans for Web 3.0, crypto, digital wallet projects, and the launch of a crypto payments platform. In addition, she also sought insights into Meta’s research on Stablecoins, potential partnerships with Stablecoin projects, considerations for adopting distributed ledger technology (DLT), and how its technology might facilitate crypto-related functions within its metaverse.
Cryptocurrency investment firm CoinShares foresees a significant development in the Stablecoin landscape in 2024, anticipating the emergence of a Bitcoin-based Stablecoin that could potentially rival the speed and cost efficiency of contemporary Stablecoins.
In their latest outlook report, CoinShares analysts, including head of Bitcoin research Christopher Bendiksen and analyst Matthew Kimmel, have expressed optimism about the viability of Bitcoin as a platform for Stablecoins. They said that Bitcoin Blockchain’s extensive history, stability, minimal technical debt, and robust assurances position it as an ideal foundation for Stablecoin projects.
They said that while Bitcoin-based Stablecoins have been introduced in the past, the year 2024 will witness the accessibility of a Bitcoin-focused Stablecoin project for users.
“Successful integration of Stablecoin spending into businesses and Bitcoin plugins could contribute to increased usage and bolster Bitcoin’s monetary properties, enhancing its resistance to censorship. Despite acknowledging existing technical barriers and historical user preferences for faster and lower-cost networks, CoinShares remains optimistic about the potential for a Bitcoin-based Stablecoin to gain traction in the evolving cryptocurrency landscape,” they wrote in their report.
While various Bitcoin infrastructure firms have already introduced Stablecoins on Bitcoin’s second layer, the report suggests the possibility of Stablecoins eventually making their way to Bitcoin’s base layer.
MoonDao co-founder Pablo Moncada has said that his decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) could change the face of space travel and interstellar exploration, and, if successful, might even see people living on the moon by 2030.
He said that for the last two years, MoonDAO has been working to create a self-sustaining colony on the moon.
“Space exploration is extremely “walled-off,” dominated by government space programs or well-funded private companies. MoonDAO, also known as the Internet’s space program, was created to flip the script and get everyday people to fund space-related research and trav,” Moncada told Cointelegraph.
He added that though they may not have placed anyone on the moon yet or come close to it, they have already successfully sent people into space. In November 2023, MoonDAO voted to send Coby Cotton, a cast member of the YouTube channel Dude Perfect, into space on one of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceships.
“A DAO has never sent someone to space before, so to watch that vote happen in real time was kind of trippy. It was like, ‘this is real you know’,” he said.
