Then 2022 came
Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Research
Kraken On-Chain Analysis (Aug 2022): Mixed Signals
Kraken Blog | Sep 8, 2022
Overview
- Over the last few months, the crypto industry faced numerous headwinds.
- These included the death spiral of the Terra ecosystem, the insolvency of over-leveraged hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, and major crypto lending platforms – like Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager and Vauld – taking drastic measures to accommodate “extreme market conditions.”
- Due to these developments, market participants have been forced to deleverage, contributing to downward market pressures since May. That trend broke in late July as cryptoassets rebounded, but August brought a pullback once again as the macroeconomic environment remained difficult.
See: Suspected Sanctions Breach? The UK Forces Crypto Exchanges to Immediately Report
- Between the challenging crypto market and the difficult macroeconomic environment, it’s tough to anticipate what lies ahead. However, on-chain data can help identify the signal amid the noise by providing evidence of trends in network usage and demand.
- A lot has happened so far in 2022 and on-chain data suggests mixed demand and usage activity across cryptoassets. However, this month, overall activity trended negative. Still, the emerging pattern indicates ETH demand could continue to rise throughout 2022 if all goes well with The Merge.
- On-chain fundamentals:
- Our findings suggest that BTC’s on-chain demand and usage fell as YTD and MoM volume and fees declined.
- On the other hand, ETH outperformed this month, as Merge anticipation helped it post MoM growth in dominance, on-chain volume and fees in August. ALGO continued to perform poorly across the board on a monthly and YTD basis, except in daily active addresses, which rose +69% in August.
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Read the 14 page Docsend report --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Coincub: Top 5 Countries with the Best Crypto Tax for Residents
Coincub | Jon Lea | Sep 8, 2022
Overall, tax havens traditionally offer highly attractive tax concessions to attract businesses and overseas investors. This list takes those countries which aren’t purely out to attract overseas investors but have decided to adopt a policy of low or generous tax rates on crypto investment for its domestic population.
1. Germany: Having a very generous no tax on gains if your crypto is kept for over a year, seems to be perfectly in keeping with a country whose population has a long tradition of saving as opposed to spending. This, and the fact that Bitcoin can be held in traditional savings accounts in Germany, is what keeps it on our list of low crypto taxation economies.
2. Italy: Gains sourced in Italy are taxable as income, with an exemption from tax on crypto asset gains that do not exceed a whopping €51,000, whilst foreign income and gains can be sheltered from Italian tax.
See: Before receiving your salary in crypto you should consider these things
3. Switzerland: Overall capital gains for individuals investing in crypto are tax exempt and the country also has a generous income allowance which can be up to around 18,000 US dollars before tax kicks in. Much depends on exactly where you live.
4. Singapore: Purely on tax terms, it is a highly desirable place to trade and invest in cryptocurrency with low taxes on high earners - as little as 22% and no capital gains tax on crypto earnings.
5. Slovenia: Slovenia levies no capital gains tax on individuals when they sell bitcoin. Also, crypto gains are not considered to be income. Enterprises have a tougher time, however, and are required to pay tax on crypto at the corporate rate. Things may change as the country seeks to reappraise its tax law.
Crypto tax haven or crypto low tax economy?
Traditional tax havens aren’t full-blown economies as such, they are not competing with mainstream economies in terms of economic power – although they draw their investors from such locations.
See: Canada: Release Of Draft Tax Legislation For Consultation including GST/HST for Crypto Mining
Tax havens tend to be small in physical size but with inordinately generous and incentivizing tax advantages overall for investors and businesses which locate in them but generate income from overseas. Broadly speaking, where traditional taxed-based mainstream economies encompass low crypto tax advantages, they are offered to residents and citizens rather than purely outsiders.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Blockdata: State of Crypto Banks in 2022
Blockdata | Aug 28, 2022
Current market overview
- The global number of people who own crypto skyrocketed 178% in 2021, from 106M in 2020 to 295M in 2021.
- Despite the increase in the number of users, cryptocurrencies suffered a steep decline this year after the industry market cap plunged to $1.6T on January 24, 2022, from $2.3T at the start of 2022 — a decline of 30% in about 3 weeks.
- Then, the collapse of the terraUSD stablecoin in May 2022, followed by the liquidation of hedge fund Three Arrows Capital in June, impacted the market as Bitcoin lost about 58% of value in the 2Q22, reporting its worst quarterly performance since 2011.
What are crypto banks?
Crypto banks (also referred to as digital asset institutions) allow users to buy, sell, and hold digital assets and offer financial tools such as prepaid debit cards and access to cryptocurrency wallets.
See: The OCC is Facing Calls to Pull Guidance That Allows Banks to Do Some Crypto Business
- Crypto banks can offer higher yields than traditional banks because they do not have the same reserve requirements.
- These platforms may be easier to access than traditional banks because there is less paperwork , fewer regulatory requirements, and credit checks involved in lending and borrowing crypto.
- Unlike traditional regulated banks, crypto lenders are not limited by restrictions on the capital they must retain or rules regarding transparency of reserves.
- These customers face additional risks due to volatility in the market, tech failure, and hacks that can impact the value of their savings.
What's next for crypto banks?
- Crypto banks such as Nexo are partnering with incumbent investment banks to acquire startups in the industry. This can be a good opportunity because consolidation will help these banks improve their operational efficiencies.
- Following the Celsius bankruptcy, these banks are expected to be more cautious and transparent. Taking steps in this direction will further help investors to start believing in their services and offerings.
See: Warren Buffett invests $1 billion in a crypto-friendly bank – maybe not ‘rat poison’ after all?
- Regulators are now admitting that banking in all forms should cover the same protection regime as traditional finance.
- Some of the prominent agencies in the US are defining frameworks to regulate cryptocurrencies, using their own set of methodologies and data.
- However, a global regulatory framework is required to manage risks and threats across countries' jurisdictions.
- Crypto banks will likely see continued growth as the uncertainty clears and a more conducive regulatory environment is developed.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Nvidia: Universal Scene Description (USD) as the Language of the Metaverse
NVIDIA Blog | Rev Lebaredian and Michael Kass | Aug 9, 2022
The web has evolved from static documents to dynamic applications involving rich interactive media. Yet despite the fact that we live in a 3D world, the web remains overwhelmingly two-dimensional. Now we find ourselves at the threshold of the web’s next major advancement: the advent of the 3D Internet or metaverse.
Instead of linking together 2D pages, the metaverse will link together virtual worlds. Websites will become interconnected 3D spaces akin to the world we live in and experience every day.
- Many of these virtual worlds will be digital twins reflecting the real world, linked and synchronized in real time. Others will be designed for entertainment, socializing, gaming, learning, collaboration, or commerce.
- No matter what the purpose of any individual site, what will make the entire metaverse a success will be the same thing that has made the 2D web so successful: universal interoperability based on open standards and protocols.
See: Highlights from McKinsey’s “Value Creation In The Metaverse” Report + Web3 for Skeptics by Brainsy’s CIO
- The most fundamental standard needed to create the metaverse is the description of a virtual world. At NVIDIA, we believe the first version of that standard already exists. It is Universal Scene Description (USD)—an open and extensible ecosystem for describing, composing, simulating, and collaborating within 3D worlds, originally invented by Pixar Animation Studios.
USD potential to serve as the HTML of the metaverse
- USD is a scene description: a set of data structures and APIs to create, represent, and modify virtual worlds.
- The representation is rich. It supports not only the basics of virtual worlds like geometry, cameras, lights, and materials, but also a wide variety of relationships among them, including property inheritance, instancing and specialization.
- It includes features necessary for scaling to large data sets like lazy loading and efficient retrieval of time-sampled data.
- It is tremendously extensible, allowing users to customize data schemas, input and output formats, and methods for finding assets.
- USD covers the very broad range of requirements that Pixar found necessary to make its feature films.
- Layers are probably the single most innovative feature of USD. Conceptually, they have some similarities to layers in Adobe Photoshop: but instead of modifying the pixels of an image, USD layers modify the properties of the composed scene and provide a powerful mechanism for collaboration.
See:
Understanding The New V2P and P2V Metaverse Commerce Models
7 Essential Ingredients of an (Open) Metaverse Framework
NVIDIA believes that USD should serve as the HTML of the metaverse: the declarative specification of the contents of a web site. But just as HTML evolved from the limited static documents of HTML 1 to the dynamic applications of HTML 5, it is clear that USD will need to evolve to meet the needs of the metaverse.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Real Estate Fintechs Feel the Heat as Macro Trends Unfold
TechCrunch| Mary Ann Azevedo | Aug 28, 2022
Then 2022 came
In 2020, historically low interest rates led to a surge in both rates and purchases. Existing home buyers rushed to alter the terms of their loans and aspiring home buyers took advantage of those low rates to purchase homes. More people were spending more time at home than ever due to COVID and many needed more space. Many relocated to new homes due to remote work possibilities.
This led to a boom in business for startups catering to home buyers. Companies (like digital mortgage lender Better.com) couldn’t keep up and had to go on a hiring spree to meet all the consumer demand. Venture dollars flowed into proptech after proptech.
See: The Growing Relevance Of Bitcoin In Real Estate
Then 2022 came: Mortgage interest rates, which began their ascent in 2021, continued to climb…significantly. Prospective home buyers, turned off by the rate surge as well as the competitive and overheated housing markets, began to reconsider their plans, as buying was suddenly far less appealing so they turned to rental markets like Rentola.
- At the same time, as the venture market slowed dramatically and suddenly, raising capital was much harder.
- Layoffs in the sector began — and they took place in a range of real estate tech companies, big and small.
- Digital mortgage lender Better.com (first round of four layoffs; you can read that here)
- Real estate tech startup Reali announced last week that it had begun a shutdown
Many fintechs are now focusing on nonprofits
Last week, I came across, or was pitched, several tidbits of news that made me realize that an increasing number of fintech companies are launching products to help nonprofits and charities more efficiently move, raise and distribute more money.
- First up, fintech startups Highnote and GiveCard said they are partnering to help nonprofits, shelters and governments issue prepaid debit cards to the “financially vulnerable” communities they serve. Studies show direct cash payments can put people on a path to permanent housing and end their reliance on predatory lenders.
See: Why BNPL Swedish giant Klarna has sights set on Canada
- Los Angeles–based B Generous, a self-described “fintech for good” platform, has launched Donate Now, Pay Later (DNPL), a new tool it says allows donors “to make contributions to their favorite nonprofits through a proprietary philanthropic credit product called a Point of Donation Loan
- PayPal is expanding further into the charitable donations business with its August 25 launch of support for Grant Payments.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Highlights from McKinsey’s “Value Creation In The Metaverse” Report + Web3 for Skeptics by Brainsy’s CIO
Medium | Lou Kerner | Aug 29, 2022
McKinsey recently published a comprehensive 77 page report titled “Value Creation In the Metaverse — The Real Business of The Virtual World.” Seven McKinsey partners were credited as the writers of the report, which included interviews with 13 senior “metaverse experts”, input from the 60 members of McKinsey Technology Council, and surveys of more than 3,400 consumers.
The ultimate conclusion of the report is that the metaverse is simply too big of an opportunity for execs to ignore, and too impactful on society for regulators to not start taking action. That said, at 77 pages, most people won’t take the time to read it. So below are my 8 highlights:
The Definition of the Metaverse Continues To Evolve
While the definition is still fluid , McKinsey believes that the metaverse is the next iteration of the internet, where it becomes something we are immersed in, rather than something we just view. Regardless of one’s exact definitions of the metaverse, it has several foundational characteristics:
- a sense of immersion
- real-time interactivity, &
- user agency
The Value Of The Metaverse Could Equal $5 Trillion In 2030
While others see even a bigger market (e.g. Citicorp sees an $8-$13 trillion metaverse market in 2030), McKinsey estimates a $4-$5 trillion market in 2030 and believes the metaverse represents the biggest growth opportunity in multiple industries including e-commerce ($2-$2.6 trillion), e-learning ($144-$206 billion), and the advertising market ($108-$125 billion).
3. The Technology Required To Realize The Potential Of The Metaverse Doesn’t Exist Yet
- The report highlighted the significant technological advancements required across multiple technologies, including compute infrastructure, network infrastructure, and devices, for the potential of the metaverse to be realized.
- For example, today, concurrency limits cap the number of players on gaming platforms. But many more users will need to be able to be online at once for the metaverse to be realized.
- With regards to network infrastructure, high-latency “lagging” creates a sensation of video and/or audio being slow for metaverse applications that require a high rate of frames-per-second.
- Finally, the metaverse today is largely accessed through devices with flat screens (i.e televisions, PCs, and smartphones). While McKinsey expects flat screens to continue to dominate for another five years, the metaverse needs AR/VR and eventually extended reality (XR) to achieve a increasingly immersive experiences.
- Yet significant advancements in AR/VR are required to enable deep immersion.
- And XR devices like contact lenses and brain-computer interfaces (e.g. Neuralink) are at least a decade away.
Continue to the full article --> here
Download the 77 page PDF report --> here
Brainsy | Brian Price | Aug 2022
Web3 Defined (for Skeptics) including Web2 vs Web3, Blockchain, DAOs, NFTs, Stablecoins, Crowdfunding and more
View the 54 page doc send report --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Card Usage is Declining to Digital Wallets: Fee Structure is Unsupportable and Facing Competition
Cashless | Rich Turin | Aug 27, 2022
FIS Global Payment report: here
“Mobile wallets’ share of global POS transactions jumped over 21% YoY in 2021 rising to 28.6% of global POS transaction value, or over US$13.3 trillion.
- Cards are under attack from BNPL, digital wallets, fintechs, and in the near future CBDCs. All will reduce card’s fat margins.
- “Credit card use dropped in 2021 and debit share increased; however, card usage is increasingly shifting to pass-through mobile wallets.
- APAC continues to lead the way in mobile wallet adoption with 44.1% of 2021 POS transaction value; mobile wallets are expected to outpace all other POS payment methods combined in APAC by 2023.”
See: Process Flow Comparison: How VISA Works When Swiping a Credit Card at a Merchant’s Shop VS Digital Wallet
- Globally mobile wallets are expected to rise to 38.6% share (over US$22.7 trillion) by 2025.
- Credit cards are clearly a good business, and while no one disputes their utility, it comes at a cost. How much it’s worth in a new era where digital connectivity is ubiquitous and CBDCs are in use is the question. Source The Economist: here or without paywall here
Digital wallets are “Made in China”
- Excluding China, where mobile wallets account for 54% of all transactions, cash and cards are the leading POS payment method in APAC.
- “Cash represents 16% of regional POS transaction value, yet remains the top payment method in half of the APAC markets in our report, including Indonesia (51%), Thailand (63.4%) and Vietnam (53.8%).
- Despite this, cash is projected to fall to less than 8% of POS transaction value in APAC by 2025.”
See: Will Top of Digital Wallets Threaten Traditional Credit Card Markets?
In South East Asia most nations prefer digital wallets to cards. This makes sense as more than six in ten people in the region are unbanked. Most of these unbanked will never be part of the credit card system and see digital wallets as their entry point to financial inclusion.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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