But Jack, what happened to Web4?
Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Web3, Decentralization, DAOs
Jack Dorsey’s is Building an Extra Decentralized ‘Web5’ on Bitcoin with Digital Identity Layer
Decrypt | Kate Irwin | June 10, 2022
But Jack, what happened to Web4?
Jack Dorsey thinks Web3 is a joke, so he’s making Web5 instead. Dorsey’s TBD, a subsidiary company within Block (previously known as Square), announced today that it is building “Web5: An extra decentralized web platform.”
See: Jack Dorsey resigns as CEO of Twitter
“On the web today, identity and personal data have become the property of third parties. Web5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to your applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals,” TBD’s website reads.
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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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PayPal Finally Allows Users to Transfer Crypto to Other Wallets and Exchanges
TechCrunch | Mary Ann Azevedo | Jun 7, 2022
In response to customer demand, PayPal announced today that its users will now be able to transfer cryptocurrency from their accounts to other wallets and exchanges, and send crypto to other PayPal users 'in seconds'.
The new functionality is only available to users in the U.S., and for security reasons, PayPal says it has implemented an additional identity verification process for users before they can transfer any crypto. The rollout will be a gradual one with select U.S. users being able to do so starting today, and with other “eligible” U.S. customers — those who complete the identity verification process — in the coming weeks.
See:
PayPal’s role in EU Antitrust complaint about Apple Wallet
PayPal is Exploring the Launch of its own Stablecoin
Customers are responsible for network fees when they conduct external transfers, which depend on the blockchain and vary depending on the crypto asset. Internal transfers — PayPal to PayPal — have no fees.
Jose Fernandez da Ponte, SVP and general manager of blockchain, crypto and digital currencies at PayPal:
This is a natural conversion for our users who want to do more with their digital assets. We see ourselves as a conduit between the fiat, or traditional finance, environment and the web3 environment. We are enabling connectivity to other wallets, exchanges and applications.
PayPal gave its users the ability to buy, sell and hold crypto in October of 2020. Then, in late March of 2021, PayPal announced the launch of Checkout with Crypto, a feature that allowed consumers to check out at millions of online businesses using cryptocurrency. If you are looking to provide crypto services to your existing customer base, you should consider working with a crypto marketing agency to help your team navigate without any missteps.
That feature expanded on PayPal’s current investments in the cryptocurrency market, which include its partnership with Paxos to power its service that allows customers to buy, sell and hold a range of cryptocurrencies and its acquisition of cryptocurrency security startup Curv. At Consensus last year, Fernandez da Ponte confirmed that offering its users the ability to transfer would be next.
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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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$40 billion payments giant now accepting USDC stablecoin
CNBC | Ryan Browne | June 7, 2022
AMSTERDAM — Online payments company Checkout.com says it will settle payments for its merchants round-the-clock using stablecoins, making it the last major financial services firm taking the plunge into crypto.
The start-up, which competes with the likes of PayPal and Stripe, said Tuesday it is launching a feature that allows businesses to accept and make payments in USD Coin, a popular stablecoin that's pegged to the U.S. dollar. Checkout.com said it is offering the new payment method through a partnership with Fireblocks, a crypto security firm.
See: Crypto Payments Report 2022: How digital currencies are revolutionizing commerce, corporates and culture
Stablecoins are a key part of the crypto market, helping investors trade in and out of digital currencies rapidly without having to go through banks. With a circulating supply of more than $50 billion, USDC is the world's second-biggest stablecoin.
The feature will allow merchants to settle payments even on weekends and public holidays, something that's not currently possible with fiat currencies, according to Jess Houlgrave, Checkout.com's head of crypto strategy. She used the example of someone buying bitcoin from a crypto exchange. While the user can get their bitcoin straight away, how banks and card schemes like Visa and Mastercard operate means merchants may not receive the funds for several days.
"Between the time that they've sent the bitcoin, and the time that they receive those funds, they have a working capital constraint," Houlgrave told CNBC on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam.
More: QR Code Triggers Instant Crypto Payments and Self-serve Frosty
Checkout.com said it has tested the feature privately with select clients, facilitating $300 million in transaction volumes in the past few months. It now plans to roll the product out globally, with Bahamas-based crypto exchange FTX among the first to use it.
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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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Do Industry Operators, Researchers, and Regulators Agree On How Big Crypto Crime Is?
Coindesk | Jack Schickler | May 9, 2022
The European Union is in late-stage talks over how to implement new rules intended to curb dodgy behavior that uses virtual assets – but estimates of the share of crypto payments linked to financial crime vary wildly from 0.15% to a whopping 46% of transaction volumes.
But attempting to get a handle on the exact scale of unlawful virtual asset activity isn’t easy. It usually relies on identifying crypto addresses that appear suspect and totting up their trade volume – but illicit users generally prefer to hide in the shadows.
See: CipherTrace August 2021 Crypto Crime Report: Crypto Fraud Dips as DeFi Hacks Grow
People in the crypto industry like to quote the figures on the lower end of the range, and on Friday, Binance’s CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao tweeted statistics to argue that crypto is safer than fiat. According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, money laundering through conventional finance is worth as much as $2 trillion, comparable to the total value of all the world’s crypto markets combined.
But regulators are worried not just about the overall volumes, but what they represent as a share of the crypto sector. They’ve noted how fast virtual assets are gaining popularity, and are thinking about what the scale of the problem might be in future, not just today.
In a report published in July 2021, FATF noticed significant variations in estimates of illicit crypto trades both over time and among different analysts, such as Chainalysis, Elliptic and Merkle Science – which could be, Grauer said, because they look at a different universe of transactions or currencies.
Whatever the reason, FATF believes that the analysts’ estimates of the percentage of transactions that are unlawful, which range from 0.1% to 15.4%, are all too low.
See: Senator Cynthia Lummis’ landmark crypto bill: Full Draft
This matters for live policy. In March, the European Parliament voted to introduce new checks on the identities of those making even the smallest crypto payments – including, most controversially, when transactions are made with unhosted wallets that aren’t managed by a regulated exchange.
The idea – whose details still need to be finalized with national governments – is that law enforcement would then be able to more easily track crypto transactions that could be used to fund serious crimes, such as terrorism or child pornography. But the move met with a slew of opposition from industry players such as Coinbase (COIN), who said the bill could stifle innovation and harm privacy.
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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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Singapore Announces Project Guardian to the Value Created in Leveraging Asset Tokenization
Crowdfund Insider | | May 31, 2022
Source: Pixabay
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has announced the launch of Project Guardian, an effort to reveal the value created in leveraging asset tokenization. Singapore has long been a top Asian Fintech hub and there are multiple Fintechs in the digital asset sector based in the country.
Heng Swee Keat, Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic Policies, announced the initiative today at the Asia Tech X Singapore Summit. The Deputy Prime Minister expressed Singapore’s openness to emerging disruption as well as the potential of Web3
See: Keynote by Mr Tan Keng Heng, Executive Director, MAS: Responding to Global Trends and Returning to Fundamentals
The first pilot will be led by DBS Bank Ltd., JP Morgan, and Marketnode. This initial phase involves the creation of a permissioned liquidity pool comprising tokenized bonds and deposits. The pilot aims to carry out secured borrowing and lending on a public blockchain-based network through the execution of smart contracts.
The four identified areas that MAS seeks to research include:
- Open, interoperable networks – Explore the use of public blockchains
- Trust anchors – Establish a trusted environment for the execution of DeFi protocols
- Asset tokenization – Examine the representation of securities in the form of digital bearer assets and the use of tokenised deposits issued by deposit-taking institutions on public blockchains
- Institutional grade DeFi protocols – Study the introduction of regulatory safeguards and controls into DeFi protocols to mitigate against market manipulation and operational risk
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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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What do you mean NFTs can now by cloned by ‘Mimics’?
Cointelegraph Magazine | Kelsie Nabben | May 31, 2022
In the precariousness of Web3 open-source code, iterative development and “move fast” ethos, things break [and] things are also made. A new project allows anyone to create a copy of someone else’s NFT, aptly named “Mimics.”
Cloning your NFTs
Anonymous Founder, Mimics:
I think I just broke the NFT market
It turns out that art NFTs have a line of code in them called “tokenURI” or “URI” that acts like a pointer to the image being displayed. As the code is public, you can redirect your own NFT to make it look like anyone else’s. If you want your NFT to display a Cypherpunk, a Bored Ape, or how about a Pudgy Penguin?
See: After you die what happens to your digital assets and NFTs?
This means that your rare and expensive cartoon image NFT can essentially be cloned, not just by right-clicking copy-save as, and making another NFT of the same image but as a verifiable copy that has remnants of the real thing through code. Users rushing to clone a Bored Ape should beware, however:
Joni Pirovich, Crypto lawyer:
This could be a blatant breach of copyright or other IP. To determine rights that attach to the ownership of the token, and any image or metadata associated with the token, the buyer should try to identify whether any terms and conditions and any IP license applies to the ‘sale.
What does this mean?
At this stage, Mimics don’t have implications for NFTs beyond artworks (such as copying NFTs with distinct functionalities to attest to membership). Only the metadata such as name, description, media and other attributes that are provided by the tokenURI can be mimicked. Instead of being “law” to provably enforce the rules of the system, code here is the undermining factor in NFT security.
See: UK Court recognizes NFTs as ‘private property’
Mimics prove the thesis by well-known cryptographer “Moxie” that crypto lacks cryptography in some respects — referring to cryptographically secure components of the codebase that make aspects of unique ownership provable, private and/or permissioned. Ironically, someone has already used the mimic contract to copy Moxie’s NFTs. The purpose of a blockchain ledger is to prove provenance, yet it is still extremely difficult to verify that an NFT is from a legitimate artist.
Current NFT standards do the opposite of protecting your art at the code level. Maybe this article and the associated code will provide some impetus” for a future where ERC standards are improved and iterated on and become even more widely adopted. The goal is to build a better standard for their information infrastructures.
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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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Senator Cynthia Lummis’ landmark crypto bill: Full Draft
The Block | Kollen Post | May 27, 2022
US Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) has spent months teasing details of a comprehensive bill that addresses crypto regulation. The Block has obtained a draft version dated March 1 that offers key details about the scope and impact of the bill.
The 70-page draft focuses on numerous aspects of US crypto regulation. These areas include which activities would fall under the jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other federal regulators.
Extensive sections on stablecoin regulation and digital asset tax policy address many of the key blind spots in crypto regulation today.
See: SEC Regulation: Constructing a Crypto Regulatory Framework – New Tech, Old Rules
The bill appears to place significant aspects of the US crypto industry under the auspices of the CFTC.
“Except as otherwise provided by this section, the [CFTC] shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any agreement, contract, or transaction involving a contract of sale of a digital asset that is offered, solicited, traded, executed, or otherwise dealt in interstate commerce.”
Perhaps crucially, the draft bill adds the term “ancillary asset” to the Securities Exchange Act, defining it as:
“An intangible asset that is offered, sold, or otherwise provided to a person in connection with the purchase and sale of a security through an arrangement or scheme that constitutes an investment contract.”
Read: Yellen Renews Call for Stablecoin Regulation After Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin tumbles
Further, an ancillary asset “may include a digital asset, as defined in section 9801 of title 31, United States Code, that is used to facilitate the governance of a distributed ledger technology network or decentralized autonomous organization.
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View the crypto bill full draft --> 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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