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U.S. House Committee Publishes Draft Stablecoin Bill, The Tiny Kingdom Of Bhutan Secretly Held Millions Of Dollars In Cryptocurrency, & more

Apr 17, 2023

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U.S. House Committee Publishes Draft Stablecoin Bill

The bill, available on the committee's hearing page, represents the first major piece of crypto legislation to move in 2023, and follows two key incidents over the past year involving stablecoins: the blowup of terraUSD (UST), which was backed by a token called LUNA, and the second-largest one, USD coin (USDC), temporarily becoming unmoored from $1.
It creates definitions for payment stablecoin issuers, echoing a term former Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) used when he introduced his own stablecoin bill in 2022.

A House Financial Services subcommittee will hold a hearing on stablecoins on Wednesday, featuring Dante Disparte from Circle Internet Financial, which issues USDC; the Blockchain Association's Jake Chervinsky; Columbia Professor Austin Campbell and New York Department of Financial Services Superintendent Adrienne Harris.

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The Tiny Kingdom Of Bhutan Secretly Held Millions Of Dollars In Cryptocurrency

Among the world’s most isolated nations, Bhutan is known for its sweeping vistas, mountaintop monasteries and a Gross National Happiness Index that prioritizes wellbeing over economic growth. With an economy largely built on agriculture and forestry, and infrastructure that began supporting cell phones just two decades ago (traffic lights are still on the horizon), it’s hardly a place one would associate with the crypto boom and bust. And yet over the past year, "the world's happiest country" has quietly dumped millions of dollars into bitcoin, ether and other digital assets.
According to court documents reviewed by Forbes, Bhutan’s $2.9 billion sovereign investment arm was a customer of bankrupt crypto lenders BlockFi and Celsius, which it has never publicly disclosed.

But since at least 2022, Druk has also cultivated a secret crypto portfolio. It was inadvertently exposed amid the fallout of last year’s crypto contagion, which saw the bankruptcy of numerous companies including FTX and another major lender, Voyager. It’s unclear whether Druk’s holdings are tied to recent modernization initiatives in Bhutan, such as a biometric digital identity platform whose first user was the 7-year-old crown prince.

Last month, lawyers for BlockFi, which filed for bankruptcy in November just days after FTX, served a complaint to Druk in Thimphu, Bhutan’s capital and home to its royal family. BlockFi is accusing the fund of defaulting on its repayment of a $30 million loan. The claim noted that in February 2022, Druk agreed to borrow 30 million USD Coin, a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar. However, BlockFi alleged that Druk “failed and refused” to repay the loan in full, even after the lender liquidated a collateral of 1,888 bitcoin (worth $76.5 million at the time of the loan), leaving an unpaid balance of $820,000.
“We do not have any comments as the matter with BlockFi has been settled. We are not able to comment due to confidentiality,”

Wealth managers have speculated for several years that government-backed funds are beginning to buy up cryptocurrency. For now the only known links emerge when these funds buy stakes in companies that own crypto, says Duncan Bonfield, chief executive of the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds. For example, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund — the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — is a shareholder of business intelligence firm MicroStrategy, whose massive bitcoin holdings meant that the fund incidentally owned 600 bitcoin as of 2020. Singapore’s $403 billion fund Temasek has also been widely theorized to have held crypto, but denied the claim last year.

Full Article

Sweden Drives Final Nail Into Its Bitcoin Mining Industry With Tax Hike

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