Turner Wright
According to IMF marketing department financial counsellor and director Tobias Adrian and legal department general counsel and director Rhoda Weeks-Brown, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin (BTC) may catch on in countries without stable inflation and exchange rates, and provide unbanked people with the means to make payments. However, the cost to an economy could be significant.
The two IMF officials alleged that countries adopting cryptocurrencies as national currencies or “granting cryptoassets legal tender status” risked domestic prices becoming highly unstable, and assets being used contrary to anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism measures, in addition to having issues surrounding macroeconomic stability and the environment.
“If goods and services were priced in both a real currency and a cryptoasset, households and businesses would spend significant time and resources choosing which money to hold as opposed to engaging in productive activities,” said Adrian and Weeks-Brown. “Government revenues would be exposed to exchange rate risk if taxes were quoted in advance in a cryptoasset while expenditures remained mostly in the local currency, or vice versa.”
Brian Quarmby
The NBA’s Chicago Bulls have launched NFTs depicting six championship wins from the 1990s via leading e-commerce platform Shopify. Shopify is a multinational firm that provides website-based storefronts and payments infrastructure. Shopify president, Harley Finklestein, announced the NFT drop on Twitter earlier today.
According to Finklestein, the Chicago Bulls franchise is one Shopify's first partners to launch an NFT storefront on the platform, with Shopify's president noting the service will only be available to a “select few” in its formative stages.
Shopify integrated Sweet’s NFT marketplace in May, allowing its customers to issue and sell nonfungible tokens directly through the popular e-commerce interface. Sweet supports NFTs issued via Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard, Simple Ledger Protocol’s SLP token standard, and Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain.
The Chicago Bulls’ NFTs were minted on Flow, which also hosts the officially licensed NBA Topshot tokenized highlight collectibles.
Martin Young
Amazon has refuted recent speculation it may be readying to support Bitcoin payments, asserting it currently has no plans for BTC. According to a Reuters report on July 27 citing a spokesperson from the firm, Amazon remains interested in the crypto industry but has no specific plans to onboard digital assets for payments just yet:
“Notwithstanding our interest in the space, the speculation that has ensued around our specific plans for cryptocurrencies is not true.”
However, the spokesperson did not deny that Amazon is researching crypto payments, adding: “We remain focused on exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on Amazon.”
On July 22, Amazon posted a job opening for a digital currency and blockchain product lead. Four days later, London’s City A.M. newspaper ran a story citing an “insider” who claimed Amazon was “definitely” preparing to support Bitcoin payments and launch a native token — igniting frenzied anticipation for Amazon's purported crypto plans.
This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
