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When you talk about crypto, I thought that, to be honest with you, was the stuff that kills Superman, says Crawley Town manager John Yems at a press conference to mark the takeover which may prove to be the first step in English footballs cryptocurrency revolution.

Crypto virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum underpinned by blockchain technology has taken the world of football by storm over the past couple of years as clubs including Barcelona to Manchester United sign lucrative deals with firms in the sector, amid excitement but also fierce criticism.

I aint got a clue, Yems, 62, tells The Athletic. But how many people in football know what their owners do?, or where they get their money from?

Yems has got a point, but this is a new frontier for the English Football League as League Twos Crawley become the first club in the league to be owned by a cryptocurrency group after Turkish steel magnate Ziya Eren sold his controlling stake to WAGMI United for a fee of around 5 million.

WAGMI United is the same US consortium that announced its intention to buy Bradford City, another fourth tier side, last year but abandoned the project after a war of words with Bradfords owner Stefan Rupp, the two parties disputing whether or not they ever had an agreement.

WAGMI which stands for Were All Gonna Make It, a popular expression among online cryptocurrency enthusiasts made a series of PR missteps at the time, such as telling the Washington Post our hope is that it works. Theres not that much downside if it doesnt.

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'Crypto? I thought that was the stuff that kills Superman' - Crawley's cryptocurrency takeover - The Athletic

The creators of Unicorn Hunters, an online reality show where budding entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a celebrity panel, are launching a new cryptocurrency.

It may sound gimmicky, but the forthcoming Unicoin could come with a layer of accountability absent from most crypto tokens. Thats because TransparentBusiness, the majority owner of the show, says it plans to register Unicoin with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Unicoin would be one of thousands of digital assets backed by the distributed ledger technology known as blockchain, but one of only a few voluntarily complying with securities laws. Its partly a bet that the SEC will expand its oversight of the $2 trillion crypto industry.

We anticipate that they will begin to have a regulatory presence at some point, Unicoin co-creator Moe Vela, an attorney and former senior adviser to Joe Biden when he was vice president, said in an interview. I think youre going to see regulatory guidelines and parameters that come in the next year.

The SEC has led the charge in the nascent battle over crypto regulation in Washington, having accused dozens of crypto players of using newfangled technology to violate old-fashioned securities laws against ripping off investors.

Cryptos proponents view it as one of many potential utopian applications of the blockchain technology, while its critics see fraud, speculation and criminal activity. Crypto transactions go through peer-to-peer computer networks rather than a central intermediary such as a bank, and criminals have used them for illicit transactions such as ransomware attacks; the International Monetary Fund has warned crypto could undermine monetary policy and financial stability.

In an executive order last month, President Joe Biden asked the SEC and other regulatory agencies, such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help come up with a whole-of-government approach to making the industry safe.

In Congress, most lawmakers seem oblivious to crypto and intimidated by the endless jargon associated with the technology. Among the few lawmakers paying attention, there are fans; a small bipartisan group of House members has proposed exempting crypto from SEC oversight, arguing the federal government shouldnt pursue regulation through enforcement, echoing the pleas of the industry for Congress to step in.

We really should acknowledge that our banking and securities laws some of which date back to the 1930s are not equipped to provide a framework for regulating something that no one could have even imagined 20 years ago, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, told HuffPost.

Partisan battle lines havent settled, but Democrats are a bit more skeptical. Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), for instance, has described digital assets as mainly beneficial for criminals, letting money launderers, hackers, and rogue regimes invent new ways to hide and move money in the dark, as he said at a hearing last month.

Brown told HuffPost Republicans calling for new legislation want to coddle the industry rather than crack down on fraud.

They say theyre for regulation, but theyre not going to do anything substantive that anybody in the industry would oppose, Brown said.

For now, Brown is happy to let executive agencies try to enforce existing laws. The SEC has brought more than 70 enforcement actions against digital asset market participants over the past decade, including an ongoing lawsuit alleging the company Ripple Labs violated securities laws by failing to register its XRP digital asset with the commission, thereby depriving investors of disclosures about XRP and Ripples business.

Commissioner Gary Gensler has spoken stridently about crypto, likening the industry to the Wild West. He said exchanges where people buy and sell crypto are illegal if theyre not registered. Its a question of whether theyre registered or theyre operating outside of the law and Ill leave it at that, he said last month.

Republican SEC appointees have complained the commissions enforcement actions are a piecemeal approach that leaves the crypto industry unsure of when its crypto coins count as securities or another kind of asset not subject to securities laws. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, for instance, has said that the best-known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, counts as a commodity, not a security. Theres no company or central entity behind Bitcoin, making it one of the most decentralized digital assets that exists.

Todd Phillips, an expert on financial regulation and corporate governance at the progressive Center for American Progress, said its clear enough current laws already cover much crypto activity, theyre just being ignored.

Many issuers of crypto tokens are failing to register their offerings with the SEC, Phillips said. If you want to sell tokens to the public and do it right, federal law requires you to register.

Phillips said the reason the crypto industry remains essentially unregulated is that the SEC doesnt have the resources to enforce the law at the scale needed to bring the necessary amount of lawsuits.

Lawmakers have been bamboozled by new financial technology before. If Congress exempted the crypto industry from regulation, Phillips has argued, it would be making the same mistake it did in 2000, when lawmakers carved financial derivatives contracts out of commodities regulation. Back then, members of Congress talked about derivatives the same way many now rave about crypto, complaining that outdated statutes were stifling financial innovation and threatening Americas technological leadership. Unregulated derivatives subsequently played a starring role in the 2008 financial crisis, magnifying the fallout from risky mortgage lending.

Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images

A broad, bipartisan crypto bill could come together this year, the result of a collaboration between Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). Lummis, herself a major crypto investor, said the legislation would not shield the industry from SEC oversight developers would have to register their initial coin offerings with the commission.

It preserves traditional authorities: CFTC over commodities, SEC over securities, Lummis told HuffPost. It provides definitions. It discusses stablecoins, banking, privacy and consumer protection.

Lummis emphasized that shes working on the legislation with Democrats: Digital assets are a nonpartisan subject, she said.

Its not clear if the industry would embrace such a bill. Adelle Nazarian, CEO of the American Blockchain Political Action Committee, sounded a skeptical note about the idea of requiring initial coin offerings to be registered with the SEC.

It would be remiss of me to suggest that ICOs could ever be exempt from regulation by the SEC, Nazarian said. Therefore, there must be a whole new subset of rules, deferential language with a more elastic framework for ICOs with guidance from the SEC that will fall under the heading of the same overarching [anti-money laundering and know-your-customer] rulemaking in following these guidelines so innovation may continue to flourish.

Industry insiders argue Congress shouldnt try to pigeonhole crypto into existing regulatory frameworks. Steve Bumbera, the lead developer of a crypto project called the Many Worlds token, said the SEC has been on the warpath and that Congress should come up with a new agency dedicated to crypto regulation. Short of that, he said lawmakers could at least come up with a clearer system for figuring out which regulator oversees different types of crypto product.

It doesnt really fall strictly into one asset class or another. Some can first be a security and change into a utility, Bumbera said. If the SEC wanted everyone to register as a security, that would destroy 95% of projects.

In the case of Unicoin, its creators say the token will pay dividends based on the performance of investments in emerging growth companies, including some of those featured on the Unicorn Hunters show, in which Vela and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, plus other business luminaries and celebrities, evaluate investment pitches from entrepreneurs hoping to vaunt themselves into billion-dollar unicorn status.

In other words, its obvious that Unicoin would meet the definition of a security buying the coin means investing in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from others.

Many other crypto tokens are securities, too, but without tough enforcement there is a strong incentive to avoid registering with the SEC, because its a major chore.

Its expensive and it takes a while, Richard Devlin, senior vice president and general counsel for TransparentBusiness, said in an interview. You need a lot of lawyers and its a several months long process. And then youre a public company, which has its own ongoing reporting and compliance requirements, so its not cheap.

Daniel Marans contributed reporting.

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The Coming Battle Over Cryptocurrency Regulation - HuffPost

The Central Bank of Russia has turned down a proposal to allow the use of digital currencies for the purpose of sanctions evasion. The monetary authority believes this is hardly an option as Western regulators are already taking steps to prevent such transactions.

Bank of Russia considers it impossible to use cryptocurrencies to circumvent financial restrictions imposed over the military conflict in Ukraine. Thats according to a statement by the central banks First Deputy Governor Ksenia Yudaeva, issued in a reply to a proposal by a member of the State Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament.

Anton Gorelkin, a lawmaker from the ruling United Russia party, had suggested that Russian companies and individual entrepreneurs should be allowed to make payments in digital currencies, including for settlements with foreign partners. He thinks the establishment of a Russian national crypto infrastructure in response to the sanctions introduced by the West is inevitable.

Central bank officials are convinced, however, that transfers of large amounts of money in cryptocurrency by Russian businesses would not be feasible. Quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency, Yudaeva pointed out that regulatory authorities in the EU, U.S., U.K., Japan, and Singapore have started to implement preventive measures.

Digital asset platforms such as crypto exchanges are also adopting restrictions amounting to denial of access to funds for Russian users, she added. And even in jurisdictions where crypto payments are not banned at the moment, authorities are setting ever higher standards for crypto service providers regarding compliance with customer identification rules.

The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) remains a strong opponent of the legalization of cryptocurrencies. In January, the financial authority proposed a blanket ban on crypto-related operations in the country. It maintains that decentralized digital currencies like bitcoin cannot be used in payments for goods and services.

With its hardline stance on the matter, the CBR has found itself in isolation among government institutions in Moscow. In February, the federal government approved a regulatory plan based on the Finance Ministrys concept which favors regulation under strict oversight, over prohibition.

Days before the Russian army crossed the Ukrainian border, the ministry submitted a new bill On Digital Currency tailored to comprehensively regulate the countrys crypto market. In mid-March, another Russian lawmaker working on the upcoming crypto regulations, Alexander Yakubovsky, suggested that cryptocurrencies could help Russia restore its access to global finances.

Do you expect Bank of Russia to change its attitude towards cryptocurrencies if Western sanctions continue to expand? Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below.

Lubomir Tassev is a journalist from tech-savvy Eastern Europe who likes Hitchenss quote: Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do. Besides crypto, blockchain and fintech, international politics and economics are two other sources of inspiration.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

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Bank of Russia Rejects Idea of Using Cryptocurrency to Circumvent Sanctions Regulation Bitcoin News - Bitcoin News

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland released her second federal budget on Thursday a 280-page, multibillion-dollar plan focused on cooling down Canada'shousing market, boosting defence spending and transitioning to a greener economy.

But those aren't the only lineitems in the federal government's new fiscal plan. Here are some of the budget's lower-profilepromises and funding initiatives.

Budget 2022 vows to establish a new Canada Financial Crimes Agency, which Ottawa says "will become Canada's lead enforcement agency in this area."

It's not clear how this new agency would work with the RCMP which already operates a financial crime unit and with other police forces.Multiple reviews, both internal and external, have suggested that the burden of fulfilling its policing contracts with provinces and municipalities is distracting theRCMP from itsfederal policing obligations.

Budget 2022 would give the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness $2 million this fiscal year to develop the new agency.

The government said further details will be announced in the 2022 fall economic and fiscal update.

The federal government is promising to launch a legislative review of the "digitalization of money and maintaining financial sector stability and security."

According to the budget document, the first phase of the review will be directed at digital currencies, or cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins digital currenciesthat peg their market value to some external standard like the U.S dollar.

"In the last several months, for example, there have been a number of high profile examples both around the world and here in Canada where digital assets and cryptocurrencies have been used to avoid global sanctions and fund illegal activities," says the budget document.

The Department of Finance will get $17.7 million over five years to review the digital currency sector including the potential need for a central bank digital currency in Canada.

Calling access to menstrual products "a basic necessity," the federal budget saysthe government will launch a national pilot project to make menstrual products more available to Canadians in need.

Women and Gender Equality Canada will get $25 million over two years, starting in the 2022-23 fiscal year, for the "Menstrual Equity Fund."

"The federal government is committed to addressing the barriers related to affordability and stigma that some Canadians face when accessing menstrual products," reads the budget.

It follows on a promisethe Liberal government made last year to make menstrual products freely available in all on-reserve schools.

After the government promised to tax vaping products in last year's budget, this year's budgetfinally gave us a date for implementation: Oct. 1 of this year.

The proposed federal excise duty rate would be $1 per 2 ml (orfraction thereof)for containers with less than 10 ml of vaping liquid. For containers with more than 10 ml, the applicable federal rate would be $5 for the first 10 ml and $1 for every additional 10 ml (or fraction thereof).

According to the government's projections, the vaping tax is expected to bring in $654 million over five years.

Effective July 1, Budget 2022 alsoeliminates the excise duty on low-alcohol beer that'sbeer with no more than 0.5 per cent alcohol by volume bringing it in line with low-alcohol wine and spirits.

Canadians looking to start familiescould get some help at tax time.

The budget allowsindividuals to claim medical expenses related tosurrogate motherhood orsperm, ovaor embryo donations that are incurred in Canada in 2022 andsubsequent taxation years.

That includes costs that have been reimbursed to a surrogate for in vitro fertilization expenses.

Budget 2022 also makes fees paid to fertility clinics and donor banks in Canada to obtainsperm and ovaeligible for the Medical Expense Tax Credit.

"Whether facing fertility issues, being part of a same-sex couple, or just wanting to be able to be a mom or a dad on their own terms, some Canadians rely on surrogacy and expensive procedures in order to build the family they dream of," the budget document says.

The budgetintroduces a "labour mobility deduction," which would provide tax recognition for up to $4,000 per year in eligible travel and temporary relocation expenses for eligible tradespeople and apprentices. This measure would apply to the 2022 and subsequent taxation years.

The government said it's meant for workers in the construction trades who often travel to take on temporary jobs, frequently in rural and remote communities.

"Improving labour mobility for workers in the construction trades can help to address labour shortages and ensure that important projects, like housing, can be completed across the country," reads the budget document.

Acknowledginglabour shortages in Canada's health-care sector, the government is promising to work with internationally trained health-care professionals to fill those gaps.

Budget 2022 provides $115 million over five years, with $30 million annually thereafter, to help up to 11,000 internationally trained health-care professionals per year get their credentials recognized and find work in their fields.

The government said it also will support programs, including standardized national exams,to reduce barriers to foreign credential recognition for health care professionals.

For those who want, or need, to have different generations of a family living under the same roof, the government is promising to put aside money to help those Canadians update their homes.

Budget 2022 offersa "Multigenerational Home Renovation Tax Credit," which would provide a homeowner with up to $7,500 toconstructa secondary suite for a senior or an adult with a disability.

Starting in 2023, this refundable credit would allow families to claim 15 per cent of up to $50,000 in eligible renovation and construction costs incurred in constructing a secondary suite.

Governments have talked about linking up the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City with high-frequency rail service for years. The budget promises to nudge that project forward.

The budget sends $396.8 million over two years to Transport Canada and Infrastructure Canada for "planning and design steps" to run frequent trains between Toronto and Quebec City.

WATCH | At Issue panel on the budget

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Cryptocurrency review, free tampons and other things you might have missed in the budget - CBC News