The Block
Quick Take A draft bill to legalize cryptocurrencies in Ukraine by early 2025 will regulate crypto transactions and introduce taxation modeled after securities, according to the Ukrainska Pravda news outlet. The bill is reportedly being finalized in partnership with the IMF and will not include tax exemptions to avoid potential tax evasion.
Quick Take Push Protocol is developing Push Chain, a Layer 1 blockchain focused on chain abstraction. Key features of the chain will include wallet and gas fee abstraction, sharding, and sub-one-second transaction finality. An initial testnet for Push Chain is scheduled to be released in phases starting in mid-January 2025, with the mainnet to follow later that year.
Quick Take An Australian federal court gave Bit Trade, the local operator of the Kraken crypto exchange, $5.1 million in penalties for failing to comply with local regulations. Kraken said it is “disappointed” with the outcome of this case.
Quick Take Lamina1, the metaverse project co-founded by Neal Stephenson, is merging with the South Korean web3 firm Another World. The move comes after Lamina1’s parent company Open Metaverse Limited acquired Another World in “an all token deal.”
Quick Take World Liberty Financial, the crypto project supported by President-elect Donald Trump, purchased $5 million worth of ETH on Wednesday. The project holds nearly $73 million worth of cryptocurrencies, with ETH making up $50 million of that amount.
Quick Take Frax Finance is developing a tech stack focusing on AI agents. The AIVM tech stack is part of Frax Finance’s broader 2025 roadmap, which includes token rebrands.
Quick Take Billionaire investor Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, endorsed bitcoin and gold as “hard money” over debt assets amid rising global indebtedness. Analysts at Bernstein expect the MicroStrategy flywheel effect to continue, given the potential inclusion of the stock in the Nasdaq 100 index this month and the Trump administration’s crypto focus. Citi Wealth said in a newly published report that stablecoins, accounting for over 80% of cryptocurrency tradi
Both firms largely purchased ether through the crypto exchange Coinbase or its institution-focused crypto services platform Prime.
Quick Take Vancouver’s city council passed its mayor’s motion to explore how Bitcoin could be incorporated into its financial systems.
Ethereum’s infrastructure limitations are leading users, applications, and capital to migrate to Layer 2 solutions and competing blockchains like Solana, an analyst said.Another analyst noted that liquidity fragmentation across Ethereum’s Layer 2 networks poses a risk to market efficiency.
