Kim Kardashian, NYSE crypto ecosystem and McDonald's MacCoin | Hodler's Digest

This week, Apple finally becomes the world's first trillion dollar company. Bitcoin is some way behind. Dipping below almost 7.5k. The bears are most certainly back in town and they've eaten our digital Goldilocks. Also this week, the SEC's new crypto czar wants to build bridges. Kim Kardashian gets her first Bitcoin, McDonald's releases the mat coin and a shipwreck scam. To top It all off, here's your weekly Hodler's Digest.

ICE. No, not that one.

The operator of 23 leading global exchanges.

Including the New York Stock Exchange, announced plans to create a Microsoft cloud powered, open and regulated global ecosystem for digital assets. The operator of NYSE is forming a new company, bakkt, and will work alongside bcg, Microsoft, Starbucks and others to create the new ecosystem. The intention is to create an integrated plan platform that enables customers, merchants and institutional clients to buy, sell, store and spend digital assets on a seamless global network, the press release notes. Bitcoin, the most liquid crypto ICE believes.

Will be the first use case to.

Be traded against fiat. Consumers will be able to purchase anything in Starbucks, a crypto first Coffee achieved mainstream adoption in 1773 because drinking tea was way too British and unpatriotic. Drinking coffee basically led to the American Revolution. Drinking coffee was revolutionary. Now using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange for coffee is revolutionary. But instead of usurping the British, this.

Time it'll be the Fed. Not sure that quite works, but you get the idea.

Bitcoin is revolution. Investors in the Bakkt ecosystem are expected to include the crypto world's who's who, like Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital, Alan Howard, Pantera Capital and Susakana International Group, among others. Mike Novogratz said recently that a trusted name custodian like a Japanese bank or hsbc, Goldman Sachs or ICE would allow institutional investors to feel comfortable. Let's see if he's right.

The world of crypto and the world of centralized finance are often at odds with each other. But there is one thing that they share. The sec when they call, it's not for a brunch of coffee and pancakes. Often it's for punitive measures with a side order of hefty fines. Too often in the eyes of Valerie Szepanek, the regulator's new crypto czar, the first position of its kind. She just wants to talk honest. She understands the intimidating reputation her agency has. But she moved from the enforcement division to oversee ICOs and corporate stock sales. So it's a position that allows a more diplomatic approach.

Why?

Well, it is fairly understood that anyone operating in the crypto field has a pretty ingrained distrust of government. It's not like she expects Satoshi to come forward anytime soon, but she wants to at least open a dialogue with those who avoid the SEC for fear of investigation. Her main focuses will be ICOs, determining whether a coin is a security and the all important ETF approval. Last month she was involved in the rejection of the latest one. We want people to come talk to us. When I'm in meetings with folks, I want them to see me as someone who's interested in communication and back and forth and looking to encourage innovation that helps investors and the markets. It may have been just a weird coincidence, but earlier this year someone spray painted ICO on her apartment's mailbox. The agency does have the power to shift markets. Following comments that Ether was not a security, the number two crypto surged 12% earlier this year. The crypto czar also offered this advice, which sounded a bit like a warning. What we're hoping is that people will want to come into compliance if there's no effort to do that. If instead folks choose to ignore applicable laws, we might take a different tack. The SEC has basically been playing catch up this whole time, so it's been difficult to get regulation right. Hopefully Sepena can help bring crypto out of the shadows without suffocating innovation. Now if you want to keep up with the Kardashians, you have to buy some Bitcoin Kim Kardashian west staked physical bitcoin chips on a charity poker night in la. The Kardashian clan were out in force for the event to raise money for City of Hope, a non profit cancer and clinical research treatment center. We moved on to bitcoin with the title of one of Kim's Instagram stories featuring her gambling with the leading crypto. Matthew Roszak, co founder of Block, claim to have given Kardashian west her first bitcoin. She has 114 million followers on Instagram. Perhaps her posts could inspire a fresh wave of hodlers. Kanye west, her base husband, is also apparently a bitcoin believer. His tweets can be pretty cryptic at times, but this one was pretty clear. Decentralize to mark the Big Mac's 50th anniversary, McDonald's is launching the mat coin on Jim Delegatti's birthday. The inventor of the famous burger, the coins will feature five unique designs, one for every decade since its invention. The MACC coin was inspired by the Big Mac index in 1986. The Economist used it to measure international purchasing power and it's still used today. It sounds fun, but does it really work as a medium of exchange? Yes, actually it does, but only if you want a Big Mac. One Mac coin equals one Big Mac throughout 2018. Oh. Ugh. It sounds like a stablecoin. Bitcoin maximalists have nothing to worry about then. No, come on, lighten up. It's not as if you are tethered to it. You can't manipulate the price of burgers. Cynical gimmick or genuine love of crypto? We don't care. Anything that pushes the culture forward is good in our books. Sometimes it is cool to be Square Square made $37 million in revenue from Bitcoin sales this second quarter, all done using the crypto feature on its Cash app. It made up 6% of Square's 814 million overall revenue. The cost of facilitating Bitcoin is over $36 million, but profits of Bitcoin sales almost doubled. The first quarter it was 223k and then this quarter 420k. In a conference call, Square's CFO said that the goal of the bitcoin buying service on the Cash app is not trying to pull push the monetization of bitcoin today. The service was added this past January. Users all across the US buy and send bitcoin and in June, Square received a BitLicense from NYC, getting ever closer to a full rollout nationwide. Ahoy there mateys. There'd be gold in them, Russian armored tankers or not. South Korean authorities are investigating a crypto investment scam by the Seoul based Chenille Group, which allegedly promised to pay investors in gold from a sunken Russian shipwreck that sank 113 years ago. Seems legit. The company claimed that the ship was loaded with $131 billion worth of gold to encourage investors to purchase the company's own crypto. Chenille allegedly promised to reimburse them with the gold from the ship. The coin reportedly attracted $53.7 million in investments, even though the company's CEO, Choi Yong Suk, has admitted that there is no clear evidence that the ship contained anything of value. Seoul's Gangsao district police subsequently issued a travel ban on Choi and are reportedly planning to question him and other parties related to the investigation. The scam also involved Yoo Ji Bum, head of a Singapore based affiliate of the Chanel Group. Yoo, who's been previously convicted of real estate fraud, supposedly established a Crypto Exchange Exchange called Dongsui International Exchange and spread posts about the shipwreck on social media. Jack Sverra was unfortunately unavailable for questioning, but his publicist issued a statement denying any involvement with the scam. It turns out that SEC Chairman Jay Clayton may be a bit more passionate about cryptocurrencies than we previously thought. Clayton, who has publicly spoken out about bitcoin not being a security, seemed to have spoken spent a fair amount of time debating the cryptocurrency sphere even beyond his public interviews on the issue. A recently released transcript from an SEC roundtable earlier this month described Clayton as heated about cryptocurrencies, speaking about them in a discussion with an unnamed lawyer and showing off his apparently in depth crypto knowledge. SEC official Eric Werner said that the first time he met Clayton, he walked into a heated discussion he was having with an attorney in my office about the legitimacy and viability of cryptocurrencies. I was taken aback, honestly, about how much thought he had given to the space and the issues surrounding it. Well, Chairman Clayton, we hope you channel a bit of that heat into cooking up some top notch crypto regulation. A moment of silence for the 4 million bitcoins lost forever on the good ship Cathy Cold Storage at the bottom of the crypto C Now if you wouldn't mind like subscribe and Hodl for a chance to meet Jack Sparrow Cointelegraph like subscribe and Hodl.