GSR Weekly Crypto News Recap - September 30, 2022

Cosmos hub shared its whitepaper for the revamped Cosmos 2.0 roadmap to rapturous excitement from the Cosmos community. The paper was revealed during the first day of the Cosmoverse conference in Medellin, Colombia. The slew of changes could see Cosmos’ native token ATOM turn into the ecosystem’s reserve currency. The new Cosmos hub whitepaper proposes a slew of changes and a major expansion to the utility of the Cosmos Hub, the blockchain at the heart of the Cosmos ecosystem. At present, Cosmos Hub acts as a template, allowing blockchains to be built into the Cosmos Interchain, a web of individual blockchains for the seamless sharing of information and assets. The new whitepaper proposes allowing other chains to use it and secure their own network. ATOM will also see a change in its utility and issuance schedule. Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman said, “Cosmos Hub is taking its place within the interchain. The Hub is still not going to dominate the interchain or own the whole interchain or bring everyone under its umbrella. But it’s trying to offer services to the larger interchain that help enable it, help support it, [and] help it thrive and grow.”

FTX US, the United States affiliate of the global crypto exchange, won the bid to purchase the digital assets of the bankrupt crypto company, Voyager Digital. According to the official press release by Voyager, the bidding agreement is valued at around $1.42b which includes the $1.3b in the estimated market prices of the digital assets and an “additional consideration” of $111m of incremental value. Customers of Voyager will be able to transfer their assets on the FTX US platform after the conclusion of the distressed company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. The companies will now present the purchase agreement for court approval on October 19.

Interpol has issued a Red Notice for Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon. The notice is a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action.
Kwon maintains that he is not on the run, but his location is unknown after Singapore authorities said he’s not in the city-state. Kwon has yet to issue a statement via Twitter, but in prior tweets he has maintained that Terraform Labs is defending itself in multiple jurisdictions.

Decentralized oracle protocol Chainlink has announced the launch of its long-awaited staking reward programs – SCALE and BUILD. The programs are part of the Economics 2.0 plan to secure the network and reward participants by introducing staking. Chainlink SCALE was designed to reduce the operational cost of running oracle data by splitting costs among project node operators and dApp users. The participating projects will offer a portion of their revenue in LINK to cover transaction fees of Chainlink oracle networks. In exchange, Chainlink will unlock advanced oracle features and solutions for the projects. Developers can get access to tweak the configurations to suit their ecosystem needs, such as Data Feed for higher update frequencies. The BUILD program was launched as part of Chainlink staking targeted at early-stage and established projects. Projects on the BUILD program will be able to deploy custom Data Feed DONs, get priority access to Chainlink upgrades, and bolster the cryptoeconomic security of the network. Participating projects stake their network fees in Chainlink’s native LINK token to provide incentives for network participants like stakers.

The IRS is gaining access to crypto bank sFOX’s customer records as a means of investigating potential tax evasion. According to a new press release, the IRS has obtained a court order authorizing it to dive into sFOX’s records to find US customers that allegedly traded virtual assets and failed to file taxes. Crypto prime dealer sFOX, which had previously partnered with M.Y. Safra Bank to offer users banking digital assets trading services, must now hand over its crypto transaction data to the IRS after the agency won a court battle allowing them to issue a John Doe summons. “sFOX has over 175,000 registered users who have collectively undertaken more than $12 billion in transactions since 2015. Based on its recent experiences with cryptocurrencies, the IRS has strong reason to believe that many virtual currency transactions are not being properly reported on tax returns.”