Hodler's Digest, July 16-22: Coinbase Backpedals on Regulatory Approval and Switzerland Becomes Even More Crypto Friendly

Major U.S. crypto exchange and wallet Coinbase has retracted their previous announcement that they had secured approval from U.S. regulators to list digital tokens considered to be securities.

Coinbase's move to form their own PAC could allow them to direct donations to politicians and campaigns that have a friendly stance to crypto and blockchain regulation.

According to Aksakov, the bill won't include separate taxation schemes for crypto owners, meaning that both mining and circulation of crypto will fall under the existing provisions of the Russian Tax Code.

Other crypto influencers that made the first for the first time include VKontakte and Telegram founder Pavel Durov - Telegram's two ICOs for a native token held this year raised a total of $1.7 billion - and co-CEOs of brokerage app Robinhood, Vlad Teve and Baiji Bhatt, which includes a crypto trading platform.

One has secured investments from PayPal's billionaire co-founder Peter Thiel, as well as crypto mining hardware firm Bitmain's Jihan Wu. Other investors that participated in Block.

Nervos Network, a Chinese blockchain startup founded by a former researcher and developer of the Ethereum Foundation, has secured $28 million in funding from entities such as crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital and venture capital firm Sequoia China to develop its enterprise blockchain solutions.

For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph's price analysis.

The decision follows an official request from the Ministry of Industry and Trade to temporarily ban imports of crypto mining machines - which reportedly had a volume of 15,600 units from 2017 to April 2018 - as they reportedly confuse the management of currency flows in Vietnam.

Marc Lasry, the co-founder of Avenue Capital Group, said this week that Bitcoin is going to hit $40,000, as the trading crypto is becoming easier and more mainstream.

Wired goes into depth about how whitepapers "rarely" achieve Satoshi Nakamoto-level quality, and why the crypto community may need more traditional vetting structures- something other than calling "the person they have beers with" reading a whitepaper a "peer review.