With help from Derek Robertson

The past couple of weeks have been bleak for crypto, with the collapse of a leading stablecoin and a deepening decline in the market for other digital assets.

But a story out of China offers a reminder that crypto isn’t just for investing. Increasingly, it’s also being put to political ends.

This one has to do with Non-Fungible Tokens — unique digital assets best-known as ways to collect digital art.

Lately, NFT’s have attracted attention mostly because of the outrageous sums these digital artworks — including a series of drawings of bored-looking apes — were regularly fetching in online sales, at least until the market crashed.

But NFTs, at heart, are just entries on a blockchain that contain unique data.

Because blockchains store information across a network of independent computers, there is no single party — like a social media company or web host — that can decide, or be ordered to, take down content. A meme posted to Reddit can be removed from Reddit, but the same meme — or metadata and links to it —…

Crypto assets are an extremely risky, speculative asset class and with any risky asset there has to be regulation, International Monetary Fund’s deputy managing director Gita Gopinath told India Today TV at Davos, adding, “I have completely stayed away from it. But that’s just me and my level of risk aversion.”

“It went from about $3 trillion market to $1.5 trillion market in about six months – very quick moves. It is not a very easy-return investment. So these are very large risks you are taking,” she said, pointing out the risks involved with the digital currency.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman at the spring meeting of the IMF called for regulating the cryptocurrencies, saying that innovation is disruptive. She also stressed the risks posed by cryptocurrencies and unhosted wallets in enabling money laundering and terror financing.

#EXCLUSIVE: Economist @GitaGopinath on crypto trading.
Says, “Crypto assets are a very risky asset class.”#Economy #Newstrack #IndiaTodayatDavos | @rahulkanwal pic.twitter.com/41E3m5A9mM

— IndiaToday (@IndiaToday) May 23, 2022

Global growth was downgraded in April from 4.4% to 3.6% entirely because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,…

Bitcoin traded higher along with stock futures early Monday after US President Joe Biden hinted at revoking trade tariffs on China.

The leading cryptocurrency jumped to $30,500 during Asian hours, extending the recovery from the weekend low of $28,912. Prices dipped 3.2% in the seven days to May 22, confirming a 7-week losing streak, its longest since 2011, Forbes data shows.

The European stocks posted modest gains and the futures tied to the tech-heavy Nasdaq interest jumped 0.7%, pointing to a positive open on Wall Street.

Risk sentiment likely got a lift from Biden, saying his administration was considering removing the economically-damaging trade tariffs on China imposed by the former President Donald Trump. “I am considering it. We did not impose any of those tariffs. They were imposed by the last administration and they’re under consideration,” Biden said during a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Biden’s comments come as the wave of…

Since its launch in December, StepN, an app that lets users walk and run to earn tokens, has quickly become a household name in the play-to-earn blockchain gaming, or GameFi, world. Two to three million users worldwide are now active on the app every month, StepN’s co-founder Jerry Huang recently told TechCrunch.

That number is nowhere close to the hundred-million player size enjoyed by popular web2 titles, but in the world of crypto, it’s a meaningful breakthrough for a five-month-old app. As of May 22, the market cap of StepN’s native token GMT stood at around $860 million.

Founded by Huang and his co-founder Yawn Rong in Adelaide, Australia, StepN debuted at a Solana hackathon in October. After coming in fourth, its exposure at the event helped land its first batch of beta users. When it officially launched two months later, words about the app that let one earn by staying fit had already spread within the blockchain community. Without any splashy ad campaign, scores of users signed up.

In weeks, StepN was growing so fast that the team needed to cap the number of daily registrations. Now, tens of thousands of new users are joining the app per day, according to…

In China, residents turn to NFTs stored on the blockchain using Arweave to record moments of the pandemic and other censorable media.

Arweave, a blockchain-based storage solution, is a new type of blockchain based on Moore’s Law of the declining cost of data storage. Users pay upfront for a hundred years of storage at less than a cent per megabyte, and the interest that accrues will cover the dwindling storage cost forever. Over 1 million pieces of data are currently stores on the permaweb, with around 200 apps already developed.

For many Chinese citizens, using the blockchain to record indelible moments from the COVID-19 pandemic has become more regular. Back in March 2020, Arweave raised $8 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, and Union Square to help fight back against the government’s pandemic censorship.

While major NFT collections including BAYC and CryptoPunks have certainly led sales, profile picture avatars have had little significance upon those Chinese citizens who have suffered through the harsh lockdowns in some of China’s major cities.

“Our ordeal should be remembered,” says Dereck Yi, a lawyer at a tech company in Shanghai…

…

In reaction to the volatile events of the last few weeks, both the stock and cryptocurrency markets have taken a deep dive. While this downturn is distressing to many, it has emboldened progressive politicians and activists whose motto is “never let a crisis go to waste.”

Critics of cryptocurrency have doubled down on their calls for heavy-handed regulation. They have seized on the struggles of stablecoin TerraUSD

UST
(UST), which has fallen from its $1 peg to its current price of around 8 cents. “TerraUSD’s instability is yet another reason we must closely regulate stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies,” proclaimed Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown in a statement quoted by Politico.

Yet there are some important facts to keep in mind before we rush into panic-driven regulation. One is that TerraUSD appears to be an outlier among stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to hard assets such as the dollar – and nearly all of the leading stablecoins have so far held their value.

As listed on CoinMarketCap as of this writing, the top stablecoins by volume and market cap — including USD Coin

USDC
(USDC) and Pax…