Ep 44. Crypto Pi Day 🥧

<p>Tomorrow (3/14) is Pi day! Yes, guilty as charged. I’m a recovering math and science nerd. Pi day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant “pi” which relates to the circumference of a circle. It’s also a great excuse to eat lots of pie. </p><p>In honor of Pi day, I wanted to take a walk around the world and touch on a couple crypto relevant stories </p><p>* Ukraine vs Russia: Crypto in war? </p><p>* EU may ban proof of work - misguided? </p><p>* Jambo: Can Play to earn take off in Africa?</p><p>* Holy metaverse?</p><p>1. Ukraine 🇺🇦 vs Russia 🇷🇺: Crypto in war?</p><p><strong> The good: </strong></p><p>* War is an ugly business. It brings out the worst of humanity. Yet even in those dark days, heroes emerge and necessity gives birth to innovation. </p><p>* Over $100M of crypto has been donated to Ukraine from around the world. Without crypto, many of these donations would have taken 2+ business days to be processed and charged up to 6% fees. But with crypto, we have solutions that provide instant, free-to-near-free international payments. </p><p>* Speed can be the difference between life and death. Imagine you lived in the US but your loved ones were under siege in Ukraine. They urgently requested money to flee. It could be heart wrenching having to wait 2+ business days. Mind you, if the request came on Friday, funds might not arrive till Tuesday. This could be unnecessary exposure. </p><p></p><p><strong>The ban:</strong></p><p>* Many Western governments and companies have put in place sanctions against Russians. This culminated in 7 leading Russian banks being cut-off from the SWIFT global payment network. </p><p>* SWIFT is a global payment messaging system. It links over 11,000 banks across 200+ countries. The system does not transfer money rather its like an email system for banks. It conducts about 42 million messages every day. The ban on 7 Russian banks would cause inconvenience but I expect they might eventually develop workarounds over time. It remains to be seen how effective th