Square’s (SQ) revenue from its bitcoin (BTC, +1.99%) (BTC) business increased 11-fold compared with this time last year.

“Cash App generated $3.51 billion of bitcoin revenue and $75 million of bitcoin gross profit during the first quarter of 2021, each up approximately 11x year over year,” according to a shareholder letter published Thursday.

That was double Square’s bitcoin revenue of $1.76 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020. Bitcoin revenue for the first quarter of 2020 was $306 million.

Total revenue in the first quarter of this year was $5.06 billion, meaning bitcoin revenue accounted for 70% of Square’s total consolidated revenue in the quarter.

In addition to Cash App’s involvement as a mainstream gateway to bitcoin, Square holds a portion of its treasury in the cryptocurrency.

“In the fourth quarter of 2020 and first quarter of 2021, we invested $50 million and $170 million, respectively, in bitcoin,” Square wrote, adding that it expects to “hold this investment for the long term.”

Due to fluctuations in market prices during the first quarter, the company reported a $20 million impairment loss on its bitcoin holdings. Nevertheless, by quarter’s end, the value had made a strong gain, as Square reported a $472 million fair value of its bitcoin on March 31, $272 million greater than its carrying cost.

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Israeli officials have moved to seize potentially millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from addresses it says are controlled by Hamas.

The wallets, 84 in all, hold a mix of cryptocurrencies including BTC (+1.99%), DOGE (+2.44%), ADA (-1.02%), XLM (+0.28%), XRP (+1.57%), ETH (-0.16%) and others, according to files from the National Bureau for Counter Terrorist Financing. Tracing firm Elliptic estimated in a blog post that the crypto wallets have received over $7.7 million in total. 

“A number of them are deposit addresses at exchanges, while others belong to brokers,” Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson told CoinDesk.

Of that, $4.1 million is in the USDT (-0.04%) stablecoin and an additional $3.4 million is in bitcoin, with relatively meager amounts sprinkled across other coins. Tron’s TRX (+0.79%) accounts for $165,000, ETH for $51,000 and DOGE for $40,000, according to Elliptic’s analysis.

The blockchain-sleuthing firm said the seizure order indicates “that Hamas is now using a range of crypto assets,” an evolution of the terror group’s previous reliance on bitcoin alone. 

Defense Minister Benny Gantz greenlit the seizure order on June 30 “having been convinced” that the wallets were linked to the terror group or used to “perpetrate a severe terror crime,” according to the seizure order.

When the general public thinks about virtual assets, they often also think of crime. Hacking, ransomware, sanctions and darknet marketplaces such as Silk Road and Hydra have all littered the headlines over the years, leading to a generalized view that the virtual asset world is something of a wild west – one that is largely unregulated and bereft of respect or adherence to rules.

In the old west, when a sheriff was unwilling or ill-equipped to reel in cowboys running amok, it was the citizens who assumed the mantle of protecting themselves and their property. And while the contemporary crypto landscape doesn’t call for reckless vigilantism, it does create the chance for crypto companies and their counsel to come together to establish the rules of engagement for the new frontier.

Delphine Forma is chief compliance and risk officer at TAAL Distributed Information Technologies and a board member of the OpenVASP Association.

Worldwide, regulators have started to apply regulation to the cryptosphere – often with good intent but misplaced priorities. They’re armed to regulate the old world of intermediaries rather than the new, trustless protocols enabled by crypto. 

Consider the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which recently updated its guidance to require that virtual assets and virtual asset service providers (VASPs) comply with the same rules as traditional financial institutions. This includes rules concerning licensing or registration, know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) rules, transaction monitoring and reporting, as well as international co-operation agreements. 

But many of these regulations were conceived long before the advent of the virtual asset industry, and the reality is that bringing our rulesets in line with a sector evolving as quickly as ours will take time. Until we reach that point, crypto companies and their counsel are tasked with operating in the gray – applying old rules to new fact sets – an approach that leaves ample leeway for both interpretation and creativity.

Personally, as a chief compliance officer in a fast-moving yet still fledgling sector, I see this as an opportunity – an opportunity to shape future market regulations, to influence and organize an emerging industry, as well as to help define the standards and best practices that can serve as the basis for self-regulation in several critical areas, including customer protection, market manipulation, financial crime and data protection. 

This opportunity to come together and help each other to stay up to date and compliant, in addition to providing a unique chance to shape the way in which regulation will ultimately be crafted and impact upon the virtual asset industry. 

It’s time for the more established blockchain and crypto companies to give back by offering dedicated training delivered by compliance officers to startups that are just beginning their journey and by sharing information on typologies and red flags to better prevent financial crime. 

Perhaps more important, by working together we can collectively determine a common approach on how to interpret and adhere to both the old and the new, as we transition towards a brighter digital future.

Collaboration works. I’ve seen it firsthand.

When the Swiss regulator issued its guidance on blockchain payments, I met with my peers here in Switzerland to discuss practical solutions on how to comply with the travel rule and what concrete actions and steps that we – both individually and collectively – should take in response.

That same year, we again collaborated in an effort to define standards for a protocol for travel rule compliance. This is how OpenVASP Association was born. I could offer many different stories like this where collaboration was the focal point for a rising tide across the industry here in Switzerland – but in essence, they boil down to simplifying common issues as a collective and deducing shared solutions for the benefit of a sector still largely in its infancy. 

That’s collaboration in action.

Today, privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet Wasabi reports it has made significant progress toward the release of its Wasabi Wallet 2.0.

Founded almost three years ago, Wasabi Wallet pools multiple users’ unspent transactions (UTXOs) into a single Bitcoin transaction using CoinJoin. CoinJoin is a trustless process that makes it difficult for third-party observers, or even participants, to trace funds and it significantly lowers transaction fees. In order to protect the anonymity of its users, Wasabi traffic runs through the Tor network, an online network that focuses on censorship resistance and anonymity, by default. 

Wasabi Wallet 2.0 aims to improve the user interface of the wallet as well as introduce a more efficient coinjoin framework, which developers call WabiSabi.

“One of the biggest challenges was developing the software for more than just cypherpunks and people very well versed in Bitcoin,” said CTO David Molnar. 

“It was difficult to get the developers and contributors to see the bigger picture, that we can only win the privacy war if we expand our vision to include all future Bitcoin users and not just the privacy advocates and cypherpunks.” 

While the new UI will allow users to access “pleb-friendly,” frictionless and secure payments via Tor, WabiSabi boasts its own set of upgrades:

• Users will no longer need to run coins through multiple coinjoins in order to gain privacy.
• There will no longer be a minimum (0.1 BTC (+1.99%)) or maximum (7 BTC) denomination when using coinjoins;
• There will be improved block space efficiency, allowing more inputs into a single coinjoin transaction. This will lower fees for each user.

Wasabi Wallet 2.0 has no defined launch date; however, the company has committed to and published three milestones:

• Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Preview will contain only the most fundamental features and will be used only on the Bitcoin testnet. This will be released in around 6-14 weeks.
• Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Release Candidate will include all features and will be available to the public for reviewing and testing. The team will work on this version until ”the quality of the software is sufficient.”
• Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Final Release (Series) will be the first version of the 2.0 series and the default when new users download the wallet. With that being said, both versions will be available until “most users” migrate to 2.0.