India’s new crypto laws, soaring NFT sales, multi-million dollar sports sponsorships – here’s everything that happened in the crypto world this week

After going public three months ago, Coinbase has announced plans to expand its operations in India. The crypto exchange has an office in the country already – in Hyderabad – and now it wants to add more to its local team.

The company says it has plans to make the country one of its primary hubs and to sweeten the deal, it is offering a one-time $1,000 in crypto – sort of like a sign-up bonus.

The best part is that the company is ‘remote-first,’ so it is open to hiring all over India, not just in Hyderabad.

After dilly-dallying for years, India is finally gearing up to deal with the crypto issue. India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced that the crypto bill is ready and that it will be tabled in the parliament this monsoon session.

“We have done a lot of work on it. We have taken stakeholders’ inputs. The Cabinet note is ready. We have to see when the Cabinet can take it up and consider it so that then we can move it," she said in her interview.

We caught up with the CEO of Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest cryptocurrency asset management company, earlier this week.

Grayscale has more than $30.4 billion in assets under management as of July 1, with the bulk of the basket consisting of Bitcoin. Sonnenshein, the man at the helm of the company, believes that cryptocurrencies as an asset class are here to stay.

“The idea of decentralised currency is something that’s here to stay, it’s an idea that has captivated investors all around the world,” he said.

Here are 12 of his best quotes from an exclusive interview with Business Insider.

Synthetic stocks – or fake stocks – are the newest blockchain fad. And unsurprisingly, Apple, Tesla and Amazon are amongst the most famous ones.

What is this, you ask? These fake stocks are pegged against the original stocks and their prices move based on the prices of the original stocks.

Users can form or create new tokens when prices are too high by posting collateral and burning them when prices are too low, driving the price up or down.

Self-proclaimed Brazilian ‘Bitcoin King’ has been arrested by the local police, following a three-year investigation.

The ‘Bitcoin king’ along with his group has been accused of running a $300 million embezzlement scheme. The accused was the president of a crypto brokerage called Bitcoin Banco Group, which had claimed in 2019 that 7,000 Bitcoin had gone missing.

With artists, celebrities and companies like Twitter and CNN backing them, sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) soared to $2.5 billion in the first half of 2021.

Digital analytics firm DappRadar, which tracks data on decentralized applications including NFT sales platforms that are based on blockchain networks like Ethereum, noted the explosion in growth, particularly over the last 12 months.

For context, NFT sales in 2020 stood at nearly $95 million. Talk about explosive growth.

Almost half of the young investors in the UK said their first investment was in cryptocurrencies, believing that they offer better yields than traditional assets.

But what’s surprising here is that half of these investors are taking loans to invest in crypto.

According to a survey by Interactive Investor, 23% of Bitcoin investors used their credit cards to fund their purchases, while 17% used student loans and 16% used a different type of loan.

Crypto sports sponsorships saw another major deal go down last week, with Crypto.com signing a multi-million dollar deal with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).

This comes after the company signed a $100 million deal with Formula 1.

According to a CNBC report, the UFC deal is worth $75 million, making it the largest sponsorship signed by the US-based martial arts promoter.

The crypto community and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have had a love-hate relationship with each other. Now, it seems that it is on the wane.

Musk’s tweets about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have often led to massive fluctuations in their prices. The most recent instance is when his company suspended Bitcoin payments, dragging down the cryptocurrency to one of its lows this year.

But the ‘Elon Musk effect’ now seems to be on the wane – Musk’s tweets on Thursday and Friday supporting Dogecoin barely moved the needle for the crypto, suggesting that traders and investors alike are not as interested anymore.