Daily Digest 11/16

Insight on the biggest stories of the day.

American Airlines partners with decentralized travel market Winding Tree

• American Airlines is one of the biggest airlines in the country and they are now looking to expand their offerings of flights through a partnership with decentralized marketplace Winding Tree. Winding Tree is a decentralized travel marketplace that allows users users to access peer-2-peer connections for travel and aviation.

• This is not the first major partner ship for the decentralized travel company as they have also teamed up with Air Canada as well. Travel companies have also started accepting cryptocurrencies as payments for flights and hotels with companies, like Travala.com, that takes payment in a wide variety of cryptos.

• After the Covid pandemic it became clear that people were going to be changing the way that they went about traveling and that would also mean that the airlines would need to change some of their internal processes as well. In 2020 Sita, an air transport technology provider, estimated that 59% of airlines would be researching blockchain solutions.

Houston Rockets Add NYDIG as Bitcoin Sponsor, Team Will Be Paid in BTC

• The Houston Rockets are no stranger to the cryptocurrency space. In 2018 they partnered with Bitcoin mining company Bitmain and earlier this year they signed a deal with Socios to implement fan tokens.

• Today the team has announced that they will be entering a partnership with the NYDIG and they will be paid in BTC. It is important to mention that the players will not be getting their contracts in BTC; however, the NYDIG will be paying the team in BTC to have their branding on the Rockets court as well as social medias. NYDIG we also be the custodian for the Rockets digital assets.

• “The Rockets will be #PaidInBitcoin, and this partnership underscores our excitement about the Houston area and the Bitcoin innovation taking place there,” said Kelly Brewster, Chief Marketing Officer of NYDIG, in a release. “NYDIG's partnership with the Fertitta family, across their businesses, will significantly accelerate its goal of making Bitcoin accessible to all."

Ted Cruz Aims to Repeal Crypto Broker Rules From Biden’s Infrastructure Bill

• Yesterday it became official that the highly criticized, at least by the cryptocurrency space, $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Bill was going into effect and will carry its existing definition of who is a broker. This is a touchy subject for some as the definition interpreted broadly would deem developers and miners a “broker” and subject to collecting and reporting information on users transactions. The SEC has said that they will not define it that broadly and only hold that definition to exchanges such as Coinbase.

• Senator Ted Cruz is still not happy that the bill was passed and has voiced his opinion on the matter by introduced legislations that would fully repeal the crypto provisions in the bill. This means that Cruz is looking for crypto custodians to also not be included in that definition.

• Senators Wyden and Lummis also introduced bills this week but un-like the one from Ted Cruz they made the suggestion of clarifying that miners, stakers, wallet providers, and developers are exempt.

• The amount of BTC on the Bitcoin lightning network continues to rise as people are using the layer 2 solution for Bitcoin to send transactions faster.

• I July there was only $50 million in BTC on the lightning network and as of today that number is up to over $200 million. This is also a 10x increase from last November.

• A lot of these gains can be attributed to El Salvador as the increases started to take a rise the same month that it became official that they were going to make BTC legal tender.

• The recent BTC taproot update will also benefit the users of the lightning network as it will give them the option to make those transactions appear as regular chain transactions to increase privacy on the network.