Latest news with #Merkle
Bangkok Post
6 days ago
- Business
- Bangkok Post
Crypto seen benefiting from tax exemption
Thailand's recent move to exempt capital gains tax on cryptocurrency for a five-year period could draw a massive pool of Thai capital estimated at more than US$60 billion currently held offshore back to the country, says Merkle Capital. According to Merkle, Thailand's first digital asset fund manager, much of this capital is spent on digital assets via unregulated international platforms. The capital gains tax exemption is poised to reshape the investment landscape, said Mana Khanijou, chief commercial officer of Merkle Capital. The decision marks a significant step towards strengthening the country's position as a regional digital asset hub, he said. Effective as of Jan 1, 2025 through Dec 31, 2029, this policy applies to transactions conducted through licensed exchanges, brokers and dealers within Thailand. "This bold fiscal incentive not only encourages greater transparency in digital asset trading, especially during peak market conditions, but also lays the groundwork to repatriate a portion of the vast offshore funds held by Thai investors," said Mr Mana. Historically, the lack of a domestic tax advantage and limited regulatory clarity have driven investors toward unlicensed international platforms, placing their capital outside of Thailand's financial oversight, he noted. But with liquidity tightening at home and the government eager to boost capital inflows, the tax exemption serves as a timely magnet for wealth to return to the domestic economy. "If successful, it could directly support broader economic goals, particularly as the digital economy is expected to account for over one-third of Thai GDP by 2030." However, to fully realise its digital potential, Mr Mana said Thailand must push forward on multiple fronts by advancing smart infrastructure, embracing lifestyle digitalisation, modernising regulatory frameworks, and continuing to offer attractive fiscal policies such as crypto tax relief. "Competition is heating up, with neighbouring countries pursuing similar strategies. For Thailand to lead, momentum must be sustained, and innovation must remain central to national policy. With the right commitment, Thailand could emerge not only as a regulatory leader but as Southeast Asia's premier digital trading hub," he said. In a related development, InnovestX Securities forecasts that Bitcoin and Ethereum prices will remain highly volatile throughout this month, driven primarily by macroeconomic and geopolitical developments. A key date to watch is Aug 1 -- the US tariff deadline. "If the outcome signals a more dovish or market-friendly approach, it could provide a lift to crypto prices," said the brokerage. Investors should also monitor the US consumer price index (CPI), a crucial data point used by the Federal Reserve in its monetary policy decisions. If the CPI reading comes in lower than market expectations, it could create positive sentiment for cryptocurrencies, as it may increase the likelihood of a rate cut later this year. For the Fed's meeting at the end of July, InnovestX maintains that the regulator is likely to keep interest rates unchanged. "If this holds true, the impact on crypto prices is expected to be relatively limited," noted the brokerage. "One of the biggest uncertainties remains the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran. Should tensions worsen, there is a chance that investors may reduce their exposure to cryptocurrencies in a risk-off move, despite recent signs of improving sentiment on the geopolitical front. The progress of trade negotiations also remains an important factor to monitor."
Coin Geek
08-07-2025
- Business
- Coin Geek
Bitcoin tradeoffs
Homepage > News > Editorial > Bitcoin tradeoffs Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Spend enough time in the blockchain world, and certain dogmas begin to sound like laws of physics. Everyone should be able to run their own node. Initial sync times should be quick. The more nodes, the better. Your wallet should 'just work,' pulling balances from thin air the moment you enter your seed phrase. Scratch beneath that elegant surface, though, and you'll find these assumptions are anything but universal truths. They're artifacts of a very specific set of trade-offs; decisions made years ago by a handful of developers on one branch of Bitcoin's family tree. And they've so thoroughly imprinted themselves on the industry that anything diverging from them looks like heresy. Take the most famous of these: the belief that it's more important for poor people to run nodes than for poor people to transact. The people who hijacked bitcoin sold this concept to the world: The poor must be able to validate the BTC payments of the rich, but only the rich can afford payments on the network. Also, hijackers have custodial solutions available for the poor to make 2nd class payments. BTC made that explicit bargain. Block sizes were throttled to an absurdly small 1 MB, which is roughly one low-resolution JPEG per block or seven transactions per second globally. So any hobbyist could download and validate the chain from a spare laptop. But what was sacrificed? Throughput. Utility. The very capacity of the network to handle global commerce. In BTC, transaction fees spike whenever 'congestion' hits, making simple payments costly or even infeasible. But that was the deal: cheap nodes, expensive transactions. It locked Bitcoin into a model where only the well-heeled could rely on the network day-to-day, and everyone else could use some kind of custodial system or a vaporware L2 like Lightning Network. These trade-offs, in my opinion, are profoundly regressive. And once you accept that premise (that keeping nodes dirt cheap matters more than serving billions of transactions), you start building expectations around it. Wallets that simply derive a seed phrase, query a lightweight index, and instantly show balances only work because the UTXO set is tiny. BSV deliberately challenges this. When your ledger is designed to scale without artificial ceilings, the set of unspent outputs balloons. A wallet restoring from a mnemonic alone, without additional proof structures, starts to look quaint. For small blockers, they would argue that this is irresponsible. Right but how will wallets work in the teranode ecosystem? Because from my understanding and it was @ProjectBabbage who first brought this to my attention, that it's no longer possible to restore a wallet from just a private key alone. The issue is that with massive blocks,… — Eric Chennells (@EricChennells) July 5, 2025 That's why BSV wallets increasingly incorporate Merkle proofs alongside private keys, pinpointing funds directly with cryptographic receipts. It's an elegant solution if you can clear the mental hurdle that things shouldn't always work the way BTC taught us. Luckily, there is an official Wallet Toolbox, and lots of unofficial ways to store the UTXO set with Merkle proofs, and I foresee GorillaPool (and possibly other miners) offering UTXO sync and wallet restoration as a simple, paid service on the network. You are completely correct, amd you are one of the very few people who actually have a very good understanding of this. You deserve a massive shoutout for being an informed participant in the ridiculous thing is that your post was only seen by 23 people. You MUST… — Babbage (@ProjectBabbage) July 6, 2025 Other Dogmas: Initial sync time and 'the' mempool BTC folks boast that spinning up a full node should be quick. They can promise that because they capped the block size years ago. But if your network's goal is to become the data layer for global trade, finance, Internet of Things (IoT), and public records, that promise becomes a relic quickly. On BSV, initial sync is naturally longer. That's not a flaw, thought. It's a market opportunity. I foresee companies like GorillaPool shipping a fully synced disk image at the latest block height. Need a new archival node? Pay a modest fee, spin up in hours, and join the network with minimal downtime. It's simply a commercial solution to a commercial-scale problem. Of course, cypherpunks who want to run a node on their wife's boyfriend's computer will be upset, but opportunity waits for no one! Or consider the mempool: Bitcoin's dusty, dimly lit waiting room where your transaction sits, tapping its foot and checking its watch, awaiting the next block. In BTC, this feature is designed to create opportunities for 'important transactions' to bid higher for block space. Small blocks mean your payment often lingers in the mempool for hours, maybe days, until there's room to squeeze into a block. This is framed as decentralization at work, as the network politely queues your transaction in a traffic jam and calls it secure. On BSV, this entire dynamic changes. The mempool is typically empty. Transactions flow straight through and settle as abundant block space swallows global throughput without congestion pricing. And soon, even this concept will evolve. Under Teranode, the mempool itself starts to disappear. It's replaced by an unconfirmed transaction store inside a dedicated block assembly microservice. Nodes coordinate by exchanging massive subtrees of unconfirmed transactions, optimizing for speed, parallelization, and truly industrial-scale propagation. Instead of a dusty waiting room, it's more like an express terminal: transactions get batched, sorted, and pushed toward confirmation at a velocity that makes the mempool model look medieval. Dogma, The Third: Muh node Perhaps the most overlooked distortion is the notion that more nodes always means better decentralization. It's an easy sell at cocktail parties with Larry Fink and Jack Dorsey, but it's to the detriment of network health, and it's built on a false premise. Small blockers believe miners should always be presumed malicious, so they believe they must have lots of non-mining 'nodes' with copies of the chain ready to fork away from the chain the miners run, which is a crazy premise. So when BTC 'Muh Node' crowd says they will enforce the rule set that doesn't comply with the law, they're saying they will run a chain that isn't trading anywhere institutional anymore. Miners will follow the legal chain, and NodeBros spend a year looking for the next block. — Kurt Wuckert Jr (@kurtwuckertjr) November 14, 2019 Furthermore, a blockchain's security doesn't magically improve by bloating its edge with thousands of underpowered nodes. In fact, managing propagation across countless low-bandwidth peers introduces fragility. BSV's approach (fewer, highly robust nodes operating as industrial data centers) emphasizes throughput and reliability. The trade-off? Fewer players are in the backbone, but a network is actually capable of supporting billions of daily transactions. It's simply a different calculation of who the end user is. In BSV, it's not the node hobbyist; it's the merchant, the app developer, the billions of ordinary people paying for coffee, querying smart contracts, or timestamping invoices. None of this is inherently more righteous. But it is honest. BSV doesn't pretend that everyone must personally validate the entire chain for a payment system to be trustworthy. It leans on cryptographic proofs and competitive commercial services like the rest of our economy. You could argue that this restores Bitcoin to Satoshi's vision of a peer-to-peer cash system where trust is engineered through incentives, not socially policed by enthusiasts running Raspberry Pis. But, there's always a but… This all poses a thorny education challenge. People have been taught for 15 years that certain UX flows are normal because they grew from BTC's assumptions. Put in your seed phrase, and watch your coins appear. Fast sync times. Small chain, lightweight everything. But that's only one vision. It was never the only one. And ironically, it's the version that scales the least. Under pressure, that UX fails the common user, too. It just doesn't happen very often because aside from the 2017 bull run and the 2023 Ordinals craze, BTC gets very little real use from real people, so the congestion doesn't get experienced by many. In BSV, we will have to keep explaining why some wallets might ask you to track Merkle paths, why your node might take longer to sync, and why there's professional infrastructure where you expected hobbyist tinkering. These trade-offs aren't bugs. They're intentional, designed to support a network that can shoulder the world's economic data. In a way, it's poetic. The same debates echo from Bitcoin's earliest days: how many nodes should there be? How big can blocks get? Who is this system for? BTC's answers to those questions hardened dogma into gospel. BSV simply dares to answer differently. And as the world starts hunting for a data ledger that can carry actual commerce rather than speculative cycles, maybe we should reconsider who made the wiser bargain. Time will tell. Watch: Lessons on Triple Entry Accounting from Malta's TEA Conference
Campaign ME
03-06-2025
- Business
- Campaign ME
Saudi's Al-Ittihad Club picks Dentsu Sports International, Merkle
Dentsu Sports International (DSI) and Merkle, dentsu's leading customer experience management company, have been appointed as digital transformation partners by Al-Ittihad Club, one of the most iconic and decorated clubs in Saudi Arabian football. Following a victorious season in the Roshn Saudi Pro League, Al-Ittihad is embarking on a bold new chapter to bring the club closer to its fans through an ambitious overhaul of its digital and data infrastructure. The 12-month project will see DSI and Merkle work alongside a consortium of best-in-class industry specialists to reimagine the club's CRM, website, mobile app and data platforms. Tarek Daouk, CEO of dentsu MENA, said, 'We're incredibly proud to support one of Saudi Arabia's most historic homegrown clubs as they take bold steps to elevate their global presence.' Daouk added, 'This partnership reflects our commitment to helping regional icons harness the power of data, creativity and technology to engage new generations of fans across borders.'\ This transformation aims to deliver a state-of-the-art, multi-sport, multi-language digital ecosystem designed to offer a seamless, connected and highly personalised experience for Al-Ittihad Club's global fanbase. Kieran Morrison, Head of Digital & Membership at Al-Ittihad Club, said, 'Our vision is to build a digital ecosystem that reflects the scale of our ambition – global in reach, but deeply rooted in the passion of our fans. By partnering with DSI and Merkle, we are investing in the infrastructure and capabilities that will help us know our fans better, serve them more meaningfully, and build lasting loyalty in every market we touch.' This strategic transformation will empower the club to engage with its fans more directly, understand their behaviours and preferences more deeply, and unlock new opportunities for content, commerce and loyalty across channels. The project also intends to signal a new era of innovation and global ambition for Al-Ittihad Club, aligned with the Kingdom's broader goals of digital leadership and sporting excellence.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Domaine Taps Industry Veterans to Lead Next Phase of Shopify B2B Growth
NEW YORK, May 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Domaine, the leading global Shopify design and development practice, today announced a significant investment in its business-to-business (B2B) offering, deepening its strategic partnership with Shopify. This move aims to further empower B2B companies, including manufacturers, distributors, and CPG brands, to grow revenue more efficiently by streamlining B2B operations and reducing the cost to serve wholesale customers. As part of this initiative, Domaine has appointed industry veterans Randy Higgins and Brad Borman as Managing Directors of B2B, both joining with decades of experience in digital commerce, B2B operations, and global B2B transformation across a variety of industries. Higgins previously served as Head of B2B Solutions at Merkle and Chief Strategy Officer at Shift7, a Merkle company. Borman was most recently SVP of Commerce Growth at Merkle, following his role as EVP of Growth and Partner at Shift7. Their leadership further positions Domaine to deliver even greater value to its clients as they navigate the rapidly evolving world of B2B commerce. "We are thrilled to welcome Randy and Brad to the Domaine leadership team," said Peter Humphrey, CEO of Domaine. "Their deep expertise and shared vision for transforming B2B commerce aligns perfectly with our mission to deliver exceptional commerce solutions to a wider—and growing—segment of the market." "Randy and I are honored to join the team at Domaine at such an exciting time in the evolution of B2B commerce," Borman said. "With more B2B revenue shifting to digital channels and Shopify investing heavily in enterprise-ready functionality, we see tremendous opportunity to help companies modernize how they sell to all of their customers. Domaine's technical roots and Shopify expertise give it the ideal foundation to lead this transformation." This investment marks another pivotal milestone in Domaine's history, as the company continues to expand its commerce capabilities and strengthen its collaboration with Shopify. By leveraging Shopify's top-tier B2B platform, Domaine aims to provide scalable, cost-effective solutions that optimize digital channels and unlock new growth opportunities for Domaine customers. Combined with world-class commerce delivery capabilities, the addition of Higgins and Borman's experience in global B2B transformation and complex systems integration further solidifies Domaine's position as a leader in modern commerce solutions. Learn more about Domaine's new B2B offerings here. About Domaine: Domaine is the leading global Shopify design and development practice. The business supports over 100 brands on the Shopify platform and has a delivery footprint spanning the US, Canada, and Europe. BV Investment Partners (BV), a middle-market private equity firm with deep expertise in the IT services sector, is the financial sponsor partnering with the existing executive team to support this next chapter of growth and expansion. Learn more at Contact: Chelsey DebalsiVP of Marketing, View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Domaine Worldwide LLC Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Yahoo
Local man accused of sexually abusing 13-year-old on trip to Hueston Woods
A 26-year-old man from Preble is accused of unlawful sexual conduct with a child while visiting Hueston Woods, according to Eaton County Court records. [DOWNLOAD: Free WHIO-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] Hunter Austin Merkle has been charged with one count of sexual battery and one count of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, court records say. The child involved in the investigation is a 14-year-old girl, but she was 13 at the time of the assault, according to court records. TRENDING STORIES: Boil advisory issued for parts of Montgomery County; see if you are impacted Newlyweds receive Amazon gift cards before groom's deployment, company says they won't honor them UPDATE: Police have identified 2 baby chick theft suspects The court records say the girl had been staying with Merkle and another person for three weeks in July and August of 2024. Court records say Merkle assaulted the girl while on a hike at Hueston Woods. They also list multiple sexually explicit messages sent to the girl from Merkle, including one message that shows intent to have sex with her on their trip. [SIGN UP: WHIO-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
