A guide to the city of Melbourne in Australia, as well as its surrounding areas. This guide was written as a guide to help local residents, tourists, and newcomers to the city, who are looking to understand the city, the people, and the culture.
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have often been considered to be some of the most influential and passionate people in the world. These people are dedicated to the idea of creating a fair and free financial system, and are responsible for driving the adoption of technologies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. But what is it like to be one of these people?
As a self-described “crypto enthusiast”, I’ve wanted to explore the world of cryptocurrencies since it first started to garner attention. I’ve been trying to find ways to make it easier to learn about this phenomenon that has fueled the growth and value of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest of the cryptocurrency market. By giving a complete guide to Melbourne, I hope to help make this massive change in currency a little easier for everyone to understand.. Read more about bitcoin magazine and let us know what you think.
Melbourne’s crypto culture, the city’s most notable projects and people, the city’s financial infrastructure, which retailers accept crypto, and where you can find blockchain education courses are all covered in this “Crypto City” guide. There’s even a brief history with all the juicy details of famous controversies and collapses.
Quick facts
Melbourne is the name of the city. Australia is a country in Australia. 5.15 million people 1835 was the year it was founded. English is the language of choice.
Although it lacks Sydney’s spectacular harbor vistas, Australia’s second-largest city makes up for it with a strong emphasis on art, sports, and culture. There are more live music venues per capita in this city than anywhere else in the world, and it has spawned a slew of famous performers, including Nick Cave, Men at Work, The Avalanches, and Kylie Minogue.
Melbourne, on Australia’s southern coast, wasn’t established until almost 50 years after Sydney, but it rapidly became the richest city in the world during the Gold Rush, which lasted from the 1850s through the 1880s. With the tenth-largest immigrant population in the world, it is a highly multicultural city. The Australian Rules football code, the Australian Grand Prix, and the Australian Open are all held in the city, which is ranked 27th on the Global Financial Centers Index. Along with Chopper and Animal Kingdom, it was used as a shooting site for the first Mad Max film. Melbourne is more left-wing than any other city in Australia, and it is the birthplace of the labor movement.
In Melbourne, the Yarra River. Pexels is the source of this image.
Culture of cryptography
Melbourne was an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, and frequent meetings like as Blockchain Melbourne, Women in Blockchain, Web3 Melbourne, and futureAUS helped to build a vibrant community. During the ICO boom in 2017, Karen Cohen, vice chairwoman of Blockchain Australia, remembers a large inflow of newcomers.
“It was a lot of fun to be a part of the meeting culture. Because we didn’t have enough space, people were watching our meetings on Facebook Live because they couldn’t get inside the room.”
Talk & Trade meetups were held every Wednesday from 2015 to 2019 at the Blockchain Centre. Located at the Victorian Innovation Hub in the docklands, the Blockchain Centre was the heart of the community in real life, at least until the coronavirus pandemic struck.
Since 2013, Melbourne has been home to a slew of crypto exchanges, as well as a slew of initial coin offerings (ICOs), including CanYa, which runs the freelancing network CanWork, and Horizon State, a blockchain voting platform.
While the pandemic has moved most things online for the past 18 months, Blockchain Australia hosted a series of events at YBF Ventures in the Melbourne central business district (CBD) for the national Blockchain Week earlier this year, and Talk & Trade is now held at RMIT, in between lockdowns.
YBF Ventures will restart its blockchain community meetings, backed by Cohen as the expert in resident for blockchain, as live events begin to resurface and vaccination rates steadily grind up. “Unfortunately, 2023 has proven difficult with COVID, so it has had to go online,” she explains. “However, I believe that even if we were able to meet in person, there would still be a strong meetup culture.”
Melbourne boasts the world’s biggest tram network. Pexels is the source of this image.
Projects and businesses
At least three significant cross-chain initiatives have close connections to Melbourne, indicating that Melbournites are highly interested in addressing the issue of interblockchain communication. JP Thor, the creator of CanYa, helped establish THORChain, a cross-chain decentralized liquidity protocol, and several of THORChain’s anonymous local developers moved on to work on Sifchain, a related project. Simon Harman of Melbourne developed Chainflip, a cross-chain automated market maker, as well as the privacy project Loki, which is now known as Oxen.
Flex Dapps and TypeHuman, two Web 3.0 developer studios, are based here, as is Pellar, a white-label blockchain services provider whose infrastructure handles 10 million requests every day from across the globe. The MatRiCT technology (licensed to Hcash) was developed by researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and Monash University. It protects cryptography against quantum computers. Zed Run, a digital racehorse game developed by NFT, has received $20 million in funding from TCG and Andreessen Horowitz. Algorand is also well-represented in Melbourne, thanks to the Meld gold platform and Algomint.
Greetings, Elon Best wishes. @THORChain CEO Chris Hemsworth, 2023 pic.twitter.com/4MDli8anpW
May 14, 2023 — Fede (@ledgermex)
BTC Markets, Cointree, CoinSpot, CoinJar, noncustodial exchange Elbaite, and OTC service Caleb and Brown are among the Melbourne-based crypto exchanges. Banxa, a major worldwide fiat-to-crypto onramp, is also headquartered in the city.
Insurance platform Day By Day, onboarding and fraud prevention platform FrankieOne, and accounting software AEM are among the next initiatives. Apollo Capital, a DeFi-focused crypto fund headquartered in Melbourne, is a major investment in Synthetix and Internet Computer, among others. Henrik Andersson, Apollo’s chief investment officer, co-founded the dHEDGE decentralized pool trading platform and the mStable yield platform (and helped out with a few ideas for this guide).
There are just a dozen or so Bitcoin ATMs in Melbourne. Pexels is the source of this image.
Infrastructure for finance
The first Bitcoin ATM was placed in the Emporium in 2014, however there are only 13 Bitcoin ATMs in Melbourne, most of which are located in large retail malls. While many banks are willing to let customers to transfer money to exchanges, many users, particularly those operating crypto-related companies, have reported being abruptly debanked. “They terminate accounts at will based on crypto usage, and we’ve witnessed that,” Cohen adds.
The New Payments Platform in Australia, which allows immediate, 24/7 bank transactions using a phone number or email address, is a rival to crypto (at least in terms of payments). The Reserve Bank of Australia has highlighted PayID as a reason why a central bank digital currency is not required in Australia at this time. Hundreds of merchants in the Blueshyft network (Synthetix creator Kain Warwick’s other business) accept cash payments for crypto swaps over the counter.
Where can I spend my cryptocurrency?
According to Coinmap, there are now less than 40 Bitcoin-accepting retail establishments in Melbourne, making it difficult to spend bitcoin directly. (To put that in perspective, Ljubljana, Slovenia, has half the population but 554 crypto-accepting businesses.) It wasn’t always like this, with a number of Melbourne cafés and companies embracing cryptocurrency a few years ago before eliminating the option when it failed to catch on.
Many shops utilized TravelbyBit’s crypto payment service, however it was discontinued when the business merged with Travala in mid-2020. Mind Games, Australia’s oldest and largest board game store in the CBD, happily accepts Bitcoin through the Lightning Network. You may also study rock climbing at Melbourne Climbing School, get in shape at the women-only Fernwood Gym in Bulleen, get your computer repaired at Another World Computer Centre in Coburg, or pick some raver gear at Ministry of Style in Collingwood.
If you depend on Coinmap’s data, keep in mind that several of the businesses listed, such as cult bookstore Polyester Books, gift boutique Vera Chan, and numerous cafés, have since closed (most likely due to the epidemic).
According to Bitcoin.com, around 20 small companies accept Bitcoin Cash, including Japanese wellness facility Sensu Spa and ties and cufflinks retailer Jay Kirby Ties in the CBD.
Despite the paucity of businesses accepting direct crypto payments, crypto may be used to pay for almost anything in Melbourne through intermediate firms that convert it to cash. You may pay any Bpay biller or bank account with 18 different cryptocurrencies via the Living Room of Satoshi.
The Blockchain Innovation Hub is located at RMIT. Pexels is the source of this image.
Education
The Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT University investigates the social and commercial aspects of blockchain, while the Blockchain Technology Centre at Monash University offers training and does research. Swinburne University and Deakin University both have Blockchain Innovation Labs that undertake research.
Dissensions and failures
Perhaps the most divisive initiative to come from the city was Auscoin. The currency was developed to finance the deployment of 1,200 Bitcoin ATMs by Sam Karagiozis, the proprietor of a Lambo-driving souvlaki chain shop. Although the ICO only collected $2 million, the Australian edition of 60 Minutes called it a “$80 million fraud” based on “grandiose claims.” After Karagiozis was accused with trafficking 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of narcotics through the dark web, AUSTRAC ordered Auscoin to stop operations.
In other news, when Melbourne-based crypto exchange ACX suddenly failed at the end of 2019, up to 200 investors lost approximately $10 million between them. The Blockchain Centre was run by Blockchain Global, whose creator Sam Lee was crucial in its establishment.
MyCryptoWallet was another local exchange that suddenly shut down. National Australia Bank, which was founded in 2017, had its accounts frozen in early 2019. The exchange established other banking services and briefly recovered, but customers discovered they had lost access to their money later that year. They have not yet received their money as of April, and Australia’s corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, was reported to be investigating. Huobi Australia first opened its doors in Melbourne in 2018, however it soon closed owing to a lack of business during the crypto winter. Horizon State, a potential blockchain-based voting platform, started in Melbourne and then relocated to New Zealand, where it was about to achieve great things until the initiative was scuppered by a mystery court action in Melbourne. In a joyful conclusion, the community is raising funds via a crowd equity raise to rebuild it from the ashes.
BREAKING: Sam Karagiozis, the creator of Auscoin, is facing drug trafficking charges, but he has been granted bail to attend his brother’s wedding. https://t.co/aGuzMRcYcR
— January 5, 2023, The Greek Herald (@greek herald)
Figures of note
Ethereum influencer Anthony Sassano; BTC Markets CEO Caroline Bowler; Apollo Capital chief investment officer Henrik Andersson; A. J. Milne of Meld Ventures and Algomint; Blockchain Australia CEO Steve Vallas; Tom Nash and Alex Ramsey of Flex Dapps; Women in Blockchain International manager Akasha Indream; Algorand Foundation chief operating officer Jason Lee; CanYa and THORChain founder JP Thor; “Satoshi’s sister” Lisa Edwards; Blockchain Centre founder Sam Lee (also of the now-defunct ACX); RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub professor Jason Potts; Joseph Liu, director of the Monash Blockchain Technology Centre and inventor of the tech behind Monero; Oxen chief technology officer Kee Jefferys; Emerging Tech Talent founder Karen Cohen; Ethitech head of education Anouk Pinchetti; TypeHuman director Nick Byrne; Auscoin founder Sam Karagiozis; and blockchain law specialists Joni Pirovich of Mills Oakley and John Bassilios of Hall & Wilcox. Cointelegraph team members and contributors based in Melbourne: Andrew Fenton, Brian Quarmby, Kelsie Nabben.
Suggestions for this guide’s expansion are appreciated. Please contact Andrew Fenton at [email protected].
The Cointelegraph team is based in Melbourne, Australia, where we cover the latest news in the world of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized applications. We also report on the latest developments in the Australian community. If you are looking for a guide to Melbourne, this is your go-to team.. Read more about blockchain magazine and let us know what you think.
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