Today in Crypto: WeChat Suspends Some NFT Accounts; Citi Sees Metaverse Market Worth Up to $13T by 2030

WeChat, China’s largest messaging app, has suspended some accounts that have been associated with NFTs as it clarifies its rules around the digital collectibles, a CNBC report said last week.

NFTs in China aren’t bought with crypto, rather being paid for with Chinese yuan, and they’re built on various blockchains that are overseen by regulators.

There’s no regulation for NFTs yet in China, and WeChat parent Tencent said it suspended accounts to prevent the risk of speculation in digital currency transactions.

Meanwhile, PrimeBlock, the bitcoin miner, plans to go public through a merger with the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) 10X Capital Venture Acquisition Corp II, Coindesk wrote Friday (April 1).

PrimeBlock has secured $300 million in committed equity financing, and the SPAC has been reported to be seeking at least $150 million through private investment in public equity for the deal. The deal is expected to be valued at $1.25 billion.

In other news, Citi has said the total addressable market for the metaverse economy might end up between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030, a report said.

The total users might hit 5 billion.

However, getting to that level will require a lot more infrastructure investment, according to the report. The bank said the content streaming environment for the metaverse would need over 1,000 times the levels of today’s computational efficiency.

In other news, the deposits and withdrawals for the Ronin network  have started back up after a recent $600 million hack at gaming site Axie Infinity, a report from Binance said.

Withdrawals of Wrapped Ether on the Ethereum network, and the convert function from WETH to ETH will be restored at a later date.

Meanwhile, Indonesia is looking at charging a value-added tax on crypto transactions, as well as an income tax on capital gains on those investments, starting at 0.1% each, Reuters wrote.

It will start as of May 1.

The country has been seeing a boom in crypto trading during the pandemic — the number of crypto asset holders surged to 11 million by the end of 2021.

Last year’s total crypto asset transactions in commodity futures markets hit 859.4 trillion rupiah, which was over 10 times as much as the 2020 amount.