“Crypto derivatives platform ErisX is officially live with its physically settled bitcoin futures contracts, launching only the second such product suite in the U.S. ErisX’s bitcoin futures will see a contract size of 0.1 bitcoin ($663 at current prices), with customers able to trade monthly or quarterly contracts at launch.

The launch of ErisX’s fully regulated futures market is a significant development for the digital asset industry. The more accessible contract size and transparent order book provides first time market participants exposure to digital assets through a familiar mechanism.”

---

“Launched in 2018, FDAS already offers custody and trade execution services services to U.S.-based institutional investors. It will now also provide European digital assets investors such as hedge funds, family offices and market intermediaries with these services.

The firm has seen ‘significant interest and engagement’ from institutional investors since its U.S. launch a year ago.

These and other market indicators, alongside interest expressed from U.K. and European client prospects, indicate a market with increasing potential which gives us the confidence to expand the digital assets business geographically.”

---

“Ultimately, Bitcoin price needs to hold the pink highlighted zone between $6,700 and $6,300 to avoid a drop back toward the May through April lows in the $4,900 to $5,500 region.

In the meantime, traders should keep an eye out for a possible double bottom around $6,530 and given that the daily and weekly RSI and Stoch are oversold, aggressive traders might look to play an oversold bounce, which seems ripe to take place as Bitcoin comes closer to falling below the long-term descending channel support at $6,400.”

See Also: 5 BIG Problems Killing Price (video)

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“Levine will help the firm to ensure that its customers receive the “best-in-class” compliance tooling for security token issuances.

I am excited to join TokenSoft not only to help further the compliant issuances of tokens and digital assets but to push for the development of a regulatory framework for the trading and custody of such assets by working with the SEC and FINRA.”

---

“CHAI is an ERC20 token that’s like DAI which earns interest from Maker’s Dai Savings Rate (DSR), currently 4% as of writing this. It’s a lot like how cDAI represents DAI supplied to Compound plus interest. Chai.sol, the token’s smart contact, deposits your DAI into the DSR and issues you CHAI tokens which can be stored, transferred, traded, and later redeemed for the underlying DAI plus any interest earned. As an added bonus, it’s also supports gas-less token transfers.

You can now pay friends, grow your savings, trade, etc. while still earning interest on your DAI.“

See Also: OKEx Becomes the First Major Platform to Integrate Maker’s Dai Savings Rate
See Also: Network Effects: Gnosis Safe and Pepo, the new dapp for the crypto community
See Also: Katalyst: Kyber Protocol Upgrade and 2020 Plans
See Also: Tornado.cash version 2 has been released (non-custodial mixer)

---

“CEO Jeremy Allaire announced that the company would be focusing on its stablecoin business through 2020, with a suite of services built around the dollar-pegged USDC. Next year, it will support global payment, custody and stablecoin wallet APIs.

Tuesday’s post follows Circle’s sale of the Poloniex trading platform in October, the shutdown of its Circle Pay app in September and the dissolution of its research wing. Circle disclosed Tuesday that its OTC desk had been sold to the Kraken crypto exchange.

In an announcement of its own, Kraken said its OTC desk would now see more than 20 employees, and allow the company to serve new trading partners in Asia and other parts of the world. Kraken said the move would also bring deeper liquidity and more automated tools.”

See Also: Gemini, State Street Launch Cryptocurrency Reporting Pilot

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“The proof of concept shows that it is possible, using the Corda platform, to build a simplified CBDC payment system that safeguards users’ privacy for lower-value transactions, while still ensuring that higher-value transactions are subject to mandatory AML/CFT checks.

The bank noted an array of issues that purportedly needed to be improved including reducing the amount of information visible to parties that are not involved in the transactions, and users’ ability to access or spend CBDC balances when the intermediary is unavailable. The bank further noted that issues of scalability were not addressed or tested.”

---

“The Colorado Education Work Lab aims to provide the state with a ‘unified but decentralized ecosystem for innovation, pilots, research, and collaboration for the future of education and work.‘

[The C-Lab] represents a first-of-its-kind ‘biodome’ experiment for blockchain and education, connecting the entire state into a decentralized 21st century education and workplace infrastructure.”

“BCBS expresses the idea that — if authorized — banks that decide to acquire crypto assets or provide related services should use prudence, especially for high-risk tokens.

The Basel Committee recommends that crypto assets should not be accepted as credit risk mitigation collateral, high-quality liquid assets for liquidity coverage ratio or net stable funding ratio.

This treatment reflects the high degree of uncertainty about the positive realisable value of crypto-assets in times of stress.“

---

“Online crypto gaming platform ChopCoin and mining pool Simplecoin both announced that they are shutting down. Both firms cite the EU’s upcoming Anti-Money Laundering Directive that would require the firms to adopt Know Your Client (KYC) measures.

The new regulations were passed on July 9 and member states are required to adopt them by Jan. 10, 2020. 

Mining should be available to anyone and we refuse to jeopardise our users’ privacy.”

---

“Sheinfeld’s eight-man team is looking to help launch a point-of-sale app by the trading firm Iterative Capital, called Escher, in early 2020. Some retailers are already testing the beta version. They will start a pilot this month in Israel.

We can do a round-trip process with bitcoin – buy, sell, settle – in four seconds.”

---

“The move makes Bitcoin.com one of the few recognized trading platforms to forge ties with HEX, which together with founder Richard Heart continues to field widespread accusations of fraud.

Not only will Richard control close to half of all HEX after the first year, but it is the first token I have seen to have its founder’s perpetual self-enrichment baked into the protocol.

While little overall trading data is available, Bitcoin.com’s HEX markets have traded the equivalent of 0.81 BTC ($5,700) in the past 24 hours. In that period, the platform’s two HEX trading pairs, HEX/BCH and HEX/ETH, have dropped in price by 64% and 57% respectively.”

---

“The trial tested working capital applications developed by TradeIX and focused on the receivables finance product on Marco Polo’s platform. Accounts receivables financing, also called factoring, is where a business sells account receivables to a third party at a discount in return for immediate cash payment.”

See Also: Accenture Will Board Corporates Onto Marco Polo Shipping Blockchain

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“If there’s one thing we know about blockchain, we know that it excels at verifying and confirming what is real.

The general idea goes like this: images, videos, and audio can be cryptographically signed, geotagged, and timestamped to establish their origins. This kind of “verified capture” calls for applications to perform a number of checks, ensuring that transmitted data conforms with the source material. Comparing that source hash to another in search of any mismatches will easily tell you if the media has been manipulated or not.“

---

“Those groups would be airdropped 0.5 petro (said to be worth $30) as a holiday bonus this week. Considering the national minimum wage is less than $10 a month, eligible citizens will be strongly incentivized to register for the app. 

PetroApp can also be used to exchange other cryptocurrencies, too, meaning users may well use the app to swap their airdropped petro for the currently supported bitcoin, litecoin and dash.”

Great read.

“Some people make the mistake of thinking all TPS is equal. No. What we’re really after in crypto is trustless transactions per second. If you’re giving up decentralization for higher TPS you’re just a cloud provider.

You can get liquid value on a crypto network really easily. Just use existing sources of trusted value. Import fiat stablecoins like USDC. Use tokenized T-bills. Tokenize gold. Some people think these will replace cryptonative assets as a store of value. But all of themm require a trusted third-party—banks, vaults, and legal systems. All of them settle natively on the legal system, not on the chain. They’re all useful, but limited. They’re foreign.

Trustless value is only present in crypto native assets. The high value, high liquidity trustless assets like BTC and ETH are the kings here. These settle onchain—no legal system, no banks, no meatspace, no trusted third-party. Tether, or USDC, or tokenized T-bills might beat BTC and ETH in liquidity and marketcap for a time but they can never beat them on the dimension of trustlessness. This is why USDC can’t replace ETH.

Trustless value is important because its economic bandwidth for a trustless economy.”

---

“ZK Sync is designed to bring a VISA-scale throughput of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) to Ethereum while keeping the funds as secure as in the underlying L1 accounts and maintaining a high degree of censorship-resistance. Another important aspect of the protocol is its ultra-low latency: transactions in ZK Sync will provide instant economic finality.

Privacy is an absolute prerequisite for mass adoption.“

---

“Interesting deep dive from Vitalik on bringing increased efficiency and accuracy to democratic decision making via ‘quadratic’ voting, funding and attention markets.

“To the proponents of these voting schemes, this is not just another slight improvement to what exists. Rather, it’s an initial foray into a fundamentally new class of social technology which, has the potential to overturn how we make many public decisions, large and small. The ultimate effect of these schemes rolled out in their full form could be as deeply transformative as the industrial-era advent of mostly-free markets and constitutional democracy.”

---

Good interview with ‘Pomp’.

---

“President of Fidelity Digital Assets, the cryptocurrency trading arm of financial services giant Fidelity, announced that the firm may add support for Ether (ETH) in 2020.

We’ve done a lot of work on Ethereum. We intend to support it in the New Year. We’re very led by our clients.”

---

“More than 240 staking pools have gone online since Shelley went live, with about 120 staking pools during the first day of operation alone.

ADA holders have been waiting expectantly for the launch of Cardano’s Shelley incentivized testnet, in which participating users will be able to earn real ADA rewards, which they will reportedly receive by the end of the testnet period.

Users who stake 100,000 ADA, worth roughly $3,600 at writing time, could earn around $260 per year in staking rewards. Shelley mainnet will reportedly go live in early 2020.“

---

“The United States central bank will inject at least $425 billion of nonexistent money into the economy by the middle of next month.

In accordance with the most recent FOMC directive, the Desk will conduct repo operations to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample.

Such moves involve conjuring vast new liquidity based on zero backing. Critics have long highlighted the policy as an example of the failure of central banks.”

See Also: The Fed Will Buy 40% Of US Treasury Net Issuance In 2020

---

“The court employs technologies such as AI and blockchain to render judgment. 3.1 million Chinese litigation activities from March to October of this year were settled through the blockchain and AI-powered smart internet courts.

In the current use of AI as an assistant to make rulings, efficiency is prioritized over accuracy. A human judge is ultimately responsible for the fair ruling. […] But we are heading toward a future when we can see an AI judge sitting at the podium.”

---

“The companies announced the release of Omni Core 0.7.0, the development of which was sponsored by Tether. The new version reportedly enhances network performance and fixes locking issues and Remote Procedure Calls. Omni is also the platform that hosted the first USDT tokens.

More interestingly, Omni Core 0.7.0 enables the building of an on-chain decentralized exchange. The new version of the Omni protocol allows users to trade any on-chain asset for Bitcoin.”

“While the initial Libra white paper published in June specified that interest on the reserve assets would be used to cover system costs, keep transaction fees low, support growth, and pay dividends to the early investors i.e. Libra Association members, mention of dividends has now been removed.

The problem with awarding dividends is that it created a potential conflict of interest between Libra Association members, and end-users of the currency. If dividends are paid from the interest on these assets, this gives an incentive to load the reserve with higher-risk assets.

There is also the possibility that the changes are in some way addressing concerns that Libra may be classified as a security.“

---

How can you not love the crypto space.

“A letter sent by law firm Miller Thomson to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) asks for the authorities to dig up and examine the body of Gerald Cotten, who reportedly died of complications due to Crohn’s disease at the end of December 2018.

Cotten’s death has been under suspicion since it was announced. According to Robertson’s statement, he had died of complications from Crohn’s disease, which is not generally fatal.

Following his death, Cotten was embalmed in a medical school and transported back to Canada, where he was reportedly buried in mid-December.”

---

Amazing. 😂

“Hydra, reportedly the largest darknet marketplace serving Russia and neighboring countries, claims it is seeking to raise $146 million through a token sale to fund a worldwide expansion. The sale is scheduled to launch Dec. 16.

The tokens, priced at $100 each, will be available to purchase on the platform for bitcoin. A “package” of 100 tokens will provide a buyer with a 0.00333333 percent share of Hydra’s profit. It makes no mention of which blockchain (if any) the tokens would run on.

Given the illicit nature of its business, Hydra’s token offering may be the most brazen ever, even compared to the ICOs that pushed the envelope of U.S. registration requirements in 2017. Russian news outlet Forklog warned that the sale could be an exit scam.”

---

Good read.

“The first is to increase efficiency by driving down overcollateralization margins. You can decrease volatility by onboarding more stable collateral, such as stablecoins, gold-pegged coins, or digital securities.  [Also] latency of the underlying blockchain matters quite a lot. With faster liquidations and more solid collateral, that overcollateralization ratio can drop by quite a bit.

The second priority for DeFi is greater diversity of synthetic assets. Maker and UMA are two protocols that are pursuing this, and I expect we’ll soon see a wide array of synthetic financial assets.

Finally, if your address has behaved well on other DeFi platforms, you should be eligible for lower rates and better credit.“

See Also: 4 New DeFi Trends to Watch Out for in 2020

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“Universally accessible central bank digital currency would bring no additional benefits for Switzerland at present. Instead, it would give rise to new risks, especially with regard to financial stability.

However, the government did say that a role for a digital franc that was confined to use among financial institutions is ‘a more promising strategy.’ A wholesale digital franc from the central bank ‘could possibly help to enhance efficiency in the trading, settlement and management of securities.‘”

See Also: Accenture Picked to Build Sweden’s E-Krona Digital Currency Pilot

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“Bitfinex will ostensibly be able to use the real-time monitoring capabilities of Chainalysis’ technology to identify high-risk outliers amid a high volume of transactions. Both firms took pains to stress that the solution will be privacy-safe, but help Bitfinex to crack down on bad actors using its platform.”

---

“Any way you slice it, the best odds among any candidate are substantially long, with the favorite offering a near 300% return on a correct prediction.

And then there’s Yang. I mean, betting against Andrew Yang is essentially free money.“

---

“Gold-backed stablecoin issuer Digix has integrated a dissolution mechanism into its DigixDAO platform. Each quarter, DGD token holders will vote on the mechanism.

If the dissolution vote passes, all of the remaining ETH in the DigixDAO fund, after other quarterly passed projects have been funded, will be returned to DGD holders. Digix and DGX tokens will continue to exist, but the platform for funding projects around the Digix ecosystem, will not.“

---

“The Singapore-based VeChain Foundation’s buyback wallet was compromised by a hacker. The firm says it has tagged and tracked the funds and is working with cybersecurity firm Hacken to isolate the tokens’ flow to various exchanges.

VeChain attributes the hacking to a human error within the foundation and has since corrected the error and protocols.”

---

“The digital assets custody service being developed by ING is purportedly part of one of the bank’s several blockchain-related initiatives and is still at an early stage of development. ING reportedly said that it ‘sees increasing opportunities with regard to digital assets on both asset backed and native security tokens.’

As cryptocurrencies begin to gain traction as an asset class, major financial firms are increasingly developing their own custody technologies and services.”

See Also: Regulated Swiss Crypto Bank SEBA Expands Services to 9 New Countries
See Also: Elliptic Launches Tool to Connect Banks with Cryptocurrency Exchanges
See Also: BlockFi to Offer First Interest-Bearing Crypto Accounts in Washington State

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“Binance users will now be able to use Paxful to buy Bitcoin (BTC) with 167 various fiat currencies. Supported fiat currencies include the Russian ruble, Vietnamese dong, Indonesian rupiah, Nigerian naira, Colombian peso, British pound, Mexican peso, Canadian dollar, euro, Argentine peso.

The partnership aims to reach and aid an estimated 2 billion unbanked people worldwide.“

See Also: Crypto Exchange Coinbase Pro Is Adding Support For Orchid Trading

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• “20m+ Total Ethereum accounts created this year
• 25K+ Monthly increased Truffle downloads throughout 2019.
• 8,516 Live Ethereum nodes
• 520 New dapps created in 2019
• The average Ethereum Name Service owner purchased 1-2 domain names
• OpenSea has become the leading marketplace for NFT sales
• At least 25 DAOs were summoned this year
• The amount of ether locked in DeFi increased dramatically, recently surpassing $650 million”

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“Waves is launching Gravity Hub, a blockchain-agnostic protocol resolving the interoperability issue. It will also operate as a data oracle, feeding data from the outside world to the blockchain. Gravity Hub is essentially a blockchain that doesn’t have any tokens, but that can communicate with other blockchains.

Gravity Hub will provide interoperability at the protocol level as well as at the decentralized application level, allowing a dApp to send a request to another dApp on a different blockchain.”

---

“China’s Sichuan province is accounting for over half the global hash rate, according to a study by London-based digital asset manager CoinShares. Other hubs include sites in the United States, Russia and Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile, Bitmain appears on track to monopolize China’s crypto mining market as some reports claim that the company accounts for 75% market share of the crypto hardware market worldwide.”

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This pretty much says it all #’nuffsaid:

“To be clear, the RSK project isn’t “based on bitcoin.” The RSK sidechain branches off from the bitcoin blockchain and issues bitcoin IOUs using a separate federation to manage the sidechain. 

There are still 15 projects in the RSK federation, down from 25 founding members in 2016. If these federation members turn off their servers, with their built-in nodes, the public RSK protocol will not be able to swap bitcoin IOUs for real bitcoin.“

See Also: Important Info on the MakerDAO Governance Security Module Vote

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“The importance of the NEC partnership is clear when looking at D-Wave’s current cloud offerings. D-Wave’s Leap program gives users free access to a D-Wave 2000Q computer and a full SDK to take advantage of their machines.

NEC and D-Wave will work with customers to develop applications that harness the power of their collaborative hybrid systems and solve practical business and scientific problems across a variety of industries.”

---

“Centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.

As such, Twitter is funding an independent dedicated team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers. Dorsey further said: ‘It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralized standard for social media that paves the path to solving the challenges listed above.'”

See Also: Square Crypto Bankrolls Star Lightning Developer Known as ‘ZmnSCPxj’

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“A total of 11 roles were eliminated in India and the Philippines due to a realignment of the sales and services team in those countries.”

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And somehow no mention of ENS, which solves exactly this. #CoinDesk

“The news that Ethos Capital, a secretive group of investors, bought the TLD caused a minor firestorm in the open-source ecosystem.

.Org is usually the namespace for non-profits, foundations, governmental research institutes, and others. Being owned by a private equity firm usually stands for maximizing profits and revenue.

The move from the non-profit Internet Society (INSO) to the for-profit Ethos could hasten the end of the public-domain Internet. In fact, INSO’s parent, the so-called PIR – which stands for Public Interest Registry – ‘has confirmed it will discard the non-profit status it has held since 2003 as a result of the sale.'”

---

“Nike patented shoes that are tokenized as a non-fungible token (NFT) on the Ethereum blockchain, dubbed CryptoKicks. The system apparently aims to provide a way to ensure the authenticity of the goods.

The patent also borrows ideas from popular blockchain collectible cats game CryptoKitties. More precisely, it suggests that the shoes can be bred:

Using the digital asset, the buyer is enabled to “breed” the digital shoe with another digital shoe to create “shoe offspring,” and, based on rules of acceptable shoe manufacturability, have the newly bred shoe offspring custom made as a new, tangible pair of shoes.“

---

“With the move, head of Digital Investment Banking at Santander and chairman of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, hailed the technology as a real-world solution for securities issuance.

We just performed an early redemption of our blockchain-based bond that we issued on September 10th, 2019. This unequivocally proves that a debt security can be managed through its full lifecycle on a blockchain (public in this case).

It’s an evolutionary step. There are no secondary markets yet, but we are on that path.”

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“Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has announced the latest version of its Ledger Live application, adding support for Tezos (XTZ) and Tezos staking.  

This feature is typically available to users through major cryptocurrency exchanges, like Binance and Coinbase. Yet this has been problematic due to the questionable level of security on these exchanges.  Storing XTZ on a Ledger hardware wallet and then providing users with a platform to stake Tezos creates a much more secure solution.

Major exchanges that provide Tezos staking also typically charge commission fees on all rewards received. Unlike those exchanges, Ledger Live lets users choose who to delegate their tokens to without applying additional fees.“

See Also: Ledger Staking
See Also: How To: Staking on Ledger Live (video)

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“Kraken Security Labs has found a way to extract seeds from a KeepKey cryptocurrency hardware wallet. All that is required is physical access to the wallet for about 15 minutes. 

The attack takes advantage of inherent flaws within the microcontroller that is used in the KeepKey and relies on voltage glitching to extract your encrypted seed. This unfortunately means that it is difficult for the KeepKey team to do anything about this vulnerability without a hardware redesign.”

---

“Based on JPMorgan’s in-house blockchain platform Quorum, the Interbank Information Network (IIN) intends to accelerate payment transactions as well as address major challenges of sharing data between banks.

Bloomberg reports that more than 80 Japanese banks have expressed their intent to join the platform. The INN is currently operating at 70 banks in Europe, Asia and the United States.“

---

“What initially seemed like a textbook technical correction due to overbought conditions turned into a full-blown sell-off with prices falling more than 67 percent (from 465 to 153 satoshis)  in just 120 minutes.

The exact reason for the selloff is not known. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that the MATIC team had nothing to do with the price drop. Some investors, however, believe the selloff was caused by manipulative dumping [and] accusing the MATIC team of engineering a pump and dump scheme.“

See Also: How Margin Trading On Altcoins Affects The Market (MATIC -73%)
See Also: FinCEN Sees Jump in Crypto-Related Suspicious Activity Reports

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“The Shenzhen-based company will provide the Blockchain-Based Service Network (BSN) with its patented open consortium chain FISCO BCOS. Rather than a single blockchain, the consortium chain is a set of blockchain applications to serve the general public.

The announcement is the latest effort by the Chinese government to build a nationwide blockchain network to serve a range of state-controlled public services across the country, including telecommunications and energy management.”

“Bakkt is using its physically settled bitcoin contracts as a benchmark to support the new products.

By starting with the physically delivered Bakkt Bitcoin (USD) Monthly Futures, we have a benchmark contract which provides the foundation for us to develop complementary products based on the needs of our customers.

Bakkt’s options contract comes just a month before CME, which already offers cash-settled bitcoin futures in the U.S., launches its own similar product. However, while Bakkt’s pricing will be based around its existing physical product, CME’s is dependent on its bitcoin index.“

See Also: Cryptocurrency Exchange OKEx to Launch Options Trading This Month

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“The company said in a notice that it would shut down trading services on Dec. 15, 2019. Customers have until Jan. 31, 2020 to withdraw all of their assets.

The company said Monday the move is specifically ‘so that it can return in a more integrated and impactful fashion as part of its ongoing strategic layout,‘ though no further details were provided.”

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“Full nodes can take hours to download, but they’re the most secure way of using bitcoin as the user doesn’t have to trust anyone to ensure they have the correct transaction data. They use a fork of the project ABCore, which makes it easier to run a full node on Android devices.

For day-to-day, it is definitely more convenient and practical to use the wallet without the full node. However it is important to have the full node available in case the network were attacked in a similar fashion to Segwit2x with miners producing invalid blocks.”

---

“Further, the bull cross happened three months ahead of the reward halving (supply cut by miners), which took place in August 2016. By June 20, bitcoin had rallied by more than 120 percent to highs above $775.

The latest bull cross (above right) comes five months ahead of the next reward halving, due in May 2020.“

---

“BTSE, a Dubai-based cryptocurrency exchange, is looking to raise $50 million in one of the first token offerings on the Liquid Network, the parallel system to bitcoin created by startup Blockstream.

The minimum investment size is $150,000 USD.

With sidechains like Liquid and RSK, an asset can be locked up on the main bitcoin chain and then traded on the parallel network, and vice versa. The idea was in vogue mid-decade until the emergence of ethereum, which was designed specifically for such use cases, and became the go-to launching pad for initial coin offerings, security tokens, non-fungible collectibles and the like.”

“The People’s Bank of China is said to be preparing to launch pilots for its digital currency in at least two major cities. The tests are likely to include the participation of state-owned partners.

The first of two pilot phases will be smaller scale and start at the end of 2019. The second, later in 2020, will be a larger-scale effort in Shenzhen, according to the report. If all goes well, a full launch of DCEP is expected soon after the pilots.”

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“Ethereum has successfully completed the Istanbul hard fork. The lowered gas costs enabled by Istanbul’s EIPs are meant to increase bandwidth on the blockchain and foster zero-knowledge privacy technologies such as zk-SNARKs.”

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“One of the most interesting recent developments in cryptocurrency is the emergence of decentralized liquidity pools. Any financial system is, in a sense, only as decentralized as the sources of its liquidity.

Therefore the health of DeFi is largely identical to the health of decentralized liquidity venues. We are excited to see so many great teams attacking this key problem and striving to unlock a new phase of maturity and innovation in the space.”

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“The Istanbul Network Upgrade is scheduled to take place at Block #9069000.”

See Also: T-Minus 1,000 Blocks Until Ethereum’s Istanbul Hard Fork
See Also: Ethereum’s Istanbul Fork — Technical Explanation

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“Follow the timeline of blockchain’s growth from Satoshi Nakamoto and the Genesis Block to Ethereum and decentralized finance.”

See Also: 2019 Was The Year of DeFi (and Why 2020 Will be Too)

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“One of the guidelines focuses on individual crypto transactions worth less than 30,000 hriven ($1,300), from which the government will only collect the public key of the sender for the purpose of financial monitoring. 

However, once the transaction exceeds that amount, the government will apply verification to both sender and receiver. The process will include identity verification, as well as the verification of the nature of the business relationship.”

---

“Announced that it will launch in beta on Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day — in 2020.

The firm also admits that the initiative is still plagued by regulatory uncertainty and that it is still working with regulators to ensure compliance.”

“Steven Mnuchin, secretary of the U.S. Treasury, has no issue with the launch of the Facebook-led Libra project – as long as financial rules are followed.

I’m fine if Facebook wants to create a digital currency, but they need to be fully compliant. In no way can this be used for terrorist financing.

At the hearing, Mnuchin also said the U.S. is unlikely to develop a digital currency in the near term.

[Federal Reserve Chair Jerome] Powell and I have discussed this – we both agree that in the near future, in the next five years, we see no need for the Fed to issue a digital currency.”

See Also: Steven Mnuchin Does Not Expect US to Issue Digital Dollar in Next 5 Years
See Also: Bank for International Settlements Exec Shows New Fondness for CBDCs

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“Parity’s eth2 client, Shasper, successfully joined Prysmatic’s Sapphire Testnet marking the first public multi-client eth2 testnet. This is the exciting start of many multi-client testnets to come in the next month.

Not one but two (!) eth2 block explorers recently launched.

The BLS standards also remove one of the final blockers for launching the eth2 deposit contract. Runtime Verification is currently finishing up their report on the formal verification and analysis of the deposit contract bytecode. This report is expected to be published by the end of the month for public review, after which we can finally launch this thing.”

---

“Launched in April 2019, Coinbase Card is a Visa debit card that allows users to spend cryptocurrencies to pay for goods as well as to withdraw cash from ATMs. As 1 DAI is equivalent to $1, the addition of the stablecoin to the Coinbase Card aims to allow customers to spend crypto with less volatility.

It represents a small step on our big journey to make crypto accessible to all.”

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See Also: Evaluating the Explosive Growth in Synthetix

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“Sherman was elected to take up the position of Chair at the subcommittee that oversees the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the New York Stock Exchange and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Sherman has expressed opposition to any money that challenges the U.S. dollar’s role as global reserve currency. He continues to argue for an outright ban on cryptocurrency.

In my view, [Sherman’s] goal is essentially to try to ban the internet.”

---

“New details have been revealed on China’s upcoming digital currency, which appear to confirm speculation that it will be fully centralized. 

The research arm of crypto exchange Binance analyzed a prototype of the digital renminbi, finding that the currency collects innumerable pieces of financial data on each of its users. 

A centralized digital currency in China is a worrying proposition. Given that its social credit rating system—estimated to go fully live in 2020—cracks down on its citizens for violations as small as playing music too loudly on a train, combining this with full control over their wealth makes citizens powerless.“

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“People’s heightened demand for dematerialized means of payment and anonymity could drive more individuals to digital currencies.

In order to gain wider acceptance, digital assets need to overcome three major hurdles. These include perceived legitimacy in the eyes of governments and regulators, which entails price stability and allows for global reach in the payment market. According to Reid, the establishment of alliances with key stakeholders like mobile apps and card providers will enable this development.”

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“As part of the CRS-19 commercial resupply service mission, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is delivering SpaceChain’s hardware wallet technology to the ISS. The initiative is set to demonstrate the receipt, authorization and retransmission of blockchain-based transactions, creating multi-signature transactions. 

By adding space-based payloads to established networks, businesses will be able to enhance the security of the transmission of digital assets that can be vulnerable to cyberattacks and hacking when hosted exclusively in centralized terrestrial servers.”

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“Börse Stuttgart Stock Exchange (BSDEX) has now opened to all interested users with residence in Germany. Users will have to limit themselves to trading bitcoins against euros. In the future, BSDEX will also list other cryptocurrencies and digital assets like security tokens.”

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“A distributed ledger can be used to look at the provenance of data before AI parses it. Underpinning this is a new tool called Azure Blockchain Data Manager.

From manufacturing to energy to public sector to retail, AI is digitally transforming businesses in every vertical. Blockchain can ensure that everything from the algorithms to the data going in and out of them is trustworthy.”

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“We have used our own blockchain-based bond issuance system in the process.

The bond issuance is part of the country’s effort to support entrepreneurs with more efficient access to capital. Financing for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) has been one of the major blockchain use cases for banks and financial services companies in China.”