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October, 2020 – Monthly Recap

Monthly Recap

October, 2020

Welcome to our monthly recap for October.

Overview 

Crypto News

The American FBI and CFTC are going after the largest Bitcoin derivatives exchange BitMEX for operating an “illegal” exchange.

CFTC and the U.S. Attorney for the District of New York have charged BitMEX for operating an unregulated exchange and non-compliance with KYC and AML guidelines.

Crypto exchange Coinbase is now offering “instant” withdrawals in nearly 40 countries, including the U.S. and the U.K.

The new feature is being facilitated via Visa and Mastercard.

The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has today officially banned the sale of cryptocurrency derivatives and exchange-traded notes to retail users, more than a year after first proposing such a ban.
The ban will come into effect on January 6, 2021.

In a press release shared with U.Today exclusively, Block.one unveiled that the global cloud monster Google Cloud intends to join the EOS community and become a Block Producer on the EOS network. Google Cloud joining in is a major milestone for EOS Google Cloud intends to become a block producer (BP) candidate on the EOS network and, after joining it, this branch of the global IT heavyweight will leverage EOS as it is taking steps to become one of its BPs.

Square, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s payment company, has purchased $50 million worth of bitcoin.
The investment represents approximately 1% of Square’s total assets as of Q2 2020.
Square has become the second publicly-listed company after MicroStrategy to invest in bitcoin.

The authorities in China’s province of Shenzhen are planning to airdrop the soon-to-launch Chinese CBDC to its local residents. Reportedly, this will mark as the largest campaign initiated as part of the pilot program for the Chinese digital currency.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, citizens have been able to enter a lottery to receive the digital funds, of which coins worth 10 million yuan ($1.47 million) will be awarded to promote their use in roughly 3,400 designated stores in the Luohu district.

XRPL Monitor spotted gargantuan amounts of XRP moved by the blockchain behemoth Ripple. Meanwhile, large XRP movements have been noticed on various Ripple ODL partner exchanges, and the Binance giant transacted 13 mln XRP to the San Francisco-based tech company.

Grayscale Investments has announced a record quarterly performance, raking in $1.05 billion in investments, mostly from institutional investors. The company also sees “unprecedented demand” for bitcoin cash.

Schnorr signatures and Taproot, formally the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP) 340 and 341, are two of the biggest changes to Bitcoin since the activation of Segregated Witness (SegWit)—an implementation which increased Bitcoin’s blocksize limit—in 2017. Schorr itself is based on the SegWit mechanism.

PayPal has finally decided to embrace crypto and will soon offer its U.S. customers the ability to buy, hold, sell, and use various virtual currencies, having obtained a New York license permitting it to do so.

Hackers obtained USDT and USDC stablecoins worth $24 million from Harvest Finance’s stablecoin and BTC pools.
Harvest’s governance token FARM plummeted 60% following the revelation of the hack.
$400 million in total liquidity have been drained out of Harvest Finance as liquidity providers (LPs) flee the platform.

Dubbed “DBS Digital Exchange,” the trading platform would allow users to trade in four crypto assets — bitcoin (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH), ether (ETH), and XRP — against Singapore dollar (SGD), Hong Kong dollar (HKD), Japanese yen (JPY) and U.S. dollar (USD).

As cryptocurrency analyst Jason Deane explained in his recent coverage of these price milestones, the fact that BTC/lira has hit an all-time high, while BTC/USD has not, indicates that the lira’s purchasing power against the world reserve fiat currency has weakened.

JPMorgan Chase announced that its native digital currency offering — the JPM Coin — has finally been deployed for mainstream use by one of the firm’s technical associates. The token is designed to facilitate JPMorgan Chase’s various cross-border monetary transactions.

 

Related News

Financial institutions and money service providers using the San Francisco startup’s XRP-powered, cross-border payment product, On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), can borrow Ripple’s native currency for a one-time fee via an approval system that will move faster than legacy financial options, according to a press release.

According to data shared by the XRPL Monitor bot, San Francisco-based tech behemoth Ripple has conducted several large transactions, transferring approximately 100 mln XRP between its wallets and sending part of the money to its ODL corridor in Europe.

September 20th, 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

September 13th- September 20th, 2020

Welcome to our 4th weekly recap for September.

Overview 

Crypto News

  • As members of the U.S. Federal Reserve plan to convene this week, both gold and bitcoin (BTC) markets have started to climb in value ahead of the meeting. Bitcoin prices rose over 4% during the afternoon’s trading sessions and gold jumped 0.76% as well. The price of one ounce of fine gold is $1,956.24 at the time of publication.

    Meanwhile, after a brief upswing in value, the U.S. dollar has started to show signs of weakness again after losing massive amounts of value this year.

  • BitPay, the Atlanta-based cryptocurrency services provider, has recently released blockchain payment statistics that show how the market performed in 2020. Among other interesting points, the data signals strong support from U.S. consumers for the company that announced its first Mastercard branded card just a few months ago.

  • Regulators in 49 U.S. states have agreed to a single set of supervisory rules for money services businesses, including cryptocurrency service providers. State regulators supervise 79% of all U.S. banks.

  • The Indian government has not made any announcement regarding its plans for cryptocurrency, which has led to rumors and speculation. Several reports indicate that the government is planning to ban cryptocurrencies as outlined in the draft bill submitted by the Garg committee.

  • Kraken announced Wednesday that it has received a U.S. bank charter. “The state of Wyoming has approved Kraken’s application to form the world’s first Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI), tentatively called Kraken Financial.

September 13th, 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

September 6th- September 13th, 2020

Welcome to our 3rd weekly recap for September.

Overview 

Crypto News

  • Online food ordering platform Just Eat has begun accepting cryptocurrencies for over 15,000 restaurants in France. The Just Eat group operates in 13 countries. Its website for France has recently undergone a significant makeover following the acquisition of Just Eat Plc by Takeaway.com. The latter has been accepting bitcoin for quite some time.

  • Global payments company Mastercard announced Wednesday the launch of its “proprietary virtual testing environment” for central banks to evaluate use cases of their central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

  • According to the report, the regulation will seek to tackle bitcoin’s high volatility as well as “risks posed by systemic ones, like libra” by creating a “new college of supervisors” involving existing national and continental regulatory agencies – and one new additional body – all chaired by the European Banking Authority (EBA).

  • Bitcoin miners are finding it difficult to obtain next-generation application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining rigs after a number of firms have sold out. Semiconductor goliaths like Samsung and TSMC have been struggling to keep up with the demand that was sparked by the Covid-19 outbreak.

  • Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has been struggling to get some functionalities approved for its iOS app, CEO Brian Armstrong detailed his company’s experience dealing with Apple Inc. on Friday. “In the wake of other companies struggling with Apple’s App Store restrictions, I want to share a bit about Coinbase’s own struggle here,” he began, elaborating:

September 6th, 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 30th- September 6th, 2020

Welcome to our 1st weekly recap for September.

Overview 

Crypto News

August 30 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 23rd- August 30th, 2020

Welcome to our 4th weekly recap for August.

Overview 

Crypto News

August 23 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 16th- August 23rd, 2020

Welcome to our 3rd weekly recap for August.

Overview 

Crypto News

 

August 16 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 10th- August 16th, 2020

Welcome to our 2nd weekly recap for August.

Overview 

Crypto News

  • A single malicious entity controls nearly a quarter of all nodes used on the anonymous internet provider Tor Network and is using its position to steal bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

  • The Bolivarian Council of Mayors in Venezuela signed the so-called “National Tax Harmonization Agreement” for 305 municipalities in the country, including the Petro (PTR) as a means to collect payments of taxes and sanctions.

    The cryptocurrency is becoming increasingly widely used as the result of a new campaign.

  • Both bitcoin and gold have risen sharply throughout 2020, driven by relentless fiat money printing by governments and central banks, keen to keep their economies afloat in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

    BTC hit a yearly high of $12,000 just as gold soared to a record high of $2,000 per ounce.

  • In a blog post on August 13, Coinbase unveiled its new crypto lending business, which places it into competition with the likes of Nexo and Blockfi. The service charges an annualized interest rate of 8% for borrows that are one year or less.
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August 07 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

August 1st - August 7th, 2020

Welcome to our weekly recap for August.

Overview 

Crypto News

  • Digital currency derivatives have been on fire during the last two weeks as Ethereum futures volumes touched an all-time high on Sunday. The popular derivatives trading platform Deribit saw 1.9 million ETH contracts traded and CME Group is now the third-largest exchange in terms of bitcoin futures open interest.

  • The four congressmen are Bill Foster (D) of Illinois, Darren Soto (D) of Florida, Tom Emmer (R) of Minnesota, and David Schweikert (R) of Arizona.

    In their letter addressed to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, the quartet expressed concern that the “taxation of staking rewards as income may overstate taxpayers’ actual gains from participating in this new technology.”

  • Ethereum Classic has suffered its second 51% attack in a week after more than 4,000 blocks were reorganized Thursday morning.

    Mining pool Ethermine’s parent entity Bitfly and crypto exchange Binance reported the reorganization, announcing all Ethereum Classic payouts, withdrawals and deposits had been suspended due to the attack.

  • Matthew McDermott, Goldman’s new digital asset global head, confirmed the U.S. investment bank was exploring whether to launch its own digital asset, CNBC reported Thursday.
    “We are exploring the commercial viability of creating our own fiat digital token, but it’s early days as we continue to work through the potential use cases,” he said.
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July 31st 2020 – Weekly Recap

Weekly Recap

July 24th - July 31st, 2020

Welcome to our weekly recap for July.

Overview 

Crypto News

  • The Bank of England’s upcoming settlement service is being designed to support a possible central bank digital currency (CBDC). The new settlements system is being designed that the bank could incorporate a facility for digital currency transactions, should it decide to support a CBDC.

  • Instead of buying groceries or paying rent, many Americans opted to invest in the top cryptocurrency when they received their first stimulus checks in April. And the gamble paid off. Those that converted the free money to bitcoin have raked in up to 54% in profit in three months.

    Now, history may be about to repeat itself.

  • The United States has suffered its worst economic decline on record with the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracting by 32.9 percent in the second quarter. Most analysts expect the economy to manage a sharp bounce-back in the current July-September quarter. Yet with confirmed coronavirus cases elevated in a majority of states, the economy could worsen in the months ahead.

  • Around 2,500 stolen bitcoins ($28 million) from the 2016 Bitfinex breach were transferred from the hacker’s wallet on Monday.The last time the Bitfinex hackers moved funds from the hack four years ago, they moved around $5 million worth of coins on June 24. This time around, the top crypto asset by market capitalization touched new price highs for 2020 on July 27.
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June 2020 Weekly Recap #5

June Weekly Recap 5

June 23th - June 30nd, 2020

Welcome to our 5th weekly recap for June.

Overview 

 

 

Crypto News

  • Australians can now pay for Bitcoin (BTC) at national post offices, thanks to a new collaboration with local cryptocurrency exchange, Bitcoin.com.au. Customers will now be able to pay for BTC at more than 3,500 Australian Post offices.

  • The European Union’s Executive Vice President of the European Commission for An Economy that Works for People – said Europe had to seize the opportunity to become one of the main rule-makers for digital finance.

    The new regulatory regime for cryptocurrency will not only cover unregulated digital assets, but it will also consolidate and homogenize existing standards across the continent, Dombrovskis said.

  • In a research paper, titled “Flood & Loot: A Systemic Attack On The Lightning Network,” researchers Jona Harris and Aviv Zohar, both of Israel’s Hebrew University, found that attackers can exploit a bottleneck in the system to drain wallets of funds.

  • Fraudulent websites successfully have stolen the personal records of a number of individuals from the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Spain and more. The attack was executed as a targeted multistage Bitcoin (BTC) scam propagated by a number of fraudulent websites impersonating recognized media outlets and personalities.According to the Singapore-based intelligence company Group-IB, the attack exposed personal data for thousands of people.
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