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April 2020 Weekly Recap #2

Posted 13 Apr / In Business Analysis, Investigation

April Weekly Recap 2

April 7th - April 13th, 2020

Welcome to our 2nd weekly recap for April.

Overview 

 

 

Crypto News

  • On March 4, India’s highest court quashed a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) order dated April 6, 2018, which prohibited banks from providing services to entities dealing with cryptocurrencies. Activity on exchanges immediately picked up.

    The activity on exchanges further improved after Yes Bank, India’s fourth-largest lender, collapsed on March 6, damaging confidence in the country’s banking system.

    The nationwide panic triggered by the Yes Bank crisis worked in favor of bitcoin, boosting Cashaa’s sales at a daily rate of 250 percent to 450 percent, according to data provided by the platform.

    Digital money transfer service, Azimo, has partnered with Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), the oldest bank in Thailand, to launch an instant cross-border payments service from Europe to Thailand through Ripple’s global payments network, RippleNet.

  • Institutional investors at Fidelity Digital Assets can now trade Bitcoin on the US-based exchange ErisX. Through a strategic partnership designed to increase cryptocurrency exposure for big players, Fidelity’s “stable of vetted institutional investors” will have increased access to Bitcoin liquidity.Fidelity Investments, which manages $8.3 trillion in customer assets, is also an investor in ErisX.

April 2020 Weekly Recap #1

Posted 13 Apr / In Business Analysis, Investigation

April Weekly Recap 1

March 31st - April 6th, 2020

Welcome to our 1st weekly recap for April.

Overview 

 

 

Crypto News

  • Opera now enables users to access decentralized web pages through a partnership with Unstoppable Domains.

    The collaboration entails Opera’s integration of Unstoppable Domain’s .crypto domain extension. This will allow the browser’s users to surf decentralized websites, as well as make cryptocurrency payments.

    Microsoft has proposed a system that can mine cryptocurrencies using data collected from humans as they exercise or read an advertisement.

    The system could use physical exertion to mine cryptocurrencies: sensors could detect when the body is doing a physical task, such as a faster pulse, and use that data to unlock blocks. Scanners connected to the head could even use brainwaves, signals sent out during mental exertion, to mine for cryptocurrencies.

  • After more than 18 months of work, the Byron reboot was officially launched on the Cardano network. This reboot entails a number of updates to the Cardano network including the Cardano node, the Cardano explorer, the wallet backend and Daedalus wallet.IOHK stated that the revamped design is modular. This means that it will differentiate the ledger, consensus and network components making it easy to upgrade any of them without affecting the rest.

    n a coordinated strike against some of the best-known companies in crypto, a US law firm issued a barrage of class-action lawsuits aimed at Binance, Block.one, Bitmex, Tron and several others. The lawsuits allege that the firms bilked investors by selling unlawful securities in the form of digital tokens.

     

 

March 2020 Weekly Recap #4

Posted 30 Mar / In Business Analysis, Investigation

March Weekly Recap 4

March 23rd - March 30th, 2020

Welcome to our 4th weekly recap for March.

Overview 

 

 

Crypto News

  • Cardano launched its off-chain scalability protocol, Ouroboros Hydra, on March 25th, after 5 years of development.

    The protocol claims vastly increased scalability and low latency for the Cardano blockchain while using little storage on the network’s nodes. The solution also allows for applications such as micropayments, voting, insurance contracts, and other uses that require low fees or instant transactions.

    According to IOHK, Hydra could theoretically scale to a million transactions per second.

    In Hydra, each user who connects to the network generates 10 heads, which are throughput lanes for data and transactions. Because of that, the system reportedly gets faster and decreases its latency as it scales.

    The global coronavirus lockdown has put a strain on Venezuela’s internet, which could logically make crypto participation difficult.

    Already, within the first seven days of a shelter-in-place movement, Venezuelans have pushed the country’s internet capacities to the limit.

    As the crypto space is largely an internet-based industry, digital asset trading and usage might logically become difficult for Venezuelans.

    Trump’s use of DPA represents the depth of the problems facing the US economy. Additional stresses to the economy will continue to unfold as supply chain concerns and stock sell-offs have continued. As pressures increase, the need for the production of medical supplies has increased as well.

     

 

March 2020 Weekly Recap #3

Posted 23 Mar / In Business Analysis, Investigation

March Weekly Recap 2

March 15th - March 22nd, 2020

Welcome to our 3rd weekly recap for March.

Overview 

 

 

Crypto News

  • Coinbase announced Tuesday that Coinbase Cards can now be added to users’ Google Pay wallets, enabling crypto-backed payments from Google Pay-enabled devices, such as phones or smartwatches.

    Coinbase Cards launched its new Visa debit card for U.K. and European customers in April 2019. Holders can purchase everyday goods and services – up to £10,000 ($12,100) per day – with cryptocurrencies held in their exchange accounts that are instantly exchanged into the relevant fiat currency.

    The cards initially supported payments BTC, ETH, LTC and BCH. On November 2019, XRP, BAT, XLM tokens were also added to the roster.

    Gasnet, a permissioned blockchain platform was launched Wednesday with approval from regulator Enargas. Running on an enterprise version of the RSK Smart Contract Network, Gasnet is designed to secure and speed Argentina’s chronically delayed gas certification processes.

    In the now-operational consortium network, certification documents and transaction details zip between Gasnor and Enargas, each of whom run a network node. That increases visibility and smooths out otherwise crippling delays, allowing technicians to ultimately bring consumer’s gas services online faster.

    US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a long-time cryptocurrency and Bitcoin skeptic, has named Brian Brooks as one of the country’s top banking regulators. Brooks will serve as the next Chief Operating Officer and First Deputy Comptroller of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) after stepping down from his role as the chief legal officer at Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States.

     

 

March 2020 Weekly Recap #2

Posted 16 Mar / In Business Analysis, Investigation

March Weekly Recap 2

March 8th - March 14th, 2020

Welcome to our 2nd weekly recap for March.

Overview 

 

 

Crypto News

  • On March 11, the co-founder of decentralized login service provider TorusLabs, Zhen Yu Yong (Zen), tweeted that he had been diagnosed with coronavirus COVID-2019. Zen urged people who may have been in contact with him during the ETHLondon hackathon or the Ethereum Community Conference (ECC) to take “extra precautions and/or get tested.” The coronavirus threat has impacted several major cryptocurrency conferences in recent weeks, leaving many crypto events canceled or postponed until later dates.

    Liquidations set in on the cryptocurrency market the day after the U.S. announced European travel restrictions due to coronavirus fears Wednesday. Bitcoin is down 21 percent and Ethereum is down 27 percent over the past 24 hours. That’s more than the traditional markets, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 down nearly 8 percent. Traders liquidating holdings on crypto’s bellwether derivatives exchange, BitMEX, fueled some of these moves. Gold also got hit as traders sold the precious metal for the safety of much-needed cash as losses in equities increases.

    San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has decided to start grouping multiple bitcoin transactions together, rather than issuing sends one by one.

    The adoption of “batching,” the firm said in a blogpost on Thursday, will mean less strain is put on the Bitcoin blockchain from large numbers of transactions arising from the popular exchange. The move is anticipated to reduce Coinbase’s load on BTC’s network by more than 50%, and so will transaction fees by an equivalent amount for customers, according to the post.

    After the massacre in the broader crypto market on Thursday, major altcoins have already started to recoup some of their losses. Altcoins such as Litecoin (LTC), Tezos (XTZ), and Stellar (XLM), were among the first to return to green after the sell-off, posting 24-hour returns between 3% and 10%. In addition, cautiously optimistic trading also drove Ripple’s XRP higher today, although the recent market bloodbath now means that the popular cryptocurrency has lost about 96% of its value from the all-time high in January 2018.

     

 

March 2020 Weekly Recap

Posted 09 Mar / In Business Analysis, Investigation

March Weekly Recap 1

March 1st - March 7th, 2020

Just like the January and February Report, our goal is to visually summarize the cryptocurrency market into an easy to understand and informative way. However, instead of the monthly duration, we will attempt to be more interactive with the market in a weekly format.

Overview 

 

 

Crypto News

  • In a press release issued on Monday, March 2nd, 2020, the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) clarified cryptocurrency as: “a digital representation of a value that has not been issued or guaranteed by any central bank or public body and is not necessarily linked to a currency specified by law and that does not have the legal status of a currency or money, but is accepted as a medium of exchange by natural or legal persons and can be transmitted, stored and traded electronically.” According to BaFin, the new classification echoes the guidelines of intergovernmental agencies like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). BaFin’s new crypto classification announcement is also part of the move by the country to adopt the fifth EU Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5) which began on January 1, 2020. As part of the new BaFin crypto guidelines, cryptocurrency custodians will need to obtain a license for the regulator to offer their services in the country.

    The Supreme Court of India has struck down the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) controversial ban on banks’ dealings with crypto-related firms. The  court justices ruled that the RBI’s action was “disproportionate.” Key arguments in the case included the central bank’s contention that cryptocurrency is a digital means of payment and that the institution was “empowered by law” in its intervention.

    Samsung’s enterprise is working on building a blockchain-based settlement solution for merchants and banks. The Korea Herald reported that Samsung SDS had signed a memorandum of understanding with Israeli fintech solutions provider Credorax to develop the technology, aimed to automatically logging payments data on bank records and ledgers. The product, yet to be named, will operate on Samsung SDS’ Nexledger Universal platform, a Samsung proprietary blockchain. Work processes will be automated using AI technology from Brity Works, another of Samsung SDS company.

    HTC announced a new privacy-focused, portable, 5G blockchain router that is capable of running a full Bitcoin node. The Exodus 5G Hub follows on from the success of the Tawainese manufacturer’s Exodus 1 phones, which also have the ability to run cryptocurrency nodes. The Hub provides 5G connectivity to all internet-enabled devices and uses Zion Vault software to enable Bitcoin, Ethereum (including ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens), Binance Coin, Litecoin and Stellar storage for users. The software offers additional security features including social recovery for private keys, allowing users to break up, encrypt and share recovery phrases among trusted parties.

    The South Korean National Assembly amended the Act on Reporting and Use of Specific Financial Information and has allowed the use of cryptocurrencies within the country under regulations. After President Jae-in Moon signs the amendment passed in the country’s parliament, the enactment process will begin. It will take one year from the date of the signing, followed by a 6-month grace period. Once the required time passes, cryptocurrency-related businesses, such as exchanges, trusts, wallet companies, and token-sales, will need to comply with new rules. Requirements include having a real-name verification partnership with an approved local bank. The goal is to prevent money-laundering between fiat deposits or withdrawals.

    The Commercial Court of Nanterre of France made a historic decision recognizing bitcoin as legal tender in the country. The ruling relates to a case between French cryptocurrency exchange Paymium and UK-based alternative investments firm BitSpread. Paymium had loaned 1,000 BTC to BitSpread before the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in 2017. After the bitcoin cash hard fork in 2017, Paymium and BitSpread both claimed that the bitcoin cash created belonged to them. The court ruled in favor of the borrower after recognizing bitcoin as a legitimate form of money.