Cryptocurrency News Now!: Volume is more dead than we thought

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Volume is more dead than we thought

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Investment success accrues not so much to the brilliant as to the disciplined.”

- William J. Bernstein

MARKET

COIN	PRICE	24H

BTC	$6,857.800274	-3.42%

ETH	$277.216008	-6.26%

XRP	$0.326527	-6.87%

BCH	$529.207414	-6.31%

EOS	$5.845286	-7.87%

*Information as of 9:30 AM EST

ADOPTION

Mass adoption is an inch closer, thanks Yahoo

Yahoo Finance Now Offers Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin Trading

'THE VIRUS IS SPREADING'

Yahoo Finance, one of the oldest business news websites online, has now integrated crypto trading options for its millions of daily visitors
Now users can check the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin while also purchase or sell the cryptocurrencies all within the same webpage
This is an important step for adoption as it eases the process of buying cryptocurrencies for many

EASY PEASY

To use the new feature, users need to search for the ticker symbol of Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), or Litecoin (LTC)
Then, just to the right of price information, a blue buy and sell button are shown
After clicking the buy or sell button, users are prompted to choose their broker, either Robinhood or Coinbase, since Yahoo Finance is using their APIs to power the new feature

DIVING INTO CRYPTO

This is not the first time that Yahoo has supported crypto
In March, Yahoo's Japanese arm announced that will open a cryptocurrency exchange by April 2019 or later
To do this, Yahoo Japan bought 40% of the cryptocurrency exchange BitARG Exchange Tokyo and plans to continue building on top of existing infrastructure

NEWS

Binance and Other Notable Crypto Players Invest $32 Million in New Stablecoin

ANOTHER STABLECOIN

TMON, a startup that is valued at $1.4 billion, has finished a seed round, raising $32 million to build a new Stablecoin
The Stablecoin will be dubbed Terra
TMON controls one of the top e-commerce sites in South Korea and its customers will be able to use the Stablecoin to purchase goods

Ella Zhang, head of Binance Labs, spoke about Terra, saying:

"While we see many stablecoins coming out, Terra's journey is especially meaningful as they are designing one of the few price-stable protocols with existing, working and strong go-to-market strategy and usage."

TWO-TOKEN SYSTEM

What sets Terra apart from other Stablecoins is that the protocol consists of two tokens: Terra and Luna
Terra will be the Stablecoin pegged to a fiat currency and Luna will be used as collateral on the network
When using Terra, users will pay a small fee in Luna

Founder of TMON, Daniel Shin explains:

"Luna is essentially a decentralized equity akin to Visa and Mastercard."

PURPOSE OF STABLECOINS

Stablecoins allow investors to hedge market volatility without selling back to fiat, which usually comes with fees
Altcoin investors often complain about altcoins dependence on price movement, stablecoins pairings can be a solution for altcoins to breakaway from Bitcoin's influence
Stablecoins are also useful for being the denominator in prediction markets that occur over a longer timeframe, as the stablecoin will remain consistent over the duration of the trade

REGULATION

Three Initial Coin Offerings Being Investigated By Colorado 'ICO Task Force'

COLORADO TASK FORCE

The Colorado State Department of Regulatory Agencies has a special task force to investigate cryptocurrency startups
The task force is headed by the Colorado Securities Commissioner Gerald Rome

INVESTIGATIONS

On Wednesday, the "ICO Task Force" opened an investigation into three companies: Bionic Coin, Sybrelabs Ltd., and Global Pay Net
These companies are accused by Colorado regulators for running fraudulent/unregistered businesses that present a risk to investors
Bionic Coin claims to have a partnership with Forbes, but Forbes has never mentioned Bionic Coin anywhere
Sybrelabs and Global Pay Net both are claiming investors will make massive returns and offer incentives for investors to shill the coins on social media

OPERATION CRYPTOSWEEP

Colorado is not the only one investigating fraudulent ICOs, earlier this year the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) started an initiative called “Operation Cryptosweep”
Announced Tuesday, Operation Cryptosweep now has over 200 active investigations

OPINION

Ethereum Co-Founder Joseph Lubin is Not Convinced Tether Manipulated Markets

MANIPULATING BITCOIN

In June, a research team at the University of Texas concluded that the stablecoin Tether (USDT) was instrumental in driving the price of Bitcoin to $20,000 late 2017
The research team concludes that "purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices"
In addition, Tether has been accused of not having enough reserves to back their $2.76 billion outstanding tokens

LUBIN SAYS OTHERWISE

While many believe Tether was heavily involved in manipulating the crypto markets, Ethereum Co-Founder Joseph Lubin is unconvinced
Lubin explained that based on "talking to a bunch of people in the space", he believes USDT are backed 1:1 by U.S. dollars in reserves

Commenting on market manipulation, Lubin concludes that in an unregulated market, big players wield power:

"...with respect to market manipulations, I’m not sure that market manipulations are related to Tether directly, if they do exist. It has been an unregulated market set of exchanges that enable big players to do what they want to do [...] Ideally we’ll get a little better regulation of those centralized exchanges at least."

BREW BITS

A moderator of the Bitcoin subreddit revealed that traffic has picked up for the first month since December 2017.
The Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service has ordered an analytical tool to track crypto transactions.
Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital led a $105 million funding round for blockchain cloud computing startup DFINITY.

TODAY IN CRYPTO

TRON (TRX)

TVM Mainnet launch

MainNet upgrade complete and TVM official launch.

PROOF | SOURCE

WAX (WAX)

Settlement Contract

"Settlement contract," in mid Q3 2018.

PROOF | SOURCE

Today in Crypto is powered by coinmarketcal.com

LEARN THE LINGO

Full Node

noun

A full node is when you download the entire block chain using a bitcoin client, and you relay, validate, and secure the data within the block chain. The data is bitcoin transactions and blocks, which is validated across the entire network of users.

COIN OF THE DAY

Couchain (COU)
Couchain is a fourth generation blockchain that is conceived to run on data layers that are supportive of expedited verification. Data flows are seamless in design, activation, and methodology. Improving the efficiency of existing Blockchains was the motivation for the conceptualization and introduction of Couchain.
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