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GROWING FAST: Fidelity Investments is planning to expand its upcoming crypto asset trading platform to include the top five to seven cryptocurrencies in the market today. Revealed at the Block FS conference in New York, the news comes just a month after the firm announced it would launch a crypto trading platform.
Fidelity Digital Asset Services originally planned to offer services for bitcoin and ether, but its head, Tom Jessop, explained Thursday that he believes there is demand for the next four or five assets by market cap.
That being said, the company is waiting on regulatory clarity before looking at certain tokens – particularly those at risk of being labelled securities. “I think when it comes to security tokens or tokens that are likely to be deemed securities, we are waiting for that space to develop,” he explained. Full Story
FUNDING SCORES: The crypto space may be in month 11 of a bear market, but startups are still raising funds. Analytic startup Flipside Crypto raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Coinbase Ventures and Digital Currency Group, while ConsenSys Labs led a $2.1 million round for AZTEC, a startup looking to make ethereum transactions private.
Flipside tracks network activity and trading patterns, among other factors, and uses such data to examine how different digital assets are being used. It differentiates between different types of activity in the hopes of providing a more in-depth view of how an asset is behaving than simply price.
AZTEC, on the other hand, wants to utilize zero-knowledge proofs – the same cryptographic technique used by the privacy coin zcash – to allow banks to store data privately on CreditMint, an ethereum-based platform. Full Stories
BUILDING BLOCKS: Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing and storage subsidiary of the global tech giant, is launching a fully managed blockchain product. The service promises to aid users in setting up their own blockchain without the overhead that typically goes into building such a platform.
Users can build their new platform on Hyperledger Fabric or ethereum, though the latter is not yet available for use. Once set up, the platform further claims to be capable of automatically scaling to support “thousands of applications running millions of transactions.”
Clients can further store data from the blockchain platform on Amazon’s Quantum Ledger Database, another data storage platform. While QLDB is not a blockchain itself, it is supposed to be immutable, allowing users to monitor any data changes. Full Story |
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 CoinDesk’s Crypto-Economics Explorer aggregates data points across the industry to measure the size and opportunity of crypto markets. In addition to price and market cap, CoinDesk’s explorer provides users with a comprehensive way to view the crypto-economic forces that shape an asset’s market maturity, growth, and potential. We compared the top two privacy coins: XMR and ZEC from Thursday, November 22 to today, November 29. Exchange - ZEC went from on par with XMR to rising about 2 percentage points by the end.
Social - XMR started about 8 percentage points above ZEC, but shrank a bit down to 10.67 percentage points compared to ZEC’s 3.27.
Developer - ZEC maintained a 3 percentage point lead ahead of ZEC throughout the week but then hit a tie at 20.5 today.
Network - ZEC started with activity of 6.77 percentage points but retracted down to 2.41. XMR’s network activity is not fully represented because its privacy features hide its on-chain transaction volume.
Price - Prices moved marginally. ZEC saw an increase of .01 percentage point compared to XMR’s .02 percentage point drop over the week.
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| HISTORY REPEATING? Bitcoin jumped over 11 percent yesterday, marking its biggest single-day gain since April. With the strong bullish move, the 14-day RSI has moved into undersold territory above 30, confirming a bullish divergence. Further, a double bottom breakout was confirmed on the 4-hour chart as prices moved above $4,120. As a result, bitcoin could be in for a short-term bullish reversal, in an echo of a similar move witnessed in April. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST FINANCIAL TIMES: Amid recent news that DRW Holding’s real-estate arm Convexity Properties has divided a holding in a high-rise into 955 tokenized shares, a Financial Times article delves into the mindset of institutional crypto and blockchain investors, who appear not to be deterred by the recent drop in crypto prices and tightened regulatory environment. For one, DRW’s Don Wilson said that tokenizing an asset that is traditionally “cumbersome” to sell in fractions, such as a property, offers advantages for both buyer and seller. Further, some in the space feel that the advent of digital securities could "bypass the infrastructure of modern finance," the piece says. Selling tokenized shares of an asset and allowing them to be freely traded could potentially make the process cheaper and provide greater liquidity. However, an analyst cautioned in the piece that with current regulatory uncertainty, the success of this new technology also depends on the “quality assurances provided by the traditional capital markets and the regulation surrounding it.” THE REST FORBES: The crypto markets may have taken a tumble of late, but, as an investment, they can still outdo more traditional options like shares in Amazon, U.S. Treasury bonds or property, says Forbes. Placing your spare funds in a basket of the top cryptos, bitcoin in particular, has the “best chance to deliver the most attractive risk-adjusted returns over the next 10-years,” the feature says. Bitcoin, the author says, may be volatile, but it is volatility that is not tied to fiat investments and, therefore, “and therefore a true method of diversification that boosts the overall portfolio’s risk-reward.” REUTERS: Emerging tech like blockchain and AI could be used to remotely monitor the high seas and bolster a proposed deal to preserve the ocean’s biological diversity, researchers and campaigners say in a Reuters piece. The world’s diplomats met recently at the UN in New York to start hashing out a treaty to preserve marine resources. The area at issue is the so-called “high seas” beyond the recognized 200-mile economic zone that sits off national coasts. With a lack of international rules to govern the resources in these areas, illegal fishing is rife. And blockchain could play an important role in enforcing the agreement, by monitoring fishing and identifying illegal behavior, said the World Economic Forum’s Center for Global Public Goods in the article. |
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WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
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