Monday, December 24, 2018

1-week notice 😨

December 24, 2018

Bitmain is Set to Layoff BCH Developers to Get Rid of Fluff

1-week notice

Signs aren't looking too positive for the Chinese mining giant before it is set to go public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

This time around, Bitmain is reportedly laying off up to 50 employees starting this week. The reason: redundancies.

Allegedly most of the targeted employees are part of the Copernicus team that works on Bitcoin Cash operations.

It could get worse

It might not stop at 50 employees either according to a report from Primitive founding partner Dovey Wan.

If the report is true, the layoffs could target up to 50% of Bitmain's 2,500 headcount - a massive shakeup for the business looking to IPO.

For now, Bitmain has yet to comment on the matter but according to Dovey Wan, reports like that are "usually very high accuracy, posted by employees themselves."

ANALYSIS

Bitcoin Private Secretely Secured 2 Million Coins for its Founders

Covert premine

On Sunday, blockchain analytics website Coinmetrics revealed that Bitcoin Private (BTCP) actually had a 23 million coin supply rather than the 21 million coin supply the whitepaper had established.

Where did the extra 2 million come from? Well, all signs are pointing to a "covert premine" - an operation that means means BTCP developers mined the cryptocurrency for themselves before other miners had the ability to.

Called out

After Coinmetrics announced the finding, one of BTCP's founders, Rhett Creighton, responded saying he believes BTCP suffered a hack. However, this tweet was later deleted.

Now, others are pointing fingers at Creighton saying he was the one who created the coins as it was some of "the earliest code work done."

Regardless of the allegations, Creighton has yet to admit anything and has furiously defended himself against claims made by users on Twitter.

The market knows

Following Sunday's events, BTCP suffered losses more than 20% as investors fear of inflated coins.

EXCHANGE

The XRP Community Got its Holiday Wish

Becoming "the standard"

The XRP community has long preached about how their beloved cryptocurrency should be "the standard."

For Binance, it might be just that - at least for the two new trading pairs it just added to its exchange.

That's because for the first time in Binance history the exchange is going to use XRP as the base cryptocurrency.

What does this mean?

For a long time Bitcoin ruled exchanges because it was the only base cryptocurrency that investors could trade against.

However, because of this, many believe altcoins are largely correlated to Bitcoin rather than individual performance.

As exchanges continue to grow and add new pairs, its possible that the rest of the market will become more independent from Bitcoin - a positive sign for many investors weary of overall market risks.

BITS

But wait, there's more...

🌍 Experts believe that the UAE will be the next biggest center for blockchain startups in 2019.
🇺🇸 Some investors are cashing in on tax write-offs amid the market downturn.
🇨🇳 China now ranks 34 different digital assets with EOS leading the bunch.

MEME