Daily Coin Update - Monday, June 11th 2018

Daily Coin Update Monday, June 11th 2018 Coin Value 24h Change 24h Volume Mkt Cap (BTC) Bitcoin $6,801.79 -7.25% $6b $116b (ETH) Ethereum $534.60 -7.48% $2b $53b (BCC) BitConnect $0.5326 -6.24% $409 $5m (XMR) Monero $137.51 -7.09% $43m $2b (DASH) Dash $277.04 -4.06% $73m $2b (XRP) Ripple $0.5895 -8.16% $498m $23b (NEO) NEO $45.56 -8.31% $97m $3b Unsubscribe  |  Edit coins Missing something? Comments? Suggestions? Email me at ohad@ohadron.com coindailyupdate.com

Are we immune?

Bitcoin's "safe haven" status may soon be put to the test by a global market correction. 

Our weekly opinion piece and overview View this email in your browser   CoinDesk Weekly is sponsored by  June 10, 2018 Contagion-free? The global capital markets face the prospect of a deep correction amid growing jitters over trade wars, Italy's political crisis, and a shrinking Deutsche Bank. If there's a flight from risk, will bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies live up to their billing as a safe haven – or tank in tandem with traditional assets?   Read more in THE TAKEAWAY below.   TOP TRENDS ON COINDESK Crossover ambitions Two of the oldest and best-known startups in the crypto space are seeking to become highly regulated financial firms, underscoring how compliance with securities laws (not just anti-money-laundering rules) has grown in importance amid the token explosion. Circle, the wallet, trading and investment platform, is reportedly pursuing a federal banking charter in the U.S., and it also hopes to be licensed as a brokerage and trading platform. Not to be outdone, fellow exchange Coinbase said it was making strides toward the goal of operating a federally regulated broker-dealer, with pending acquisitions of three licensed firms. In both cases, part of the aim is to be able to list tokens that U.S. law deems securities. Circle also cited among its motivations federal preemption – that is, answering to one regulator in Washington, D.C., rather than 50 different states – and the benefits of being plugged into the Federal Reserve system. But many users are likely to view the Circle and Coinbase moves as a betrayal of the ideals behind the technology that gave these unicorns their original raison d'etre. As cryptocurrency maven and Wall Street veteran Jill Carlson tweeted, channeling The Who: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. #openfinancialsystem" Ripple watch Ripple, the payments startup that has a complicated relationship with the cryptocurrency XRP, brought out the big guns to defend itself against legal troubles. The company has hired two former Securities and Exchange Commission officials to represent it in one of the ongoing civil matters. Former SEC chairwoman Mary Jo White, along with Andrew Ceresney, a former SEC director of enforcement, are representing Ripple in the investor lawsuit filed last month. Following that revelation, another class action lawsuit was filed against Ripple, similarly alleging that XRP is a security. Separately, Ripple's former CTO Stefan Thomas, who announced his departure from the company in May, is going up against ethereum with the relaunch of Ripple's long-shelved smart contracts platform, called Codius, as the technical backbone for his new company, Coil. Tightening their grip... Regulators across the globe are exerting more influence over the young cryptocurrency industry. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission appointed its first-ever crypto czar. Valerie Szczepanik, long the agency's unofficial point person on cryptocurrency and token sales, will take on the new role as associate director of the Division of Corporation Finance and senior advisor for digital assets and innovation. On the other side of the Pacific, Japan for the first time officially denied an application to register a cryptocurrency exchange, in large part because the firm was uncooperative with government requests. Meanwhile, South Korean police recommended charging cryptocurrency exchange Coinone for offering illegal gambling that could be used to launder criminal proceeds. … while opening their arms At the same time, though, governments continue to embrace the innovations of the blockchain sector. For example, New York State Assemblyman Ron Kim hopes to introduce cryptocurrencies to local communities. He's proposed legislation that aims to launch 10 pilot programs creating local community currencies, which would be cryptocurrencies or other alternative, digital forms of money. Elsewhere, China's central bank has finished work on a blockchain-based system to digitize checks issued by domestic businesses. With that, the government aims to solve the issue of check fraud in the Chinese market. And South Africa's central bank has published the results for a trial of its blockchain-based system for interbank clearance and settlement. It claimed success for the system, which managed to settle the country's typical 70,000 daily payment transactions within two hours. See all CoinDesk stories ⭐ CoinDesk Weekly Sponsor ⭐   Your Data. Your Life In the current system, your personal data is sourced, held, used and swapped by third-party providers. The Pillar Project is an ambitious project to return ownership of personal data to you. We do this through decentralized blockchain technology, starting with a token wallet. Learn More QUOTE OF THE WEEK "I know [developers] are saying 'we're innovative, we're startups, we need to be left alone and put in a sandbox.' Toddlers play in the sandbox. Adults play by the rules." – New York State Department of Financial Services Superintendent Maria Vullo, defending the state's BitLicense regulation.   THE TAKEAWAY Michael J. Casey is the chairman of CoinDesk's advisory board and a senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT's Digital Currency Initiative. A common thought experiment in the crypto community is to ponder how cryptocurrencies would fare in the event of another global financial meltdown.  It is not an idle question. There is a host of troubling developments in the global economy: the threat of a trade war, jitters in Italian debt markets, problems at Deutsche Bank and new emerging market crises in Turkey and Argentina.  Meanwhile, central banks, led by the Federal Reserve, are tightening or signaling tighter monetary policy. That's putting a brake on the huge gains that low interest rates and quantitative easing had bestowed on global markets in the eight years since the end of the last crisis. With this combination of risk factors already in play, there's always a chance that some unforeseen trigger could set off another terrified rush for the exits among global investors.    What would the impact be on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? Would their reputation as independent assets see them benefit from safe-haven inflows? Or would the market-wide reduction in risk appetite spread wide enough that crypto assets get caught up in the selloff?   Opposing scenarios   Some crypto hodlers salivate at the idea of market panic. They contend that, unlike the 2008-2009 collapse, when Satoshi Nakamoto's newly launched cryptocurrency was essentially out of sight and unavailable to the hordes seeking a haven from the fiat world's chaos, bitcoin is now widely recognized as a more versatile alternative to traditional flight-to-safety assets such as gold.    In a crisis, they say, bitcoin could shine – as might other cryptocurrencies designed as alternatives to fiat cash such as monero and zcash. Unaffected by future monetary policy responses, immune from draconian interventions such as the Cypriot bank deposit freeze of 2013, and easily acquired, they could prove their value as digital havens for the digital age in such a moment. Accordingly, the bulls' argument goes, their prices would surge.    On the other hand, if there's enough of a market-wide departure from risky investments, it's hard not to see this sector being swept up in it. Just as the most extreme gains in crypto prices in the latter part of 2017 were inextricably linked to the rapid "risk on" uptrend seen in stocks, commodities and emerging-market assets, so too a major selloff could easily infect these new markets. Cryptocurrencies and tokens are perceived by most ordinary investors as high-risk assets – you buy them with money you can afford to lose when you're feeling upbeat about market prospects. When the mood sours, this class of investment is typically the first to be retrenched as investors scramble to get cash.    At $340 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.com's undoubtedly inflated estimates, the market cap of the overall crypto token market is more than three times its value of a year ago (even though it's down more than half from its peak in early January). But it's less than 1% of the end-2017 market cap of $54.8 trillion for the S&P Global Broad Market Index, which includes most stocks from 48 countries. If once-risk-hungry investors are panicking and looking for things to dump – or for that matter if they're looking for something safe to buy – it won't take much of their funds to move the crypto markets, one way or another.    Low correlations   Backing the bitcoin bulls' argument is the fact that correlations between cryptocurrency and mainstream risk assets – the degree to which prices move in tandem with each other – are quite low.  A 90-day correlation matrix compiled by analytics firm Sifr put bitcoin's correlation with the S&P 500 index of U.S. equities at minus-0.14. That's a statistically neutral position since 1 represents a perfect positive correlation while -1 is a perfectly negative relationship.    But they say that in a crisis "all correlations go to 1." The panicked state of the crowd, with investors selling whatever they can offload to cover debts and margin calls, means that everything could go out with the flood.    Intellectually, too, that sort of wholesale downturn would comfortably stand as a logical counterpoint to the conditions seen last year when market valuations reached excessive levels. We cannot separate the flood of money that flew into crypto at the end of the year from the fact that eight years of quantitative easing had driven a "hunt for yield" in once-obscure markets as the return shrank on now pricey mainstream investments such as corporate bonds. With bond funds paying little more than, say, 2 percent for years, bitcoin looked attractive to mainstream investors. When that artificially-stoked liquidity disappears, the reverse could happen.    Despite all of this, I do believe a global financial crisis could be an important testing moment for crypto assets. Perhaps there'll be a two-phase effect. In the immediate aftermath of the panic, there would be a selloff as every market is hit by the liquidity squeeze. But after things settle, one can imagine that the narrative around bitcoin's uncorrelated returns and its status as a hedge against government and banking risk would gain more attention. Just like the mid-2013 surge in bitcoin that accompanied the Cypriot crisis' lesson that "they can come for your bank account but not for your private keys," so too a wider financial crunch could spur conversation around bitcoin's immutable, decentralized qualities and help build the case for buying it.    The wider point here is that, whether it's as an aligned element that rises and falls in sync with the broader marketplace or as a contrasting alternative to it, cryptocurrencies can't be viewed in isolation from the rest of the world.   – Michael J. Casey Share Tweet Beyond CoinDesk...   OTHERS ARE TALKING ABOUT R3 could run out of money by early next year, Fortune reports, citing former employees of the enterprise blockchain startup.  Further evidence that Chinese regulators might be more open to blockchain: According to this article in Quartz, the country's predominant TV broadcaster, CCTV, aired an hour-long show featuring government officials and international crypto experts talking about the subject.  The New York Times' business section includes a commentary piece by Peter J. Henning, who provided some insights on why fighting fraud in cryptocurrencies has almost become a game of whack-a-mole for regulators. Bloomberg reports that Bitmain, the world's leading producer of cryptocurrency mining chips, is considering going public.  Blockchain could offer a solution to the issue of fake, contaminated or stolen drugs, according to the Wall Street Journal.  UPCOMING FROM COINDESK We're taking Consensus on the road. Join us on September 18-20 at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore for the first international Consensus event. Register here. Send feedback on this newsletter to marc@coindesk.com. Follow @CoinDeskMarkets for price updates and market analysis. And everyone interested in keeping up with this rapidly evolving field of technology should follow our main Twitter handle, @CoinDesk.      Thanks for reading! Until next week... Copyright © 2018 CoinDesk, All rights reserved. You're receiving this email because you subscribed for updates on our website. Our mailing address is: CoinDesk 636 Avenue of the Americas New York City, NY 10011 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list Received this from a friend? Subscribe here. Share Tweet

#52: One full year of Token Economy

📌 An opinionated recap of the most interesting news in crypto Token Economy Got forwarded this email?  Subscribe here. Subscriber?  We'd appreciate if you could forward it to someone who would find it valuable. 🙏 All issues available at tokeneconomy.co

1 year of Token Economy!

Today marks our 52nd edition, and since we haven't missed a week it means we've been doing this for a year! It surely feels like a lot longer...   Reading the inaugural issue and skimming through the next 51 you can see just how far the space has come, both in innovation, madness, and drama, as well as how fast it has moved. Hearing from you how much you enjoy reading Token Economy every week and seeing new readers subscribing from all corners of the world and industries has kept us going so far, but when Coinbase reached out offering to sponsor Token Economy we saw in there an opportunity to scale further and reach even more people.

So this week's Token Economy is supported by Coinbase, whose mission is to create an open financial system for the world. Thanks! 🙏

Q&A with Ron Bernstein, former CEO of Paradex

In issue #50 we commented on Coinbase acquisition of Paradex and alluded at an upcoming Q&A with its CEO Ron Bernstein. It took a couple of weeks to let the dust settle and the team decompress, but we finally managed to arrange it. So here you go! TE: You only started working on Paradex 9 months ago. What's been the main driver of your decision to exit now vs continue on the journey independently? RB: Over the past six months, we've seen an explosion of potential business opportunities Paradex could explore, like NFTs for example. After our first conversations with Coinbase, it was apparent that they had an amazing bird's-eye view of the space and a very strong, mission-oriented drive to pursue those opportunities. We had a choice to explore those independently, or explore them mutually with the resources and brain trust they've built. It was an easy decision to make. TE: How does Paradex fit within Coinbase's corporate strategy and portfolio of products? RB: Paradex signifies Coinbase's seriousness in building an open financial system for the world, and shows their commitment to non-custodial, user-controlled products and decentralized protocols— things complementary to their core business. In terms of where we fit in the overall suite of products, Coinbase has been extremely respectful in giving us both leeway and runway to find our own footing. So, we're focused less on interoperability and synthesis, and are just concerning ourselves with building the best relayer for our users. Opportunities for overlap and cross-pollination will come with time and adoption. TE: Binance is now building a DEX, Coinbase acquired one. Is there a future for 'pure-play' DEXs and, if so, what would that look like and what do you think will cause the inflection in adoption? RB: I really can't say if the DEX and relayer space will be driven by small, niche teams hyper-focused in their specific protocols and competencies, or if larger, multifaceted blockchain companies will pursue those competencies in-house. I do think the inflection point comes naturally with further crypto adoption, and not necessarily related to asset price either. Where that tipping point is is unclear. But it all feels very early to me, and the momentum is extremely encouraging. TE: You have taken a pragmatic approach to designing Paradex using the 0x protocol, for example removing the need for the ZRX token. Are you going to continue building on Paradex from the existing architectural foundations or start from first principle inside Coinbase? RB: We'll continue to evolve Paradex to satisfy users. That means removing friction wherever possible. That's also consistent with Coinbase first principles: empowering users in a truly open financial system with the easiest to use set of tools. TE: If you'll continue building on 0x, is it rational to expect Coinbase to become a big holder of ZRX in order to influence its governance? RB: It will be interesting to see how V2 of the protocol gets integrated into the ecosystem in July and how a framework for future governance will start to form. The 0x team is incredibly thoughtful, and they ship solid software. I expect their approach to governance to be very well thought out too. TE: Continuing on 0x, should we expect congestions in the Ethereum network's as Coinbase starts funnelling its user base and liquidity to Paradex? RB: I'd consider that kind of a good problem, and also everyone's problem. If this turns out to be true, it validates the desire for more user-control of assets, and it'd be in everyone's interest to allocate time and resources to scaling so that congestion would be less of an issue. TE: Presumably there will be regulatory implications, the press release states that the service will open up "eventually to U.S. customers after we implement changes." Can you give us some more colour on that and your views on how you think the regulatory environment will evolve in the US? RB: It's no secret that regulators are actively trying to figure out what to do with crypto. Fortunately, a big part of the Coinbase brand is regulatory respect and a willingness to take in active role in helping inform the regulatory environment in which it operates. The different agencies are highly engaged and appear very mindful about not stifling innovation. Clarity will come with time. TE: Thanks for your time and insights Ron, and best of luck in your new role!

🔥Thoughts

Binance's Venture Fund Head Is Waiting for ICO Bubble to Burst We're starting to sound like a broken record in calling out crazy inflated valuations compared to the risk of most projects. Today we're not alone as Ella Zhang, who's with Binance Labs and needs to invest $1 billion in blockchain-related businesses (oh how we don't envy her!), said the same thing. Next week they are unveiling  the Cryptocurrency Governance Initiatives, or CGI. "The main purpose of this is to fight scams and sh*t coins, and to boost crypto and blockchain technology" Looking forward to it.

The 0x Mission and Values Lots of good stuff in this. Even if people can write what they want, we find it incredibly easy to figure out who is in it for the right reasons. They envision a world in which all forms of value are tokenized on public blockchains and their mission is to create a tokenized world where all value can flow freely.

The Forgotten Contracts Nothing extremely new, but a good post on the topic of "actual" smart contracts, which has been mostly neglected recently even thought it is one of the most interesting things that are enabled by all this new technology. I might have to change my mind around Tezos slowly..

So You Want to Work in Crypto… Some useful evergreen tips from Meltem for how to get a job in crypto.  Beyond the basics, writing great content and engaging in online discussions seem to be the highest leverage activities.

RE: Cost of Bitcoin Mining Misconceptions The folks at CoinShares have produced an indepth research report in an attempt to debunk some of the claims about bitcoin network's energy consumption.  It turns out prior reports were greatly exaggerated, according to their findings.

Crafting New Value with Existing Tokens An interesting post navigating through fun examples of the extensibility feature of NFTs and fungible tokens, enabling all sorts of new layer 2 experiences. "a civic shirt can now become a non-fungible token represented by the burning of 5 CVC tokens and a CryptoKitty. This non-fungible shirt with the Civic logo can now be worn on your CryptoKitty representing your loyalty to Civic. A completely new way to shill your favorite shitcoin!" But...why, one wonders. Because it always starts out looking like a toy...

Ethereum Will Be the Backbone of the New Internet As new smart contract platforms launch and newer ones emerge making big claims, this is a timely reminder of what Ethereum's head start is made of. 1/ More developers, accelerating 2/ A universe of developer tools and infrastructure 3/ Truly decenltralized, permissionless and censorship resistant base layer offering 'strong guarantees' 4/ A secure base layer for layer 2 scaling 5/ 3 years of battle-testing

Is DPOS the Next Step in Distributed Consensus? Flowing nicely from the post just above, here's another well reasoned sceptical take on EOS DPOS consensus mechanism and the scenarios it may lead up to. "You may disagree with my conclusions, but the reason this system falls apart is because you have created a system in which incentives can be paid for. The cost in becoming a delegate is high, delegates will do what they need to mitigate the risk of loss through buying votes. Some users will undoubtedly be willing to sell their votes. There are individuals whose primary source of income may even lie in voting, which would be a valid economic contribution except for the fact that they aren't the ones voting". In the meantime,EOS is now finally set to launch very shortly... PS: if you want to dig further, here's a dissection of another network that uses DPOS (Lisk).

Classifying Ethereum users using blockchain data The team at TokenAnalyst have done an in-depth data analysis of Ethereum on-chain activity for a large number of addresses and generated some really cool charts to visualize the findings.

Bitcoin's $30 billion sell-off: insights from crypto money supply analysis Another fascinating in-depth data piece but on Bitcoin, produced by the folks at Chainalysis. They break down the Bitcoin money supply into different clusters of liquidity and thus use cases, and plot changes over time. It's particularly interesting around the big sell-off earlier in the year. They also chart how velocity has trended over time, with and without the investment use case (it's been steadily decreasing).

Vitalik's response to "Sharding centralizes Ethereum by selling you Scaling-In disguised as Scaling-Out" This is a Medium response from Vitalik to the "Sharding centralizes Ethereum by selling you Scaling-In disguised as Scaling-Out" piece published this week. We link to the response because it's a good recap of the mining and validation process in Ethereum.

Monetary policy in the digital age [pdf] The deputy director of the IMF's Monetary and Capital Markets Department has published a 4-pager on how digital currencies may impact central banks activities and how central banks should respond. In short: 1/ Making fiat better by running more effective monetary policies with the use of  big data and AI/ML 2/ Pushing gov'ts to regulate crypto 3/ Issuing a central bank digital currency. Interestingly the CEO of Lazard this week vaguely hinted at cryptocurrencies as potential alternatives to the USD as reserve currency of the world.

💥Newsy stuff

Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion By now you must have all read the news of Microsoft acquiring Github for $7.5B. That inevitably sparked a heated debate in the crypto Twitter-sphere around the implications of a large corporation controlling a critical piece of web infrastructure like Github and whether that should instead be a decentralized public utility. The fact that Microsoft is involved made the broader reactions in the developer community even more spicy, given its history with Linux and OSS generally and it's M&A track record, albeit under Satya Nadella's leadership things have arguably turned around on both fronts.   Point worth noting: despite being built on top of a open source protocol (Git), Github was already a for profit entity run in the interest of its shareholders, . Some used the analogy that Github is the Coinbase of Git: yes you can host your code elsewhere since Git is a public protocol, but the convenience of good UI, plus the network effects of the social layer, clearly appealed to 28M developers. Being VC-backed and revenue making ($300M according to sources), it was only a matter of time before an acquirer scooped it up. Worthwhile readings: - Oscoin timely post on the motivations and principles behind their endeavour - The Linux Foundation's reaction to the news - A Reddit AMA with Nate Friedman, new Github CEO.

MyHeritage Statement About a Cybersecurity Incident Not strictly TE material, but a constant, painful reminder of the perils of relying on single points of failure for the privacy and security of our personal data.   This time it sounds like 'only' email addresses and hashed passwords were potentially exposed, without evidence of further exploitation, but the thought of them holding DNA data for +100m plus users and the Black Mirror type scenarios of it being hacked makes us all shiver.

In other news:

- On the move. Greg Rosen is joining Benchmark Capital as a Principal to focus on blockchain companies. Congrats Greg! 🎉 - Wall st. Fidelity job posts suggest the large asset manager is planning to build a proprietary digital asset exchange as well as its own crypto custody solution. - IPOs. The video chat with Zooko seems to have sparked something in Jihan Wu, who now claims to be open to an IPO in Hong Kong. With his co-founder they own 60% of Bitmain, that booked $2.5B in revenues last year. - Lawsuits. In a weird turn of events, the former Chair of the SEC and her enforcement chief are now representing Ripple in a securities fraud class-action lawsuit. - R3. Rumours are circulating that R3, the makers of the Corda enterprise focused blockchain, is potentially heading into financial troubles in absence of another large funding round (or a positive settlement in the Ripple lawsuit). - Regulated. Coinbase has acquired a Finra-registered broker-dealer for its licenses to operate as a registered investment adviser and to run an alternative trading system. Pending regulatory approval, this would allow Coinbase to offer 'security tokens' and related services. Circle is also going down a similar path, seeking registration as a brokerage and trading venue with the SEC and then applying for federal banking license. - DEXs. Decred has published a new proposal for a zero-fee decentralized exchange that they intend to build collaboratively with the community. - Drama. Robbie Bent and Sina Habibian are out at TrueBit for unclear reasons.

😎 Cool new projects

Introducing DS (Digital Securities) protocol Say what you want, the infrastructure for digitizing securities on the blockchain continues to being laid.   The Securitize team seem to be leading the way on this front, announcing a proposal for a protocol for developers to build 3rd party apps on and enable lifecycle management and compliance for digital securities. Components of the protocol include registry, compliance, comms and integrations with exchanges.

The Graph - A Query Protocol for Blockchains Super solid new GraphQL project to get data out of dapps. The team is all former Mulesoft and I have a good feeling about this one. Some features that could be coming to a dapp near you soon: Filters, pagination, sorting and subscriptions with websockets.

Bidali Beta Web Demo Cool new Demo from Bidali of their Ethereum based payments tool.

Crypto Against Humanity! I'm going to be poor. But in all honesty, wow - amazing. Aside from just the awesome possible combinations that could be created, this is a really interesting application of TCRs and crypto incentives. Is this the future of games? "Users submit black cards to a Token Curated Registry and create white cards that each have an associated bonding curve market. Players participate by buying into the white cards that match best with the black card in the current round. One black card is chosen at random for the round every 12 hours. Players can make money by selling a white card they bought into early, or by creating black cards that the community deems valuable!"

The Stablecoin Index If you are into stable coins, here's a one stop shop site with everything you need to know and read about existing and new projects, complied by Myles from Multicoin.

SpankChain Camsite Launches into Public Beta! SpankChain has finally launched its camsite! Still very impressed by the execution speed and quality of this team.

Curated on a Product Hunt collection!

👮 This week in regulation

SEC chief says agency won't change securities laws to cater to cryptocurrencies This video of Clayton speaking to the CNBC caused a lot of noise but quite frankly he hasn't really said anything new, unless we have misinterpreted his words. "A token, a digital asset, where I give you my money and you go off and make a venture, and in return for giving you my money I say 'you can get a return' that is a security and we regulate that. We regulate the offering of that security and regulate the trading of that security."  He's only just said that securities are securities and they should be regulated as such, which we knew already. He still hasn't provided any additional clarity on the SEC stance on 'utility tokens' distributed at the point of network launch when the 'efforts of others' and 'common enterprise' prongs of the Howey Test don't necessarily apply any more.

SEC Names Valerie A. Szczepanik Senior Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation Does this make us closer to clarity? "Ms. Szczepanik will coordinate efforts across all SEC Divisions and Offices regarding the application of U.S. securities laws to emerging digital asset technologies and innovations, including Initial Coin Offerings and cryptocurrencies." Her first public comments in the new role were rather encouraging.

💰 New funds

Ripple sets up $50 million blockchain research fund for universities Another creative deployment strategy for using all that XRP that Ripple has no idea what to do with. This time they're giving $50M to universities including MIT, University College London, Princeton, and the Australian National University for "research".

💸 Funding rounds

Chinese Blockchain Firm Hyperchain Raises $234M Series B Round Just your average Series B in China. "Hyperchain provides enterprise level blockchain platform with the technology of container cloud, core algorithm and management facilities" It's above our paygrade to understand what that means.

Binance Leads $12 Million Investment In AngelList Crypto Spin-Off Republic Republic finally announced its funding. The round ended up being led by Binance Labs, and NEO Global Capital, an affiliate of the public blockchain project of the same name. East Chain Co., Jeffrey Tarrant and Passport Capital also participated. As a reminder, Republic is the AngelList spin-off that offers crowdfunding to non-accredited investors and has recently gone very crypto. The cool thing in this raise is that they introduced a new instrument, the Simple Agreement for Future Equity and Security Tokens which combines all the previous SAF-s. With the SAFEST, when the token is ready, pre-sale investors will have the option to take their full investment in tokens or up to 20 percent of their investment in equity. If for some reason Republic fails to launch the token, investors can convert all their investment into equity.

Blockchain Game Momentum Builds With EON Foundation $5M Seed Round EON is building a sort of game app store on top of Ethereum. The Singapore-based company announced a $5M seed round led led by Feng Li, Cherubic Ventures and Uphonest Capital. [This is being announced at the same time that CryptoKitties is down 98.5% from all-time highs. Now just at 200 DAUs. (h/t @nic__carter)]

Unchained Capital announces Ethereum Lending and Seed Round Unchained Capital raised a $3M seed round. As a reminder, they are offering fiat lending by getting BTC (and now ETH) as collateral. A solid business run with no hype.

ℹ️ About us

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