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STABLECOIN SHUTDOWN: The startup behind the Basis stablecoin confirmed it was shutting down Thursday, citing the current regulatory landscape in the U.S. The company will return funds to investors in the coming days.
In a blog post, founder Nader Al-Naji explained that the project's bond and share tokens, which are used to expand and contract the token supply to maintain the stablecoin's peg, would be classified as securities – though the stablecoin itself would likely be free of this designation.
"We considered many alternative paths to launch to try and comply with the regulatory constraints while keeping our product compelling and competitive ... ultimately, however, we don't think any of the paths we considered are compelling enough," he said. Full Story
WHAT WINTER: While some blockchain projects quickly burned through the capital they raised during the heady days of 2017, others prepared for this market downturn by limiting access to their own funds. Such was the case at New York-based blockchain startup Blockstack, which raised nearly $54 million in 2016 and 2017 from a Series A round and a token sale to accredited investors.
Blockstack’s board of directors recently unlocked roughly $25 million of that funding when the startup surpassed its goal of getting the unique blockchain network up and running with real users. The platform currently supports dozens of decentralized applications (dapps).
“It was a self-imposed thing we did for investor protection,” Blockstack co-founder Muneeb Ali told CoinDesk about the unusual choice to lock up its capital. “We, in general, have been pretty lean.”
Ali said the startup has an extended runway because Blockstack held roughly 70 percent of its capital in fiat. Plus, the 30 percent of its funds that Blockstack holds in bitcoin and ether aren’t intended to cover operating costs.
“Crypto would be the last thing we’d use,” Ali said, adding that a lock-up procedure was also applied to Blockstack’s native token so that token holders could only access their crypto a full year after the original purchase. Full Story
FORCED ADOPTION: Venezuela has reportedly begun converting pensioners’ monthly payments into its controversial cryptocurrency, the petro.
According to a local politics and economics blog, the government has recently been swapping sovereign bolivars (the country’s current fiat currency) paid to its elderly residents for the oil-backed and controversial token.
Normally, a pensioner would receive their monthly sum in bolivars, shift the funds to a bank account, and withdraw them from a local branch. However, the government apparently converted residents’ bolivars to petros immediately after sending the fiat funds.
How pensioners would be able to use their unrequested petros is unclear, as they are not generally accepted. However, it seems to be possible to convert them back to bolivars via a complex process, according to the post. To make matters worse the value of the petro relative to the bolivar is unstable, rising from 9,000 to more than 15,000 over the course of a few weeks. Full Story
OPERA DEBUT: Opera has announced the public release of its “Web 3-ready” Android web browser, which notably sports a built-in cryptocurrency wallet.
Previously available in beta, Opera for Android supports ethereum’s ether and other tokens using the network’s ERC-20 standard. The app also provides support for crypto collectibles (ERC-721 standard) such as CryptoKitties, as well as ethereum-based decentralized apps, or dapps, that can be accessed from the wallet.
“Until now using cryptocurrencies online and accessing Web 3 required special apps or extensions, making it difficult for people to even try it out. Our new browser removes that friction,” Charles Hamel, the product manager of Opera Crypto, said in a statement.
Speaking to CoinDesk, Hamel said the new product is largely the same as the beta version, but as it was approaching a “much wider audience” the firm had taken feedback on board and updated the app’s user interface “significantly.”
It now displays “less confusing language” to users and reduces the steps needed to set up the wallet, he said. Full Story |
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 Did you ever wonder about the political bent of cryptocurrency users? We did and, following some good old-fashioned research, we have the answer. As noted in our Q3 State of Blockchains report: The dominant political ideology of crypto is liberal at 31 percent, but the grouping of conservatives at 18 percent, libertarians at 19 percent, and anarcho-capitalists at 7 percent make a total of 44 percent that can be described as the "right wing" of crypto. Fringe groups include communists, the alt-right, and nihilists, all at about 2 percent. This survey question reveals perhaps a disintegration of founding stock of right-wingers in the crypto community as adoption brings in those who don't share those beliefs. Learn more about the crypto market in Q3 across price, network, exchange, developer, and social fundamental metrics in our recently released State of Blockchains report here. |
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| BULLS BUILDING? Bitcoin's five-day-long symmetrical triangle, as seen in the hourly chart, could end up with a bullish breakout, courtesy of extreme oversold conditions and bullish breakout on the 6-hour chart RSI. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST FORBES: Ripple CTO David Schwartz has warned that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology need to see improvements before widespread adoption becomes a reality, according to a piece from Forbes. With concerns over exchange reliability, investor risk and lack of regulation, it says, the public might end up averse to the tech, even if those issues are ultimately resolved. Schwartz argued adoption shouldn’t run ahead of the technology. “It took a long time for the internet to get to the point where it was suitable for anybody to use it and you didn’t have to really understand the technology in great detail in order to be able to get it to work," he told a podcast quoted in the piece. THE REST
CNBC: Mobile banking app Revolut has secured a banking license through the European Central Bank, which it will begin to implement next year in the UK, France, Germany and Poland, CNBC reports. With the license secured, Revolut will be able to begin offering customers additional services, including consumer or business lending and overdrafts. Users will be able to set up direct deposit services for their salaries, with €100,000 insured through the European Deposit Insurance Scheme. This is the first license secured by Revolut, but founder and CEO Nik Storonsky told CNBC that the company will apply for others, including a UK banking license as a hedge against the nation exiting the EU. BLOOMBERG: The most-searched phrase on Google in the U.S. and UK this past year was "what is bitcoin," Bloomberg reported Thursday, followed shortly thereafter by "how to buy Ripple." The piece explained that the world's first cryptocurrency gained massive popularity last year after its price jumped more than 1,400 percent, before falling 80 percent from its 2017 highs. As for the Ripple-related trend (which was the fourth-most searched phrase), Bloomberg notes that users were likely looking for the XRP cryptocurrency. |
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