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SURVIVAL APPEAL: The NEM Foundation, a community-funded nonprofit established to promote the NEM blockchain, is planning layoffs across its entire 150-person staff in the wake of severe budget cuts and ahead of an imminent restructuring.
The newly elected president of the NEM Foundation, Alex Tinsman, told CoinDesk Wednesday that the Singapore-based foundation now intends to submit a request to the NEM community fund for 160 million tokens (worth roughly $7.5 million), money that would be used to rescue the organization from dire financial straits.
“Basically we realized we had a month to operate, due to the mismanagement of the previous governance council,” said Tinsman, who took over the non-profit in January.
As a result, the foundation’s 202 members – people who undergo identity checks and pay an annual $50 membership fee – will be asked to vote on the funding request in February after it’s published on Thursday. The number of layoffs will be determined by how much funding the community approves. Full Story
BITCOIN TOKEN: A new token backed one-to-one with bitcoin is now live on the ethereum blockchain.
“Wrapped BTC” (WBTC) officially launched its ERC-20 token Wednesday evening – a joint initiative between decentralized exchange startups Kyber Network and Republic Protocol, as well as cryptocurrency custody company BitGo.
As stated on the project’s website, the aim of WBTC is to bring “greater liquidity to the ethereum ecosystem including decentralized exchanges and financial applications.”
At the time, BitGo CTO Benedict Chan described WBTC as possessing both "the stability of bitcoin and the flexibility of ethereum," likening the new crypto asset to traditional bank notes (the kind that were once redeemable for gold). While volatile compared to the U.S. dollar, bitcoin is the most liquid and stable of cryptocurrencies, he noted.
Now listed on cryptocurrency market data site CoinMarketCap, as of early Wednesday evening there was a reported 72.4214 WBTC on the ethereum network, slightly over-collateralized with 72.4216 BTC (roughly $250,000) locked in custody on the bitcoin blockchain. Full Story
CRYPTO ON CREDIT: Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by adjusted trading volume, has just made it easier for users to buy cryptocurrencies.
The exchange announced Thursday that it has partnered with Israel-based payments processing firm Simplex to enable purchases with Visa and MasterCard credit cards.
At launch, the exchange is supporting credit card purchase for bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), litecoin (LTC) and XRP. These can then be traded against up to 151 other tokens offered by the exchange.
“The crypto industry is still in its early stages and most of the world’s money is still in fiat, ” said Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. “Building fiat gateways is what we need now to grow the ecosystem, increase adoption and introduce crypto to more users.” Full Story
BAN CONTINUES: South Korea's top financial regulator has said it will not lift the ban on domestic initial coin offerings (ICOs) after finding that some projects have been violating rules.
As ICO investment is a very “high risk” activity, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) said, calling on the public to exercise caution when investing in token projects, according to a report from CoinDesk Korea.
The FSC decision was informed by the results of a survey conducted by the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), indicating that some ICOs purportedly conducted abroad had also illegally raised money from Korean investors.
From September 2018, the FSS sent the survey questionnaire 22 local firms that conducted ICOs in foreign countries, of which 13 responded. The companies had held the ICOs since the second half of 2017, raising a combined total of about 566.4 billion won ($509 million).
It found that firms had been setting up paper companies in Singapore to circumvent the ICO ban, yet still raised money from Koreans – as evidenced by Korean language white papers and marketing materials.
Some ICO projects also did not disclose important information such as company profile and financial statements, and in some cases provided false information, the survey found. Further, tokens had dropped in value by an average of 67.7 percent since launch. 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. Exchange interest is important in determining the activity occurring among speculators and investors buying and selling cryptocurrencies on exchanges. We observed DASH over the course the past five days and found some growth in exchange activity. The exchange interest fluctuated as follows: - 1/27: 13.92 percent
- 1/28: 14.41 percent
- 1/29: 20.91 percent
- 1/30: 20.91 percent
- 1/31: 12.89 percent
This was largely due to DASH’s total exchange volume hitting a high of $941 million on January 28 which grew 481 percent from the previous day’s total. Exchange volume levels like this have not been seen on DASH since Dec. 20, 2017, which reached a high of $816 million. For more research insights, check out the CoinDesk Crypto-Economic Explorer here to see this table and more. |
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| BUCKED TREND? February has brought cheer to bitcoin bulls for the last four years. That trend may be broken this month, however, as bitcoin is leaving January on a very bearish note. If the crucial 200-week moving average support at $3,298 serves as trampoline for a good bounce, however, the bulls may be in with a chance of extending the winning streak. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST ZEROHEDGE: A recent JPMorgan report suggested a good price floor for bitcoin was $2,800, or perhaps even $1,260. That's absurd, says a piece from ZeroHedge. Apart from pointing to such a wide range for "fair value," the investment bank's analysts used a traditional finance tool called marginal cost pricing to get to that range. Unfortunately, that model is "useless" for bitcoin, says the author. Effectively, with physical commodities, production drops with price until it falls below demand, at which point prices stabilize. With bitcoin, on the other hand, production is “price inelastic.” That is, the system is designed to produce coins at a set schedule that automatically adjusts to maintain that rate. Hence, “BTC can climb to 10 million this year or fall to 10 dollars, and production would average 12.5 new Bitcoins every ten minutes – until the next halving.” Bitcoin is a “truly new” asset class, the piece concludes, adding that the most honest answer to the question of its real value would be, “We have no idea.” THE REST FORBES: Nasdaq is now providing market surveillance technology to seven different cryptocurrency exchanges, according to Forbes. The stock exchange has a team of roughly 20 individuals who conduct due diligence and other vetting procedures before signing a new client on, as well. These procedures look into exchanges’ business models, how they conduct know-your-customer/anti-money laundering processes and the exchanges’ governance and controls, with both legal and technical experts examining each prospective client. In its list, Nasdaq asks clients about their customers and the assets being traded on their platforms. While Nasdaq claims to have a number of clients, to date, only Gemini and SBI Virtual Currency have publicized their use of the surveillance tech. BLOOMBERG: Crypto-focused hedge funds are beginning to look more like traditional venture capitalists, largely thanks to the crypto bear market, reports Bloomberg. This is partly because of the fact that many of these funds’ liquid assets declined in value, leaving a large part of their assets under management illiquid, according to Multicoin Capital managing partner Kyle Samani. As a result, investors are pulling out of token sales where they lost or are losing money, allowing funds to make purchases below market price and acquire ownership stakes. Jeff Dorman, a partner and portfolio manager with Arca, explained: “There’s going to be a lot of opportunity in distressed buying and even activist investing … Often you can buy below even the cash value of the company." |
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WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
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