Thursday, January 17, 2019

Headed to Europe ✈️

January 17, 2019

Binance Launches Exchange Featuring EUR and GBP Pairs

Bring on the fiat

On Wednesday, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced the launch of its newest exchange.

Binance's newest product is an exchange which features crypto-to-fiat pairings for the Euro and Pound, targeting the European market.

The new exchange is a totally separate entity from the main Binance exchange, but uses the same technology.

Island living

Binance's new exchange is based out of an island called Jersey. This island is a British self-governing dependency.

The island was chosen due to regulatory reasons that allow Binance to facilitate fiat trading.

Partnering with the local government

Binance Jersey has been in the works for some time. Binance partnered with the island's government agency, Digital Jersey, back in June of last year.

The new exchange is expected to create 40 additional jobs for the island. Changpeng Zhao, Binance CEO talked about the benefits of Binance Jersey to the local economy:

"With its local economy based on a major currency (GBP), and its close proximity to the U.K. and western Europe, we are confident the cooperation with Jersey will not only benefit the local economy, but also form a strong operational foundation for our expansion into the rest of Europe."

ADOPTION

WWF Launched a Platform to Help Consumers Shop Ethical Products

Welcome OpenSC

In a tweet Thursday, World Wildlife Fund-Australia (WFF-Australia) announced it has launched a new platform that aims to make supply chains transparent and ethical.

The project, named OpenSC, works by attaching a "unique blockchain code" at the product's origin. Suppliers can then track the product all the way to the end consumer and consumers can verify it was ethically sourced.

WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O'Gorman spoke on the new launch:

"Through OpenSC, we will have a whole new level of transparency about whether the food we eat is contributing to environmental degradation of habitats and species, as well as social injustice and human rights issues such as slavery."

An area to disrupt

This is not a new idea. Actually, according to Deloitte in 2018, supply chain is the largest area that top executives are looking to disrupt within their business.

That's because many supply chains are outdated, complex, and fragmented to the point where tracking and organizing data is a massive challenge. With blockchain technology, however, data can be stored and recorded in an immutable ledger - in a transparent way.

As more trust and development gets put into blockchain development, it's expected that the supply chain industry will see real world use cases much faster than other industries.

TAX

US Bitcoin Investors Lost $1.7 Billion in 2018, Many Don't Plan on Deducting Losses on Their Taxes

Major losses

According to a survey conducted by Credit Karma, US Bitcoin investors realized losses of $1.7 billion from selling Bitcoin. The investors who are still hodling are sitting on unrealized losses of $5.7 billion.

The main point of the survey is to research how many of these losers are planning on reporting the losses on their taxes. Credit Karma found that only 53% of Bitcoin losers plan on reporting their Bitcoin losses on their taxes this tax season.

Shockingly, 58% of respondents did not even know that they could claim a tax deduction for their cryptocurrency losses.

Script flipped from last year

This tax season is a totally different story from last thanks to the depressing bear market of 2018.

2017 saw crypto's historic price appreciation, making many early investors rich. Last tax season, many of these newly rich investors chose not to report their gains on their taxes.

Now after the bear market, many investors are not reporting their losses to the IRS. However this time around, investors would benefit from reporting to the IRS.

REVIEW

BitPay Processed Over $1 Billion Crypto Payments Last Year

Hitting the big billion

Announced Wednesday, popular payment processor BitPay announced that it had facilitated over $1 billion crypto transactions in 2018 making it the second time ever in the firm's seven year existence.

Speaking on the accomplishment, BitPay CEO Stephen Pair said:

"To process over a $1 billion for a second year in a row despite bitcoin's large price drop shows that bitcoin is being used to solve real pain points around the world."

What was it driven by?

To start, the harsh bear market sure didn't help. But BitPay found itself crushing sales last year when it expanded its business-to-business ventures more than 255%.

That meant convincing IT firms like Dish Network and even the U.S. State of Ohio to accept crypto payments.

To close, BitPay's head of product Sean Rolland left his two cents:

"Bitcoin has the network effect around the world and we are still extremely bullish on bitcoin and the bitcoin ecosystem"

BITS

But wait, there's more...

📉 Bitcoin's price volatility is down 98% on the year.
👎 USDC Stablecoin audit comes back as fully dollar backed from the latest report.
🏛Wyoming state lawmakers have suggested tokenized stock certificates in a newly proposed bill.

MEME