Friday, January 18, 2019

Stellar choice 🚀

January 18, 2019

Grayscale Makes Stellar Its Latest Investment Trust

Number nine

On Thursday, Grayscale announced that it was making a new investment trust and revealed that it would be focused on Stellar (XLM).

That means the firm now has interest in nine different cryptocurrencies including:

Bitcoin (BTC)
Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum Classic (ETC)
Horizen (ZEN)
Litecoin (LTC)
XRP (XRP)
Zcash (ZEC)
Stellar (XLM)

Stellar choice

Standing behind the decision, Michael Sonnenshein told Fortune that the new trust was a reflection of investor demand for XLM exposure.

He then reiterated the business case:

"An American bank may be keeping large amounts of currencies in foreign banks, and to be able to bring those balances of foreign currencies onto a balance sheet as working capital is valuable. Financial institutions won't be required to hold balances all over the place. This will improve efficiency and shore up balance sheets for other uses."

A massive force

Although being added to Grayscale's products somewhat legitimizes the projects, Grayscale's other investment trusts haven't gained the popularity that its Bitcoin trust has.

Actually research publication Diar found that this trust had over 1% of the total circulating Bitcoin supply. While that's an impressive feat, the trust was hit hard in the bear market as its investment value dropped below $1 billion late last year.

Nonetheless, Grayscale's investors see a strong use case for XLM and that got it its own seat at the table.

REGULATION

South Africa's Central Bank Proposes Regulation for Crypto

In a recently published paper, the South African Reserve Bank laid out a framework for regulation of cryptocurrencies and related companies.

The primary motivation behind the proposed rules is to protect consumers and investors.

Useful starting point

The proposed regulations are by no means an all encompassing solution to how the government will treat cryptocurrencies, rather they are seeing it as a starting point.

The main ruling of this proposal is that all cryptocurrency companies will need to register with regulators.

Next in plans for regulations for the central bank is to apply already existing rules to cryptocurrencies. However, the bank did recognize that it may need to amend the existing rules to fit the new asset close.

The South African Reserve Bank stated in their proposal

"The phased approach, starting with the registration requirement, could lead to formal authorization and designation as a registered/licensed provider for crypto asset services operating in South Africa at a later stage."

RUMOR

Russia Official Denies Rumor Country is Buying $10 Billion in Bitcoin

The rumor

Over the past week, a news story has spread throughout the crypto media that said that Russia was reportedly going to buy $10 billion.

It all started when a tweet was posted from a self-proclaimed Russian government economist that said that the country was going to buy Bitcoin to evade sanctions imposed on the country.

As the tweet spread around the crypto space, investors got excited about the idea of Russia pushing up the price of BTC.

Confirmed: fake news

While many got excited about the tweet, a good number of people thought it was too ludicrous to be true.

It turns out the non-believers were right. Elina Sidorenko, chair of the Russian Duma's cryptocurrency group, denied all the rumors that were spread.

Her exact quote on the situation was:

"This statement has no common sense. The Russian Federation — like any other country in the world — is simply not ready to combine its traditional financial system with cryptocurrencies. And to say that this idea can be implemented in Russia for at least the next 30 years is unlikely."

BITS

But wait, there's more...

💰 Coinme inks deal with Coinstar to bring Bitcoin to thousands of ATMs around the United States.
👎 TSMC reports a massive crypto mining revenue drop in Q4 2018.
🚨 ShapeShift law enforcement requests jump 175% in the second half of 2018.

MEME