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103 BITCOINS: Beleaguered Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX accidentally lost 103 bitcoins – worth nearly $500,000 CAD or $378,000 USD – when it transferred the coins to a cold storage wallet it cannot access. According to Ernst and Young, a court-appointed monitor for the exchange, the mishap occurred last week.
“On February 6, 2019, Quadriga inadvertently transferred 103 bitcoins valued at approximately $468,675 to Quadriga cold wallets which the Company is currently unable to access. The Monitor is working with Management to retrieve this cryptocurrency from the various cold wallets, if possible,” the monitor wrote in an initial report.
The mistake is only the latest issue for the exchange, whose CEO and founder, Gerald Cotten, died in India late last year. According to a previous court filing by Quadriga, Cotten was the only member of the team to know how to access its cold storage wallets, meaning the majority of its crypto holdings were frozen.
While the exchange did not break down how much of its holdings were in hot wallets compared to cold storage in its initial filing, Tuesday’s report indicates that less than $1 million CAD ($682,000 USD) were in the hot wallets, meaning $179 million CAD (about $136 million USD) are frozen. Full Story
PAYMENTS PLAY: Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) – Japan’s largest financial group and the world’s fifth largest bank by assets – is launching a blockchain-based payments network next year.
The firm said Tuesday that it has formed a joint venture with U.S.-based fintech firm Akamai Technologies to develop the platform “by the first half of 2020.”
Called the Global Open Network, the system will be capable of processing over a million transactions per second, MUFG claimed. The firms are also looking to integrate internet of things and Akamai’s cloud platform into the network.
The new venture launches with capital of 250 million yen ($2.26 million), with MUFG having an 80 percent stake and Akamai the remaining 20 percent.
The platform was initially announced back in May. At the time, Akamai said it would provide a number of services, including current payment processing, pay-per-use, micropayments and “other developing IoT-enabled payment transactions.” Full Story
SETTING STANDARDS: The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is boarding the tokenization train.
The 385-member standards body plans to form a “token task force” this year, executive director Ron Resnick told CoinDesk. The group will work on a specification for tokens that run on top of ethereum and private blockchains based on it, with business uses in mind.
Notably, the task force will do this not only for assets whose units are interchangeable with one another (such as shares in a corporation, or blockchain representations of fiat currency), but also for individual tokens with unique properties (with CryptoKitties being the most famous example, although a more plausible business application would be digital certificates for diamonds).
"We are creating a token task force; we will do that first half of this year," Resnick said. "It's going to be focused on support for fungible ERC-20 and non-fungible ERC-721 tokens."
Crafting a business-grade spec for tokenization could ease corporate adoption of the technology, whose main use case to date has been fundraising by startups, often in a legally dubious manner.
“We want to create a token specification standard for enterprise tokenization so basically [assets] can be managed in a much better way with more assurance than what's happening today,” Resnick said. Full story |
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 Every quarter, CoinDesk Research takes stock of the key data, trends and events with its State of Blockchains reports. As our research efforts evolve and expand, we hope to provide amplification to a variety of perspectives within the crypto community. We reached out to analysts, builders, and lawyers to understand the industry from their unique vantage point. Check out the full article, but here's a sample insight: “Q4 2018 was quietly one of the most interesting times to be in Bitcoin. As the price dropped, so did its importance in the conversation. We started to see more philosophical questions on Bitcoin emerge. Discussions regarding POW vs POS, Big Blocks vs Small Blocks, On-chain vs Off-chain Governance became mainstream… The average crypto user will be more comfortable with hardforks & network upgrades as we can assume all forks that can exist, will exist. Bitcoin will be defined as the sum of all forks. I believe the most exciting future developments are in Bitcoin-As-A-Computer. As more developers enter the space and actively build applications that store, manage, and run data on-chain, we will see exponential progress in what I believe is the first true “World Computer”. The implications of this are incredibly far reaching. Regardless of what happens in the near term, this is one of the most exciting times to be building in the space. I look forward to a Bitcoin future.” — Elon Moist (@ coinyeezy), adviser at Honeyminer. We want to hear your perspective too! Do you have thoughts on the crypto industry? Do you want to add to the conversation? Do you want to help shape the direction the ecosystem moves in? If the answer is yes, please fill out our survey. We will be releasing the results in the coming weeks with tons of insights that you can help provide. For an in-depth view of crypto data, you can also check out the CoinDesk Crypto-Economic Explorer here. |
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| TOUGH HURDLE: Bitcoin's repeated failure to beat the 50-day MA resistance has weakened the bullish case. As a result, the bears may hit the market with fresh offers if the hurdle remains intact for another 24 hours or so. However, a move above $3,730 would confirm an inverse head-and-shoulders breakout on the 4-hour chart and open up upside towards $4,000. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST
MARKETWATCH: Overstock founder and CEO Patrick Byrne has argued that government services need a revamp and blockchain provides the means to do that.
Byrne told MarketWatch that he’s looking at building government-as-a-service – “a set of applications and companies that, between them, can bring blockchain to different services that governments provide.” That would potentially make governments more efficient, less costly to run and “incapable of being bribed,” he added.
“We could step into Venezuela with six laptops and create not only a functioning society but arguably one with the most advanced government systems in the world,” Byrne said.
Overstock subsidiary Medici’s land-governance service has already titled almost 50,000 properties using blockchain tech in Zambia, he continued, and the government has authorized a further 300,000 homes. “We anticipate doing the whole country,” he said.
THE REST CONSULTANCY.UK: A new study from marketing consultancy Simon-Kucher & Partners suggests that blockchain could create a global market for added services in the auto industry of over £90 billion in the next 10 years, as reported by Consultancy.uk. Drivers, it found, would be willing to pay more for services such as traffic congestion management and automated payments.
In the survey, participants said they were particularly interested in services that can save them time. Solutions that reward good driving, such as with lower insurance costs, were also popular, with 11.7 percent supporting the option. Just over 10 percent were interested in financial rewards for eco-friendly driving. Making life easier behind the wheel was also popular. 27 percent said they would pay around $11 every month for traffic congestion management services. While 12 percent would fork out $8 for remote control of the vehicle, with features such as locking and unlocking.
Automated payments that take the hassle out of tolls and paid parking were of appeal to 17 percent of the study group, who said they’d pay over $6 for the service. Seven percent also said they would pay around $5 for an immutable record of an auto’s history; for example, when buying a used car. BLOOMBERG: Galaxy Digital founder and former hedge fund manager Michael Novogratz believes the crypto space will see a large influx of cash from major institutions over the next year, Bloomberg reports.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Novogratz explained that "all the architecture that institutions need to feel comfortable with this is being put in place," and he expects custody services to come online over the next month and a half.
Fidelity is one such example. The trillion-dollar asset manager plans to launch its digital asset custody service, and Novogratz thinks there are as many as 300 potential customers interested in using the platform.
“Over the next six to 12 months you are going to see institutions put a small amount of their assets … [and] a small amount of institutional assets is a lot of money,” he said. |
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