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CLEAN MINERS: Bitcoin miners made the case for their industry as a driver of clean energy adoption, rather than the ecological disaster depicted by critics, at Fidelity’s Mining Summit Friday. In presentations, miners and others sought to disprove the popular perception that the copious amount of electricity devoted to securing the bitcoin network is an environmental threat. “Bitcoin is at the center of the next great infrastructure that we’ve never seen before. We’re going to go to places that have incredible renewable energy sites,” said John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna. Full Story
PRIVACY PROPOSALS: Prolific bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille has unveiled two Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) that could prove foundational to a possible upgrade to the cryptocurrency. The two proposals describe Taproot, a code change designed to increase bitcoin’s privacy. Taproot is expected to be bundled together with an upgrade called Schnorr in a soft fork that developers have been looking into for some time, paving the way for privacy and scalability improvements to bitcoin. Full Story
CONSENSYS SHAKEUP: Ethereum-centric conglomerate ConsenSys is restructuring as it seeks to raise $200 million, with its ventures arm now being combined with other sectors of the ConsenSys “mesh,” including the Tachyon startup accelerator and ConsenSys Labs. Related to the move, Kavita Gupta, the head of ConsenSys Ventures, has stepped down to teach at Stanford. “All the investment activities are lining up together, which is great,” Gupta told CoinDesk. “I will remain on the board of some of the existing companies and help.” Full Story
ANT INVESTS: QEDIT, a developer of privacy technology for enterprise blockchains, has closed a $10 million Series A round led by MizMaa Ventures and included Ant Financial, the payments affiliate of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Ant Financial will also be incorporating QEDIT’s zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) tech into its blockchain projects. Full Story |
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$6K PLUS? Bitcoin could rise toward $6,200 soon if prices close today above the June 2018 low of $5,780. Even so, bulls need to observe caution, as a bearish volume divergence seen on the three-day chart casts doubt on the sustainability of the recent rise from $5,000. Full Story
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BEST OF THE BEST
TRADER BASES: The U.S., Japan and South Korea are home to a majority of crypto traders, says crypto analysis platform DataLight. The company used website traffic data from the 100 most popular crypto exchanges to map out where people are trading cryptocurrencies, finding that the U.S. has more traders (just over 22 million) than the next four countries combined (Japan takes second place with 6 million). The site also notes that nations with volatile native currencies like Turkey, Ukraine and Mexico, are seeing increasing volumes in crypto trading.
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BLOCKCHAIN BOURSE? Malaysia’s stock exchange is eyeing a role for blockchain tech in securities borrowing and lending, according to The Edge Markets. For the effort, Bursa Malaysia is developing a proof-of-concept blockchain-based lending pool in collaboration with five financial institutions, including Citibank. “The project aims to ramp up efficiency, speed and capacity in securities lending supply and borrowing demand (the lending pool),” Bursa Malaysia said in a statement.
TECH FATIGUE: The supply chain industry is struggling to find use cases for blockchain tech, according to a Gartner report. As reported by Information Age, that could mean 90 percent of blockchain-based supply chain projects will suffer ‘blockchain fatigue .” The survey found that only 19 percent of businesses polled ranked blockchain as a very important technology, while only 9 percent have invested in blockchain. A Gartner analyst said that immaturity of the tech, a paucity of standards and misunderstanding of how blockchain could benefit the industry are keeping projects at the pilot stage.
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WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
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