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NEW PROPOSAL: Bitwise Asset Management is throwing its hat in the ring to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). The company announced Thursday that it had filed an initial registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to issue shares in the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF Trust.
NYSE Arca will list shares in the trust, should the ETF be approved. The stock exchange will file the needed rule change proposal outlining the ETF in the coming days.
Bitwise claims that its new proposal differs from previous (rejected) ETF proposals by pricing its fund through data collected from numerous major exchanges, to account for the majority of the verifiable bitcoin trading market.
John Hyland, global head of ETFs at Bitwise, said in a statement that he believes a bitcoin ETF will launch this year, though he acknowledged that Bitwise's may not be approved.
“We believe the crypto trading ecosystem has evolved in significant ways in the past year … Having a regulated bank or trust company hold physical assets of a fund has been the standard under U.S. fund regulation for the last 80 years, and we believe that is now possible with bitcoin,” he said. Full Story
MARKET FIRST: A regulated alternative trading system (ATS) and custodian has facilitated a secondary trade of security tokens on a blockchain in a milestone for the market.
SharesPost, a registered broker-dealer, ATS and registered investment advisor, said Wednesday it had executed its first secondary transaction with BCAP tokens issued by Blockchain Capital. The tokens, which run on top of the ethereum blockchain, represent shares in the Blockchain Capital III Digital Liquid Venture Fund.
SharesPost did not disclose the size of the trade for reasons of confidentiality, though SharesPost Digital Asset Group CEO John Wu told CoinDesk that it was essentially a proof-of-concept transaction. The Digital Asset Group is the division within the firm that oversaw the test.
"To our knowledge, this was the first trade of digital securities by an Alternative Trading System and broker dealer in which the ATS custodied the digital securities. This clears the path for companies to do compliant STO's in the U.S. and provide their investors with secondary liquidity," he explained. Full Story
MALWARE <3 MONERO: Monero (XMR) is by far the most popular cryptocurrency among criminals deploying mining malware, according to a new study.
Two researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and King’s College London published the report last week, saying that monero is the “most prevalent” crypto mined using malware. They also estimated that bad actors have mined at least 4.32 percent of the total monero in circulation using malware.
The paper says: “Overall, we estimate there are at least 2,218 active campaigns that have accumulated about 720K XMR (57M USD). Interestingly just a single campaign (C#623) has mined more than 163K XMR (18M USD), which accounts for about 23% of the total estimated. This campaign is still active at the time of writing.”
Of the malware-associated wallets identified by the team, monero was 56 percent more represented than bitcoin, while zcash came in third place.
Around 4.4 million malware samples were analyzed over a 12-year period from 2007 to 2018, and and 1 million malicious miners were identified, the paper says. Full Story
BEAM BUG: The team behind Beam, a newly released privacy-oriented cryptocurrency, announced Wednesday that a "critical vulnerability" has been discovered in its wallet software.
Taking to Twitter, Beam urged users to uninstall the Beam Wallet application immediately and redownload a patched version of the app from their website. The project’s GitHub page – which echoes the warning about the bug – states that “details for the vulnerability and the CVE will be published within a week to avoid exploits.”
The GitHub page further said that the vulnerability affects "all previously released Beam Wallets, including desktop and command-line interface and stressed that users should not delete the wallet database or other wallet data.
“The vulnerability does not affect wallet data, secret keys or passwords,” it said, adding in an update today that “So far, we are not aware of Beam’s users being affected by this vulnerability.”
CTO Alex Romanov said that “the issue was already fixed” and that miners and nodes are unaffected. 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. Social interest is valuable to understand community coordination dynamics. We observed the volume of new posts and comments on the subreddit for each cryptocurrency, on Thursday, Jan. 10. The top five coins based on Reddit posts and comments: - BTC
- BCH
- XRP
- ETH
- XMR
BTC takes the top spot as usual, with about double the volume of BCH at second place. They are followed by XRP, ETH and XMR. It’s important to note that subreddits are not the only outlet for communications. Other public platforms, like Twitter, and private ones, like Telegram, provide the social layer of coordination to synchronize decentralized communities. For more research insights, check out the CoinDesk Crypto-Economic Explorer here.
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 The Oxford Blockchain Strategy programme is developed for business leaders, innovators, and future thinkers with an interest in blockchain. This programme gives you a fundamental understanding of blockchain, and its implications and effects on your business strategy. Visit the programme page to learn more. |
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| MARKET MELTDOWN: Bitcoin's indecisive price action came to a bearish resolution today as its price fell more than 10 percent to reach a low of $3,570. Any further losses would invalidate the widely viewed bullish reversal pattern known as the "inverse head and shoulders" and set the scope for bitcoin's 2018 low of $3,200. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST FORBES: Did a new product just revealed at IBM sound the death knell for blockchain? That’s the question asked in a Forbes piece that looks at the possible knock-on effects of the first commercially viable quantum computer, hot from the labs at Big Blue. With blockchains protected by encryption and consensus agreed across networks, the tech is extremely tough to crack using traditional hacking methods. Quantum computers, though, have the ability to unwind much of the cryptography that underlies how data – including cryptocurrency private keys – passes through the internet. Thankfully, Forbes concludes that that isn't going to happen just yet. IBM's first-generation quantum product, IBM Q System One, may be a breakthrough but it's a huge beast rather like the mainframes of old. And it's still going to be some time before the technology scales down enough to be passed into the hands of the masses. THE REST THE VERGE: The ethereum classic deep reorg may have troubling implications for smaller cryptocurrencies, The Verge says. The ongoing bear market and a subsequent decline in overall hash power supporting the network indicate that these cryptocurrencies are becoming easier to attack. UC Berkeley professor and bitcoin skeptic Nicholas Weaver explained that the incident reflects how coins using the proof-of-work consensus model "cannot be both efficient and secure." “Any coin not burning $100,000 per hour should probably be considered insecure in the face of attackers, and should not be supported by any exchange ... That Coinbase supported a coin that has just $5,000 per hour of protection is negligence," he said. FORBES: The health of the cryptocurrency space should be measured more through development milestones than market movements, writes Forbes contributor Alison McCauley. While the ongoing crypto winter may be harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose treasuries are denoted in cryptocurrencies, the tamping down of the hype cycle is also allowing startups to quietly build upon their work. Even though "steady progress may feel almost boring," it still allows the space to grow, particularly with regard to practical use cases, rather than speculative projects. |
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