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SOLD OUT: BitTorrent's namesake BitTorrent Tokens (BTT) sold out within minutes in a public sale through Binance's Launchpad platform Monday, despite technically issues preventing some users from buying.
Binance Launchpad began selling BTT in two separate sessions starting at 03:00 UTC, with one aimed at investors purchasing using the TRX token and the other meant for customers paying with Binance's BNB token.
According to Tron CEO and founder Justin Sun, both sales ended within 15 minutes, with a total of 59.4 billion tokens going to 962 participants overall. Full Story
DECENTRALIZED TRUST: Boston-based tech firm Arwen launched its namesake protocol on testnet Monday, looking to reduce the trust users place in centralized exchanges by allowing them to maintain control over their private keys and conducting transactions off-chain using atomic swaps.
Arwen CEO Sharon Goldberg explained that the system acts as “a layer-two protocol specifically for trading,” and was designed to increase security on the user’s side.
“Even if the exchange is hacked, even if the exchange is malicious the entire time and goes offline, we don’t care,” she said. “What would happen is Arwen would freeze those coins and give you a time window for when you’d recover the coins.”
Crypto exchange KuCoin is integrating Arwen over the next few months, and plans to launch support for the protocol at the start of Q2. The exchange’s president and founder, Eric Don, told CoinDesk that he does not anticipate immediate widespread adoption, but sees the move as important for the space in the long run. Full Story
STANDING GROUND: Canada-based messaging app company Kik is planning to fight an expected U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement action over its 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) in which it raised almost $100 million.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston said that the firm’s token, kin, works like a currency and is not “an unregistered security” as believed by the SEC.
Adding to the WSJ comments, Livingston said in a Medium post yesterday that there are “dozens of projects at a similar point” with the SEC, and adding: “We all believe that this industry needs regulation, but we also believe that this is not the way to get it.”
Making that case that kin "truly is a currency," he said the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 "explicitly states that the definition of a security 'shall not include currency.'" Livingston further said that kin does not satisfy the Howey Test, the U.S. standard for determining whether an asset is a security. Full Story
LOCALBITCOINS BREACH: Peer-to-peer bitcoin trading portal LocalBitcoins says it has suffered a hack that affected a small number of users.
The firm posted an update to Reddit on Saturday saying that it had detected the security breach at around 10:00 UTC, “which was related to a feature powered by a third party software.” As a result, the hacker was able to access some user accounts and make transactions.
So far six user accounts are known to have been compromised LocalBitcoins said, adding that it is further investigating the attack to determine the exact number of accounts affected.
A Twitter user posted that the LocalBitcoins forum site had apparently been replaced by a fake phishing site that stole users' two-factor authentication (2FA) details and used them to access their crypto wallets.
While this is not yet fully confirmed by LocalBitcoins, it said, “For security reasons, the forum feature has been disabled until further notice.” However, user accounts are “currently safe to log in and use,” it said. 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. Network interest is important in determining the activity occurring within a blockchain’s internal ecosystem. Today, January 28, we observed one metric within network interest: onchain transaction volume. This is the amount of total U.S. dollar volume of transactions within the blockchains of each crypto. The top five coins by onchain volume are: - BTC
- ETH
- BCH
- EOS
- XRP
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| BULL FAILURE: Bitcoin's price dropped to six-week lows near $3,350 this morning, confirming a range breakdown. As a result, a return to December lows near $3,100 could be on the cards, albeit after a minor bounce, as the short-duration RSI is reporting oversold conditions. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST CNBC: Investors are moving from bitcoin to gold in 2019, according to the CEO of VanEck Associates, the firm that recently pulled its proposal for a bitcoin ETF with the SEC. Jan Van Eck told CNBC that, while bitcoin did draw some of the demand away from the precious metal in the last two years, according to his firm’s new poll of 4,000 bitcoin investors, their number one investment choice for 2019 is gold. “So gold lost to bitcoin and now it's going the other way," he added. Going forward, the cryptocurrency may struggle to win back those investors, the piece continues. Tim Seymour, founder and CIO of Seymour Asset Management said, “"Not only have we lost all liquidity on the underlying [commodity] but ... it's been very difficult to argue store of value." There’s “no disputing" that gold is a store of value, he said. THE REST SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: Israel-based online investment platform eToro is planning to further expand into Asia, according the firm’s CEO, Yoni Assia. As reported in the South China Morning Post, Addia said the region's large numbers of young and crypto-savvy investors means the markets in Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand could bring in up to 30 percent of the firm's total revenue this year. EToro now offers crypto trading in Asia via spot trading and contracts for difference, but it plans to add to its offerings with a new crypto-assets exchange called eToro X later in 2019. Further, the firm is eyeing a move into Hong Kong, via the island’s regulatory sandbox for digital asset exchanges. BREAKER: An entrepreneur in Indonesia has set up a blockchain scheme to help small farmers tackle challenges they face with finance and gaining access to vital information. In the tropical Asian country, Breaker reports, a monsoon can wipe out farmers’ crops and they can struggle to gain the finance needed for seed and fertilizer in the aftermath. Getting a loan application seen by banks can take months and they may end up with nothing if their land titles are not correct. To address the issues, tech entrepreneur Regi Wahyu set up a blockchain information exchange called HARA, that links farmers to financial institutions and retailers. ID documents from the farmers are stored on HARA’s ethereum-based blockchain, along with details such as their land holdings and crops. A token is used to incentivize parties in the system to participate and build up a store of useful data as the basis for credit. |
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WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
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