Market Watch | Bitcoin | $11,524 | 7 day: -1.4% | | Ethereum | $394 | 7 day: -0.5% | | All crypto | $360b | 7 day: unch | | Bitcoin dominance | 59.0% | 7 day: -0.8% | Prices as of 5:20 p.m. ET
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 Forensic cryptocurrency security company Chainalysis details how Nicolas Maduro's regime has tried to use cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions. - The U.S. and most major countries prohibit business and investment with Venezuelan assets.
- The bolivar is undergoing hyperinflation.
- Maduro has led an initiative to open Venezuela to cryptocurrencies so that his ostensibly oil-backed PETRO cryptocurrency can circulate globally.
- Adoption has increased, but perhaps not in the way that Maduro had hoped. Chainalysis finds that cryptocurrency exchanges are mostly popular for peer-to-peer transactions and capital flight out of bolivar-denominated assets.
- Maduro has enlisted the help of Iran, China, Russia, and other countries to steadily liquidate Venezuela's dwindling gold and oil reserves.
- Maduro has approved only seven cryptocurrency exchanges to operate in Venezuela.
- LocalBitcoins reports $242m in bolivar-to-bitcoin trading over the last year. Criptolago reported $380,000. Paxful posted $311,000. Most bolivar-denominated transactions are opaque and poorly reported.
Chainalysis 
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South Africa's $1.4 trillion internet giant Naspers is backing an Australian launch for a small cryptocurrency exchange, Luno. Naspers is Africa's largest public company. - Luno's General Manager Marius Reitz told Bloomberg that Luno operates in the U.K., Singapore, Uganda, Zambia, South Africa, and Nigeria. Luno subsidiaries are also registered in Malaysia and Indonesia.
- Luno Money Limited is an Authorised Payment Institution according to the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, but it is not a Registered Cryptoasset Firm.
- Luno is a relatively old cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2015 with $3m in initial funding led by Naspers.
- Digital Currency Group also owns a small minority stake in Luno.
Bloomberg
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 Algorand Founder Silvio Micali Algorand (ALGO) to launch stablecoins on Archax. Earlier this month, the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority granted Archax its second cryptoasset firm license. - Last month, Coinbase listed ALGO which prompted a 30% rally in its token price.
- Archax CEO Graham Rodford was quick to align Algorand's brand with the current decentralized finance (DeFi) boom, saying, "The DeFi space is nascent and growing incredibly fast, but there are a number of areas that need to be solved to make it institutionally friendly."
- Rodford also claims that Archax will remain "a blockchain agnostic marketplace" notwithstanding the new partnership.
- Many cryptocurrency exchanges like Archax have partnerships with third-party cryptocurrencies, including Bitfinex's promotion of Tether (USDT), Coinbase's promotion of USD Coin (USDC) and Tezos (XTZ), and Binance's promotion of Tron (TRX).
CoinTelegraph
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 Screenshot of Gemini's Brave browser widget Gemini launches a trading widget within Brave's desktop web browser. - Brave is a popular ad-limiting web browser within the cryptocurrency community that rewards users with Basic Attention Token (BAT) for clicking on push notification ads.
- BAT has doubled in price this year and is now a $500m cryptocurrency.
Gemini
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Investors issue more stratospheric cryptocurrency price targets. - Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have increased their price target for bitcoin from their February 2018 bitcoin market capitalization forecast of $3 trillion. The twins now claim bitcoin's market capitalization will reach $10 trillion, or equal to all the world's mined gold. The twins double down on their call that asteroid mining is a legitimate threat to gold's supply, despite the prohibitive costs of space operations.
- Techemy Capital claims that the DeFi industry will grow 1,000x from today and reach $5 trillion, capturing half the value of all mined gold today.
- Galaxy Digital CEO Michael Novogratz says bitcoin will reach $20,000 this year.
- RT's Max Keiser says bitcoin will reach $100,000 this year.
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Quick Hits: - Bloomberg provides an overview of the DeFi boom, as does Coinbase. Bloomberg defines yield farming, as does Binance.
- Coindesk investigates the disappearance of Yaroslav Shtadchenko in Ukraine after the ex-employee accused Bitsonar of an exit scam.
- Bakkt bitcoin monthly futures contracts traded at an all-time high of $147m this week.
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 |  | Edited by wide-eyed bitcoin watcher since $1, Aaron Wise. Streaming headline junkie, Associated Press fanboy, eye-strained news terminal watcher, 2017 founder of Cryptocurrency Newsfeed. Temporarily based in Florida while awaiting the construction of cryptopia. |  | | Editor | Written and curated by Eduardo Garcia in New York. Eduardo is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School M.A. Science program and writes regularly for the New York Times Climate Fwd: newsletter. In one of his previous lives, Eduardo worked as a Reuters correspondent in Latin America for nearly a decade. | |
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