Market Watch | Bitcoin | $10,697 | 7 day: +4.3% | | Ethereum | $376 | 7 day: +7.2% | | All crypto | $348b | 7 day: +7.4% | | Bitcoin dominance | 56.6% | 7 day: -2.4% | Prices as of 3:30 p.m. EDT
| |
 T.I. SEC charges five high-profile individuals for participation in a fraudulent ICO. - On September 11, the SEC charged five Atlanta-based individuals, including film producer Ryan Felton and Rapper T.I (Clifford Harris Jr.), for promoting a scam Initial Coin Offering (ICO).
- SEC has also charged two companies controlled by Ryan Felton, FLiK and CoinSpark. Apart from Felton, others have agreed to settlements to resolve SEC's charges.
- FLiK changed its name to Skyblock in August. On August 28, someone purchased the domain for skyblockmediagroup.com
- Rapper T.I. used his twitter account to promote the FLiK ICO in 2017 and enlisted other celebrity contacts to participate. Celebrities repeatedly referred to FLiK as T.I.'s venture.
SEC 
| |
Binance announces a $100m support fund for projects built on Binance Chain. - CEO Changpeng Zhao's marketing of Binance's centralized finance (CeFi) offerings, a wordplay on the DeFi boom, is resonating within the industry.
- Binance Coin (BNB) has rallied 47% in the eight days since he announced his CeFi initiative.
- Binance has earmarked the $100m for DeFi and CeFi projects built on BNB.
- Recipients further receive an opportunity to be listed on Binance’s trading platform, among other resources.
- The announcement arrived on September 11 from the virtual stage of The World of DeFi Summit.
- DeFi projects which pass security audits and due diligence process will receive "liquidity support," a euphemism for Binance's dominant liquidity that claims to be 20X deeper than Coinbase.
Binance
| |
 A message from HOTJAR Go beyond traditional analytics: understand the real behavior of your website users. If you want your visitors to keep returning to your website, you need to understand how they interact with it, and learn what works—or what doesn’t—so you can give them a better user experience. Behavior analytics tools take you beyond what’s happening on your site and help you understand why it happens: -
Heatmaps highlight aggregate behavior so you can see which buttons, videos, or other elements users interact with, scroll past, or ignore -
Session recordings show you how visitors navigate between pages and highlight potential bugs, issues, or pain points -
On-site surveys help you collect in-the-moment responses about what users are looking for -
Feedback widgets bring you visual feedback about what visitors are loving or hating -
External surveys let you reach targeted customer segments to investigate their experience in detail Hotjar makes it easy to understand users and is easy to get approval for, sign up to, and install. Start collecting behavior insights today! Sign Up For Free
| |
Swiss lawmakers advance the Blockchain Act. - Swiss reporting outlet Swissinfo announced on September 10 that parliamentarians voted to pass new reforms called the "Blockchain Act." If the act is signed into law next year, it will amend the Swiss legal code in several advantageous ways for blockchain companies.
- The Blockchain Act will allow decentralized finance operations within Switzerland. It will also permit the creation of digital company shares and other tradable assets.
- The Act would also amend some bankruptcy laws.
- According to Heinz Tännler, President of the Swiss Blockchain Federation, the law could come into force early next year.
Swiss Info
| |
 U.S. Treasury Dept. Request for Proposal An IRS investigative division will track more privacy coin transactions. - On behalf of a cybersecurity unit of the IRS, the U.S. Dept. of Treasury published a request for information (RFI) regarding privacy-centric crypto assets from industry partners on June 30. The RFI is named Pilot IRS Cryptocurrency Tracing.
- Requested information includes systems that allow developers and testers to perform research on distributed ledger transactions related to privacy coins. The request includes names of privacy-focused cryptocurrencies such as Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), Dash (DASH), Grin (GRIN), Verge (XVG), Horizen (ZEN), and Komodo (KMD).
- Proposals are due by September 16.
- In July, the SEC awarded a contract to CipherTrace to investigate Binance Chain transactions.
U.S. General Services Administration
| |
Gemini lists Pax Gold (PAXG), Amp (AMP), and Compound (COMP). - In an unusually long listing announcement, cryptocurrency exchange Gemini has simultaneously listed three cryptocurrencies.
- Trading for the newly-listed tokens will begin on September 15.
- Including the three additions, Gemini now lists 12 cryptocurrencies for trading.
- Gemini was one of the first New York-regulated cryptocurrency exchanges and prided itself on its sparse and ostensibly non-security-like list of tradeable cryptocurrencies.
Gemini
| |
Aspire (ASP) announces a bounty program for creating digital assets. Aspire is a former Dan Larimer project that claims to be a proof-of-work digital asset creation platform. - Aspire announces a project and bounty program that allows participants to earn ASP and Aspire Gas (GASP) tokens by creating digital assets.
- According to a press release, Aspire technology released its mainnet on August 13. Led by Jim Blasko as CEO and Michael Terpin as co-founder. Dan Larimer promoted Aspire as his creation on stage at the 2018 North American Bitcoin Conference.
- Larimer's other cryptocurrencies include BitShares (BTS), Steemit (STEEM), and Eos (EOS).
- Larimer has distanced himself from Aspire with little explanation.
- Aspire uses embedded consensus techniques, and its Aspire Gas token is a proof-of-work blockchain.
- The ASP token is only available through an airdrop campaign, a common marketing technique to attract investor interest.
- Larimer is a co-defendant in several lawsuits related to his involvement in Eos' (EOS) $4b ICO. The lawsuits are Crypto Assets Opportunity Fund LLC et al. v. Block.One et al. and Williams et al. v. Block.One et al., case numbers 1:20-cv-03829 and 1:20-cv-02809, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Do you enjoy reading Inside Cryptocurrency? We work hard to get to the heart of the issue and make you smarter! Support us and start a free 14-day trial ($0!) for unlimited ad-free newsletters plus premium content. Aspire
| |
Quick Hits: - DeFi Lender bZx (BZRX) loses $8m in its third attack of the year. The project claims to have "restored" the tokens lost in the so-called iToken Duplication Incident.
- The Board of Directors of MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) adopted a new Treasury Reserve Policy that allows the public company to increase its purchases of bitcoin above its prior $250m balance.
- Software engineers at Prismatic Labs published a progress update regarding Ethereum 2.0. Ethereum 2.0 is in Medalla testnet. The engineers detailed a mainnet release checklist.
- On September 11, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a blog regarding coordination, collusion, decentralization, and forking. Buterin discusses possible risks related to coordination and shared personal views about forking as counter-coordination.
- Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shared his thoughts on Apple's App Store restrictions in a Twitter thread. Armstrong argues that Apple's position is that Coinbase cannot include functionalities that would enable earnings through crypto nor access to unregulated, decentralized finance.
- A poll regarding central bank digital currencies (CBDC) finds that 51% of the respondents from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) believe that a fully-functional CBDC could launch within the next two years.
- Anthony Pompliano, co-founder of Morgan Creek Digital, tweeted on September 10 that he convinced The Street founder and CNBC celebrity Jim Cramer to buy bitcoin. Pompliano said that he would publish his interview with Cramer on his personal YouTube channel.
- Square's (NYSE:SQ) payment platform introduced a new cryptocurrency open patent alliance (COPA) to address patent lock-up concerns. Functioning as a separate entity from Square, Inc., COPA will allow companies functioning in the crypto industry to utilize patents for only defensive purposes, while building a shared library of patents available for everyone to use freely.
- Slack is gathering industry leaders and product experts at Slack Frontiers, a free virtual conference dedicated to digital transformation.*
*This is a sponsored post. Inside is hiring! Check out our available positions:
| |
 |  | Written and curated 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 | 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. | |
| |
