Market Watch | Bitcoin | $11,524 | 7 day: +7.5% | | Ethereum | $390 | 7 day: +10.6% | | All crypto | $366b | 7 day: +7.6% | | Bitcoin dominance | 58.3% | 7 day: unch | Prices as of 3:30 p.m. EDT
| |
100x Group, owner of troubled crypto-derivatives exchange BitMEX, hires Malcolm Wright as its new Chief Compliance Officer. - Wright's hiring is part of efforts by 100x Group to align BitMEX with regulatory guidelines. Malcolm is an associate fellow of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the U.K.'s Royal United Services Institute.
- Wright will monitor 100x Group's global compliance activities, and directly report to Vivien Khoo.
- Khoo became acting interim CEO and COO of BitMEX after removing previous co-founders Arthur Hayes, Samuel Reed, and Ben Delo who face charges by the U.S. Department of Justice, SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for offering derivatives illegally to U.S-based residents and violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
- It is unclear whether the company had a CCO before Wright.
Coindesk 
| |
 Rural Japan is vulnerable to bitcoin extortions Japanese prefectures reveal numerous extortion attempts demanding bitcoin over the last three months. Analogous to states, there are 47 prefectures in Japan. - Since July, at least 18 prefectures report an increased number of severe bitcoin extortion attempts, including bomb threats. Extortions follow a pattern, sending an email to either a city hall or a school, threatening to detonate a bomb unless paid a certain amount in bitcoin, according to local news reports.
- Ransom amounts vary but remain low, indicating that extortionists intend to follow a "ransom low, sell high" pattern. Most of the victims are rural prefectures such as Sanjo, Niigata, Minami, and Tokushima, to name a few.
- Most extortionists are located abroad.
Coindesk
| |
 A message from TEAMISTRY The stories of unsung teams who pioneered new ways of working to achieve the unexpected. Teamistry is the chemistry of unsung teams who achieve the impossible. In season two, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite looks beyond the heroics of a single team and focuses on the power of multiple teams working together. How groups of teams embrace uncertainty, innovate, and tackle massive challenges. Listen To Teamistry
| |
Matter Labs launches Zinc Alef, a zkSync smart contract testnet. - DeFi darling Curve Finance (CRV) will be its first decentralized application (dApp).
- Matter Labs, known for Zero-Knowledge ("zk") proofs that made Zcash (ZEC) famous, has launched zkSync L2 roll-up smart contracts on a testnet dubbed Zinc Alef as of Oct. 9.
- Ethereum's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, praised roll-ups on Oct. 5, saying that they are the "only" option for scaling Ethereum, because trusted sidechains are highly vulnerable.
- Matter Labs mentioned that the smart contracts for ZincVM only support their Zinc programming language for now, which is currently in closed beta.
- Matter Labs team says that the testnet is fully functional and allows writing smart contracts, deployment into the testnet, and local testing.
- Matter Labs is also helping Curve (CRV) to rewrite its existing Curve contracts into a Zinc-language version. The main challenge is to make Zinc Turing-complete.
Medium
| |
 Jack Dorsey More on Square's (NYSE:SQ) purchase of $50m worth of bitcoin. We first reported the initial headline on Oct. 8. - As early as August, ditching cash reserves for bitcoin had become a meme.
- Square's purchase amounted to merely 1% of its assets. However, the immediate share price boost from the headline and its associated marketing repaid Dorsey's purchase within one trading day.
Jack Dorsey marketing plan: - Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey's is also an executive at payment company Square.
- Dorsey personally designed the website for Square Crypto.
- Square's purchase amounted to $50m: 4,709 bitcoins at an average price of $10,600. As of the end of Q2, the investment equaled approximately 1% of the company's total assets.
- Square is following MicroStrategy's playbook (NASDAQ:MSTR), which masterfully parlayed its purchase of bitcoin from its otherwise moribund business into a marketing strategy that sent shares from $124 before the announcement, to $135 the day after, and to $166 today.
- Square has a notable history with cryptocurrencies; Cash App allowed users to buy bitcoin as early as 2018.
The Block Crypto
| |
Bloomberg highlights a report from Tom Lee's Fundstrat. Lee was J.P. Morgan's Chief Equity Strategist from 2007 to 2014. - Fundstrat praises recent crypto regulatory moves, calling them "good for crypto" in the long-term.
- Cryptocurrencies are likely to confront strict regulatory guidelines in the days to come, and it is probably a "good thing," according to Fundstrat Global Advisors LLC.
- In the previous week, the crypto industry received a slew of regulatory admonishments, from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) banning cryptocurrency derivatives outright, to new enforcements by the SEC and the U.S. Department of Justice.
- Fundstrat says that it is glad regulators "are cleaning up bad actors."
- Fundstrat suggests that bitcoin's bull market remains intact. Lee also highlights crypto areas that remain risky given regulatory uncertainty, such as decentralized finance (DeFi), which lacks AML/KYC protocols.
Bloomberg
| |
Quick Hits: - BitMAX lists DeFiner (FIN), a DeFi project that is less than two weeks old. BitMAX, whose name is just one character different than BitMEX, is a cryptocurrency exchange that claims to process $100m in daily transactions.
- A tweet raised suspicions of a bitcoin ATM installation within Tesla's Gigafactory in Nevada. LibertyX reportedly installed three bitcoin ATMs in August for Tesla employees. Elon Musk replied to the now-deleted tweet, doubting its accuracy.
- Bitcoin has been rallying amid rising probabilities of Congress passing more inflationary U.S stimulus.
- Revolut, a Europe-based, Venmo-like app with 13m users, will pay for Fireblocks' platform for securing digital assets.
- An R&D wing of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Science and Technology Directorate, awards $817,712 in funds to five blockchain startups: Mattr Limited, Mesur.IO, SecureKey Technologies, Mavennet Systems, and Spherity GmbH.
- Crypto-friendly travel booking platform Travala.com launches its token AVA on Binance's Smart Chain.
- Spanish blockchain-based educational platform, Tutellus, and the European Commission's Blockchain Observatory distributed cryptocurrency worth €1 to all lower house members in Spain's Congress to highlight the role of cryptocurrencies in the economy and society.
- Blockchain payment company RocketFuel filed a lawsuit in California's Central District Court against its co-founder and former treasurer Joseph Page. RocketFuel alleges Page transferred expired patents to the company and seeks over $5m in damages.
- Actor Kate Winslet will star in a movie based on the OneCoin scam. MGM acquired rights for the production for the film, titled "Fake!"
- As Apple device adoption grows in the enterprise, organizations are looking for ways to seamlessly manage and secure devices while extending the world-class Apple experience users expect.*
*This is a sponsored post.
| |
 |  | 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 | Edited by Eduardo Garcia in New York. Eduardo is writing an illustrated book about climate change that will be published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Scientific American, and others. In one of his previous lives, Eduardo worked as a Reuters correspondent in Latin America for nearly a decade. | |
Each episode of Teamistry tells a story with practical lessons for your team, and your business. | |
