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BLOCKCHAIN SERVICES: Amazon Web Services believes that blockchain is a tool useful for only certain specific applications – but even so, it's still seeing plenty of interest from big enterprise names.
This is why Amazon is offering two distinct products: the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database, a centralized, yet immutable, ledger product, and Amazon Managed Blockchain, a decentralized trustless platform.
The offerings have already seen interest from firms including Verizon, Philips, DTCC, GE Aviation, Liberty Mutual, Guardian Life, Workday and Change Healthcare – all of which have signed up to use the AMB preview until the full product is released.
As Daniel Johnson, CTO at Guardian Life, explained, “We’d rather have a large provider and let them administer lower-level technical services. Amazon becomes a trusted third party instead of us going into a consortium where you have to worry about that person leaving or another person joining. We’d rather have a technology company that has financial stability and is really performing well, and rely on them.” Full Story
COINBASE CONVERT: Coinbase is adding a crypto-to-crypto trading option for its retail customers – a feature that has long been available to professional cryptocurrency trading services.
Users on Coinbase.com, as well as the Android and iOS apps, will be able to begin trading bitcoin pairs in the coming days through the new feature, called Coinbase Convert.
Product manager Anna Marie Clifton told CoinDesk that while trading pairs are “a pretty common paradigm in the crypto trading space,” they are not currently being served well to the broader retail audience.
Unlike professional trading services, which use such pairs to take advantage of price fluctuations, retail users are likely to use these pairs for more utilitarian purposes.
As one example, Clifton said, some customers have purchased bitcoin but now want to interact with decentralized applications (dapps), and therefore need to convert their holdings.
“I think one of the things that was most surprising was seeing a lot of customers frustrated because they wanted to use the product immediately [but] it required two trading fees,” she said. Full Story
TETHER HOLDINGS: Does Tether Ltd., the company behind the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT, have the cash reserves to back up its 1.8 billion tokens? That’s a question that has been asked many times over the last year, and, according to Bloomberg, the answer is: possibly.
Bloomberg News reported today that it has seen Tether bank statements indicating that, over four separate months at least, the company held sufficient dollars to back the tether (USDT) tokens on the market.
While the report does not provide the reassurance of a full audit by a specialist firm, it appear to provide evidence that Tether’s token – used by many crypto traders and exchanges to move value internationally – is backed by more than just claims from the firm, at least during certain windows of time.
Bloomberg said it has seen documents from September 2017 suggesting that Tether had $452.9 million in accounts at Noble Bank, Puerto Rico, and Bank of Montreal. At the end of that month, the firm had 435 million USDT in circulation. Bank statements for several other non-consecutive months also indicated its dollar reserves matched tokens on the market, says Bloomberg.
The firm has previously promised but failed to provide a full audit from a professional specialist firm – an issue that has prompted many to wonder if the firm is, as claimed, backing its token 1:1 with the U.S. dollar. Full Story
DATA BOOST: Crypto data research startup Nomics has secured $3 million in a Series A funding round, led by Arthur Ventures but with participation from Digital Currency Group and Coinbase Ventures, among others.
The company plans to use the funding to staff up its engineering team, as well as continue its mission to index 95 percent of all data surrounding the trading of crypto-assets.
CEO and co-founder Clay Collins told CoinDesk that the startup is looking to log raw trading data, all on-chain data and orderbook data and make it available to investors, including hedge funds, through the company's API, which already sees roughly 35 million calls each month for 3.5 billion data points.
There will be “millions of new pages” made available after this data is indexed, he said, adding that “it will look like more API endpoints, more data behind existing endpoints, lower latency, improved documentation, as well as more aggregate data/indicators.”
At present, the team is almost entirely engineers already, with every employee but Collins working on the product. Full Story |
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 Five years ago today a typo on a Bitcointalk forum led to one of the most powerful memes in the crypto world. To hodl is more than a meme though, it's also an investment strategy and one that introduces even more complexity into valuations of bitcoin. Lost bitcoins (there are potentially >1 million) inflate market cap numbers (spot market price * circulating supply). But because hodled coins (often practiced through deep cold storage) are difficult to distinguish from lost coins, they make excising lost coins from the value of bitcoin difficult. The folks at Coinmetrics have spent the past few months working on an alternative to market cap that aims to give a more accurate gauge of the value of bitcoin. The metric, realized cap, uses historically weighted UTXOs of bitcoin from the spot market price the last time individual coins moved. It’s a kind of hybrid of exchange activity and on-chain network activity that can capture a notional idea of hodled coins, lost coins and the coins that active traders sling every day. The graph here shows the difference between market cap and realized cap. Note that the current sell-off is less dramatic when measured by realized cap. Learn more about the crypto market across price, network, exchange, developer, and social fundamental metrics here. |
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| HOLIDAY RALLY? Bitcoin's 10 percent rise on the anniversary of its all-time price high yesterday validated recent extreme oversold conditions and established a bullish outside-reversal on the three-day chart. As a result, a stronger recovery rally above the key resistance of $3,633 could be in the offing. Full Story |
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BEST OF THE BEST WIRED: Fintech startups like Revolut, Monzo and BitPesa are finding ways to digitize existing payment systems and services, and actually draw new customers in the process, Wired reports. This overview of the space notes that in the past, “customers were more likely to get a divorce than change their bank.” Not any longer, the piece says. By providing services using opaque payment systems like bokeh in Nigeria and hawala in Malawi, and providing new services to customers, different companies are finding ways to attract retail customers from traditional financial services firms. Monzo and Revolut, for example, provide customers with immediate notifications whenever they spend any funds. Where traditional banks are reactive to the world around them, Revolut global head of communications Chad West says the newcomers are proactive in finding new ways to serve customers, such as enabling cryptocurrency purchases or storing data in a secure manner on a blockchain. THE REST
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: Cryptocurrencies may provide China with one option to move away from the U.S. dollar, according to the South China Morning Post. The piece provides a broad overview of of how the nation is looking to shift away from the dollar amid a trade war with the U.S. Fran Strajnar, CEO of crypto market research firm Brave New Coin, told the news organization that using a blockchain platform can help speed this shift up, due to the fact that they can be cheaper and more efficient than many current monetary systems. China has already indicated that it is open to the idea of issuing a central bank-backed digital currency, though details are scarce. The country has previously made efforts to ban crypto exchanges and token sales. FORTUNE: A piece in Fortune looks at what things might be like if consumer tech giant Apple launched a blockchain token. While it may be fantasy right now, it’s not so far-fetched, according to the author. The article posits that, in fact, for blockchain to truly scale for mass adoption, it’s actually going to take such a vast company to get behind it. Further, anyone using the token, from Apple, to customers to third parties, would stand to benefit from cutting out the fees charged by the payments middlemen, the card companies. Streamlined payments processes could also result from such a move. The article also argues that the media could also benefit from an Apple coin. While other firms like Civil have tried to bring publishing to the blockchain, it’s not yet taken off. Apple, though, could could “leverage its existing relationship with media outlets to install a blockchain system behind the scenes, and kick-start adoption by providing free tokens to its vast user base.” |
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WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
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