Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Facebook's Calibra Facelift

Tencent eyes blockchain, Craig Wright is challenged and more
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May 26, 2020
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By Daniel Kuhn
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We're happy to be back after a recharging long weekend. India's central bank has clarified its crypto stance, Tencent is looking to invest in "emerging technologies" including blockchain and Facebook's digital wallet subsidiary announced a rebranding and new details. Here's the news:

Libra's New Face
A statement announcing the rebranding of Facebook subsidiary Calibra to Novi also reveals details of the anticipated wallet product.  The Novi wallet will operate as a standalone app, as well as provide interoperability with Facebook’s social messaging apps Messenger and WhatsApp, to make transactions as “easy as sending a message.” Novi customers will need to be verified using a government-issued ID. The wallet will initially be rolled out to a limited number of countries, though the release date still remains unclear.

'No Such Prohibitions'
India’s central bank has clarified the nation’s new crypto policy, months after the Indian Supreme Court lifted restrictions on banking crypto clients. Commercial banks can indeed provide banking services to traders and firms dealing in cryptocurrencies. “As on date, no such prohibition exists,” the Reserve Bank of India said on May 22. The statement came in response to a query filed by BV Harish, co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Unocoin.

Signed Transactions
More than 100 addresses Craig Wright – the self-proclaimed inventor of Bitcoin currently being sued for half of his supposed multi-billion dollar stash of the cryptocurrency – claimed were his were used to sign a message calling Wright a “fraud” and making it plain that he does not in fact own or control them. The Bitcoin addresses were inadvertently entered into the public record in the ongoing case against Wright. 

Challenging Amazon
In a bid to attract users beyond the cryptoverse, Halsey Minor’s VideoCoin platform will launch Wednesday with fiat payment options. VideoCoin decentralizes the hosting and streaming of video, paying out a native token to participants in the network. “A company like Fox is never going to go to an exchange and buy volatile tokens. You kind of have to be in the crypto world to use crypto projects – and we are trying to break that barrier down,” Minor said. 

Bitcoin 401(k)
Bitwage has unveiled a trial of a bitcoin 401(k) plan. The pension plan is supported by crypto exchange Gemini, the custodian service Kingdom Trust, as well as the established pension provider, Leading Retirement Solutions, who keep records for the 401(k) plan with the Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). 

Tencent's Investments
Tencent is investing 500 billion yuan ($70 billion) into “new infrastructure” based on emerging technologies including AI, cloud computing and blockchain over the next five years. The investments are aimed at recovering losses accrued during the coronavirus crisis and “further cement virus containment success,” Tencent’s senior executive vice president Dowson Tong told Guangming Daily.

Trading Currents
Thailand is teaming up with a blockchain firm Power Ledger to encourage peer-to-peer trading of renewable energy. “Blockchain-enabled transactive energy solutions including peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading, virtual power plants as well as renewable energy certificates and carbon credits trading will be the key to establishing economically viable renewable energy markets,” said the startup’s co-founder Jemma Green, and help the nation hit its 25% renewable energy target by 2037.

Strategic Investment
India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, CoinDCX, has secured a $2.5 million strategic investment led by Polychain Capital with support from Coinbase Ventures. The investment will reinforce the exchange’s efforts to drive cryptocurrency adoption in the country after a major legal victory in March.

Telegram Throws in the Towel
Telegram is no longer challenging the SEC's ban on its blockchain token project in the courtroom. On Friday, the company filed an agreement for dismissal without prejudice of a previous appeal challenging the SEC’s prohibition of distributing gram tokens to U.S. investors. 

Supporting Steem?
Binance is forced to “technically” support last week’s hard fork of the Steem blockchain, according to the crypto exchange’s CEO. In a statement on Binance’s official blog Sunday, CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said the exchange is “very much against zeroing other people’s assets on the blockchain,” but to not support it would mean that Binance users would not be able to withdraw their steem tokens.

Louisiana Licensing 
The Louisiana State Senate is about to consider a bill to regulate and license virtual currency businesses. If passed, the legislation would establish Louisiana’s first crypto licensing regime. Crypto businesses would have to apply with the state’s Office of Financial Institutions (OFI), fork over executives’ fingerprints, subject their “experience, character and general fitness” to investigation – and perhaps the business premises as well – and pay a nonrefundable registration fee, among other requirements.
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CRYPTO LONG & SHORT

VC Inflows
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) stirred up discussion last week by claiming the crypto economy is teetering on the edge of its next cycle of development, just days after it unveiled a second $515 million crypto-focused fund. CoinDesk’s Noelle Acheson a look at venture capital inflows into crypto and what a16z's plans means for the direction of this industry . “[V]enture funding implies building, steady progress, support for the never-ending search for product-market fit and a relatively attractive profile for institutions looking for return with reasonable risk,” she said. You can sign up for Crypto Long & Short here.

MARKETS INTEL

Digitization Boost
Messari analysts wrote a report arguing the “coming digitization of money,” including the launch of CBDCs, could provide a “secular tailwind” for bitcoin . The resilience of cryptocurrencies has catalyzed government investigation into CBDCs, which in turn expose the wider population to the mechanics of cryptocurrencies. CBDCs, “will increase people’s comfort with and understanding of cryptocurrencies, get more people creating and using cryptocurrency wallets, and provide on-ramps into decentralized cryptocurrencies like bitcoin,” the analysts said. This insight comes from First Mover. Get it in your inbox here. 

Inflation and Price
Rewards per block mined on the zcash blockchain – launched and supported by the Electric Coin Company – are scheduled to be cut by 50% sometime in November. The privacy-centered crypto is often criticized for its high levels of inflation, though some industry experts are saying its programmatic halving could solve this problem. This case study could reveal insight about the impact inflation has on a cryptocurrency’s price. 

Fees and Transactions
Bitcoin's average transaction fee has dropped 53% from $6.64 to $3.06 in the past five days, as the backlog of unconfirmed transactions sitting in the blockchain’s mempool has dropped 71% over the same time period. (Decrypt)

OPPOSITE EDITORIAL

Spiritual Reflections on the Bitcoin Halving
Allen Farrington, a freelance writer, reflects on Bitcoin's third programmatic halving and what the shared event means for the future of the network and the internet. "The Bitcoin halving happened at the same time for everybody because the Bitcoin protocol is the same thing for everybody. It knows no borders and no nationalities. It knows no time zones," he said. 

What I Learned the First Time I Lost a Million Dollars
Jeff Dorman retells the tale of his gains and losses on Wall Street and what this experience means for risk management in the age of digital assets. "The ability to stay disciplined with risk management changed my career. I always knew I had the tools required to be a successful investor, and I’ve always been convinced I can make smart investments, but it took years to realize the difference between good asset managers and bad ones comes down to more than just picking good investments," he writes. 

WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER

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Friday, May 22, 2020

Iran and Russia Revisit Their Crypto Regulations

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May 22, 2020
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By Daniel Kuhn
Holiday Notice: Blockchain Bites will publish next on Tuesday, May 26. Happy Memorial Day to our US readers, and happy Bitcoin Pizza Day to all. 

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Iranian Crypto Mining
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has ordered the the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), energy department and information and communication technology ministries to draft a renewed national strategy for the crypto mining industry. The news comes days after the Iranian parliament published a bill proposing to apply the country’s strict foreign exchange and currency smuggling regulation to cryptocurrencies. It’s unclear why the nation’s crypto policies are being revisited, though some speculate its to prevent value from escaping the nation’s borders.  

Tough Drafts
Harsh new rules making many uses of digital assets punishable with fines or prison might soon become law in Russia. Two draft bills setting out how Russia should regulate cryptocurrencies were sent to the country’s parliament, the State Duma, earlier this week . The first of which would prohibit the issuance and transaction of, digital currencies in the nation while the second would impose new sanctions for the illegal use of digital assets. The draft bills have not been finalized, according a high ranking official at the Duma.

Quarterly Loss
Canaan has reported a net loss of $5.6 million and shrinking cash reserves for the first quarter of 2020. Revenues are up 44% quarter over quarter after the firm slashed prices, but it also incurred $9.3 million and $5.9 million expenses in cost of goods sold and R&D, respectively. Canaan’s next generation miners will hit shelves next quarter, though the firm has not provided a business outlook citing the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-Bitcoin halving.

Libra-like Stablecoin
Top Chinese political advisers have proposed a regional digital currency to facilitate regional trade that would be backed by four major Asian currencies including the Japanese yen, Korean won, Hong Kong dollar and the yuan, with the People’s Bank of China leading the proposed effort. The basket of underlying collateral would be weighted based on its nation’s economy, resembling the original vision for Facebook’s libra.

Next of Kin
  • The kin cryptocurrency may leave its own fork of Stellar for the Solana blockchain. "The fork of Stellar enabled Kin to reach millions of consumers, but we knew it would not be a long-term solution," a draft Kin Improvement Proposal reads. "Stellar has five-second block times, so irrespective of network load, a consumer could be seeing five-second latency on their transactions – not what we would deem a great consumer experience." The draft proposal claims switching to Solana would lead to an 84% reduction in kin's latency.
  • The Kin Foundation published a transparency report Thursday, laying out its structure and operations, in a partnership with Messari and its disclosure database. Notably, 28 million users have acquired kin in the last three years across more than 50 different apps, and are spending 300 million kin per day, the report claims. The foundation’s tokens are vested at a rate of 20% per year.
Blockchain Bill of Rights
The World Economic Forum revealed a “blockchain bill of rights,” to protect a crypto user’s right to “manage consent of data stored in third-party systems, port data between interoperable systems” and “revoke consent for future data collection.” Called the Presidio Principles, the document includes signatories from the Government of Colombia, Deloitte, ConsenSys, Electric Coin Company, CoinShares and the United Nations’ World Food Program, just to name a few. 

Breadcrumbs...
Anchorage now has six executives in its C-suite, hiring a head of finance and head of sales with experience in both tech and Wall Street. With the new hires, this will be the first time the custodian has employees with “this deep of a bench” running the sales and finance sides of the business, President Diogo Mónica said. “It’s pretty obvious that Anchorage has larger ambitions than its current set of services,” he said. “I think you can start following the breadcrumbs.”

ADAM Hires Blockinger
ADAM, a 15-member crypto trade group, hired Jeffrey Blockinger, a former hedge fund legal chief, as its first chief executive. The agency write codes of conduct for the industry. "I look forward to expanding our leadership role in shaping the future of the digital assets markets by building consensus for the entire industry," Blockinger said in a statement. (The Block)

Hack Track
Whale Alert has tracked 28.3 bitcoin ($260,000) stolen in a Bitfinex hack four years ago moving to an unknown wallet. (Decrypt)

Crypto Travels
Travala, a crypto travel booking platform, has been merged with Binance’s TravelbyBit, which also provides travel services. The merged company aims to provide offerings for 2 million hotels and 600 airlines. (The Block)
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WEEKEND READS

Crypto ‘Gray’ Markets Could Be Unintended Consequence of FATF Travel Rule
The Financial Action Task Force's (FATF) “Travel Rule,” an attempt to extend prescriptive banking regulations to the crypto market, may lead to a bifurcation of the market. “We are going to see white crypto; we are going to see gray crypto. And those different forms of crypto will most likely trade at different prices,” said Bakkt President Adam White at Consensus: Distributed. Other commenters noted that the rule could lead to increased use of privacy coins and regulatory arbitrage between nations that choose to turn a blind eye on exchanges ignoring this global standard.

Finance and the Real Economy Can’t Stay Out of Sync Forever
Jill Carlson, co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, argues that the imbalance between stock prices, spurred by Federal stimuli, and record-levels of unemployment will rectify sooner than later.  “[W]hen I look at the impacts of COVID-19, I see as much slowing down or creaking to a halt as I see speeding up. Our way of life has slowed. Economic time has stopped. For now, financial time has carried on. But there is good reason to think that may slow soon, too, as we realize our spendthrift habits don’t always serve us well,” she said. 

THE BREAKDOWN

‘Dismantle the Euro to Save Europe’ Feat. Tuomas Malinen
Tuomas Malinen, CEO of GnS Economics, a macroeconomic advisory firm, joins NLW to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic is putting pressure on the legitimacy of the European Union and the euro. 

NEWS 'DIET'

Pizza Day
Laszlo Hanyecz has the honor of conducting the first commercial Bitcoin transaction: trading 10,000 bitcoin for about $30 worth of pizza. 

Ten years later, those bitcoin would be worth $91 million. He apparently has no regrets. “It was a really interesting system but nobody’s using it,” Hanyecz said. “If nobody’s using it, it doesn’t matter if I have it all.” 

This one transaction, conducted about a year after Bitcoin’s inception, was the proof-of-concept necessary for a whole emergent economy to blossom. Ten years – to the day – later Bitcoin is looked at as a legitimate hedge against the Fed, a means of payment and veritable worldview . 

While Hanyecz has said if it wasn’t him it would have been someone else, today we recognize his sacrifice and experiment. 

Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day!

WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER

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Thursday, May 21, 2020

Kin Foundation Transparency Report 2020

The Kin Foundation is teaming up with Messari Inc. to publish an annual Transparency Report. Read more inside...
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Coldplay bassist is backing fintech Zumo / Travala.com merges with Binance-backed TravelByBit / Crypto Masterclass

Inside Cryptocurrency .
                                                           
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