Latest real-time cryptocurrency news, ICOs, market capitalization and analysis

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A startup has shunned ICOs and launched a platform designed to make paying in crypto as easy as contactless cards without external funding.

The team behind a new cryptocurrency platform designed to transfer the way consumers and businesses are paid, says it is putting its money where its mouth is – and has managed to launch without the need for an initial coin offering (ICO).

BLOC argues that too many ICOs have been popping up in the crypto world – disappointing users by failing to offer real products at their conclusion. By contrast, the startup says its platform already boasts “an exclusive set of mining tools, world-first features, and an unrivaled ecosystem to connect buyers and sellers.” The upbeat company has a “strong belief” in its no funding strategy, saying: “If we make a cool product, the value will create itself.”

The buzzwords BLOC uses to describe itself are “fully decentralized, secure, private, fungible, fast, and egalitarian.” It wants to help the crypto world shake off its image of only being suitable for investment by enabling individuals to use coins, as they would any other type of cryptocurrency.

QR codes would be one of the driving factors in making this happen, enabling consumers to offer it for scanning whenever they want to pay a merchant. BLOC says that these transactions would be processed instantaneously – offering security, not dissimilar, from contactless payments.

BLOC says that its platform is going to be open to developers, enabling companies to build their own products and engage with clients in a tailor-made way. Ideas proposed in its white paper include loyalty programs and automated regular payments.

A busy time since launch

The company takes pride in the milestones it has achieved so far without the need of an ICO over a five-month period. As well as developing a BLOC crypto wallet for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it has created a bot and successfully translated its ecosystem into three languages: French, Russian, and Chinese. Mining pools are online in North America, Europe, and Asia, the platform for developers launched, and an “innovative dashboard” has been introduced. As of October, the crypto wallet has also been made available for iPhones through the App Store.

BLOC says it has made efforts to dismantle some of the barriers to entry for mining by ensuring that anyone – whether they have hi-tech hardware or a humble smartphone – can mine BLOC.money “with the same probability of coin reward, in what it describes as a “true egalitarian proof of work.”

Changing the way we are paid

One of the concepts BLOC has unveiled is PAYCHANGE, which aims to take advantage of the popularity of contactless payments by encouraging cryptocurrencies to be used instead of conventional credit and debit cards. It hopes to integrate into standard payment methods including Apple Pay – “creating bridges between the real world and cryptocurrencies.” In order to educate the public and fuel widespread adoption, PAYCHANGE plans to launch physical stores around the world for the “hassle free” purchase of cryptocurrencies – and provide visitors with the courses they need to understand more about how the technology works. From here, they would have the chance to purchase the accessories they need to make the most out of their crypto.

In a sign of how ambitious BLOC is, it has also created TRAAKX, which aims to “revolutionize the sport talent management system using advanced hardware to track and record the activity of an athlete.” This would enable members of the public to financially support their favorite athletes, and give up-and-coming stars the encouragement they need to thrive. Over time, the startup believes that tokenization of sports will help create a much-needed boost for the sector – enabling audiences to grow and new stars to be discovered.

Hong Kong’s securities and futures commission chairman announces crypto regulation prior to his retirement.

Hong Kong’s securities and futures commission (SFC) is planning to introduce crypto regulation to protect investors, the SFC chairman told Hong Kong English-language newspaper the South China Morning Post (SCMP) Monday, Oct. 15.

Chairman Carlson Tong Ka-shing — who will pass his position in the SFC to Tim Lui Tim-leung on Oct. 19 — said in an interview that the watchdog is not considering a ban on cryptocurrency platforms as the Chinese mainland has done, adding that they don’t think that a total ban is “necessarily the right approach”:

“It will not work in today’s internet world when trading can cross national boundaries. Even if we were to ban them, transactions can still be easily conducted via platforms in overseas markets.”

The official added that a legal framework to regulate crypto exchanges is absolutely necessary, noting that the SFC is going to consider the approach carefully as such platforms are “new technologies” and cannot treated as securities. Despite the fact they do not fall under the SFC’s current requirements, Tong proposes equating them to traders:

“We need to see if and how these platforms can be regulated to a standard that is comparable to that of a licensed trading venue, while at the same time ensuring investors interest are being protected.”

According to the SMCP, the exchanges that are working in Hong Kong’s market have welcomed the move. For instance, BitMEX chief operating officer Angelina Kwan told the newspaper that the regulatory authority can help to develop a new industry. And Circle’s CEO Jeremy Allaire said the company will proactively work with the government on those frameworks.

As Cointelegraph previously wrote in a review of Hong Kong’s policy on crypto, the SFC has warned the public about the potential issues of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) at least twice. Back in September, the country has issued a public warning on the dangers of crypto investments and stressed that ICOs might be considered as securities. In early 2018, a second warning was released, reminding the public about potential risks of ICOs and urging investors to do their due diligence.

This July, the SFC declared in its annual report that it is keeping “a close watch” on crypto and ICOs and will intervene when appropriate.

Payment giants MasterCard and VISA to group crypto and ICO brokers into a new “high risk” category, sources say.

Payment giants MasterCard and VISA will soon group cryptocurrency and Initial Coin Offering (ICO) jurisdictions in a new “high risk” category, financial trading news site Finance Magnates reported Friday, October 12.

According to the Broker Complaint Registry, some details of the shortly upcoming classification by MasterCard had already become public in May of this year. The registry notes that binary options, CFDs, forex, cryptocurrency options, and ICOs will fall under a new category of “High-Risk Securities Merchants” starting on Oct. 12, 2018, and will be subject to additional monitoring.

According to Finance Magnates, the grouping means that chargebacks could now be executed up to 540 days after the actual date of the transaction.

Anonymous sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Finance Magnates that the new classification by MasterCard will reportedly start on Monday, Oct. 15, while VISA is planning to implement a similar grouping in December of this year.

The grouping targets all companies that operate their businesses without licenses or do not require them, the sources report.

Some associated businesses have already reported to their customers that they will stop accepting credit cards, according to Finance Magnates, meaning that the clients of brokers that operate poorly regulated businesses will have to rely entirely on wire bank transfers or turn to alternative payment options.

MasterCard’s reported announcement goes in line with the general anti-crypto stance publicly expressed by the company. In July 2018, MasterCard CEO Ajaypal Banga argued that anonymous, not-state-issued cryptocurrencies are “junk,” due to their high volatility and inability to operate as a medium of exchange.

VISA had stopped supporting crypto debit cards via a partnership with debit card provider WaveCrest in January of this year, with affected cards including products from CryptoPay, Bitwala, TenX, Wirex, and others.

Earlier today, Cointelegraph published an interview with well-known American economist Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini, who had predicted the financial crisis of 2008. In the interview, Roubini again spoke negatively about cryptocurrencies, comparing them unfavorably to the traditional financial market, and claiming that major altcoin Ethereum (ETH) is a scam.

Recently tested Ethereum hard fork Constantinople has reportedly caused a “consensus issue” on a testnet, which will delay its launch.

An alleged “consensus issue” in the testing of a planned hard fork of Ethereum, called Constantinople, has caused a testnet to be “not usable,” according to a tweet from Ethereum blockchain infrastructure firm Infura October 13.

Infura’s tweet also advises developers to use other testing networks while the Ethereum developer community is “investigating” the issue.

As reported by multiple Ethereum developers the hard fork became active on the Ropsten testnet Oct. 13 at block 4,230,000.

However, the testing reportedly caused a “consensus issue on ropsten,” which led Ethereum developer Afri Schoedon to state in a thread of tweets following the test that there would be “no constantinople in 2018,” adding “we have to investigate.”

As a clarification following the strong statement, Schoedon noted Oct. 14 that at the most recent Ethereum core developers call, developers had agreed they would “not be able to activate Constantinople this year if there are any major issues on Ropsten.” He also added that the next scheduled call on the topic would be Friday, Oct. 19, telling the community to “stay tuned” until then.

The Constantinople hard fork is a system-wide Ethereum update designed to increase the network’s efficiency.

Earlier this year, Ethereum developer Piper Merriam opened an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) suggesting the idea of a possible Ethereum hard fork to invalidate ASIC miners, which are regarded as highly centralizing.

At press time, Ethereum is trading at $197, down about 1.5 percent over the past 24 hours.

An interview with Mr. Roubini about “buggy” smart contracts, Ethereum being a scam, why he might want to give the industry another try

The interview has been edited and condensed.

Nouriel Roubini is a New York-based economist that famously predicted the 2008 financial crisis when only a few considered there might be a threat to the existing course of events at the time.

A Harvard alumnus and now a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, Mr. Roubini has always been critical of the crypto and blockchain industry. Oct.11, 2018 he testified at the Congressional hearing on Capitol Hill, Washington D.C., warning U.S. senators about “the mother or father of all scams and bubbles," — crypto.

We met with Mr. Roubini during BlockShow Americas in Las Vegas and talked about why he doesn’t believe in smart contracts, thinks Ethereum is a scam, and the fact that he might want to give the industry another try.

On being “against” the crypto industry

“I'm not against [it], I'm open to any type of innovation, but I'm an expert on financial crises and asset bubbles. And I became famous [by] predicting the global financial crisis  — the burst of that bubble.

I can see a bubble when there is one — and to me, this entire space has been the mother and the father of all financial bubbles and now it’s [going to] burst

Last year, almost everybody I knew was asking me every other day, “Should I buy Bitcoin?”
And the price of Bitcoin doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and went to $20,000. And when that bubble burst, it collapsed — collapsed from $20,000 down to $6,000 today (at the time of the interview).

If you bought it at the peak, you lost 70 percent of your value. And it's typical of all these financial bubbles: They go up until they collapse. And Bitcoin is actually the best [example], because the average cryptocurrency has lost, in the last nine months, more than 90 percent of their value.

I spoke about the bubble existing and this bubble going bust. And guess what? In the last year, [it] has gone bust. So I think I've been vindicated and proven right.

Bitcoin could go to the moon or zero, I'm not going to make a penny either way because I'm neither short or long.

And I'm just an academic that speaks his mind. And I saw a big bubble, and I think that it's fair as an intellectual to discuss these things and then figure out what's going wrong.”

To watch the interview go here:

On future price movement and Ethereum being a “scam”

“An academic study suggests that 81 percent of all ICOs were a scam to begin with; 11 percent of them have failed or have died; and of the remaining eight percent that is traded on exchanges, the top 10 have lost on average, in the last year, 95 percent of their value — more than Bitcoin.

So, there was a bubble — and everybody was riding the bubble, everybody was issuing an ICO, raising money — but now it's gone bust.

I think that they've lost already 95 percent of their value and they could lose another 95 percent.

I would say 99 percent of cryptocurrencies are worth zero. Just because some people believe in something alternative to fiat currencies — alternative to gold — then, like collectibles, some people are going to hold some Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not going to disappear. But, you know, Ethereum is a bubble and it’s a bit of a scam — it's worth nothing — XRP, all the other ones, they’re all going bust.”

Catherine Ross: Why do you think Ethereum is a scam?

It’s a scam because the technology. They talk about smart contracts — there's nothing about them that is smart, they’re all buggy. They’re not real contracts because you have to enforce certain contracts, you cannot have just the code.

They've tried things that have failed: Their DAO was a failure.

You know, there's a lot of people [who] talk about their DApps or their distributed apps. 75 percent of those apps are what? CryptoKitties, Ponzi schemes and other pyramid schemes, and other casino games, like Las Vegas. So, after a decade, what does Ethereum have to show us? CryptoKitties and Ponzi schemes? And that's what they're doing? They're not doing anything that is of any use to anybody.

CR: But if a smart contract is a technology, — and you said “it's buggy” — technology can be buggy and it can be fixed. Don't you think we need more time to see the technology rise and smart contracts working better?

NR: I don't believe, first of all, in smart contracts. By definition, any contract has to be enforced by lawyers — [there is nothing that is enforced] by itself. So, the idea that you put everything in a code in a contract is silly to begin with. And, you know, a typical other program has less than one percent of bugs in its code, and a typical smart contract has 10 percent of its code  is buggy [sic].

I mean, this is the reality where we are in now.

And by the way, the broader question about cryptocurrency is that they are not scalable, and there's no system that makes them scalable; they're not decentralized because the entire system is [becoming] centralized; and they are not secure because there are so many ways to hack them.

So, it doesn't have any functions [it] should have: It's not scalable, it's not secure, it's not decentralized. So, what is it worth for? With Bitcoin, you can do five transactions per second; with Visa, you can do 25,000 transactions per second.

They've [the blockchain community] been saying for a decade, “We are going to resolve it with proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work.” It has not worked yet. And even if there was something scalable, it’s going to be centralized and therefore is not secure. So, there's a fundamental flaw in the technology.

At least financial systems that we know are centralized, yes, but they're secure and they're scalable.  

They've been talking about fixing it, but Vitalik Buterin, who is the creator of Ethereum, said you cannot have a blockchain system that has three characteristic of the same time: being scalable, decentralized, and secure.

On trusting financial system

CR: Even after the 2008 global financial crisis, you still believe in the traditional financial banking banking system?

Traditional financial systems are centralized —  and there's nothing wrong with institutional centralizing in my view. They [the blockchain community] criticize it, saying “We want it decentralized.”

But I prefer a centralized system with a trusted authority — but at least they're secure and scalable.

There's a lot of talk about decentralization: Miners are centralized as an oligopoly, coders are centralized, exchanges are centralized — as 99 percent of all transactions occur on a centralized exchange — and there's a massive concentration of wealth. This is worse than North Korea in terms of income and wealth inequality.

The reality is just the opposite: It's a totally centralized system.

[At the same time] there are many problems with the traditional financial systems. And I’ve been one of the biggest critics of the financial system. And I believe that there are ways to [democratize] finance and [to] make it more efficient, but this is not based on blockchain.

There is a revolution in financial services: It's called fintech and it has zero to do with cryptocurrency and  blockchain.

It’s based on AI, machine learning, Internet of Things and big data. It’s revolutionizing payment system, insurance, credit allocation, capital market functions, and asset management.

Take, for example, payment systems: There [are] already plenty of digital payment systems — that do billions of transactions a day, and are used by billions of people around the world — that are not based on blockchain. In China, you have AliPay and WeChat Pay; in India, you have all these UPI systems; in Africa, you have M-Pesa; in the United States, you have Venmo, PayPal, Square — and so on, and so on. These are useful transactions.

With these models, you can do millions of transactions — and there are billions of transactions done by billions of people today. They are digital payment systems based on [the] traditional financial institution and fintech. They have nothing to do with blockchain. We don’t need blockchain, we don't need crypto to [democratize] finance.

There is already a revolution: there’s going to be much more competition, there’ll be much more access. If you are a poor farmer in Kenya today, you are using M-Pesa. On your little smartphone, you can make transactions, you can borrow and lend, you can buy and sell your goods and services, you have a whole slew of financial services without the brick-and-mortar bank. And all these things are available to billions of poor people in Africa. What [do] they have to do with blockchain or crypto? Nothing, zero. So, there is a revolution and it has nothing to do with blockchain.

CR: The entire philosophy of the industry was to create a transparent system and create a new world from a financial system that you can trust, a financial system that thinks about a user, a client. So you think it failed to do what it was supposed to do?

NR: Of course, it completely failed: After 10 years, there is no killer app; the crypto assets are going bust; they’ve lost 99 percent of their value; all these experiments have led not a single corporation or single financial institution using this technology; and there is no reason why they want to use this technology. And why would you want [to]?

Why would I want to trust somebody in Russia or China to verify my transactions? It’s not safe. Why would I want to do it? There are central banks, there are corporations, there are institutions that have been existing forever that are based on trust — on the reputation. And I know what I’m dealing with.

I'd rather have those institutions verify my transaction rather than somebody in China who can manipulate everything I am doing. Why should I trust somebody while I don't even know what the name is, who they are, what they do.

CR: So, you would rather trust a bank? How can you be sure that your money is safe?

NR: We have security laws. If a bank manipulates, there’ve been hundreds of billions of dollars in fines on the banks and their misbehavior — people ended up in jail. There are lots of problems with the traditional financial system: Blockchain and cryptocurrency do not resolve this problem. Fintech resolves it, but fintech has nothing to do with blockchain or cryptocurrencies.

I'm the first one who criticized the financial system, I've been writing about financial crises, I've been criticizing [the] banking system. I don't believe that crypto or blockchain resolves any, any of the problems of our existing financial system, [and they] don't resolve anything.

It's just something for a bunch of self-serving people speaking about decentralization, speaking about freedom, speaking about [the] democratization of finance — and there is no democratization of finance, there is no more access to financial services through crypto or blockchain. There are other alternatives that exist out there, like M-Pesa, that are giving power and giving democratization of finance to billions of people in Africa. Those things have nothing to do with blockchain. I believe in those things.

I don't believe in blockchain.

CR: I see your point of view, but just to be clear, the banking system has been around for centuries, right? So, maybe you should give the crypto industry and blockchain industries a try?

NR: No. I'm not giving it a try. I'm gonna give a try to financial innovation that changes the financial system.

All those things [mentioned above] —  they are revolutionizing finance, they are leading to competition, they are forcing the banking system to innovate or not survive, and they are changing the world. But they have nothing to do with blockchain. Why should I give the benefit of the doubt to something that has not provided any application which is used by anybody. I don't believe in it and the proof is in the pudding.

CR: My last question is, have you ever tried trading cryptocurrency?

NR: I haven’t tried it. Some people say, “Oh, you are critical of crypto because you are shorting Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies.” I have zero position — I have no long position, no short position.

I may be right or may be wrong, but crypto could go to the moon to go to zero; I'm not going to make a penny out of it. I'm an intellectual. I'm an academic. I have no conflicts of interest.

My only thing is my own academic reputation. If I’m proven wrong, my reputation is going to be negatively affected. But I'm not going to make a penny. And therefore, I'm not going to take a position one way or another because if I take a position, I have a financial interest to talk down or up a particular cryptocurrency; and that's not my interest.

I'm an intellectual and I'm not going to make money —  one way or another — out of it.

Crypto markets hold steady after the recent sell-off, most of the top 20 coins by market cap see slight growth, Bitcoin trading above $6,300.

Sunday, October 14: crypto markets keep their balance after the recent sell-off this week, with most of the 20 top coins by market cap slightly in the green. Fluctuations on the markets in both directions have for the most part been no more than 1 percent, as data from Coin360 shows.

Market visualization from Coin360

Bitcoin (BTC) has seen slight growth over the past 24 hours, having strengthened to above the $6,300 threshold. At press time, the major cryptocurrency is trading at $6,331, slightly down from its intraday high around $6,360, while recovering from its intraday low around $6,277. On the week, Bitcoin is down almost 4 percent from around $6,580.

Bitcoin 7-day price chart. Source: Cointelegraph Bitcoin Price Index

Ethereum (ETH) has also seen a slight rebound, up around half a percent over the past 24 hours to press time. The second cryptocurrency by market cap has been hovering just above the $200 price point in the second half of the day, and is trading at $202 at press time. In terms of weekly dynamics, Ethereum is down about 11 percent to press time.

Ethereum 24-hour price chart. Source: Cointelegraph Ethereum Price Index

Total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies is hovering around the $200 billion threshold, appearing to stabilize after the crypto markets’ recent decline. At press time, total market cap amounts to $202.8 billion, slightly down from $204 billion earlier today.

Total market capitalization 24-hour chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Bitcoin dominance — or the percentage of the total crypto market cap that is Bitcoin’s — has been steadily near 54 percent today. At press time, Bitcoin dominance is at 54.1 percent.

Among the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap, TRON (TRX), the eleventh largest, has seen the most notable change over the past 24 hours to press time, up a solid 3.66 percent.

TRON continues to see gains today following a recent cryptic announcement from its CEO of a partnership with an unnamed “industry giant” that is valued at “tens of billions of dollars.” Following the tweet an unconfirmed report was released claiming that TRON has partnered with China’s Internet giant Baidu.

Crypto analyst Joseph Young commented on Twitter today expressing concern about Bitcoin’s trading volumes, claiming they are “approaching yearly low once again” and adding “Decent short-term recovery earlier today (October 14) but low volume is really concerning.”

Young has also participated in an ongoing Twitter battle recently between the crypto community and American economist Nouriel Roubini, who has been posting particularly audacious anti-crypto Tweets — most recently calling the whole idea of crypto “fascist at core.”

The crypto commentator today retorted a recent Tweet from Roubini about Bitcoin transaction fees that claimed “the cost per transaction of bitcoin is literally $60.” Young clarified for Roubini that “cost per transaction” is in fact different from “transaction fee.”

Roubini — a New York University professor also known as “Dr. Doom” for reportedly predicting the 2008 financial crisis — recently testified in a U.S. Senate hearing on cryptocurrency.

Roger Ver wants Bitcoin.com to have its own crypto exchange, while CNBC’s Ran Neuner thinks Bitcoin’s price could soon “explode.”

Coming every Sunday, the Hodler’s Digest will help you to track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions, and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

CNBC’s Ran Neuner Claims Bitcoin’s Price Is Set To “Explode”

Ran Neuner, crypto analyst and host of CNBC’s show Cryptotrader, said this week that the price of Bitcoin is “about to explode.” In a series of tweets, the trader predicted that a notable Bitcoin rally could be tied to the SEC’s upcoming decision on several BTC ETF applications. Neuner hypothesized that Bitcoin’s climb to $20,000 in December 2017 was “on the back of  the expectation and launch of a cash settlement BTC futures contract.”

Venezuelans Must Now Pay Passport Fees In Cryptocurrency

According to an announcement from Venezuela’s vice president, Venezuelans can only use the state-backed cryptocurrency, the Petro, to pay for passport fees starting Oct. 8. The newly raised passport fees will cost either 2 petros for a new passport or 1 petro for an extension. According to Bloomberg, the average monthly minimum wage in Venezuela is four times less than the cost of the new fee.

Roger Ver Plans To Open Crypto Exchange Through Bitcoin.com

Bitcoin.com, a Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash services firm with Roger Ver as CEO, is planning to either buy or set up its own cryptocurrency exchange. According to Ver, the crypto trading platform will be set up on the Bitcoin.com website, thus generating “thousands or tens of thousands of new users every single day.” Earlier this week, Ver underlined that digital currencies will lead the world to economic freedom, stating that he will “never give up” until cryptocurrencies accomplish this goal.

Study Shows Cryptocurrency Market Could “Implode” Soon

A recent study conducted by Juniper Research has found that the cryptocurrency market could soon “implode” and that transaction volumes are decreasing. In their report, Juniper looks at the technical, social, and regulatory concerns of digital currencies, also examining regulatory developments globally, exchange failures, hacks, and blockchain forking and how it all impacts crypto volatility. The report also found that daily BTC transactions have fallen from $3.7 billion to around $670 million from the end of 2017 to September 2018.

TRON CEO Hints At Partnership With “Industry Giant” Valued At “$10s Of Billions”

CEO of TRON Justin Sun posted a tweet Friday, Oct. 12, saying: “Finally, First time to partner with tens of billions USD valuation industry giant. Guess the name.” With Sun’s tweet revealing little information of the forthcoming partnership, Twitter followers have suggested a number of possible candidates, including Baidu, Clover, and even Disney. In a later tweet, real-time crypto market news service Coinness claimed that TRON’s new partner is indeed Baidu, citing former team members as its source.

Most Memorable Quotations

“TRON will be 200x faster vs. ETH, 100x cheaper vs. EOS. dApp developers & users, this one is for you!” — Justin Sun, CEO of Tron

“The inequality coefficient of BTC is worse than North Korea that has the worst inequality on earth. Crypto beats Kim Jong-un in regards to centralization and inequality," — Nouriel Roubini, New York University economics professor, known as "Dr. Doom" for predicting the 2008 financial crisis

Laws And Taxes

European Union Markets Watchdog To Examine ICOs, Considers Regulation

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) said this week that it will be looking into ICOs in order to determine how they should be regulated. The organization, established in 2011 with the aim of creating a common set of guidelines for E.U. financial markets and their supervision, plans to assess ICOs on a case-by-case basis to see how they comply with existing securities regulations.

Ukrainian Finance Ministry Creates Working Group For Crypto Taxation

Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance has announced the creation of a working group with the aim of discussing and developing a legal framework for cryptocurrency taxation. The group will begin work in mid-October, identifying crypto-related tax options within the current legal framework, and then presenting their findings by the end of 2018. Previously, a proposed bill for crypto taxation suggested a five percent tax for individuals and legal entities that possessed coins and tokens.

Legal Expert: Implementation Of Crypto Regulations In The U.K. Would Take About Two Years

Legal Director of a prominent U.K. law firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (RPC) Jeff Kaufmann has said that implementing cryptocurrency market regulations could take the country two years. According to Kaufmann, the new regulations would imply the involvement of the U.K.’s financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which in turn raises concerns about the agency’s readiness for its upcoming role as a cryptocurrency industry regulator.

Adoption

IBM Announces Launch Of Blockchain Food Tracking Network Food Trust

U.S. tech firm IBM has launched its blockchain-based food tracking network, Food Trust, along with major food retailer Carrefour. The France-based company, which operates more than 12,000 stores in 33 countries, will begin by testing blockchain in their own stores, with the goal of bringing the tech to all its brands by 2022. Food Trust, which was announced back in 2016, has been tested by IBM for 18 months.

Dubai’s State-Backed Digital Currency Gets Its Own Payment System

Dubai’s government-backed digital currency, emcash, will get its own payment system through a deal with blockchain payment provider Pundi X and its partner Ebooc Fintech & Loyalty Labs LLC. The subsidiary of the Dubai Department of Economic Development will work with the two firms to facilitate point of sale payments in emcredit’s emcash currency. The digital currency is pegged to the United Arab Emirates fiat currency, the dirham.

Mastercard Secures Patent For Partitioned, Multi-Currency Blockchain

Financial services heavyweight Mastercard has been awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a method to partition a blockchain. The proposed technology would allow a single distributed ledger to support multiple types and formats of transactions. In the patent, Mastercard noted that using multiple blockchains simultaneously leads to “significant” resource consumption – a problem their new solution is purported to solve.

Mergers, Acquisitions, And Partnerships

Oasis Labs Partners With Crypto Venture Capital Firms To Launch Blockchain Tech Hub

Blockchain cloud computing platform Oasis Labs announced a partnership this week with names including Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto venture fund a16zCrypto, Accel, Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital, who will assist developers in building “privacy-first” DApps in a new tech hub. The Oasis Startup Hub, which will focus on the creation of a space for collaboration between blockchain developers, investors, technologists, and industry key-players, will also get support from Oasis Labs engineers.

PwC To Bring Tech Expertise To Cred’s USD-Backed Stablecoin Launch

Auditing giant PwC has partnered with decentralized lending platform Cred to act as a tech advisor in the release of their USD-backed stablecoin. According to the press release, the partnership aims to bring more trust to investors, and solve the problems of transparency and “substantiation” that keep investors out of the crypto space. The firm also will give a perspective on enhancing standards in order to provide a “more transparent set of reserve functions.”

Forbes Partners With Civil To Publish Content On Blockchain

International business media outlet Forbes has partnered with blockchain-based journalism platform Civil to publish its content on a decentralized network. Initially, Forbes will only publish crypto-related news through Civil’s software — which will be integrated with Forbes’ own content management system (CMC) — but will move over more content if the testing is successful. Forbes will also use smart contracts to allow their contributors to upload articles to Forbes’ CMS and then share them on other platforms, such as LinkedIn and Medium.

Unconfirmed: IBM, Central Bank Of Azerbaijan Partner For Blockchain Implementation

IBM and the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA) will reportedly collaborate on implementing blockchain technology for a digital transformation of the country’s economy. According to a local Central Asian news outlet, the director of the Information Technology Department at the CBA  revealed news of the five-year digital economic program this week, noting that IBM will work with the bank on blockchain development. The director also noted that a digital identification system is in the works.

Korean Plastic Surgeon Buys $352 Million Stake In Crypto Exchange Bithumb

A group led by startup investor and one of South Korea’s most famous plastic surgeons Dr. Kim Byung Gun, has made a major investment in Bithumb’s holding company. According to Bloomberg, 50 percent plus one share has been purchased, making the surgeon’s BK Global Consortium the majority shareholder of the Korean exchange. As of press time, Bithumb is the largest crypto exchange in the world by reported daily trade volume, which amounts to almost $1.04 billion.

Funding Rounds

ETC Labs Announces A Startup Accelerator Pilot, Applicants Number Over 100

Ethereum Classic’s investment branch ETC Labs has announced the launch of its business incubator, slated for Q1 2019. In an interview accompanying the announcement, Elizabeth Kukko, the director of the program, has revealed that the incubator plans to work with as many as 24 startups each year. According to Kukko, ETC Labs has so far received 120 applications from various companies in the industry.

Winners And Losers

Crypto markets experienced a sharp drop Thursday, Oct. 11, bringing BTC down to trade at $6,305, ETH at $200. The total market cap is at $202.4 billion.

Top three altcoin gainers of the week are Blazercoin, MedicCoin, and Motocoin.

Top three altcoin losers of the week are EagleX, RabbitCoin, and Minex.

For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.

FUD Of The Week

“Dr. Doom” Nouriel Roubini “Debunks” Crypto Before U.S. Congress

American economist Nouriel Roubini has testified at a U.S. Congress hearing with a speech “debunking” cryptocurrencies and blockchain. In his scathing review, Roubini mentioned such factors as Bitcoin’s scalability problems, high energy consumption and low decentralization, among others. Roubini’s attack on the crypto space was not limited to the congressional hearing, as he made multiple anti-crypto tweets this week — after comparing crypto to North Korea he went as far as to claim that the idea of crypto is “fascist at core.”

Oldest British Crypto Exchange To Reportedly Lay Off Majority Of Employees

Coinfloor, the oldest British digital currency exchange, is laying off the majority of its employees, unnamed sources stated this week. The exchange, which was founded in 2013 and has traded $1 billion in Bitcoin over the past 12 months, is apparently going to let go most of its around 40 employees. When asked about the rumors, the exchange’s CEO Obi Nsowu said that they are “making some staff changes and redundancies” as part of a business restructure.

Report Shows Coinbase Hits One-Year Low For USD Volumes In Q3 2018

A Diar report this week showed that crypto exchange and wallet Coinbase has seen a 1-year low in U.S. dollar volumes in the the third quarter of 2018. According to the analysis, Coinbase’s USD volumes have dropped to the lowest level during the past year, although the trading volume of BTC is almost $1 billion higher than last year. Crypto exchange Bitstamp has seen a better performance in this regard, Diar notes, with the trading volume of BTC $0.2 billion less this year than last year.

China: Man Gets 3.5 Years Of Jail Time For Stealing Train Station Power To Mine BTC

A man in China has received three and a half years of jail time for stealing power from a train station to support his Bitcoin mining. According to court documents released this week, the individual was also fined around $14,500 for stealing electricity from a factory at the Kouquan Railway from November to December 2017 to power his 50 BTC miners and 3 electric fans.

SpankChain Suffers Smart Contract Breach Leading To $38,000 Loss

SpankChain, an Ethereum-based adult entertainment platform, lost around $38,000 when it suffered a smart contract breach this week. The anonymous hackers stoles around 165 ETH, as well as caused the immobilization of another $4,000 of SpankChain’s internal token, BOOTY. The platform has later said that it got in contact with the hacker and persuaded them to return the stolen assets for a “reward” of $5,000 in ETH.

Prediction Of The Week

Blythe Masters: “Tens If Not Hundreds” Of Blockchain Projects Coming To Commodities

Blythe Masters, a former JPMorgan executive who is now CEO of her own software digital firm Digital Asset Holdings, said this week that commodity supply chains would soon get an influx of “tens if not hundreds” of blockchain projects to improve efficiency. Speaking at the London Metal Exchange annual dinner, Masters noted the complexity of supply chains, adding that Digital Assets Holdings is designing software to aid the trading sector in blockchain implementation.

Best Features

Artist Puts A Giant, Inflatable Bitcoin Rat On Wall Street

A hedge fund manager-turned-artist Nelson Saiers has put up an inflatable white rat covered in crypto code on Wall Street, facing the Federal Reserve Bank. According to the artist, he was in part inspired by billionaire investor Warren Buffet’s comments about Bitcoin, who called it “rat poison squared.” “If the Fed’s a rat, then maybe rat poison is a good thing,” Saiers said.

According To Google, Bitcoin Has Several CEO Candidates Who All Hate Bitcoin

Several Reddit users have noticed that entering a search query “CEO of Bitcoin” or “Bitcoin CEO” in Google brings up an information carousel with several possible candidates, including the CEO of JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon, Bitcoin Cash proponent Roger Ver, and CEO of Mastercard Ajay Banga. Curiously, all three are known for their negative stance on Bitcoin, with Dimon calling it a “scam,” Banga saying that all non-government-backed cryptos are “junk,” and Ver being hit with allegations of using his platform to mislead people into buying Bitcoin Cash, instead of Bitcoin.

What is a ‘subnet’ and how the financial services giant is going to partition a blockchain.

On October 9, American financial services giant Mastercard was granted a patent for a method to partition a blockchain so that it can store multiple transaction types and formats. The filing published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reveals the details of the new system — not the first of the kind for Mastercard.

Why would you need to partition a blockchain?

Simply put, different blockchains store their transactions in different blocks — say, Bitcoin (BTC) uses one kind of system to record data on its blockchain, while Ethereum (ETH) opts for alternative metrics.

Now, imagine a company that wants to use blockchain technology to store different kinds of data or use multiple cryptocurrencies for their business. It will have to run multiple blockchains, because, as per the recent patent’s filing, the transaction records are “often required to be of the same format and include the same types, and sometimes even sizes, of data.” Consequently, this company will also have to be able to afford all the extra resources and computing power involved.

This problem might be caused by varying degrees of permissioned or open access of blockchains. On the one hand, there are non-permissioned blockchains that allow anyone to view record or be part of it — just like the aforementioned BTC and ETH with their public ledgers. On the other hand, they can also be permissioned — those require special permissions to read, access, and write information on them. They are more common among industry-level corporations, for whom security, identity and role definition are crucial.

Mastercard’s new patent claims the inflexibility of blockchains in terms of data formatting restricts the usage of permissions on permissioned blockchains:

“[...] an entity may want to operate a permissioned blockchain, where varying levels of permissions may be used for participation in the blockchain, such as by limiting the nodes that may add new blocks to the blockchain. However, because all transactions in a traditional blockchain are formatted similarly, the permissions may not be extended to access to the actual transactions in the blockchain … The patent authors say their partitioned blockchain could bypass such limitations and provide ‘enhanced usage of permissions’.

So how would that work?

Mastercard’s new system aims to expand blockchain’s utility by allowing blocks to receive data from “a plurality of subnets”.

“Subnets” are proposed partitions, which would be internally consistent but would interact in a wider, single system: “a subnet may have rules about data in a transaction record, the organization of the data, the size of each data value, and the hashing algorithms used in the formulation of the subnet’s merkle root.” Therefore, subnets would be able to receive information from different computing devices and allow to add data of any kind and size without following a standardized data format. However, the amount of subnets is limited, as the proposed system supports a maximum of three.

Not a first for Mastercard: ambitious plans for blockchain

Mastercard first applied for the above mentioned patent back in July 2016 — it is a time consuming process. The patent office publishes applications up to 18 months after they are filed, and it can take years to decide whether to grant patent protection.

However, the grant for a partitioned blockchain is just one of many for Mastercard. Its first blockchain-related patent was approved in November 2017 titled "method and system for instantaneous payment using recorded guarantees". Since then, the company has come a long way in terms of studying the technology: according to IRP Daily’s August report titled “2018 Top 100 Global Blockchain Patent Enterprise Ranking”, the American credit giant is the third largest with a hefty 80 patent filings, surpassed only by Alibaba and IBM, which makes it a key participant of the potentially forthcoming patent war in the field of blockchain.

Just last month, USPTO published Mastercard’s series of three similarly-written patent applications, where the company argued that the distributed ledger technology (DLT) could significantly simplify business-to-business (B2B) transactions, noting that “21st century B2B collaboration sits on an unwieldy, unconnected and largely unchanged mid-20th century B2B payments platform”. Blockchain, in turn, as the patent authors argued, would store data in a system that is easily accessible by involved firms and is highly-resistant to forging.

Previously in July 2018, Mastercard filed a patent for consumer protection and payment transactions based on DLT. In it, the company described the form of a public blockchain-based method for linking assets between blockchain and fiat currency accounts.

Securing blockchain-related patents does not necessarily mean that the company will go on to create those new systems — whilst blockchain remains a relatively new field, some players just want to stake their claim before taking action. For instance, Bank of America — another top patent applicant — so far have prioritized having a registered technology over actually using it.

In 2016, Catherine Bessant, chief operations and technology officer at Bank of America, told CNBC that having blockchain-related patents is “very important … to reserve our spot even before we know what the commercial application might be.” Notably, those endeavors didn’t prevent the company from calling Bitcoin ‘troubling’ and uplifting its decision to ban customers from purchasing crypto.

The notable activity of Mastercard towards blockchain is backed by the ambitious statements, highlighting the company’s fundamental interest to the technology. In September, Ken Moore, the executive vice president and head of Mastercard Labs, told The Irish Times — on of the biggest Irish daily newspapers —the company’s Dublin-based unit was going “beyond the hype that surrounds new technologies such as blockchain to develop real, grounded services and products” that would be introduced the wider group. “This is not exploratory work for us,” he added, following Mastercard’s announcement that it plans to create 175 new jobs in Dublin with “new roles including blockchain specialists, data scientists and cloud infrastructure specialists”.

Why the European Blockchain Partnership proves Europe is getting serious about distributed ledger technology.

On April 10, 2018, 21 EU member states and Norway signed up to create the European Blockchain Partnership. Including the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Ireland, they committed themselves to "cooperate in the establishment of a European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) that will support the delivery of cross-border digital public services, with the highest standards of security and privacy."

Since April, a further five nations have joined the Partnership, with Italy becoming the latest to do so after it signed the Partnership's Declaration in September. As a member, it has committed itself to helping to identify, by the end of 2018, "an initial set of cross-border digital public sector services that could be deployed through the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure."

By bringing distributed ledger technology (DLT) to European infrastructure, the Partnership hopes to make cross-border services – such as those related to logistics and regulatory reporting – safer and more efficient. However, progress towards this goal has so far been slow and piecemeal, with the Partnership's members having had only three meetings since April. Nonetheless, it retains ambitious aims, with the European Commission telling Cointelegraph that it wants the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) to become an international "gold standard" for large-scale DLTs.

Still deciding

So far, the Partnership's mission is vaguely defined. While there was already agreement in April that it would work towards developing cross-border, blockchain-based public services, there is still no actual agreement on what particular services to hone in on and develop. The European Commission's head of Digital Innovation and Blockchain, Pēteris Zilgalvis explains:

"The Partnership's mission is defined in the Joint Declaration and it is on that mandate that we have to deliver before the end of the year. In the Joint Declaration the signatories committed to working together and with the European Commission in order to develop an EBSI that can support the delivery of cross-border digital public services in Europe. So the description of what this services' infrastructure [EBSI] could look like is what we are currently working on."

In other words, the Partnership's membership is currently at the very early stage of negotiating just what kind of blockchain-based public services to develop. However, as Zilgalvis explained to Cointelegraph, it expects to have agreed on all the fundamental details by the end of the year, so that these can be used as the basis for actually building and rolling out distributed cross-border technologies.

"As stated in the Joint Declaration, by end of 2018 the Partnership must provide a set of use cases of cross-border digital public services that could be deployed through the EBSI, a set of functional and technical specifications for the EBSI and finally, a governance model describing how the EBSI will be managed."

A global reference for blockchain

The Partnership and its members will therefore be busy for the rest of 2018, although it has only three more meetings left to hammer out the all-important details, having already had three meetings so far. According to Finland's representative to the Partnership, Kimmo Mäkinen, a senior advisor at the Department of Public Sector Digitalization, the most recent meeting took place on September 17. "This was the third meeting," he tells Cointelegraph. "The main topic was to discuss about the most prominent cross-border blockchain use-cases that had been proposed by member states and by the commission."

As for whether the Partnership will successfully decide on all the necessary parameters before the start of 2019, Mäkinen doesn't offer confirmation. "We will have three monthly meetings by the end of this year during which we will have to agree not only on use-cases but also technical/functional requirements and governance model for European blockchain infrastructure," he says, his use of "not only" implying that the Partnership has a more-than sizeable workload to get through before Christmas.

Still, even though three meetings and no particular end-product hardly counts as an impressive achievement, these meetings were positive for the Partnership. More importantly, they've revealed a strong commitment among its members towards developing blockchain technologies, as explained by Pēteris Zilgalvis:

"At these meetings we found that the Partners were extremely supportive of collective efforts to establish strong EU leadership in distributed ledger technology, drawing on the Digital Single Market framework, and that EBSI could play a very important role in achieving this objective."

Indeed, it would appear that the European Blockchain Partnership is being used by the European Commission as a vehicle for the EU becoming a global leader on DLT.

"In the longer term, we would like EBSI to become a global reference when it comes to trusted blockchain infrastructures," admits Zilgalvis, "a 'gold standard' infrastructure that is governed through a transparent multi-stakeholder organisation, meets the most advanced cybersecurity and energy efficiency standards, is scalable to accommodate different use cases, is highly-performant in terms of speed and throughput, ensures the continuity of services on the long term, integrates eIDAS (electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services) and supports full compliance with the EU requirements on data protection (General Data Protection Regulation) and network information security."

So even if the Partnership hasn't really achieved anything concrete yet, its significance lies in the fact that it represents a massive vote of confidence in blockchain technology. By committing to it, and by aiming to build "highly-performant" blockchain tech, the Partnership's 27 member nations have effectively declared that they believe DLT is here to stay and that it has genuine applicability to a range of areas.

Separately, each member is for their own purposes interested in blockchain tech from a variety of different perspectives, further testifying to blockchain's growing status as a promising new solution to a range of problems. "Finland is interested and curious of new possibilities that are to be presented by blockchain technology," acknowledges Kimmo Mäkinen, "in order to boost cross-border services for example in matters related to document authenticity, data exchange and identity management."

Implementation mode in 2019?

Of course, while there's little doubt that the Partnership's signatories are completely serious about DLT, there still remains the unavoidable question of when, exactly, it will produce and begin introducing the platforms it was set up to build. Well, despite there not being anything absolutely definite on this front, Pēteris Zilgalvis states that we may begin seeing actual output as early as next year:

"These deliverables [functional and technical specifications, governance model] will be addressed to the political representatives who signed the Declaration, and if approved, the Partnership could move into implementation mode in 2019."

Once again, this time frame is ambitious. But even if certain differences of opinion may need to be ironed out between members before implementation can begin, the target of 2019 shows just how confident the European Commission is that the Partnership's member states are on the same page with regards to blockchain, which is further indicated by them signing its Declaration in the first place. If the Partnership does indeed follow through with its plans and implements blockchain-based cross-border infrastructure, this will only have positive ramifications and knock-on effects for wider blockchain adoption elsewhere. All of which means that the future of blockchain adoption in Europe looks increasingly bright.

Weekly price review of the best performing cryptocurrencies

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

The market data is provided by the HitBTC exchange.

On October 11, the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrencies plunged below $200 billion for the first time since September 20, as a global risk-off trade led investors to dump their holdings. However, the encouraging sign is that the sell-off was short-lived and most currencies are trying to claw back.

The next week is critical because it will provide insight on whether the currencies will break down of their key supports or rise above their overhead resistances. A breakdown to new lows will be negative and might signal the extension of the ongoing bear market. On the other hand, if the bulls succeed in scaling the key levels, it will signal a likely bottom and might attract buying.

Let’s take a look at the top 5 performers of the week and their medium-term outlook.

TRX/USD

Among the digital currencies that have a market capitalization of more than $1 billion, TRON is the only one that has managed to stay in the green in the past seven days. Two news stories attracted buyers in a range bound/falling market.

The first news that pushed prices higher was the tweet from Justin Sun, CEO of TRON on October 08. He said that the latest upgrade would make the digital currency “200x faster than Ethereum and cost 100x cheaper than EOS.”

The second news that led to higher prices was the tweet on October 12 that hinted at a partnership with an industry giant.

So, can this fundamental news propel prices higher and should the investors buy now? Let’s study the charts and find out.

The TRX/USD pair topped out at $0.35013935 on January 05. At the current levels, the price is down about 93 percent from the highs. Since August 14, it has stopped falling and is trying to form a range. Such a consolidation shows that the owners of the digital currency are in no hurry to sell their holdings. Additionally, the investors are buying on dips, close to $0.0183.

The range has seen two touches at the top and two at the bottom. If the bulls break out and sustain above the range, it will indicate the probable start of a new uptrend. The first pattern target is $0.03801042. However, when the breakout happens after a large consolidation, it easily overshoots the minimum pattern target. Therefore, in the medium-term, investors can expect a move to $0.0415 followed by a rally to $0.052.

If the bears sink prices below $0.01587681, the downtrend will resume. Therefore, we suggest traders wait for a confirmed breakout and only then initiate a long position.

BTC/USD

The sell-off in the global stock markets caught up with Bitcoin. The warning by International Monetary Fund (IMF) that the “rapid growth” of the new asset class could create “new vulnerabilities in the international financial system," did not help matters either.

Global economist Nouriel Roubini continued his anti-crypto rhetoric. He called cryptocurrencies “the mother or father of all scams and bubbles,” and the blockchain technology as “nothing better than a glorified spreadsheet or database.”

Another study from Juniper Research warned of an implosion in the crypto markets. Still, the BTC/USD pair ended as the second-best performer among the mega cap digital currencies. So, does this signal buying at the lows?

On a medium-term timeframe, Bitcoin has formed a large descending triangle pattern. It has formed successive lower highs but has largely held the $6,000 levels in 2018. Each lower high shows that the sellers are in a hurry to short or liquidate their positions and are not waiting for higher levels. The bulls have been buying only on dips close to $6,000, which has resulted in the support being held.

If the bears break the $5,900 levels, it is likely to attract further short selling and long liquidation, pushing prices to $5,450 and $5,000 levels. The first sign of a change in trend will be a close above the downtrend line of the triangle.

Investors should wait for a breakout above the most recent low of $6,831.99 to sustain for about three days before turning bullish.

LTC/USD

Winklevoss twins led cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, has received the required regulatory approval to add Litecoin trading and custody since October 12.

The LTC/USD pair has been in a steady downtrend. Previous attempts to stabilize and start a new uptrend have failed at higher levels. For the past two months, the digital currency has been consolidating in a tight range near the lows. A breakdown of the range will resume the downtrend.

If the bulls succeed in breaking out of the range, a rally to $94 levels is possible. A new uptrend will be confirmed only after the virtual currency successfully defends the breakout of the range and makes a series of higher highs and higher lows. Until then, it is best to remain on the sidelines.

EOS/USD

The EOS community is trying to bridge the gap between the West and the East. Language barriers, cultural differences and use of different platforms for conversing with each other were causing issues to the Chinese users. The EOS Mandarin Arbitration Community (EMAC), created to help the Mandarin-speaking users, is believed to be able to bring the two continents together.

In the medium-term time frame, the EOS/USD pair has largely been range bound between $18.67-$3.8723. Both the top and the bottom of the range have been tested twice. Though the bulls broke out of the range in end-April, they could not sustain the highs and prices crashed back into the range.

On the downside, the bulls have been defending the bottom of the range but have failed to rally higher. The digital currency has been trading close to the bottom of the range for the past two months. A breakdown can start a new downtrend that can result in a sharp fall.

On the upside, a breakout of $6.8299 will signal the start of a new upswing. The first target is $9.1668. If the bulls scale $10 levels, a rally to $15 is possible.

ADA/USD

Charles Hoskinson, founder of Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), and Ken Kodama, CEO of Emurgo have demanded the resignation of Michael Parsons, chairman of the Cardano Foundation. They have cited lack of performance and the non-responsive attitude of the council and the chairman as a “great frustration.” The Foundation is yet to respond.

The possibility of Coinbase listing the coin is doing the rounds. If successful, it might give a boost to Cardano’s price. So, is it worth buying? Let’s find out.

The ADA/USD pair has been in a long-term downtrend. It has fallen about 94 percent from the highs of $1.396281, reached on January 05. Various attempts to start a new uptrend have failed as higher levels attract selling.

For the past one month, the digital currency is trying to form a range close to the bottom. If the bears break down of $0.060105, it will resume its downtrend.

On the upside, the bulls will have to scale $0.094256 and $0.111843 to signal strength. A sequence of higher highs and higher lows will herald the start of a new uptrend. If the bulls breakout and close (UTC time frame) above $0.111843 for three days in a row, a move to $0.2-$0.23 is probable. Medium-term traders should wait for a new uptrend to start before initiating any long positions.

The market data is provided by the HitBTC exchange. The charts for the analysis are provided by TradingView.

The famous crypto-hater testified to the US Senate committee alongside the blockchain advocate Peter Van Valkenburgh.

Normally, there is very limited room for drawing legitimate comparisons between a Senate hearing and an Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fight. Yet the hearing entitled “Exploring the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Ecosystem,” which took place on October 11, 2018 on the US Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs’ floor, definitely bore quite a few similarities to a hyped sporting event that had made big waves just a few days ago. Two witnesses who were brought to testify on issues and promises of crypto stood by polarising views on the subject matter, albeit they expressed these views with varying intensity.

On the pro-crypto side, there was Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research at Coin Center, a reserved yet very articulate speaker. In the opposite corner, there was Nouriel Roubini. Roubini or “Dr. Doom”, whose reputation is mainly founded on the prediction of the 2008 housing bubble crash, would be the fighter who does trash talking. In the buildup to the hearing, he fired a long series of vehement tweets, bashing blockchain and its supporters, picking local fights and bragging about having debated best crypto gurus and “beating them by a wide margin”.

Into the hearing

Chairman Mike Crapo, a Republican Senator from Idaho, opened the proceedings with a statement that gave a nod to Bitcoin’s unique status as the first ever digital asset, and highlighted how the bulk of the latest news on crypto has been negative, including falling prices and regulatory woes. Ranking member Sherrod Brown of Ohio weighed in to point out that it was almost Bitcoin’s tenth anniversary, yet the space is still rife with fraud and misconduct, while tangible applications are scarce. He mentioned regulatory issues and referenced the famous statement by Jay Clayton, the chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the recent report by the Attorney General of New York that was anything but complementary to biggest crypto exchanges. Brown implied, however, that blockchain could be potentially useful for improving the lives of the unbanked and underserved.

Roubini’s testimony

In his speech, the New York University professor followed rather closely the rambling argument presented in his 30-page written statement. In addition to a constellation of derogatory terms – it is quite likely that for many senators this became the first encounter with terms like ‘shitcoin’ – Roubini developed several central talking points that he would reiterate dogmatically throughout his testimony and on to the Q&A session. He argued that the whole crypto ‘asset class is imploding’ now, following the steep decline of prices compared to late 2017, and educated senators on the study that identified 80 percent of initial coin offerings (ICOs) in the same year as scams. He added that digital assets are useless as currency, since they are unable to serve as unit of account, means of payment, or store value.

A recurrent theme in Roubini’s account was superiority of centralized payment systems to blockchain-based ones. Several times he brought up the claim that the Bitcoin network’s throughput is only five transactions per second, while Visa can process up to twenty-five thousand transactions per second. Other attacks included assertions that ‘nobody uses it for transactions,’ except for criminals and terrorists, while mining is an ‘environmental disaster.’

Roubini also offered a rather unconventional view of what constitutes the realm of fintech. He claimed that, indeed, there is a revolution in the financial services industry currently going on, yet it has nothing to do with blockchain. Instead, it is allegedly powered by artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT), and displays in proliferation of centralized digital payment systems.

Meanwhile, the crypto libertarian dream of total decentralization is ‘utter nonsense.’ In fact, Roubini claims, ‘crypto land’ is subject to the opposite trend: heavy centralization of mining - which is apparently controlled mainly by Chinese and Russian oligopolies, trading at the hands of centralized exchanges that are ‘hacked daily’, and development reserved for a narrow tech elite that arbitrarily changes code and forks coins whenever things go wrong.

Against this background, massive manipulation permeates the ‘crypto land,’ where pump & dump schemes, spoofing, and insider trading call the shots. In Roubini’s view, stable coins exist for the sole reason of manipulation; security tokens break all security laws, and utility tokens pave the way back to the Stone Age, where barter was prevalent. According to Roubini, even the “Flintstones knew better,” as they used clams as a universal currency.

Finally, corporate permissioned ledgers received their fair share of beating: according to Roubini, they are no more than ‘glorified databases,’ and they have no relation to the concept of blockchain.

Van Valkenburgh’s testimony

Right after Roubini’s furious charge, a composed account that Coin Center’s Van Valkenburgh delivered sounded almost soothing. The crypto advocate decided not to overcomplicate things, and dedicated a huge share of his time to explaining what Bitcoin is, what it does, and why is it revolutionary. Unlike cash, which only works face-to-face, Bitcoin is the world’s ‘first globally accessible public money.’ It is not yet ‘perfect or stable,’ yet it is working. Similar to the early years of the internet, the technology is full of loopholes and inefficiencies, but this is by no means a reason to abandon it.

Various kinds of human interactions, Van Valkenburgh maintained, are riddled with state or corporate chokepoints. Like the internet had removed such chokepoints from the realm of communication, blockchain’s promise is to do away with single points of failure that are inherent to other interaction systems’ designs – such as that of monetary transaction systems. Giant private corporations are increasingly prone to security failures, such as electronic bank robberies and massive personal data leaks. The rise of IoT makes such concerns even more grave, as even cars and pacers can now be targeted. According to Van Valkenburgh, no critical infrastructure has to have a single point of failure, and to achieve that, we need a ‘light-touch, pro-innovation’ policy in place.

Questions

Chairman Crapo opened up the floor for questions on where the crypto markets are headed next year, and what conditions need to converge in order for them to stabilize. Van Valkenburgh responded that volatility is raging due to the markets having a hard time with finding a level, a fair price for something very new and disruptive. However, institutional money have already brought some sense of stability: it’s been beneficial to have  Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulated crypto derivatives enter the market, but it would be even better if the SEC allows the trading of crypto-based exchange-traded funds. Having a nationally chartered bank for crypto custody would bring even more rationality to the market.

Criticisms thrice told

Roubini responded to this point with the argument that cryptocurrencies are not scalable, not decentralized, and not secure, seasoning his response with the same points about five transactions per second, widespread oligopolies, and no authority to go to in case if one’s funds get stolen. Crapo pressed on, asking what hinders faster development of decentralized computing technologies’ real-world applications. Van Valkenburgh deflected this with a reference to email, which first appeared in 1972 and took a couple of decades before going mainstream, while Roubini said that no government or corporation will use permissionless decentralized systems. The idea of decentralization, he maintained, “won’t fly, because it’s nonsense”.

Ranking member Brown inquired whether there are blockchain-based applications ‘on a broader scale,’ which Roubini took as a chance to dismiss permissionless blockchains again, grudgingly admitting that there is some useful innovation in the sphere of private distributed ledgers. Again, he lauded payment systems like Paypal, China’s WeChat Pay, and African M-Pesa as the ‘real revolution,’ dismissing decentralized crypto systems as being losing users and transactions. While the internet had a billion users after a decade in existence, he added, cryptocurrencies command the following of just 22 million.

As Senator Brown asked to describe a typical crypto investor, Van Valkenburgh painted a portrait of a young, tech-savvy person, and quickly moved to a more policy-relevant conversation. After praising the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s (FinCEN) trailblazing efforts in laying the groundwork for crypto investors’ protection, he criticized the current state-by-state approach to money transmission licenses’ issuance to crypto enterprises, and called for federal licensing system.

Bridging gender gaps & standing up to totalitarians

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana demanded how the world got better since cryptocurrencies came into existence. Van Valkenburgh offered a story of an Afghani female entrepreneur who used crypto to pay her mostly female employees’ wages, which was the only way to do it in a society where women are especially underserved by banks, while few accounts that exist are often controlled by male relatives. Roubini, once again, brought up superiority of centralized payment systems and Bitcoin’s meager five transactions per second. He then went on to complain about concentration of miners in places like China, Russia, and – for some reason – Belarus and Georgia, claiming that these nations will use their alleged oligopolistic dominance to manipulate the US.

Van Valkenburgh retorted that with payment infrastructures like the Chinese WeChat Pay, users’ transaction records and personal details reside without encryption in centralized repositories, ready to be hacked or surveilled by the government, if needed. Such systems, he argued, are ‘tools for totalitarians.’

A word on security

Doug Jones of Alabama was concerned with the extent to which ‘bad guys’ and rogue nations can exploit the decentralized design of public blockchains. Van Valkenburgh noted that every worthy technology, especially at the early stages of development, gets exploited by shady characters – if it does not, it is probably not very useful. At the same time, he contended, US law enforcement is already quite comfortable for tracking illicit transactions on open ledgers. Roubini took to bemoaning the dangers of blockchains’ anonymity.

Potential for scaling

Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey jumped in, showing off his intimacy with blockchain fundamentals and jargon. He said that while crypto assets are riddled with flaws, central banks do not have a flawless record of frictionless operations either. He suggested that an asset being a currency or not is just an issue of scale, and asked whether cryptocurrencies are fundamentally not scalable. Toomey was also interested whether the oligopolistic tendencies in mining really mattered for cryptocurrencies’ capacity to operate securely.

Van Valkenburgh delved into an overview of various scaling solutions, particularly highlighting the potential of batch settlement. He added that with oligopoly, you cannot really do much more to the network than denial-of-service attacks. Roubini’s response was anything but surprising:  five transactions per second, centralized mining, not secure. He explained that 51 percent attacks are a reality – they happen ‘every day’ with minor coins. Transactions costs “have gone through the roof,” while massive economies of scale implicit to mining operations incentivize cartelization.

ICO woes

Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was wondering how the theft of an aggregate $1.1 billion in the first half of 2018 was possible, as well as what could be done with the 80 percent rate of scam ICOs.  Van Valkenburgh explained that most of the funds stolen were in obscure alternative coins from overseas exchanges that failed to scale up their security systems to match the value they came to store. He also said he was on the same page with those who identify ICOs as securities, but added that it is entirely possible to have an ICO and comply with all the relevant securities regulations.

Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen appeared to be marginally interested in crypto affairs specifically. He lamented how the Fed was sluggish in moving towards a real-time payment system, blockchain-based or not, and moved on to solicit Roubini’s advice on the overall state and near perspectives of the US economy. The famed economist did not sound optimistic, suggesting that it’s possible that growth would stall by 2020.

Global KYC standards

Catherine Cortez Masto from Nevada was the last to pose questions. She asked if there are any provisions in the bitcoin protocol that enable detection of payments that go to human trafficking, drug trafficking, or money laundering. Van Valkenburgh responded that policing such activities is incumbent upon the businesses that operate on top of the blockchain, as well as law enforcement. Roubini noted that such policing won’t be efficient unless there is a globally ratified set of rules in place. Van Valkenburgh agreed that such a unified approach to know your customer (KYC) procedures are needed, marking a rare moment of solidarity with the opponent.

Finally, Cortez Masto asked Roubini whether he believed in blockchain technology’s successful applications beyond finance, to which he responded, once again, that no serious government or corporation would ever entrust an open, trustless, permissionless distributed system with any sensitive information. ‘It’s just nonsense!’ – he concluded.

Chairman Mike Crapo reminded senators that additional questions to witnesses, if any arise, are due within one week, and adjourned the hearing.

Crypto markets are seeing a mix of red and green, with 10 out of top 20 coins by market cap growing by less than 2 percent each.

Saturday, Oct. 13: crypto markets are seeing mixed price movements, as half of the top 20 coins by market cap have grown on the day.

The overall market is relatively stable, with two major cryptocurrencies Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) seeing changes in value of under 1 percent.

Market visualization from Coin360

Bitcoin has been fluctuating between $6,200 and $6,300 over the day. It’s intraday high was $6,323, while the intraday low was $6,259. At press time, Bitcoin is trading at $6,279, down around 0.3 percent over the past 24 hours. The dominance of Bitcoin’s market capitalization currently amounts to 53.9 percent.

Bitcoin 24-hour price chart. Source: Cointelegraph Bitcoin Price Index

Ethereum has fared better over the day, seeing growth of almost 1 percent, to trade at $199. The cryptocurrency has recovered slightly, following a drop to as low as $191 on Oct. 11, according to Cointelegraph Ethereum Price Index.

Ethereum 24-hour price chart. Source: Cointelegraph Ethereum Price Index

In contrast, Ripple (XRP) has taken a downturn over the past 24 hours. After experiencing significant growth yesterday, Ripple has dropped by around 2 percent on the day, and is now trading at $0.42. The third largest cryptocurrency by market cap is still up 50 percent over the past 30 days, due to a price surge on Sept. 20.

Ripple 30-days price chart. Source: Cointelegraph Ripple Price Index

The total market capitalization has been hovering around $201 billion in 24 hours to press time. Specifically, it now amounts to $201.5 billion, with an intraday high of $202.8 and a low of $200.7 billion.

Total market cap 24-hours chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Daily trade volume of the entire crypto market has recently dropped below $10 billion for the first time since Aug. 26, when Bitcoin was trading above $6,700, and Ethereum was above $270.

TRON (TRX), the eleventh largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is seeing some of the largest gains on the day, according to CoinMarketCap. Following a recent announcement of a partnership with a unnamed “industry giant” that is valued at “tens of billions of dollars,” TRX is up around 1.4 percent over the day, to trade at $0.023 at press time.

Earlier today, Cointelegraph wrote about an unconfirmed report that TRON has actually partnered with a Chinese Internet giant Baidu.

American economist Nouriel Roubini testified before the U.S. Congress with a speech “debunking” crypto on Oct. 11. Also known as Dr. Doom for predicting the 2008 economic crisis, Roubini has followed up with yet another anti-crypto tweet, claiming that the idea of crypto is “fascist at core” due to “paranoia & conspiracy” about centralization.

Responding to Roubini’s statement, crypto commenter WhalePanda has called the economist’s tweet “the dumbest thing you will read on the internet today.”

Crypto analyst and host of CNBC's Crypto Trader show Ran Neu-Ner has tweeted a poll, asking his audience who should debate Roubini. As of press time, the winning candidate is Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin, with 33 percent of the audience casting their vote for him.

Crypto market news service Coinness claims that TRON is about to partner with China’s Internet giant Baidu, citing private correspondence with the former.

The team of cryptocurrency project TRON (TRX) has reportedly partnered with China's largest Internet search provider Baidu. Crypto market news service Coinness has claimed this in a tweet Thursday, Oct. 11, citing its private correspondence with TRON’s team.

Neither TRON nor Baidu have been able to confirm the partnership to Cointelegraph as of press time.

Without specifying the details of the partnership, Coinness has claimed that the deal between TRON and China’s Internet giant Baidu will be “officially” revealed by the cloud storage service Baidu Cloud “next week.”

While Coinness claims that TRON has exclusively confirmed the partnership in private correspondence with it, the crypto platform itself has not yet officially announced any details of the partnership or even the identity of its new business partner.

TRON’s CEO Justin Sun has recently hinted on Twitter at a secret partnership with an unnamed “industry giant” that is valued at “tens of billions of dollars.” In his Tweet, posted Friday, Oct. 12, Sun has similarly provided little information:

“Finally, First time to partner with tens of billions USD valuation industry giant. Guess the name.”

As mentioned on TRON’s website, the decentralized Internet company TRON Foundation was established in Singapore in July 2017, while TRON’s open source protocol was launched in December 2017. The company has dual headquarters in Beijing and San Francisco, and a team of over 100 employees working all over the globe, with some of them being formerly employed by China’s Internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.

In late September, TRON released details about its partnership with a popular torrent client BitTorrent, following the earlier acquisition of the company. A collaboration between the two companies dubbed “Project Atlas” will reportedly enable the users of the BitTorrent client to receive rewards in TRON for seeding torrent files.

Earlier in August, Baidu has joined Tencent and Alibaba in enforcing new anti-crypto policies in line with China’s overall toughened stance on the industry. The firm has shut down at least two popular crypto-related forums, with a notice to their users stating that Baidu’s measures are compliant with the “relevant laws, regulations and policies.”

On Sept. 26, Baidu has released its Baidu Blockchain White Paper V1.0, aiming to create “the independent development of the ‘Super Chain’ network system.”

TRON is currently the eleventh largest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to CoinMarketCap data. On June 25, TRON celebrated its “Independence Day,” when it migrated off the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain to its own independent public blockchain.

At press time, TRON is trading at $0.023, up 2.79% on the day. The coin saw its all-time price high of $0.217 on Jan. 5, 2018, which was followed by a fall in value of almost 90% over the rest of the year – against the backdrop of an overall declining crypto market.

TRON one-year price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

 

A top Korean financial regulator has reiterated his negative position on ICOs and digital currencies, though he does not deny the potential of blockchain.

The chairman of Korea’s Financial Services Commission Choi Jong-koo has reaffirmed his negative position on digital currencies and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), Business Korea reported Oct. 11. Choi spoke at a parliamentary audit session of the commission held at the National Assembly.

South Korea prohibited ICOs in September last year, stating that such a type of fundraising is “almost a gamble.” This August, Korean lawmakers, including participants from government ministries, returned to the cryptocurrency issue, focusing on repealing the country's ICO ban. Lawmakers agreed on the need to develop a related policy before carrying a resolution on ICO reallowance.

At the recent session, Choi reportedly said that “the government does not deny the potential of the blockchain industry," while noting that it “should not equate the cryptocurrency trading business with the blockchain industry.” Choi said:

"Many people say the Korean government should allow ICOs, but ICOs bring uncertainty and the damage they can cause is too serious and obvious. For these reasons, many foreign countries ban ICOs or are conservative towards them.”

Choi also addressed criticism of commercial banks that refused service to crypto exchanges, stating that "exchanges should be able to persuade banks to issue bank accounts to them.”

Other officials have said that the South Korean government is “likely” to announce its official position on ICOs in November. The Chief of the Office for Government Policy Coordination Hong Nam-ki said that the government will announce its position once it finalizes its discussion and receives the results of a government survey.

Hong told Korean business publication the Investor that the government launched a survey of blockchain companies to gather their views on the current legal framework.

In September, South Korean cabinet ministers agreed to exclude all sale and brokerage of digital assets based on blockchain technology from venture business classification. The move was reportedly taken in order to “strengthen the cooperation of related institutions” and to protect citizens from the “illegal activities” related to the digital assets business.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has stated that blockchain technology has “huge potential” that can help the organization “leapfrog generations of bad practice.”

The president of the World Bank Group Jim Yong Kim has stated that distributed ledger technology (DLT) has “huge potential” and that the bank should keep pace with innovative technologies. Kim spoke at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Banks’ Annual Meeting in Bali, Indonesia Oct. 11.

Kim addressed the importance of fighting poverty while boosting prosperity, pointing out that “there are innovations in the technological world that can help us leapfrog generations of bad practice, generations that would take forever in terms of reducing corruption.” Kim said:

“We talked about cryptocurrencies, but we think distributed ledger has huge potential and we issued the first blockchain bond in August, where we created, allocated, transferred and managed the entire bond through blockchain technology.”

Kim further noted that the deployment of blockchain helped the group reduce paperwork and costs, adding that it is “something that can be extremely helpful” in the future. He admitted, however, that the bank has not been keeping up with all the latest developments, particularly in a way that would help their customers take advantage of the “great things that are coming out.”

According to Kim, the World Bank’s goal is to develop universal access to financial services by 2020 which, in his opinion, will not happen without deeper engagement with the technology world.

As previously reported, the World Bank and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) issued a public bond exclusively on a blockchain. The $73.16 million deal entails two-year bonds that reportedly settled Aug. 28 and have been priced to yield a 2.251 percent return.

Following the positive results of the blockchain-platform, Arunma Oteh, a treasurer at the World Bank, stated that the bank “will continue to seek ways to leverage emerging technologies to make capital markets more secure and efficient.”

Notably, the World Bank President has previously expressed criticism towards digital currencies. Speaking with CNBC in October last year, Kim shared his bullish views about blockchain technology, while noting the risks of blockchain derivatives like Bitcoin. He stated then:

"Blockchain technology is something that everyone is excited about, but we have to remember that Bitcoin is one of the very few instances [of blockchain’s use in currency]. And the other times when blockchain was used they were basically Ponzi schemes, so it’s very important that if we go forward with it, we're sure that it’s not going to be used to exploit.”

The North Dakota Securities Commissioner issued cease and desist against three crypto promoters for misleading representation and violating securities law.

North Dakota Securities Commissioner Karen Tyler has issued cease and desist orders against three firms for allegedly offering unregistered and fraudulent securities in the form of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), according to an announcement published Oct. 11.

The companies at the center of the orders are Crystal Token, Advertiza Holdings (Pty) Ltd., and Life Cross Coin a/k/a LifecrosscoinGmbH. Per the statement, Crystal Token (CYL) is an “evolutionary multi-utility” ERC-20 token, that promises earnings up to two percent per day. The token’s website allegedly contains fraudulent claims of “excessive unsubstantiated” rates of return on investment. CYL is not authorized to sell securities in North Dakota.

Advertiza Holdings offers cryptocurrency called “Tizacoin,” or “TIZA,” and claims that holders “can expect to make a profit from the appreciation of the value of TIZA tokens.” That, according to the regulator, indicates that the token’s description as a utility token is incorrect, and is instead a security.

According to the North Dakota Securities Department, Advertiza falsely claims to be registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and is also not registered to sell securities in North Dakota.

The third firm, Life Cross Coin, operates a website from a Berlin IP address associated with ransomware, malware, and identity fraud, and offers a cryptocurrency called “Life Cross Coin,” or “LICO.” The firm claims that the token will be spent on charity, while investors can allegedly get a “huge return on investment.” LICO is not registered in North Dakota, and its site reportedly contains unsubstantiated claims and blatant misrepresentations. Tyler commented on the orders:

“The continued exploitation of the cryptocurrency ecosystem by financial criminals is a significant threat to Main Street investors. In formulaic fashion, financial criminals are cashing in on the hype and excitement around blockchain, crypto assets, and ICOs – investors should be exceedingly cautious when considering a related investment.”

The order is part of Operation Cryptosweep, a coordinated multi-jurisdiction investigation into potentially fraudulent crypto investment programs, that involves 40 U.S. and Canadian state and provincial securities regulators. Since the initiative’s launch in May, investigators discovered about 30,000 crypto-related domain names and conducted over 200 investigations of ICOs.

In May, the Colorado Securities Commissioner launched probes into two companies — California-based Linda Healthcare Corp. and Washington-based Broad Investments LLC — for promoting unlawful ICOs.

A former economic adviser to U.S. Pres. Donald Trump has joined the board of blockchain-related tech company Spring Labs.

Gary Cohn — former chief economic adviser to U.S. Pres. Donald Trump — has joined the board of advisers of blockchain-related tech company Spring Labs, according to a press release published, Oct. 12.

In addition to serving in the Trump administration, Cohn has previously worked as COO of American banking giant Goldman Sachs, and most recently served as a director of the U.S. National Economic Council. In the release, Cohn states that he has been “very interested in blockchain technology for a number of years.”

Working as Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser in 2017–2018, Cohn was responsible for the administration's tax reform, which came into force last December. Moreover, Cohn was oversaw the administration’s international and domestic economic policy agenda.
Chairman and CEO of Spring Labs Adam Jiwan says his company expects Cohn to implement his knowledge of financial markets in the blockchain sphere:

"Gary brings a wealth of experience in understanding the complexities of the global financial markets and an unparalleled network...."

Spring Labs is a U.S.-based tech company that uses blockchain solutions to swap identity and assets information between banks and companies. The company is in the process of building its Spring Protocol, which it claims will “[enable] network participants to exchange valuable information without sharing underlying source data.”  

As Forbes revealed in March, Spring Labs managed to raise $14.7 million in early-stage investment just four months after it was founded.

Spring Labs also managed to attract Brian Brooks — a chief legal officer at crypto exchange Coinbase — to its advisory board. Brooks previously worked as general counsel at the U.S. Federal National Mortgage Association, known as Fannie Mae.

The main suspect in a Bitcoin fraud case in Thailand was detained at a Bangkok airport after being on the lam for 2 months.

Thai citizen Prinya Jaravijit, who allegedly defrauded a Finnish investor of $24 Million worth of Bitcoin (BTC), has recently been detained in Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, the Bangkok Post reports Friday, Oct. 12.

According to newspaper, Jaravijit arrived in Bangkok on a flight from South Korea en route from the U.S., where he allegedly spent two months after his brother’s detention in connection with the same crime.

Shortly after the arrest Jaravijit, who was wanted on charges of conspiracy to defraud and money laundering, was delivered to local police where he was questioned. His lawyers are reportedly preparing to apply for bail.

As per the Bangkok Post, in January Finnish investor Aarni Otava Saarimaa along with his Thai business partner Chonnikan Kaewkasee complained to the Thai Crime Suppression Division (CSD). They claimed that Jaravajit along with six other suspects had duped them into investing $24 million worth of BTC into a scheme involving three companies and gambling-focused crypto token Dragon Coin (DRG).

However, Saarima and Kaewkasee never received any dividends from the so-called investment, proof of investment in DRG, nor were they invited to a shareholder’s meeting. CSD states that the funds were withdrawn from their BTC wallets, converted into baht and then spent by the alleged fraudsters.

As Cointelegraph previously reported, the case came to public attention when soap-opera actor Jiratpisit "Boom" Jaravijit — Prinya’s younger brother — was detained  in August.

In October, the Thai Money Laundering Office confiscated funds worth $6.4 million from Jaravijit's family and other people connected to the case, and is preparing to charge the suspects with fraud.

Following the detention of his brother, Prinya Jaravijit reportedly fled to the U.S. to avoid charges. He was ordered to return to Thailand by Oct. 8, but failed to do so. The Thai Foreign Ministry then revoked his passport which made his further stay in the U.S. illegal.

While many predicted Bitcoin to be an alternative to gold, during the recent drop in stock markets, cryptocurrencies also sold aggressively.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

The market data is provided by the HitBTC exchange.

In 2017, Bitcoin (BTC) was being projected as an alternative to gold. Many believed that with its unique properties, the leading digital currency would replace the precious metal as a preferred choice of investment when the markets enter a risky environment.

However, during the recent drop in the stock markets, cryptocurrencies were also sold aggressively. Does this mean that digital currencies will not be considered as a safe haven investment in the future?

Not likely. There have been many instances in the past when gold has faced aggressive selling along with the more risky assets. In 2008, even though gold was in an uptrend, it was initially sold off along with the other asset classes, only managing to find its footing in the last quarter of the year.

It’s too early to say that virtual currencies are not a safe haven investment and are doomed. Those who don’t understand the significance of the new technology are mostly the ones who continue to criticize it.

Others, including governments and a number of large corporations, are exploring options to use blockchain technology in various fields. Several prominent Universities’ endowments are investing millions of dollars into cryptocurrency funds.

After the recent steep fall on crypto markets, do the chart patterns predict an even deeper fall, or a sharp rebound? Let’s find out.

BTC/USD

Bitcoin nosedived Oct. 11, breaking below the support at $6,341. Though we would have expected a retest of the critical support zone at $5,900–$6,075.04, the bulls are currently attempting a pullback.

If the bulls close (UTC time frame) above $6,341, the BTC/USD pair will again try to break out of the downtrend line of the descending triangle. The bulls will have to scale a slew of overhead resistances before the trend changes. A rally above $6,831.99 will indicate the start of a new uptrend.

A break of the $5,900 mark will trigger a number of stops, resulting in a sharp fall. Currently, the moving averages are flat, with the 20-day EMA showing signs of turning down and the RSI in the negative territory. This shows that the bears have an upper hand.

Therefore, we suggest traders keep their stops at $5,900. The next few days are critical and can shed some light on the future direction.

ETH/USD

The tight range bound trading in Ethereum has resolved on the downside and broke below the support at $200. The bulls are currently trying to bounce from $188.

Both moving averages are turning down and the RSI is in the negative zone, which shows that the bears have an advantage. A break of the Oct. 11 intraday low of $188.35 can result in a drop to the Sept. 12 low of $167.32.

The ETH/USD pair will gain strength and show signs of a trend change if it sustains above $249.93. Until then, we suggest traders stay on the sidelines.

XRP/USD

Ripple broke below the support at $0.4255 on Oct. 11, triggering our stop loss. The price nosedived below the 50-day SMA and found support close to the 78.6 percent retracement level.

On the upside, the zone between $0.4255 and the 20-day EMA will act as a strong resistance. The 20-day EMA has started to turn down and the RSI is in the negative zone, which shows strong selling pressure in the short-term.

If the bears break below Oct. 11 intraday lows, the XRP/USD pair might plunge to $0.26913, completing a 100 percent retracement of the recent rally. The first sign of strength will be a move above the downtrend line.

BCH/USD

The bulls are trying to keep Bitcoin Cash inside the symmetrical triangle. A break down of the triangle and the Sept. 11 intraday low of $408.0182 will resume the downtrend. The next support on the downside is $300.

If the bulls succeed in defending the support line of the triangle, the BCH/USD pair will again attempt to rise to $530.

The 20-day EMA is starting to slope down and the RSI is below 50 levels, suggesting bears have the upper hand. We recommend traders keep a stop of $400 on their long positions.

EOS/USD

After clinging to the resistance line of the symmetrical triangle for three days, EOS tumbled on Oct. 11, breaking below both moving averages and the trendline of the triangle.

The bulls are currently attempting to hold the $5 line, below which, a drop to $4.49 is possible. The traders can protect their long positions with a stop of $4.9. The EOS/USD pair will attract buyers if it breaks out of the overhead resistance zone at $6.044–$6.3117.

XLM/USD

The fall in Stellar hit our stop loss suggested at $0.21. The current pullback attempt might face resistance at the 50-day SMA and the 20-day EMA.

The XLM/USD pair will invalidate the descending triangle pattern if it can sustain above the downtrend line. The failure of a bearish pattern is a bullish sign; hence, we might suggest long positions on a successive close above $0.26.

On the downside, any break below the Oct. 10 intraday lows can push the price towards the critical support of $0.184.

LTC/USD

From the midpoint of the range, Litecoin has declined to the bottom of the range of $49.466–$69.279. A break of the support can resume the downtrend and push the price towards the next support at $40.

The bulls are currently trying to bounce from close to the $50 mark. $60 will continue to act as a resistance on the upside.

The LTC/USD pair will show strength if it can sustain above $69.279. Until then, volatile trading inside the range is likely.

The aggressive investors can wait for today’s close and buy a small quantity with the stops below $47. A conservative investor should wait for the break out of the range before attempting a buy.

ADA/USD

On Oct. 11, Cardano broke below the first support at $0.073531, but the bears have not been able to capitalize on the fall.

Currently, the bulls are attempting to push the price back above $0.073531. If successful, the  ADA/USD pair will continue to trade inside the range of $0.073531–$0.094256.

If the bears thwart the attempt, the cryptocurrency can decline to the recent low of $0.060105. We can’t find any buy setups and are not recommending a trade on the pair.

XMR/USD

After days of tight range bound trading action, Monero broke down of the range on Oct. 11, triggering our suggested stop loss at $106. It is currently trying to bounce off the psychological support at $100.

The previous support of $107.8–$112 will now act as a strong resistance. The XMR/USD pair will show signs of strength if the bulls scale above the moving averages.

If the bears defend the overhead resistance, a drop to the lower level of $90 is likely. Traders should wait for a new buy setup to form before attempting to get in again.

TRX/USD

TRON has broken down of both moving averages, which extends its stay inside the range of $0.0183–$0.02815521.

Both moving averages are flat and the RSI has dipped into the negative territory, which shows that the sellers have an advantage in the near-term. If the bulls fail to scale the 20-day EMA, the probability of a fall to the bottom of the range will increase.

The TRX/USD pair will resume its downtrend if the bears succeed in sustaining below $0.0183. Traders should wait for a breakout and close (UTC time frame) above the range to establish new positions.

The market data is provided by the HitBTC exchange. The charts for the analysis are provided by TradingView.

Shortly after leaving Coinbase, Adam White has now become the Chief Operating Officer at Intercontinental Exchange’s crypto platform Bakkt.

Former head of institutional platform group at Coinbase crypto exchange Adam White is reportedly joining Intercontinental Exchange’s (ICE) platform Bakkt. ICE’s new hire was revealed by anonymous sources familiar with the matter cited by news outlet The Block on Oct. 12.

White left Coinbase in early October, declining to comment on his decision. However, a spokesperson of Coinbase then said that the company was “extremely sad to see him go.”

As per The Block’s source, Bakkt has now hired White as its Chief Operating Officer.

The crypto trading platform Bakkt was first announced in August by the Intercontinental Exchange, which is also the operator of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). It has been developed in partnership with Microsoft and Starbucks.

As Cointelegraph previously reported, White has been working for Coinbase for almost five years and was its fifth-ever employee, joining the team at the time it gathered in a one-bedroom apartment and Bitcoin (BTC) was trading at around $200.

While White was working for Coinbase, the company deployed a series of services targeted at big institutional clients, such as custodian services and an index fund.

The exchange, which was recently valued at $8 billion according to some reports, has made a number of high-profile hires in the past months. For instance, this October Coinbase welcomed a board member of the Charles Schwab bank Chris Dodds, and in September it hired Fannie Mae’s former General Counsel Brian Brooks as its new Chief Legal Officer.

Moreover, this summer a former Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft employee Tim Wagner joined Coinbase as vice president (VP) of engineering.

Blockchain is coming to one of the world’s best-known auction houses this month in a trial by Christie’s.

Christie’s, the auction house with a history going back over 250 years, has announced a pilot scheme to use blockchain for auction data.

The result of a partnership with blockchain art startup Artory that was revealed Thursday, Oct. 11, the Christie’s will use the technology to provide details and certificates of purchases to buyers.

The plans, it says, were “timed to coincide” with the upcoming $300 million sale of U.S. modernist art in London and Los Angeles this month.

Explaining the impetus behind the scheme, Christie’s CIO Richard Entrup said it provided a chance for “clients to experience this technology for themselves and to explore the advantages of having a secure encrypted record of information about their purchased artwork.” He added:

“Our pilot collaboration with Artory is a first among the major global auction houses, and reflects growing interest within our industry to explore the benefits of secure digital registry via blockchain technology.”

Blockchain will allow the auctioneer to provide a “permanent digital record of relevant information” about each sale, with the buyer having a registration card to access it.

Artory CEO Nanne Dekking meanwhile said there was a “broader desire within the industry to embrace new technologies.”

The traditional art world has been relatively slow to embrace technological innovation, despite projects such as a pioneering Andy Warhol “cryptocurrency art auction” in June.

Justin Sun, CEO of decentralized internet startup TRON, has hinted at a forthcoming partnership with an unknown firm valued at “tens of billions of dollars.”

Justin Sun, CEO of decentralized internet startup TRON, has hinted at a forthcoming partnership with an unknown firm valued at “tens of billions of dollars.”

The tweet, posted Friday, Oct. 12, gives little information, stating that:

“Finally, First time to partner with tens of billions USD valuation industry giant. Guess the name.”

Twitter followers were quick to join the guessing game: one proposed Alibaba – Sun is a graduate of Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Hupan university, as his Twitter profile states, to which another replied: “Alibaba is worth more than 500 billion. Not tens of billions.”

Other suggestions included Baidu, Clover, and – more than one – Disney. None of these have been confirmed as of press time.

This is the second time that the CEO’s tweets have made crypto headlines this month: on Oct. 8, Sun claimed the TRON token’s forthcoming update would see it beat Ethereum (ETH) on speed and EOS on cost, prompting an 8 percent surge in the asset’s value.

In late September, TRON released further details of its bid to integrate with torrent client BitTorrent, which it had acquired this July for an undisclosed amount. According to the latest news, a product dubbed “Project Atlas” will seek to integrate TRX within the platform’s user base to create a hybrid content sharing ecosystem that leverages cryptocurrency.

As of press time, TRON’s TRX cryptocurrency is ranked 11th largest cryptocurrency by market cap and is trading at around $0.0227 per token, up 1.65 percent on the day.

U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, owned by the Winklevoss twins, has sealed regulatory approval to add Litecoin custody and trading.

U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, owned by the Winklevoss twins, has sealed regulatory approval to add Litecoin (LTC) custody and trading. The news comes from an official Medium blog post published Friday, Oct. 12.

Gemini’s vice president of engineering, Eric Winer, informs Gemini traders that they can begin depositing Litecoin into their exchange accounts as of 9:30 am EDT Saturday, Oct. 13. Litecoin trading will reportedly go live Tuesday, October 16th at 9:30 am EDT.

The coin is set to be the fourth crypto supported on the platform, alongside Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Zcash (ZEC). Consequently, LTC trading pairs will be available against all three cryptos, as well as against the U.S. dollar.

Winer’s post underscores Gemini’s thoroughgoing “banking compliance and fiduciary obligations” under oversight from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). It notes that Litecoin trading support comes as the result of close cooperation with the watchdog, and that the exchange continues to expand with a “security-first” approach.

Lastly, the post reveals that support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) had also been slated for today. However, due to high levels of “uncertainty” within the Bitcoin Cash community about “one or more possible hard forks” planned for mid-November, Gemini has decided to delay its support of the asset:

“Some of [the] forks [currently under discussion] lack the replay protection feature that would be required for Gemini to safely support Bitcoin Cash. Because of this situation, we are delaying our launch of Bitcoin Cash deposits, withdrawals, and trading until late November, after the forks have passed and we can evaluate the health of the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem.”

Earlier this month, Gemini announced it had secured insurance coverage for custodied digital assets from lending services firm Aon, which will complement its already available Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) coverage for U.S. dollar deposits.

The Winklevoss twins have also recently sealed the approval of the NYDFS to launch their own U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, the Gemini dollar, the same day as U.S. Trust company Paxos announced its own NYDFS-approved stablecoin.

Shortly after the news, the brothers reportedly started to hire advisors to oversee Gemini’s potential expansion to the U.K. market.

As of press time, Gemini is ranked the world’s 38th largest crypto exchange by CoinMarketCap, seeing over $34 million in daily traded volumes.

After yesterday’s carnage, crypto markets are seeing some relative price stability, with the top cryptocurrencies by market cap seeing mild movement, both up and down.

Friday, Oct. 12: after yesterday’s carnage, crypto markets are seeing some relative price stability. The top cryptocurrencies by market cap are seeing mild movement, both red and green.

Market visualization by Coin360

Bitcoin (BTC) has has seen little price action on the day, and is up 0.5 percent to trade at $6,318 as of press time. Ater a strong week of sustained trading around $6,600 – briefly trading as high as almost $6,670 Oct. 8 – the top coin took a plummet yesterday, hitting as low as $6,201.

On its weekly chart, its cliff-like performance yesterday has brought Bitcoin down to around 4.7 percent in the red, although it continues to practically break even on the month, at around 0.3 percent in the negative.

Bitcoin 7-day price chart. Source: Cointelegraph Bitcoin Price Index

Ethereum (ETH) is down around 1 percent on the day to trade at $197 at press time. Its weekly chart shows a similarly stark sudden drop yesterday, after the altcoin had circled $230 levels throughout much of the week. Yesterday’s losses brought Ethereum as low as around $194.

On the week, Ethereum is now almost 13 percent in the red; monthly growth remains around 8 percent.

Ethereum 7-day price chart. Source: Cointelegraph Ethereum Price Index

Ripple (XRP) is faring better, and is up close to a solid 7 percent to trade at $0.43. Nonetheless, the asset was not spared yesterday’s market-wide losses, and is showing a 17 percent loss on its weekly chart.

Buoyed by its outstanding price performance in September, Ripple’s monthly gains remain at 60 percent.

Ripple 7-day price chart. Source: Cointelegraph Ripple Price Index

The remaining top ten coins on CoinMarketCap are all seeing a mix of red and green. After Ripple, Litecoin (LTC) has made the strongest recovery, although it has seen a relatively mild 2 percent gain to trade $53.32. Stellar (XLM) is up around 1.6 percent and is trading at $0.216.

Meanwhile, anonymity-oriented altcoin Monero (XMR) is down a further 1.8 percent on the day and is trading at $102.79; EOS (EOS) has also shed around 1.46 percent in value at $5.21.

In the context of the top twenty coins, the picture is mostly red: Tezos (XTZ) is down the most, losing 3.5 percent to trade at $1.21, and Ethereum Classic (ETC) is down a round 3 percent at $9.51. Dash (DASH) and IOTA (MIOTA) are seeing smaller losses, at around 2.2 percent ($158.59) and 1 percent ($0.502) respectively.

Tron (TRX) has grown 2.2 percent to trade at $0.227 and is the only other top twenty crypto to see green.

Total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies is down to around $202.2 billion as of press time – slightly recovering from a 24-hour low of $196.3 billion, yet remaining almost $20 billion down from an intra-week high at around $222 billion Oct. 8.

7-day chart of the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies from CoinMarketCap

Earlier today, Cointelegraph reported that the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has issued an advisory that calls on cryptocurrency exchanges to monitor Iranian use of crypto to evade sanctions.

According to the agency, as of 2013 Iranian use of cryptocurrency includes “at least $3.8 million worth of bitcoin-denominated transactions per year”; FinCEN goes on to warn that cryptocurrencies represent an emerging “payment system that may provide potential avenues for individuals and entities to evade sanctions.”

Six projects are currently under the wing of Ethereum Classic incubator entity ETC Labs.

The director of Ethereum Classic’s investment branch ETC Labs revealed in an interview Thursday, Oct. 11, that it will work with as many as 24 startups each year.

Elizabeth Kukko confirmed that six selected projects were currently involved with ETC Labs in a pilot scheme, with the full incubator to launch in Q1 2019.

“The goal of this pilot program is to put the incubator model to work and get feedback from these initial teams before going live,” she explained.

The move comes as Ethereum Classic (ETC) continues to lose its position as the overall cryptocurrency market slump continues.

In June, ETC’s prices jumped 25 percent after U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced it would add the token to its orderbook.

At press time, ETC/USD traded around $9.55, its lowest since May 2017, but the altcoin’s market cap still remains at over $1 billion.

“[We chose] Ethereum Classic because there is a lot of security on the main layer, and it doesn’t really matter what sidechains are used in conjunction to this,” Kukko said when asked about the decision to work off the network.

“Also, the Ethereum Classic space is very competitive, with a lot of good ideas and startups with immense potential for growth.”

To that end, Kukko did not reveal the identity of the projects under supervision, but added that “technical capabilities of the team and their ability to build on the ETC blockchain” were priority requirements for consideration of candidates.

ETC Labs claims to have so far received 120 applications.

The hacker who stole almost 170 ETH from SpankChain’s smart contract has chosen to return the funds.

Ethereum-based adult entertainment platform SpankChain confirmed that it had recovered all the funds lost during a security breach October 6.

In a series of tweets Friday, Oct. 12, officials said that after speaking by telephone with the hacker who stole 165 ETH ($32,000) from the project’s smart contract, he had agreed to return the amount in full.

SpankChain had notified users about the breach a day after it occurred, promising to instigate reimbursements of lost money to affected investors.

Of the total losses, only around $9,000 consisted of customer funds, it said.

Linking to a transaction confirming the transfer, SpankChain added it had given the hacker $5000 in ETH as a “reward,” along with refunding the capital used to initiate the attack - another 5.5 ETH ($1070).

“Congratulations, anonymous haxor!” the tweet concluded.

During the attack, the malicious party had also immobilized 4000 units of SpankChain’s native BOOTY token, which they subsequently also released.

The event marks a rare occurrence in the lives of altcoin projects and their security trials. Other instances of token or other funds thefts have rarely resulted in voluntary refunds.
One-way hacks continue to affect the cryptocurrency ecosystem this year, with exchange platforms such as Bithumb and Zaif losing coins in recent months.

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has issued an advisory calling on cryptocurrency exchanges to monitor Iranian use of crypto to evade sanctions.

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is calling on cryptocurrency exchanges to monitor Iranian use of crypto to evade sanctions. The agency requested this in an advisory issued Thursday, Oct. 11.

The call comes as part of a wider directive warning of the “systemic” Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) risks Iranian activity poses to the global financial system.

According to FinCEN, as of 2013 Iranian use of cryptocurrency includes “at least $3.8 million worth of bitcoin-denominated transactions per year.” Conceding that the use of crypto in the country is “comparatively small,” the document warns that crypto represents “an emerging payment system that may provide potential avenues for individuals and entities to evade sanctions.”

It continues to outline that despite the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) banning domestic financial institutions from handling decentralized cryptocurrencies, the internet facilitates both individuals’ and businesses’ access to crypto-related platforms. These are listed as “Iran-located, Internet-based virtual currency exchanges, “U.S.- or other third country-based virtual currency exchanges,” and “peer-to-peer (P2P) exchangers.”

FinCEN thus urges that "institutions… consider reviewing blockchain ledgers for activity that may originate or terminate in Iran," noting that the “highly dynamic” international crypto industry is liable to obscure transaction footprints.

As part of its recommendations, the agency advocates the use of blockchain intelligence tools and other means to monitor IP login activity from Iran-based entities through acquiring “technical details such as IP addresses with time stamps, device identifiers, and indicators of compromise that can provide helpful information to authorities.”

The advisory more broadly “remind[s] financial institutions of [their] regulatory obligations under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA).”

As reported this spring, it has been suggested that Iranians were increasingly turning to Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies in the midst of domestic economic turmoil ahead of the anticipated U.S. exit from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCOA). At the time, the chairman of Iran's economic commission stated that citizens had so far succeeded in siphoning a staggering $2.5 billion out of the country via cryptocurrencies.
More recently, Iran’s National Cyberspace Center has revealed that the draft of the state-backed cryptocurrency project is ready, which was avowed to be a centrally-controlled means of circumventing international sanctions when the plan was officially confirmed this July.

A group led by one of South Korea's leading plastic surgeons has made a $352 million investment in domestic crypto exchange Bithumb’s holding company.

A group led by one of South Korea's leading plastic surgeons, Dr. Kim Byung Gun, has made a major investment in crypto exchange Bithumb’s holding company. Bloomberg reported the news Friday, Oct. 12.

The surgeon’s BK Global Consortium has closed a deal to acquire “50 percent plus one share” of BTC Holding Co. – the largest investor in Bithumb’s operator – for around 400 billion won ($352 million), Bloomberg reports, citing a Bithumb spokesperson. The report states that BK Global Consortium was already the “fifth-largest” shareholder of BTC Holding.

According to Bloomberg’s source, the transaction is to be finalized in February 2019.

Dr. Kim Byung Gun also established an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) analysis firm in Singapore last year, according to a Korea Joongang Daily profile published in May. The firm reportedly aims to help individual investors distinguish between scams and “promising project models,” amid the surgeon’s concern about the prevalence of Ponzi schemes and other fraudulent offerings in the space.

The profile outlines how the surgeon, who is said to have made his fortune by investing in tech and bio startups, “has caught the blockchain fever.”

Bithumb is currently the world’s second largest by reported daily traded volume according to CoinMarketCap.

Earlier this month, Cointelegraph reported that the exchange plans to open a global decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) with technical support from blockchain firm One Root Network (RNT).

Crypto exchange Coinbase has launched the 0x token on Coinbase Pro, it will be the first ERC-20 token supported on the platform.

Leading U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has started listing 0x (ZRX) token, according to an announcement published Oct. 11. The move marks the first time Coinbase has added support for an ERC-20 token.

ERC-20 tokens are tokens developed and used solely on the Ethereum (ETH) platform, where ERC stands for Ethereum Request for Comment, and 20 is the number assigned to this request. ERC-20 makes the creation of new tokens extremely easy, which is why ETH became popular with crowdfunding companies working on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).

Per the announcement, Coinbase has launched support for ZRX on its professional platform, Coinbase Pro, although trading will only be allowed once sufficient liquidity is established. The exchange notes that a separate announcement will be made when the token becomes available on coinbase.com and on its iOS and Android apps.

ZRX trading will be available in most jurisdictions, except the state of New York during its initial launch stage. Coinbase has divided the launch into four independent stages for each new trading pair; ZRX/USD, ZRX/EUR and ZRX/BTC, while the exchange notes that currently it will not offer trading on the ZRX/GBP pair.

As Coinbase states in the blog post, in the first, “transfer-only” stage, customers will be able to transfer ZRX into their Coinbase Pro accounts, without an option to place orders. The second “post-only” stage will let customers post limit orders, however with no matches. The subsequent stages — “limit-only” and “full-trading” — will enable matching limit orders and full trading services, including limit, market, and stop orders respectively.

In July, Coinbase announced its was considering adding five new assets — Cardano (ADA), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Zcash (ZEC), and ZRX — to its trading list. The trading platform noted then that the new assets “will require additional exploratory work,” also warning that the listing process may make some coins available for customers to buy and sell only, without the ability to send or receive them using a local wallet.

Coinbase revealed its intention to add support for ERC-20 tokens in March, reversing previous statements from January. “After evaluating factors such as liquidity, price stability, and other market health metrics, we may choose to add any ERC-20 asset added to GDAX to the Coinbase platform,” the platform asserted.

At press time, ZRX is trading at around $0.76, up by 5.42 percent on the day, according to CoinMarketCap. On its weekly chart, the cryptocurrency price surged from $0.62 on Oct. 6 to $0.86 today following the Coinbase announcement. ZRX’s market capitalization is around $407 million, while its daily trading volume is around $67 million, at press time.

0x Weekly Chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Despite recent calls from Congress to provide regulatory clarity on ICOs, the SEC continues is crackdown on hundreds of ICOs, according to a joint report.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has expanded its crackdown on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), putting “hundreds” of projects at risk, according to a recent joint investigation by Yahoo Finance and Decrypt Media published, Oct. 10.

The authors of the report stressed that hundreds of crypto and blockchain startups that conducted token sales have eventually found that they had violated securities laws despite their endeavors to comply with regulations. In response to SEC pressure, dozens of firms have reportedly “quietly agreed” to refund investors’ money and pay fines, rather than attempt to reach a legal compliance.

According to Yahoo and Decrypt’s conversations with more than 15 industry sources, many startups that were subpoenaed by the SEC did not know how to satisfy the commission’s demands, and were unable to consult with other firms on how to handle the matter.

The sources — who are represented by employees of subpoenaed companies or their attorneys — preferred to stay anonymous due to an SEC restriction from disclosing the issue.

An anonymous securities attorney at a high-profile Silicon Valley firm told Yahoo and Decrypt that while “everybody’s holding their breath,” waiting for new rules, the SEC is not going to provide them. According to the anonymous attorney, while dealing with the recently emerged industry, the SEC still applies the “same laws, the same statutes, the same rules, to stocks and bonds and everything else.”

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, there has been a “cascade of uncertainty,” associated with the existing ICO token classification, which only further complicates the development of desperately needed regulations for ICOs.

While major altcoin Ethereum (ETH) was launched back in July 2015, the SEC stated that the cryptocurrency would be regulated as a security only in June this year. Despite calls for regulatory clarity and comments from lawakers that the ICO industry needs “light touch” regulation, the SEC continues its crackdown on ICOs.

According to a recent study by financial research firm Autonomous Research, ICOs raised $20 billion since the start of 2017, which is $18 billion more than the previous year. With that, more than 80 percent of ICOs that were conducted in 2017 have been identified as scams by the ICO advisory firm Statis Group in July. Still, the U.S. is ranked the “most favorable” country for the ICO market, based on amount of funds raised by top companies in the field.