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31
Coin Home / Ravencoin (RVN) Story and Price Performance: 2019
« on: April 07, 2019, 04:21:34 AM »

Described as a digital peer to peer network for the facilitation of asset trasnfer [MEDIUM post] – and named after the messengers of truth in the GoT fictional world Westeros, Ravencoin is making its place among leading coins in the top-50 by market capitalization.

Using 16 mining algorithms or X16R – the Bitcoin HF Hard Forked coin pushes security and privacy further ahead compared to the crypto-pioneer.

Key changes include a faster block reward time and a change in the number, but not the weighed distribution schedule, of coins. Ravencoin is free and open source and will be issued and mined transparently with no pre-mine, developer allocation or any other similar set aside. Ravencoin is not designed to be cash. Ravencoin is intended to prioritize user control, privacy and censorship resistance and be jurisdiction agnostic, while allowing simple optional additional features for users based on need.

Parallel with the inspiration for the name – comes its function. Ravencoin helps determine the rightful ownership of assets with no flaws. Parallel as noted out above in the quote, it wants to make transfers and payments as direct as possible and fully decentralized – as it suits cryptos.
Being around only since Jan 3rd, 2018, it has been doing much noise in the crypto-space reaching the 36th rank by market cap.
In an age where people can move significant amounts of wealth instantly using Bitcoin, global consumers will likely demand the same efficiency for their securities and similar asset holdings.

Per time of writing it is in the green for 12.12% in the last 24-hours reaching the $0.06680 level with a market cap of $218.3 mil. This is a record-high set by the truth-speaker as its previous highest note was $0.06000 in November.

Source: coinmarketcap

Source

32
Trading / $50,000: Crypto Guru Reveals Dizzying Bitcoin Price Target
« on: April 07, 2019, 04:13:16 AM »

The crypto rally has lots more runway ahead, even if the bitcoin price appears stuck. Trader and classical chartist Peter Brandt revealed his bullish prediction of $50,000 for the bitcoin price, which is currently holding steady at $5,000.

Investors must exhibit some patience, however, as it won’t happen overnight. Brandt expects that it will achieve this level over the next two-to-three years based on historical patterns that are resurfacing like a reflection in a mirror.

BITCOIN PRICE COULD SURGE TO $50,000 BY 2021

Bitcoin continues to test resistance above the $5,000 mark. | Source: CoinMarketCap

There are countless bitcoin predictions out there, so what makes his so special? Unlike much of the other analysis, Brandt presciently called bitcoin’s 2018 destiny in which the leading cryptocurrency shed more than 80% of its value.

He identified a similar pattern in the charts in 2018/2019 that replicate the price movements from the 2013-2015 bear market period, after which time the bull market arrived. Technically speaking, that’s where the bitcoin price is trading today. He told Yahoo Finance:

“We saw sequential 10 up and down moves in the bear market, and we’ve almost identically formed that same sort of pattern. After the 2015 low in bitcoin, we saw the market then developed into a parabolic advance,” said Brandt, adding: “Based on those analog studies, I think crypto now will go back into a parabolic bull market.”

WILL THE BITCOIN PRICE RETEST 2018 LOWS?

While Brandt’s outlook is music to the ears of bitcoin investors, his crystal ball isn’t free of interference. Brandt has questions, too, chief among which based on the “analog year comparison is whether [the] 10a rally will lead to 10b retest similar to 2013-2015,” as depicted in the below chart. In other words, will the bitcoin price rally for a while before retesting late 2018 lows, which was $3,122 on Bitstamp, over the summer before climbing to $50,000?

“There’s a chance that it does and a chance that it doesn’t,” he said in answer to his own question.

https://twitter.com/PeterLBrandt/status/1114567264714612736

CRYPTO BULL RUNS DON’T WAIT FOR ANYBODY

Whether that parabolic move has begun or bitcoin “takes a break” in the coming months, one thing is clear: the BTC price is headed for $50,000 between now and 2022.

“When bitcoin starts moving, it moves. It doesn’t hold up for everybody to catch a stagecoach,” said Brandt, who expects that bitcoin will leave its previous high of $20,000 in the dust.

Brandt, who has been trading for more than four decades, isn’t concerned with what’s driving the rally, just the “basic underlying demand for the coins themselves.” This is easier said than done, considering the unique nature of the cryptocurrency market whose only basis for comparison is about a decade. This differs from fundamental analysis, like that of Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, which will illuminate the catalysts behind the price moves. Lee is similarly bullish and told CNBC this week that bitcoin’s fair market value is currently $14,000.

Brandt, meanwhile, chalks up this week’s 20% bitcoin rally to good old “more buyers than sellers” – but also more urgency among buyers.

Source

33

Last month, reports surfaced on crypto mining research conducted by tech conglomerate Cisco with the following headline: “College kids are using campus electricity to mine crypto.”

Indeed, many students don’t have to worry about paying power bills, as per their university housing contracts, which tend to cover electricity expenses. That “free” power allows them to host cost-efficient mining rigs, where the only expense is the actual hardware. It almost seems too good to be true: Mining students receive a passive income, which can potentially cover the purchase of a few textbooks — or even pay for the whole semester and more.

However, there’s a catch: No electricity is actually free, and someone ultimately has to pay the price.

How popular is mining among students?

Cisco’s security researchers investigated cryptocurrency mining activity across various industry verticals. The research was carried out with the company’s cloud security platform Umbrella, which monitors clients’ network connections to screen malicious activity, allegedly revealing incidents of crypto mining.

According to the findings, university campuses are the second-biggest miners of virtual currency across industry verticals at 22 percent, second only to the energy and utilities sector, with about 34 percent.

As Cointelegraph reported, miner revenues began to wane in 2018 (the last full year for statistics), thanks to the crypto winter and its attendant price drop. That made mining less profitable. But hash rates have continued to increase, indicating that the global mining pool continues to grow, even as individual miners come and go.

Cisco threat researcher Austin McBride explained the trend to PCMag, saying that "you leave [the mining rig] running in your dorm room for four years, you walk out of college with a big chunk of change."

While running mining rigs in dorm rooms, students purportedly avoid electricity costs associated with cryptocurrency mining profitability, said McBride, adding:

"Mining difficulty for a lot of coins is very high right now — which means it costs more for electricity and internet than the profit you can produce from mining those coins. If you don't have to pay for those costs, then you are in a really good spot for making money on the university's dime."

Cointelegraph reached out to Cisco and Cisco Umbrella to clarify which campuses were monitored, but has yet to receive a response. 

A similar report was conducted earlier in March 2018, when cyber attack monitoring firm Vectra found out that both intentional cryptocurrency mining and cryptojacking was becoming more prevalent on college campuses than in any other industry.

As per Vectra, universities are not able to monitor their networks as closely as large corporations with high-budget IT departments, “at best [advising] students on how to protect themselves and the university by installing operating system patches and creating awareness of phishing emails, suspicious websites and web ads.”

Students who take advantage of this “free power,” in turn, are “simply being opportunistic as the value of cryptocurrencies surged over the past year,” Vectra’s blog post stated. Matt Walmsley, Europe, Middle East and Africa director at Vectra, told Cointelegraph that, while the scope of their research was international, he cannot disclose which universities participated in the study:

“The data was provided by from education establishments around the world on the understanding that any identifying information would remain anonymous.”

Therefore, while it is difficult to pinpoint the hot spots for college virtual currency mining on the map, the phenomenon seems to be quite popular overall. According to the 2019 Vectra report issued earlier this year, “cryptocurrency mining has surged in popularity with students and criminals, particularly among universities with large student populations.”

Is it really that simple?

One of the main things about mining in university housing conditions is that it has to be discreet — otherwise, the wardens might hear the noise and start investigating. Mark D’Aria, founder and CEO of Bitpro, a New York-based installation and mining operation management firm, told Cointelegraph:

“I suspect the vast majority of mining from college campuses isn't from what you would think of as mining ‘rigs’ — those giant machines with multiple GPUs [graphics processing units], purpose built for mining. ASICs [application-specific integrated circuits] are also certainly going to be extremely rare simply because they're so loud and hot that no one is going to tolerate them in their dorm room for very long. The student is going to need to explain that, and he's not going to get away with it for long.”

Instead, most of the mining seems to be coming from students' old-fashioned PCs, the Bitpro CEO suggested. Notably, casual machines could provide their owners with a moderate income even during the current, bearish market. Given that additional electricity-related expenses are covered by a third-party, of course. According to D’Aria:

“A gaming rig with a single high end GPU could produce maybe $1/day. But even a run of the mill laptop could produce a few cents as well. The important thing to recognize is that even though $1/day is small — if you don't have to pay for electricity, there's no reason for someone with a gaming rig or reasonably powerful laptop *not* to mine. It's literally free money.”

Moreover, generating cryptocurrency with a computer does not necessarily require substantial technical skills and knowledge. “It's extremely easy to do with services such as NiceHash [a crypto cloud mining marketplace], which can be set to automatically mine when you're not using your PC like a screen saver,” D’Aria added.

Indeed, Tom (a pseudonym to maintain confidentiality), a University of Mississippi pharmaceutical sciences student, told Cointelegraph that he used NiceHash with his gaming PC to mine Bitcoin for about two months, but soon decided to abandon the idea because of the continuously high workload and rising GPU prices:

“I was able to make about $120 USD if the price of bitcoin had stayed at $15,000. With bitcoin currently around $4,000 USD it may be profitable, considering I was getting free electricity. However, because of the strain on the system, plus the overinflated prices of GPUs, I wouldn’t do it anymore.”

Tom specified that, being a resident advisor in the dormitory, he was able to make inroads with the local maintenance assistant. That allowed him to make sure that his floor had sufficient air conditioning to host a miner:

“It would be impossible to tell if I had my PC on all the time, especially since it was a huge, 11- story building.”

Tom’s room felt chilly during the winter months, so additional heat was actually useful. He said, “I just used my computer instead of a space heater.”

However, sometimes, mining students get exposed. Ken (a pseudonym to maintain confidentiality), an Arizona State University undergraduate who studies applied physics, showed Cointelegraph a screenshot of an alleged email from a university staff member. In it, Ken was being informed that the security team “has detected a coin miner program” on two of his devices.

“We would like you to either uninstall the programs, or run a virus scan in the event that you were unaware of these programs, as this is indicative of malware on your devices,” it stated.

Ken indeed was using NiceHash at the time, as he confirmed to Cointelegraph. After consulting with fellow miners on the r/BitcoinMining subreddit, he decided to use a virtual private network (VPN) whenever he was mining, saying: “I already had one, and I made sure that it turned on startup and the internet kill switch was active so they couldn’t track me.”

However, once Ken had managed to mine “a couple of hundred dollars,” NiceHash was hacked, and the student lost a large percentage of his funds, as he hadn’t yet moved them to a private wallet.

Chris Partridge is a computing security graduate from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), who also mined cryptocurrency during his time in college, starting in 2015 and continuing until mid-2016. “I was curious about Bitcoin and that seemed like a good way to learn,” he told Cointelegraph. His setup was a bit more advanced compared with Tom and Ken, as he used “a couple” of Antminers, a BFL Monarch and a Prospero X1. Consequently, the amount of heat produced by his equipment was significantly higher:

“None of them [the mining rigs] were remotely current-gen even at the time, and all of them were heavily underclocked/undervolted/modded to be cooler and quieter. Living up in Rochester [New York), where it was freezing all the time, we had our window open 24/7 (even during blizzards!) and the miners pointed out into it, or else it became too hot in our living areas very quickly. It was a bit of a strain for my roommate and I, but he was a good sport about things.”

Partridge said that he was never caught in the act, despite a couple of room checks that occurred due to unrelated reasons. “Nobody seemed to care,” he said. “Especially since it was a very small operation — I suppose I came off as a bit eccentric, but no further investigation was prompted.”

Even though it wasn’t a profit-focused endeavor for the former RIT student, he walked away with around 0.4 BTC, which he then sold for a hefty sum of $6,000. The earnings came at just the right time: Partridge needed cash that would carry him through to an internship. After spending the money on general living expenses for a few months, he even had some left over for nonessential shopping:

“I also bought a Roomba, because if there's anything I'm going to spend profits from magic internet money on, it's a Roomba.”

There are even larger success stories: Marco Streng, co-founder and CEO of Genesis Mining, a large cloud mining company whose farms are located across several countries, claims that he essentially started his business out of a dorm room back in 2013. He declined to specify which university he went to, however, saying that it’s “the same anywhere in the world.”

“There was this kind of sauna atmosphere in my 10-13 square meter room, and the noise was really loud,” he told Cointelegraph. “We tried to mitigate it by putting some pillows over the miner and put it closer to the window to cool it down.”

Streng said that, while the uproar was attracting attention, his neighbors didn’t seem disturbed. “I mean, I found it annoying, but it was a trade-off for me,” he added. “I was excited, passionate, and there was an economical aspect — it created some money.”

Around 2014, Streng realized that the local student community had started to actively set up their own mining rigs across campus. “The rumour was spreading, so it [mining] got some traction,” he recalled. “The electricity bill of the student dorm went up quite significantly.”

When crypto market began growing and Streng’s activity became increasingly profitable, he realized that he could run “a few thousand of those machines,” establishing a mining operation on an industrial scale.

“That lead to the creation of Genesis Mining, one of the largest mining companies,” Streng told Cointelegraph. “I’m really happy that I did that in my dorm and found that opportunity. Otherwise, it would never have come this far.”

How legal and ethical is that?

While no university seems to have a specific policy in regard to cryptocurrency mining on its premises, in January of 2018, Stanford University issued a public warning against crypto mining on campus, arguing that school resources “must not be used for personal financial gain.” The warning also cited the university’s chief information security officer:

“Cryptocurrency mining is most lucrative when computing costs are minimized, which unfortunately has led to compromised systems, misused university computing equipment, and personally owned mining devices using campus power.”

Indeed, many universities seem to prohibit the use of their resources for personal financial gain — including the ones observed in this article. RIT’s code of conduct for computer use, for instance, states the following:

“No member of the RIT community may use an RIT computing account or any communications equipment that is owned or maintained by RIT to run a business or commercial service or to advertise for a commercial organization or endeavor. [...] Consistent with other specific policies, members of the RIT community should not waste university resources or use them for personal benefit or for the benefit of a non-university entity.”

However, not having specific rulesets for cryptocurrency mining might actually induce tax problems for educational institutions who (unwillingly or not) host such activity on their premises. As Selva Ozelli, international tax attorney and CPA, told Cointelegraph:

“Given that electricity is usually included in a student's tuition or rent, Universities would need to set policy as to whether they will allow cryptocurrency mining on campus premises or not or whether students should be charged extra for electrical expenses relating to cryptocurrency mining. If Universities do not set proper policy in this regard, they could subject themselves to tax problems. Because section 4, Q&A-8 of Notice 2014-21 states that cryptocurrency mining which is treated as a service activity should be treated as ordinary income in the year it is mined, and the expenses of mining — including electrical charges — deducted as incurred based on the matching of income and expenses." 

From an ethical point of view, the situation is also quite complex, and opinions vary even among those who benefited from mining on campus.

“I pay to have the room and since no explicit details in my contract punished overuse of electricity I figured I was fine, especially since I would have had to use a space heater anyway because students couldn’t control the temperatures in their own rooms,” said Tom from the University of Mississippi, denying that he was in the wrong for setting up a mining rig in his room.

Rochester Institute of Technology’s Partridge was more critical. “I don't believe it's ethical to mine at scale on college campuses,” he told Cointelegraph. “The electricity being ‘free’ to me isn't the same as the electricity being free, unfortunately.” The former RIT student recalled that he burned around $200 while mining in his dormarty, “assuming they get pretty solid commercial electrical rates.” He continued:

“Most people who claim that mining on campuses is ethical don't take into account an important second variable: this is not without risk. Student housing isn't designed to accommodate large quantities of electronic equipment, and couldn't suppress or otherwise contain electrical fires - that could easily lead to massive property damage and loss of life.”

Streng, the Genesis Mining CEO, believes that, while students can contribute to the decentralized network via mining, they shouldn’t exploit the resources of their universities and inform the local administration, if possible. “I think it’s great if a student wants to do it [mine in his/her room] and is excited about it,” he said. “But of course they have to pay their bills.” He continued:

“The new side-effect of the whole cryptocurrency idea is that someone living in a small room can turn electricity to money. There are many institutional setups — not only in education — when someone is paying for the electricity of a specific area, while residents have to pay a flat contribution no matter how much electricity they consume. I think those providers should be aware of these possibilities now and that people can make use of them. They should respect that and draft it into their agreements.”

Therefore, if universities continue to largely overlook mining on their premises, the phenomenon is likely to stay, allowing students to at least earn some beer money.

“I can't imagine any college student is going to turn down $30/month or even $5/month,” said D’Aria of Bitpro. “Even though they're dealing with small amounts on an individual basis, dorm room mining is introducing cryptocurrencies to a whole generation of young adults. It doesn't take them long to figure out how easy and useful it is to use something like Ethereum to split the cost of a 12 pack of natty ice — particularly when there's no credit card statement their parents can keep an eye on.”

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34
Trading / Here’s Really Why Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is taking off
« on: April 07, 2019, 04:07:25 AM »

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is back with a bang.

For sure it is bitcoin that has led the market higher but its 20% leap pales beside the gigantic strides of Bitcoin Cash, 84% the better this past week at $305.

In the same way that analysts and investors have been struggling to find a reason to explain the timing of bitcoin’s breakout, so too has the head scratching been in evidence with the price movement of Bitcoin Cash, witnessed in its near-doubling in value since 1 April.

The successful launch of the simple ledger protocol for creating tokens on the BCH blockchain has been cited as a catalyst as well as the pop in BCH futures trading on Kraken.

Also lending a helping hand may have been bitcoin.travel, which now also accepts BCH, in addition to just bitcoin previously, if you are looking to book a flight with crypto.

But that’s hardly enough to explain the stellar price performance of BCH. The bitcoin.travel part is especially unconvincing, given that it also added five other crypto to its roster of accepted cryptocurrency  – Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic, and Dash.

Ok, if none of that is convincing enough to explain the ongoing pump then perhaps it is the unique mandatory upgrade road map that the BCH dev community has instigated. Bitcoin Cash upgrades every six months, with the next batch of changes due in May.

At first brush baking in six-monthly network upgrades seemed something of a gimmick or perhaps an ideologically driven gambit to emphasise BCH’s ease of upgradeability in contrast to the slow pace of development seen in the bitcoin dev community with its notoriously ponderous governance.

Schnorr is welcome but not the price booster
But it is not likely that the buyers since Monday 1 April were primarily driven by the prospect of software changes such as Schnorr signatures coming to the BCH blockchain, welcome though that is.

Certainly, it should be noted that Schnorr is not as insignificant as some would have you believe and is surely another feather in the BCH hat in contradistinction to bitcoin, where Schnorr has been much discussed but failed to arrive, as yet.

Schnorr signatures will free up space as SegWit did, but it will also bring into play the ability to make transaction information private. Whereas the old ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) signatures required the sender to sign each transaction, with Schnorr aggregation is possible so that just one signature can be used by a bunch of collaborating senders.

So Schnorr is most welcome but in and of itself does not explain the 84%% gain either.

BCH survives the hard fork near-death event
At the top we said that Bitcoin Cash is back. Well, it is back in the way that the entire market is back, if this is the beginning of a new bull market.

But BCH is also back in another perhaps more significant sense.

Crypto watchers will recall when BCH had a near-death experience in November 2018. Many will remember that date as the moment when the hard fork of its blockchain triggered the crash in the wider market, pushing bitcoin below $6,000.

Bitcoin Cash, itself of course a fork from bitcoin, split into ABC (today known by most of the world as Bitcoin Cash and SV (BSV), and while at first there was a tussle between the two to see which chain would grab the most hash power, a clear winner did eventually emerge.

Despite the best efforts of Craig Wright and his nChain team and the dollar muscle of billionaire Calvin Ayre, the direction of travel since January has been clear: BCHABC is the winner.

The past week has made that definite, as it left BSV behind in the dust, to currently trade at $305 compared to BCH’s $84.

Sure, BSV still made a 30% gain which outperforms bitcoin, but it is a long way behind the 83% appreciation in the BCH price.


BCH has left BSV in the dust

For those still interested in keeping up with these things, the node count on BSV’s chain is only 438 to BCH’s 821.

So pulling ahead decisively ahead of BSV is good for BCH but that was something that, as we said, had been the likely outcome since January, if not before.

Asia still in love with BCH
Then there’s the Asia angle.

Ever since the birth of Bitcoin Cash, rooted as it was in the internecine warfare that broke out in the bitcoin development fight over those pushing the SegWit upgrade and the rival camp’s belief that radical scaling solutions were urgently required, which they insisted meant raising the block size – hence the BCH fork.

In the BCH camp, outside of the likes of Roger Ver (aka Bitcoin Jesus) and his bitcoin.com site and mining pool, were the Chinese companies such as Bitmain that had come to dominate mining and who it was claimed wanted to make a success of BCH at bitcoin’s expense.

Less political observers argued that Asia’s more advanced mobile payments ecosystem was driving the push for BCH with the US consumers lagging behind, still in the habit of handing over their card to a merchant.

For crypto enthusiasts in high-tech countries such as South Korea the scaling question at the time was more pressing.

The fact that the bitcoin rally began when the Asian market was awake is significant because Bitcoin Cash has for long time been a favourite. The finger behind the three 7,000 BTC algo trades is not known but for our argument that doesn’t matter although the timing points to Asian provenance.

As bitcoin jumped, the BCH fans took the opportunity to scream party on, and they put their won, yen and maybe yuan (or BTC) where their mouths were, helping to propel BCH into fifth place in the market cap rankings.

Excluding Tether and BTC the Korean won and Japanese yen are the second and third-placed currencies in the BCH market

Small is beautiful – preference for a whole over fractions
All of the above can be brought to bear in the BCH story of the past week, but it is still not enough in this writer’s view to explain the staggering near-doubling in value.

There is something altogether more prosaic at work.

Reading the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s interviews with consumers who entered the market in the wild ride to $20,000, we are reminded of one of its key findings – the ignorance of many market participants.

Getting skilled up is essential in this space for reasons we do not need to rehearse here.

One of the buyers in the FCA survey said she wasn’t aware that you could buy a fraction of a bitcoin and so decided to buy coins with a smaller unit price.

This tendency, driven by buying psychology that dictates that it is more palatable to purchase a coin with a smaller unit price, was seen among new consumer entrants in the previous bull market. It seems to be happening again and BCH is a prime candidate for attention.

Bitcoin Cash has a high profile because it a top 10 cryptoasset and can exploit the halo effect of the bitcoin brand name.

In conclusion then, the source of the momentum behind BCH may in part be influenced by any one or all of the factors already mentioned, but it is the fact that it presented the least friction for potential buyers, priced as it was at $167 as opposed to the $4,150 bitcoin price at the point of take-off.

BCH had fallen 98% from its all-time high to low, compared to bitcoin’s smaller 84% drop, which further accentuates the risk-reward proposition.

BCH could be starting its parabolic climb ahead of the rest.

And if you are pondering on how the other bitcoin forks are doing – don’t.

The argument of the BTC maximalists that there is really only one bitcoin is still valid.

Thanks to Ceteris Paribus

If that’s not enough of a note of caution then the transaction chart for BCH at bitinfocharts might provide some balance.

Bitinfocharts.com

Evidently, there’s not a lot happening on the BCH adoption front – there aren’t many people buying flights with BCH at bitcoin.travel it would appear. Roger Ver of course might say the same for bitcoin.

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35

The cryptocurrency world has been pushing its limit to educate people about blockchain and cryptocurrency globally. South Korea was one of the countries to adopt the new tech, but framed strong regulations to keep the field from the illicit players.

At the recent Deconomy conference in Seoul, South Korea, government officials said that it was time to re-evaluate the cryptocurrency policies of the country.

Song Hee-kyong, the co-president of the 4th Industry Forum of the National Assembly, said:

“The government has misunderstood the virtual currency and tried to meet the real currency standards, so there are various problems.The industry does not stand still while waiting for the regulatory sandbox authorization, so it is just like keeping it in the box.”

Min Byung-doo, the chairman of Korea’s National Policy Committee, told the audience that the government’s idea was to protect the economy of the nation by ‘vaccinating’ it against the first major run-up of cryptocurrencies, reported Beincrypto. The chairman, however, acknowledged that the market has matured and the need for such stringent regulations are less.

The chairman further added that it will be illogical for the government to pass a sandbox policy to facilitate the growth of fintech and restrict the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency sector.

However, the chairman of the Special Committee on the 4th Industrial Revolution of the National Assembly, Choung Byoung-gug, informed that the government officials were cautious in imposing new policies around cryptocurrencies as they feared that the policies would have a negative impact on the crypto-market.

However, the chairman expects to see some changes occur in the near-term, reported Messari.

This announcement, which loosens the grip around the crypto market, was in contradiction with United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC], which is aiming to enforce the Howie Test for ICOs. The environment looks appropriate for South Korea to completely adopt cryptocurrencies as the market showcases bullish trends.

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36

As the darknet’s largest market prepares to wind down, its second largest is taking the strain. When Dream closes for good at the end of April, Wall Street will become the largest darknet market (DNM), at least until Dream’s successor launches and can prove its legitimacy. Paranoia has pervaded the darknet in recent weeks amidst uncertainty over marketplace integrity and a string of high profile busts.

Wall Street Profits from Dream’s Demise

While Dream winds down the clock, ahead of a planned shutdown and transition to a new DNM, customers have flocked elsewhere. Many have taken up residence at Wall Street, which has struggled to process the spate of new orders. A notice posted on the site this week warned of address generation, input detection, signing messages and other onchain processes taking longer than normal. Unlike Dream, Wall Street doesn’t provide deposit addresses: instead buyers send funds from a personal wallet directly to a two-of-three multisig, created for each unique transaction.

The warning notice posted on Wall Street

Customers have the option to pay with BTC or with monero (XMR), and PGP login is available for added security. The number of vendors and listings on Wall Street is much lower than on Dream, and the success or failure of the first orders placed by former Dream users will be pivotal in determining whether Wall Street can capitalize on its competitor’s impending demise.

With DNMs in Turmoil, LEA Launches Crackdown

In addition to facing uncertainty on the darknet, vendors and buyers have been on high alert in the streets. A series of law enforcement raids have added to the sense of disquiet, including a Sacramento operation that netted close to $2M of BTC. “The darknet is not the cloak of secrecy for illegal drug users that they think it is,” said U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott at a news conference announcing the busts, which targeted opioid sellers.

Meanwhile, a Canadian drug dealer battling to retain the $1.4M of BTC found in his possession has suffered mixed fortunes. Superior Court Justice Jane Kelly ruled that the BTC should be confiscated, but consented to allow 30-year-old Matthew Phan to keep 7.23 BTC, as the judge was not entirely confident that this sum was associated with criminal activity. The raid which saw Phan’s BTC confiscated occurred in 2015, when his digital assets were worth around $65,000. While he has now forfeited the lion’s share of the 280 BTC he was found with, Phan’s remaining 7.23 BTC should provide some solace upon his release.


Tor Project Supports 10 Cryptocurrencies Including BCH

The past month has provided little cheer for darknet users, with one of the few crumbs of comfort coming courtesy of the Tor Project, responsible for developing the onion browser used for connecting to the darknet. The foundation has expanded the list of cryptocurrencies it accepts, and now takes donations in bitcoin cash, monero, zcash and several more. In addition, donations sent to Tor will now be received directly by the project, instead of going via Bitpay. Thanks to the addition of support for several privacy-centric coins, the darknet’s most devout users now have an easier way to support the project whose work makes it all possible.


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37

The concept of ‘stablecoin’ appears to be treading the fine line between virtual and fiat. Investors can enjoy the benefits of ubiquity and universality of payments, two core concepts of the cryptocurrency world, while still standing in firm opposition of them by being tethered to a sovereign currency.

Stablecoins like Tether [USDT], USDCoin [USDC], Paxos Standard [PAX], TrueUSD [TUSD], and the Gemini Dollar [GUSD] are the most notable fiat-pegged ‘cryptocurrencies’ in the market, steadily growing in valuation, especially during the crypto-winter.

Despite the controversies surrounding the tenth largest virtual currency in the market, Tether has seen its valuation surge since 2017. With a market cap of under $500 million prior to the December 2017 bull run, in under a year, the coin shot up to $2.84 billion by October of the following year.

A slew of debates around the actual one-for-one backing of USDT with a corresponding dollar value had led many to abandon the stablecoin. This led to the coin’s market cap dropping by 40 percent in a matter of weeks. Coupled with the apex of the winter, by the penultimate month of 2018, the stablecoin dropped to $1.67 billion.

Regardless of Tether’s popularity within the market, the growing dominance of stablecoins is not something that should be ignored. Crypto-mainstays like the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini exchange, Coinbase and Circle have released their own stablecoin. At press time, USDC Coin, Paxos Standard and the Gemini Dollar amass $260.93 million, $107.39 million, $201.95 million and $66.65 million in valuation, respectively.

Given this increasing popularity of the fiat-pegged cryptocurrency, the collective market cap amassed in such a short time makes many question the intent of stablecoin investors. Some have even suggested that if the market cap of the stablecoin market was to flow into the decentralized currency, the December 2017 high could be revisited.



 
 
The concept of ‘stablecoin’ appears to be treading the fine line between virtual and fiat. Investors can enjoy the benefits of ubiquity and universality of payments, two core concepts of the cryptocurrency world, while still standing in firm opposition of them by being tethered to a sovereign currency.

Stablecoins like Tether [USDT], USDCoin [USDC], Paxos Standard [PAX], TrueUSD [TUSD], and the Gemini Dollar [GUSD] are the most notable fiat-pegged ‘cryptocurrencies’ in the market, steadily growing in valuation, especially during the crypto-winter.

Despite the controversies surrounding the tenth largest virtual currency in the market, Tether has seen its valuation surge since 2017. With a market cap of under $500 million prior to the December 2017 bull run, in under a year, the coin shot up to $2.84 billion by October of the following year.


 
A slew of debates around the actual one-for-one backing of USDT with a corresponding dollar value had led many to abandon the stablecoin. This led to the coin’s market cap dropping by 40 percent in a matter of weeks. Coupled with the apex of the winter, by the penultimate month of 2018, the stablecoin dropped to $1.67 billion.

Regardless of Tether’s popularity within the market, the growing dominance of stablecoins is not something that should be ignored. Crypto-mainstays like the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini exchange, Coinbase and Circle have released their own stablecoin. At press time, USDC Coin, Paxos Standard and the Gemini Dollar amass $260.93 million, $107.39 million, $201.95 million and $66.65 million in valuation, respectively.

Given this increasing popularity of the fiat-pegged cryptocurrency, the collective market cap amassed in such a short time makes many question the intent of stablecoin investors. Some have even suggested that if the market cap of the stablecoin market was to flow into the decentralized currency, the December 2017 high could be revisited.


 
Mati Greenspan, the senior market analyst at eToro, hinted that this “flow” to Bitcoin and the other altcoins could come up to approximately $3 billion. Although this value injection would be a fraction of what the collective market saw over the past week alone, a stablecoin exodus could lead to a consolidation of belief within the decentralized currency world.

The eToro analyst’s tweet read:

“Nearly $3 billion ready to flow into BTC and alts.”

It should be noted that Greenspan’s tweet was in reply to speculation made by Jonathan Habicht, the founder of Blockfyre, a cryptocurrency investments platform. Habicht dwelled on the stablecoin market in comparison to its crypto-brethren. Despite the gulf of valuation between the two, their difference, or lack thereof, is notable and an “interesting metric”.

Habicht speculated that the funds “parked” in stablecoins, if dispersed to the cryptocurrency market, the all-time-high [ATH] could be a reality once again. He described the stablecoin investors as the “people who never actually left #crypto”.

His tweet in full read:

“I keep hearing that we need new money to get back to ATH, but think about all the money parked in Tether and other stable coins. These are people who never actually left #crypto.
Also an interesting metric to watch.”

Stablecoin investors are those that are reliant on the “stable” nature of fiat currency, while still staying within the cryptocurrency paradigm. During the crypto-winter, many investors pulled their funds out of decentralized currencies and reinvested it into stablecoins, fearing another bearish onslaught. Hence, Habicht’s claims can be attested.

These investors are indeed flirting the line between the fiat-pegged stablecoin market, masked in their ‘crypto’ technology, while still being fearful of the decentralized currency realm. If the tide does turn in favor of the cryptocurrency, in its purest form, Greenspan’s prediction of a $3 billion flow could be imminent.

Interestingly, one of the catalysts of the 2017 bull run backs the stablecoin approach. Terry Duffy, the chairman at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange [CME], now operating unrivaled in the Bitcoin Futures market, stated recently that cryptocurrencies backed by fiat are likely to find minimal opposition by regulatory authorities.

Source

38
Crypto Products & Services / Infinito Wallet Adds Tokensale Support
« on: April 06, 2019, 06:18:42 PM »

The multi-asset Infinito Wallet has partnered with Holdex, a cloud based platform for token issuance and distribution, to roll out full support for crowdfunding token sales. According to a joint press release, the partnership will see Holdex’s decentralized service integrated into the Infinito Wallet Platform, allowing’ users to participate in token sales.

The collaboration’s objective is to not only integrate the user communities of both platforms, but to provide a seamless experience for digital asset storage and token issuance and distribution. Both companies hope to provide new businesses with access to blockchain-based financing through Utility Token Offerings. Such ‘UTOs’ are a pivotal factor in accelerating blockchain adoption.

In the announcement, Infinito CEO Jack Nguyen said;

“We know that only by helping businesses and startups put blockchain into practice, this disruptive technology can fully evolve as it should. Therefore, partnering with Holdex is a significant step for Infinito to not just provide better service for our users but also contribute to the global blockchain ecosystem.”

Holdex CEO Vadim Zolotokrylin added:

“Partnering up with Infinito Wallet is a key milestone in our journey to aid startup financing. While we focus on enabling financing via our infrastructure and network, Infinito and their technology unlock the potential for our projects to reach a massive community of users.”

Infinito Wallet has recently been working to improve user experience by releasing App Square, a native dApp browser. They’ve also added support for Binance’s DEX and native token BNB.

Blockchain startups continue to integrate technologies and dissolve barriers between industry-shaping services. As adoption accelerates, unions like the Infinito Wallet-Holdex partnership may welcome a massive pool of incoming customers.

Source

39

Lightning Network (LN) has been praised by many as the solution to the Bitcoin network’s scalability problem. However, the founder of EOS, Dan Larimer believes there are many problems associated with this solution.

Dan Larimer Believes LN Has Problems

Dan Larimer, while expressing his thoughts on Lightning Network, believes it is a high jack of protocol. He added that the issues of this solution are too many, without delving into them.

However, Larimer is not the only one with such a view. Peter Ruzin, a data scientist and cryptocurrency enthusiast, recently published a blog highlighting the problems behind the LN solution. While talking about it, Ruzin nitpicks the layer-2 solution saying: “The Lightning Network is a solution for high transaction fees that only works when transaction fees are low.”

Ruzin predicted that in the future where there would be small blocks and high mining fees, lightning entities would lose customer funds, prevent customers from moving their money, and charge customers exorbitant routing and liquidity fees. When that happens, then centralization would set into Bitcoin, something we have been trying to avoid since the creation of the cryptocurrency.
According to the blog post, LN payments below about $0.02 aren’t trustless, so $50 could end up requiring trust too if fees rise. The complaints are that Lightning Network (LN) Hashed Time-Locked Contract (HTLC) does not work for small payments. At the default minimum fee rate of 10 nBTC/vbyte, that makes it uneconomical to attempt to claim a routed micro-payment below about 2,000 nBTC ($0.008 at $4,000 USD/BTC). As fees rise, larger and larger micro-payments become uneconomical to claim.

When the LN channels are required to route payment the dust limit, they trim those HTLCs by increasing the potential transaction fee of their channel by the amount of the micro-payment rather than adding an HTLC. This fee pays miners if the circuit is closed in a state that includes this fee. However by mutual agreement between channel counter-parties, the cost can be removed in a later stage.

LN Has Other Problems
Ruzin in his post highlighted that the lack of absolute trust on the LN is just one of the reasons why this scaling solution is not ideal. He adds that LN scales transactions and not users, and for that reason, the cost of running a full validating node will still be high. There is also a liquidity problem as most wealth states cannot be reached via Lightning transactions, which implies that payment failures are unavoidable.

On the issue of centralization, Ruzin said that Lightning hubs would have to centralize so that they can reduce routing and eliminate the liquidity problems. Besides, the average miner fees on LN would not be enough to secure the Bitcoin blockchain when the block reward gets exhausted.

These flaws are further brought to the fore with complains that some users are losing funds on lightning channels for no reason despite not carrying out transactions.

https://twitter.com/Bitcoin/status/954397289812021248

While LN has been praised in some quarters for the fantastic work it has done on the Bitcoin blockchain, it is evident that there are still some issues yet to be addressed, chief amongst which is the centralization and its inability to work with low transaction volumes. Encouragingly, David Harding, a Bitcoin writer, is positive and believes there are solutions. However, they they aren’t worth bothering about at the moment.

Source

40

Bitcoin ( BTC ) today maintains its slow uptrend, after several rounds of stiff defense of the shocking 2 April breakout.

Support/resistance (S/R) zones that have defined BTC’s new post-April market structure, are now being slowly eaten away by an uptrending channel (green, below) rather than abrupt launches.

Any dips to threaten these zones have so far only briefly managed to pierce the 55 hour exponential moving average (EMA, pink below). However, the area at about $5,040 seems to have formed a solid resistance level for the leading crypto.

These three factors - the uptrending channel, the 55 EMA, and the $5,040 ceiling - are together squeezing price into a potential decision point.

(source: TradingView.com)

On a slightly larger timescale, Bitcoin’s shocking breakout, and the movements that have followed it, are coming to strongly resemble a bull flag pattern - which suggests another break up. Although this may seem unthinkable after getting so much upside, Bitcoin has already defended two aggressive selloffs, and has established a local uptrend.

(source: TradingView.com)

Taking a look at the daily timeframe, we can see all the features of the new market structure contained between $4,200 and $6,000-ish. Bitcoin’s highest rejection came squarely in the middle of a S/R zone, at $5,345 on the Coinbase chart. A retest of this zone could weaken and begin to break it.

Alternatively, should Bitcoin decide to take a much-deserved correction, holding the $4,600 mark - where the important 200 day moving average (MA) lies - would be ideal and cause for continued optimism for the medium term. Failing holding this level, there is a decent knot of support screening the critical $4,200 point.

A return to $4,200 would probably invalidate the thesis, proffered by many analysts now, that the 2018 bear market / “crypto winter” is truly over. A successful retest of the 200 MA, in fact, would be very healthy and a boon to market confidence.

(source: TradingView.com)

Source

41

The number of stores that accept cryptocurrencies is rising in Slovenia and Croatia. Starting with merchants in one of the largest shopping and entertainment complexes in Europe, Elipay has now integrated with 300 stores in Slovenia and begun expanding into Croatia following approval by the country’s central bank.

300 Locations in Slovenia Including Bitcoin City

Cryptocurrency adoption has been rapidly growing in Slovenia. Elipay by startup Eligma is a crypto payment mobile app for iOS and Android devices. Many stores at one of the largest shopping and entertainment complexes in Europe, BTC City, have integrated Elipay which currently supports BCH, BTC, ETH, and ELI token.

Eligma CEO Dejan Roljic told news.Bitcoin.com Friday:

We have reached another Elipay milestone this week – 300 locations … About one third of them are in Bitcoin City.

BTC City with stores that accept cryptocurrencies via Elipay shown.
Eligma describes Bitcoin City as “the result of infusing one of Central Europe’s largest and most important commercial, shopping and logistic areas, BTC City,” with cryptocurrencies and other innovations. There are over 500 shops in BTC City.

Nationwide, “The number of Elipay locations is constantly increasing,” Roljic remarked. “Elipay now covers most service and product categories: food and drinks, fashion, electronics, services, sports and leisure, entertainment, home and garden, toys and kids, pets, auto and moto, travel, adult, online stores, and other.” The latest addition, announced on April 5, was for Intaxi which allows taxi rides in and around the capital city to be paid for with cryptocurrencies.


Roljic further shared:

In addition to the use of crypto for shopping with the Elipay system, the Bank of Slovenia has also approved euro value to be added into Elipay by means of credit / debit cards and SEPA.

Expansion Into Croatia

Eligma has been working on its global expansion, starting with Croatia. “The Croatian National Bank has confirmed that Elipay can legally operate in Croatia,” the company tweeted on April 1.

Roljic explained to news.Bitcoin.com that after the central bank “confirmed the legality of Elipay operating in Croatia, the localization of the system started taking place,” emphasizing that it “will actually be completed in the course of next week.” He also revealed that his company is “already in contact with ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning software] providers as well as individual merchants and service providers, so that the first integrations can be expected as early as next month,” adding:

We will initially test and adjust the expansion model. In that phase, our goal is to enter the first 20 stores … If the testing is successful and a decision is made to fully expand throughout Croatia, then we anticipate that over 200 locations could integrate Elipay by the end of the year.


Billy, a major ERP and prospective payment system (PPS) provider in Croatia, is in the process of integrating Elipay into its system. Once completed, the system will “be tested and re-evaluated. This will be followed by a review of the technical documentation in order to prevent any potential issues with future updates,” the CEO described. Eligma has also been negotiating with another ERP provider in the country.

While the company has been conducting market research to establish which countries to expand into next, Roljic confirmed that further expansion “will only be initiated once the proof of concept on the Croatian model (MVP) has been brought to a successful conclusion.”

Source

42

Crypto markets are full of volatility and most investors FOMO. Hence, they do not want to sell their holdings even when the markets are down. This creates a huge market for crypto lending platforms allows users to acquire loans instantly, by leveraging their cryptocurrencies for EUR or USD. While the opportunity is huge, not many platforms have been able to make the best of it. YouHodler is definitely the one that stands out.

YouHodler- The Top Crypto Lending Platform

YouHodler is one of the few crypto-backed loan service providers which helps hodlers in retaining their crypto assets without being out of money or forcing them to sell their holdings. The company has an established blockchain platform and it allows users to acquire loans instantly, by leveraging their cryptocurrencies for EUR or USD. Youhodler has some exceptional features that make it clearly stand out from the others. This includes
  • The KYC process that the platform undertakes is fast and user-friendly
  • The company offers the highest loan-to-value ratio in the entire industry – up to 80%.
  • The platform accepts seven of the top cryptocurrencies as collateral, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple (XRP), and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), Stellar (XLM)
  • The operations are super quick and the platform allows a user to take loans anytime. The loan approval process is swift and cash transfers are made instantly in USDT or in Fiat.
  • The platform has a 24/7 customer support available which work towards solving customer queries and borrow funds instantly.
Loan Terms

The platform provides 3 different types of loan terms: 8-day, 50-day, and 120-day. Our interest rate varies from 5% to 13% (depends on the terms of your loan). The loan-to-value ratio varies from 55% to 80% (depends on the terms of your loan). A user can get up to $30,000 in cash automatically. Larger amounts of money can be lent on an individual basis. The platform does not determine interest rates by the amount of your collateral. The company believes everyone should be offered the same rates regardless of how much money or crypto they have. The ethos of doing this is because the current financial system is unfairly biased towards people with more – more assets, more connections, more access.

Loan Process
  • A user requests a loan, using his/her crypto asset as collateral.
  • In return, the user instantly receives an agreed loan amount in fiat or stable coins (USD, EUR, USDT)
  • After repaying the loan, the user gets his/her collateral back, even if it has increased in value.


Approved Member of Blockchain Association

The company is an official Blockchain Association member of the Financial Commission, an independent Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO) and External Dispute Resolution (EDR) provider. Blockchain Association members and their customers benefit from access to Financial Commission’s efficient dispute resolution process and compliance technology.

Youhodler introduces Crypto Spring

To provide the best Loan to Value to its existing and new customers, Youhodler has introduced Crypto Spring special offer which now offers 90% LTV. The reason behind this offer is that the crypto market is on the rise and the company wanted to help its users all take advantage of it. Under the Crypto Spring scheme, a user can get a 30-day loan term, with an astounding 90% loan to value ratio (LTV).

Future plans

In the latter part of 2019, the company would be launching its personal YouHodler Master Card (EUR) or will be allowing users to connect their existing VISA/MasterCard to YouHodler’s Mobile App. With this credit card system, the loan process will further become seamless as the credit card would come with a EUR 30000 limit and would bear a 16% annual rate of interest with 0 monthly fees.

The platform looks impressive and its features are unmatchably making the platform a one-stop destination for all hodlers to encash their holdings without actually losing any of their digital assets.

Do you think Youhodler is the best crypto lending platform? Do let us know your views on the same

Source

43

While the cryptocurrency market has cooled down after breaking previously set resistances, a Bitcoin hard fork has continued projecting a double-digit surge. The bulls successfully pushed Bitcoin Gold [BTG] above the highly anticipated $18-mark. The 27th largest crypto-asset on CoinMarketCap posted major gains during the crypto-rally propelled by Bitcoin [BTC], earlier this week.

At press time, the fork coin, BTG, held a market cap of $325.6 million against the US Dollar, priced at $18.70. The 24-hour trading volume recorded by the crypto-coin stood at $28.65 million, according to CoinMarketCap. It further recorded a surge of 11.27% over the past 24-hours.

The digital asset, which was spiraling below $14, recorded a three-month high after the latest surge. A significant hike of 43.48% was also noted over the week.

BTG: 1 day-chart

Source: TradingView
Approximately 26.18% of the Bitcoin Gold trade volume was registered by Bithumb via the trading pair BTG/KRW, followed by the pair BTG/BTC on Binance.

In the otherwise silent space of this particular hard fork, the surge is being speculated to be because of the latest full-featured desktop called the Electrum G. The wallet boasts a light-weight, feature-rich, and user-friendly wallet for BTG. According to the official BTG website, Electrum G is a Simplified Payment Verification wallet that stores just the headers and not the entire blockchain.

The latest wallet is

https://twitter.com/bitcoingold/status/1114229924477526016

Source

44

Some 2.5 million eth, or slightly more than $400 million, is now locked in dapps as decentralized open finance (defi) continues to grow (pictured above).

MakerDAO’s DAI smart contract continues to dominate by far, with 2.2 million eth locked in there, allowing 20,000 people to hold dai.

In second position is arguably the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) which back in June 2017 by itself held about half a billion dollars worth of eth.

That has now fallen from ◊2 million to 159,691 eth ($27.9M), allowing individuals to create humanly readable eth addresses, like trustnodes.eth rather than the random numbers and letters that make up our donation address at the bottom pages.

Then comes Compound, a very interesting dapp that allows you to borrow and gain interest by lending eth as well as a number of other tokens, including dai.

This now secures close to 40,000 eth, with the total value of all assets in there standing at circa $27.5 million.

Crypto amounts locked in dapps, April 2019.
Uniswap is rising in usage, up now from about $1 million in February to circa $10 million or close to 30,000 eth.

The only other decentralized exchange listed here is Kyber. They had an article of their own detailing how their ecosystem is doing.

In that article they mention Nuo, a new dapp that allows one to margin long or short bitcoin eth or MKR, as well as allows one to lend their assets.

Apparently $1.6 million worth of eth (and presumably other assets) is now locked in there, with it being just one example of projects/dapps that have not yet made it to stat pages presumably because such pages are very new.

This entire defi field in fact is we’d say only 4-5 months old because after dai launched around the beginning of 2018, everyone was waiting to see whether it will actually work, whether it will be hacked, and so on.

Some pioneers showed the water is safe-ish, so more confidence was gained with other dapps then building on that new area of financial ethereum applications.

The billions that were raised starting in 2016 eventually begun to translate into working products last year, with defi being one outcome of things you can now do with your eth.

You can sort of have all of the tokenized S&P500, and that has $1.1 million dai in their smart contract, with that project very much brand new.

One can imagine it expanding into effectively any asset of value, perhaps even as abstractly as the entire shipping industry or maybe the whole European Union economy.

That being the fruits at near the top of the tree, but for now even those laying on the ground are not yet being picked, so there are plenty of far easier applications as this space continues building the Windows 95 MS Paints.

While that goes on, there’s the protocol level sort of defi with the Proof of Stake testnet now out. That will give an interest rate of 2%-6% according to Vitalik Buterin and a very rough translation.

Interestingly phase 1 of sharding, that is the chopping up of storage, may now launch in Q1 or Q2 of 2020. That technically means they’re keeping to the deadline we have given them jokingly (sort of), but “real” sharding is “delayed” by a year as it will now hopefully go out in 2021.

That’s what one would have expected, so it kind of appears like all is going to plan because all these dapps and so on do need some work on UI, testing out, improvements on every front, with this potential two years period giving them the needed time.

Then when sharding launches hopefully these dapps won’t be so bleeding edge any more, but sort of at least semi-cutting edge.

Source

45

Coinbase, a US-based cryptocurrency exchange, has recently made it to LinkedIn ‘Top Companies 2019’ list, which looks at US firms’ popularity by analyzing their performance when it comes to interest in the company, employee engagement, employee retention, and job demand.

According to the networking platform for professionals’ list, Coinbase ranked 335 out of 50, ahead of giants like JP Morgan Chase, Twitter, and Intel. It was notably the only cryptocurrency-focused firm to make it to the list.

LinkedIn’s report notes Coinbase has predominantly been hiring staff to work in IT, engineering, and human resources roles, and has a headcount of roughly 600 in the country. Its employees can choose to be paid partially or fully in bitcoin, and roughly 40% choose to have part of their salary be paid out in crypto.

Per CoinDesk, the cryptocurrency exchange offers “above industry standard perks” to retain its staff, including offers of up to $5,000 a year for treatments like egg-freezing, and health insurance options.

LinkedIn has in the past ranked Coinbase as one of the best startups to work for, alongside payment network Ripple and another US-based cryptocurrency exchange, Gemini. Another report, on emerging jobs, noted the blockchain developer role was in high demand last year.

Notably in this year’s list of top companies in the US, Coinbase came ahead of JP Morgan, which earlier this year launched its own stablecoin called JPM Coin. The banking giant has, per LinkedIn’s report, been focusing on hiring for finance, engineering, and business development roles.

Topping the networking platform’s list were tech giants like Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, as well as Facebook and Amazon, which came in at number two and three.

Source

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