Crazy days in Crypto…
Top Stories (7/26)
SEC issues guidance on ICOs
TL:DR Some, but not all, tokens are considered securities. The SEC did not press charges against the DAO or any other ICOs.
Good piece here and a good tweet storm by Marco Santori. Statement from CoinCenter:
“ We believe that applying the same facts and circumstances test to other tokens will mean that some do not fit into the definition of securities, particularly tokens with an underlying utility rather than a mere speculative investment value. Our securities framework and other research explains why this is the case. We hope clear guidance from the SEC to that effect will be forthcoming.”
BTC-E arrest on money laundering charges connected with Mt Gox hack from 2011
Good deep dive from CoinDesk here. Wild stuff — the Mt. Gox thief stole 630k Bitcoin or $1.5B at today’s rate.
Bitcoin Cash fork on August 1st
Friendly reminder to get your Bitcoin off exchanges until this plays out.
Here’s some more background on the potential fork.
“How Coders Hacked Back to ‘Rescue’ $208M in Ethereum
As of today, the white hat group has returned 95% of the rescued funds.
On Wednesday, an anonymous hacker (or hackers) stole $32 million worth of ethereum’s cryptocurrency, ether, from three multi-signature wallets thanks to a vulnerability in the contract for the wallets.
A volunteer group of coders calling themselves the White Hat Group took it upon themselves to “rescue” the funds in the other 500 vulnerable wallets before the hackers could get them. They did this by breaching the wallets using the same vulnerability as the hackers and funneling the funds into the group’s own account.
On Monday morning, the group was in possession of $86 million USD worth of other people’s ether, and $122 million in tokens — the digital assets that are sold off in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), fundraising events that have raised millions in mere minutes. That’s about $208 million worth of digital assets in ethereum, in total.
And with all this drama going on, the market remains resilient.
Mainstream News (7/26)
CFTC Approves LedgerX to trade derivatives … key to institutional adoption
American Express Brings Credit Card Buying to Bitcoin App Abra
Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz Are Secretly Backing This Cryptocurrency Hedge Fund
7 Cryptocurrency Predictions From the Experts
An Airline Just Started Using an Ethereum Blockchain to Issue Tickets
Resources (7/26)
Coin Center: Do you really need a blockchain for that?
Research from Vitalik on incentives in Casper