Crypto Month in Review — July 2018
Previous reviews: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun
Crypto moves way too fast for me to keep up, so I aggregate each day’s biggest headline and publish the list at the end of the month. Below is my list for July. My main holdings are ETH and NANO, but I try to make these lists as unbiased as possible.
7/1 — Tezos launches its betanet, calling the milestone “an inflection point” in the company’s often controversial history.
7/2 — Coinbase Custody, a platform designed for institutional investors, goes live, with 11 institutions already using it in the first day.
7/3 — India’s highest court upholds the country’s ban on banks to deal with cryptocurrency.
7/4 — Neo signals the beginning of its “era of decentralization ” by voting in a new master node.
7/5 — A senior engineer at Facebook becomes their “Director of Engineering, Blockchain”.
7/6 — Swiss stock exchange SIX plans to launch its own fully regulated cryptocurrency exchange by mid-2019.
7/7 — Binance says they are on pace to record a profit of $1 billion in 2018, surpassing many major banks.
7/8 — Google co-founder Sergei Brin is a last minute addition to the Blockchain Summit panel on emerging technologies, and he states he mines Ether with his 10 year old son.
7/9 — Bancor, which raised one of the largest ICOs ever, experiences a security breach of its contract wallet, resulting in the theft of over $25 million ETH and BNT.
7/10 — Augur’s prediction market, a flagship Ethereum distributed application, goes live and immediately becomes the most used dapp on the platform.
7/11 — South Korean regulators reveal drafts of bills intended to create rules regarding cryptocurrency, ICOs, and blockchain technology in general. This would reverse an ICO ban started in early 2018.
7/12 — After raising $100 million in an ICO in 2017, messaging company Kik starts a $3 million developer fund for programmers who develop apps that use the Kik cryptocurrency.
7/13 — Coinbase states in an interview that they are considering adding support for five new coins: Cardano, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, Basic Attention Token, and 0x.
7/14 — Robert Mueller and the special council reveal that the Russians who hacked the DNC database purchased web servers and domain names using Bitcoin because they thought it was anonymous.
7/15 — A theory that accuses EOS of using ICO funds to spam the Ethereum network and raise transaction costs gains traction on reddit and other social media sites.
7/16 — After its acquisition of 3 trading-focused companies, Coinbase gets the go-ahead from financial regulators to list cryptocurrencies that are deemed securities.
7/17 — IBM backs a USD-pegged stablecoin called Stronghold, the first stablecoin to ever be implemented on the Stellar platform.
7/18 — MasterCard files a patent for a payment system that links blockchain based cryptocurrencies to fiat accounts.
7/19 — Brian Armstrong and Vitalik Buterin make the Fortune “40 under 40” list for the second time, while Telegram founder Pavel Durov and Robinhood co-CEOs Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt make their first appearances on the list.
7/20 — Cloud mining service HashFlare cancels all Bitcoin mining contracts due to lack of profitability.
7/21 — Coinbase starts its own political action committee to lobby US politicians to support cryptocurrency adoption.
7/22 — Google adds currency conversion support for Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin.
7/23 — Leaders at the G20 summit state that digital currencies are not a threat to global financial stability.
7/24 — The SEC suspends a much-anticipated approval vote on a Bitcoin ETF proposed by Direxion until September, stopping a Bitcoin price recovery.
7/25 — Concern is raised in the Augur community over the creation of “assassination markets” which allow users to bet on the death of public figures such as Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos.
7/26 — The SEC denies an appeal of their decision to reject the Bitcoin ETF proposed by the Winklevoss twins in 2017.
7/27 — Nasdaq holds a closed-door meeting with other traditional and cryptocurrency exchanges, including Gemini, to discuss legitimizing and improving the public image of cryptocurrencies.
7/28 — Results of a Gallup poll show that only 2% of US investors own Bitcoin, but that 26% are “intrigued” by it.
7/29 — In a tweet, Vitalik Buterin stresses for mainstream adoption the importance of “being able to buy small amounts of cryptocurrency” over ETF approvals.
7/30 — Sky Mining CEO Le Minh Tam flees Thailand with 600 mining rigs and over $35 million worth of investor funds.
7/31 — Thompson Reuters partners with CryptoCompare to provide order and trade book data on their financial platform Eikon.
