The market made small gains over the weekend, finally pushing past $4,000. However, it is not out of the wind yet as the price is still around that price point. The growth slowed down slightly towards the end of the weekend as the total market cap lost $400 Million in the last 24 hours. Bitcoin has to move further to $4,200 to confirm a bull run. Until then, it is still in a limbo as both bears and bulls tussle. Meanwhile, the market volume for Bitcoin surpassed $10 Billion, reaching a 15-month high that has not been since January 2018.
In other news, Germany-based cryptocurrency investment app Donut has announced a successful seed round of $1.8 Million. Donut simplifies the daunting task of creating a digital asset portfolio for new investors. The firm is still in the product development process and app is in beta right now. It is expected to launch this summer. Also, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said fundraising on blockchain will be an essential application for crypto and he stressed the importance of exchanges supporting the industry. CZ said “we have got to help entrepreneurs who build things in our industry” and proof of this comes from Binance’s recent listing of BitTorrent token which quickly gained more than 1,000 percent in value over 3 days. CZ said that Binance’s Launchpad is essentially “an exchange, an initial sales platform where we help projects to raise money.” KuCoin has also announced the launch of a similar initial exchange offering (IEO) platform called Spotlight and Huobi appears to be launching a similar ICO incubator and launch platform.
1) Binance Coin (BNB), the native currency of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been enjoying a lot of traction lately. In fact, while the entire market crashed last year, it was the best performing cryptocurrency. In the last 3 months alone, it tripled its value from $5 to $15. Its market cap at the same time went from $638 Million to $2.2 Billion, making it the 7th largest cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, Binance continues to remain the top crypto exchange with a volume of $700 Million in the last 24 hours. Binance Coin has enjoyed huge success due to various Binance initiatives such as Binance Chain and initial token sales. (Read More)
2) Bitcoin Cash is set to upgrade its protocol on May 15th 2019, and the biggest change will be the implementation of Schnorr Signatures. Leading Bitcoin Cash developer Amaury Séchet has been working on the technology for over a year now. Schnorr can facilitate ring signatures, which can allow for any actor in a group to sign without revealing which actor did it. It is this technology which provides anonymity in privacy coins such as Monero. Surprisingly, this feature is coming to Bitcoin Cash well before Bitcoin Core. Schnorr signatures are at the design stage for Bitcoin core and there has been a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) since last year. (Read More)
3) Beginning earlier in March, the Gate.io cryptocurrency exchange began announcing support for residents from other countries, starting with the US. Previously, users from many industrialized countries were prohibited from using the platform due to KYC and AML restrictions. Now, users from the US, Japan and Canada are able to use the exchange services offered by the platform once they have gone through a simple KYC procedure to verify their identity. (Read More)
