Hey everyone,
You may have seen me before through Stratis, Medium or Twitter.
In my Weekly Crypto Overview, I will try to assemble the important news of the last week and make a summary of it. This way you will have one place to go for all the major events that happened the week before in crypto. I hope you enjoy it and that it saves you a lot of time searching for all the news. I know not everyone has the privilege to be full-time in crypto, so I hope this is a solution for many of you.
So let’s dig in… What kept the crypto world at hands last week?
- Bakkt 12 December
- HTC Blockchain Phone
- Elon Musk and Bitcoin
- Coinbase Stablecoin
- Coinbase Qualified as Custodian
- China and Bitcoin
- Bitfury Considers Going Public
- OKEx Delisting Trading Pairs
Bakkt to launch on 12 December
By now everyone should have heard about Bakkt, for the people that didn’t, here is a small summary of Bakkt:
Bakkt is designed to enable consumers and institutions to seamlessly buy, sell, store and spend digital assets. Formed with the purpose of bringing trust, efficiency and commerce to digital assets, Bakkt seeks to develop open technology to connect existing market and merchant infrastructure to the blockchain.
Bakkt will work with companies that include BCG, Starbucks, Microsoft and others to create an open ecosystem that supports growing needs in the digital asset marketplace.
Last week ICE announced that Bakkt could begin offering physically settled bitcoin futures contracts in December, marking the first cryptocurrency-related offering provided through the new platform. Bakkt will hold the bitcoins backing the futures contract in the ICE Digital Asset Warehouse, according to the notice, provided the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) signs off.
With Bakkt leading the way, this could be a great step in the direction of getting an ETF in the foreseeable future as well.
HTC Blockchain Phone
Global consumer tech giant HTC is officially releasing its first blockchain-enabled phone.
The HTC Exodus (early-access version) is now available for pre-order and can only be bought with Bitcoin or Ethereum.
The goal of this first version is to work with the crypto community and making their wallet and technology even more secure. It’s pretty cool that such a giant is essentially asking for testers in the crypto community and providing feedback and suggestions to make it a better and secure phone.
You can read more about the HTC Exodus on their website -> https://www.htcexodus.com/eu/
Elon Musk and Bitcoin
As some of you may have noticed, Elon Musk founder of SpaceX and Tesla is becoming more and more ‘diverse’ on Twitter.
Last week Elon tweeted ‘I love anime’ -> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1054501056229588992
So what does this have to do with Bitcoin? Well in this post he tweeted the following reaction:
I have no idea what we should make out of it, but at least Bitcoin got some nice exposure out of it. Let’s see what the future of Elon Musk and Bitcoin brings us.
Coinbase Stablecoin
Stablecoin, stable coin, sta ble coin.. I don’t know how many times I have seen the word stablecoin last week and the week before. It’s definitely trending in crypto.
Well… There is another one! Coinbase and Circle announced the launch of their Stablecoin ‘USDC’ a Digital Dollar. The new USDC stablecoin is fully collateralized by US dollars and supported by Coinbase and Circle as co-founding members of the CENTRE Consortium.
You can find their announcement over here.
Coinbase Qualified as Custodian
Last week Coinbase received approval from New York regulators for a qualified custodial for cryptocurrencies.
The New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) released the following press release:
https://www.dfs.ny.gov/about/press/pr1810231.htmsaid Tuesday
In this release, it states that the NYDFS grants Coinbase’s application to create the Coinbase Custody Trust Company LLC, as well as approving the Coinbase Trust to offer custody services for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin and XRP.
The odd one in the list is XRP because you can’t buy XRP on Coinbase right now.
China and Bitcoin
Last week, an arbitration body in China has ruled that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are legally protected as property.
Cointelegraph wrote an article with full details about it, which you can read here.
With China approving Bitcoin as a property, individuals and businesses can own and transfer Bitcoin without being in conflict with existing financial regulations.
Bitfury Considers Going Public
Bitfury was founded in 2011 and is known as the largest non-Chinese company that develops Bitcoin blockchain software and provides infrastructure for mining.
Bitfury is thinking about going public. This could be Europe’s first major listing in the industry. Bitfury has reached out to global investment banks as it explores making its trading debut in Amsterdam, London or Hong Kong as early as next year.
Read more about it in the article from Bloomberg over here.
Okex Delisting Trading Pairs
Recently we have seen a lot of crypto exchanges, small or big, delisting trading pairs. This could have various reasons like regulations, shady ICOs or weak performance.
One of the largest crypto exchanges OKEx is joining the party. Last week they announced that they will be delisting over 50 trading pairs due to weak performance.
In their announcement, they published a list with all the trading pairs that will be delisted -> https://support.okex.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018396732-Delisting-of-Trading-Pairs
All trading pairs will be delisted at 06:00 October 31, 2018 (Central European Time). Important notice is that only trading pairs with weak liquidity and trading volume are delisted, but not the tokens themselves.
I would like to thank all of you for the positive feedback and excitement after the launch of my first Weekly Crypto Overview. I hope you continue to read them and spread the word.
Cheers,
Khilone
