2018 in Review: The Biggest Crypto News Stories of the Year
Time for a recap of an eventful year.
MainNet launches, massive hacks, large scale investments, acquisitions, hard forks, and just a ton of absurdity that mandatorily accompanies emerging technologies. This one goes out to anyone who needs a quick refresher of what happened in 2018 besides bubbles deflating. Here’s some of the news items that made 2018 an unforgettable year to forget.
January
Jan. 4: Cease and Desist order against Bitconnect. While having been worth as much as $3BM on paper at some point, Bitconeeeeect eventually got disconnected. With Bitconnect investor Carlos Matos’ annual ceremony speech becoming one of the most meme-worthy events late 2017, the year could not have started with a more symbolic shut down of a high-profile scam.
Jan. 8: TRON whitepaper plagiarism scandal. TRON gets called out for plagiarism by Protocol Labs’ founder and inventor of IPFS Juan Benet. TRON’s founder Justin Sun attempts to shift the blame to volunteer translators, but a deeper look at the original Chinese whitepaper doesn’t advance his claims.
Jan. 26: Coincheck hack. In what was likely the hack of the year, hackers gained access to Japanese exchange Coincheck’s NEM wallet. Hackers made off with over 520MM XEM coins, worth over $530MM at the time of the hack. NEM was the only cryptocurrency on Coincheck that wasn’t secured in an offline cold wallet. The hackers’ wallet was subsequently flagged by Coincheck, both rendering the stolen funds obsolete and raising concerns about the level of centralization within the NEM network.
Jan. 30: Facebook bans ads for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Labeling crypto ads as “frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices”, the social network imposes an all-out ban on ads from exchanges and ICOs. Google and Youtube would follow suit by mid-March, making the big tech crypto-ad ban complete.
February
Feb. 16: Coinbase glitch wrongfully charges customers’ credit cards up to $67,000, and blames Visa. One month later, Visa exonerates Coinbase in a joint statement, proving the glitch did in fact happen downstream in the payment processing.
March
Mar. 18: Red Sunday. Ether, NEO, Cardano, Stellar and EOS all see near to 20% drops amidst major sell-offs. Between March 11th and March 18th, the total market cap for the crypto-economy lost over USD $100BN plunging from $384BN to $280BN.
Mar. 23: Binance announces opening office in Malta. Warned by the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) that it would face criminal charges if it continued to operate in Japan without proper license, the company announced it would move it headquarters to the crypto-friendly Mediterranean island.
April
Apr. 1: No better space for April Fools than the cryptoverse. This year’s announcement of the Google ICO and the launch of Googol Coin (GG) takes the grand prize in a field with numerous worthy runner-ups.
Apr. 2: Robinhood launches commission-free crypto trading functionality. The long-awaited functionality went live in 5 states: California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire.
May
May 20: Bitmain invests $110MM in Circle, showing support for its USD-pegged stablecoin USDC. Circle had previously raised $130MM from Goldman Sachs and IGC Capital.
May 31: TRON (TRX) launches on Mainnet. The TRON Foundation claims Odyssey 2.0 will increase the overall throughput of the platform to over 1000 TPS while charging a fraction of the transactions costs of the Ethereum blockchain. The TRX price would start a precipitous decline right after this launch event, lasting until as late as November. On the plus side, TRON did post an impressive 1 million user accounts by late December.
June
June 9: EOS Mainnet Launch. June was all about the EOS mainnet launch and the troubles that quickly followed. The ambitiously monikered ‘Ethereum Killer’ championed by Dan Larimer launched under a wide set of security governance issues.
June 12: Binance takes 5% stake in Malta’s Founders Bank at a $155MM pre-money valuation, in an attempt to create the world’s first decentralized bank. Founders Bank offers legally-binding equity tokens under the German regulatory regime through Neufund, a blockchain-based fundraising platform.
June 11: Bitmain raises $400MM in a pre-IPO round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $12BN. The Chinese giant owns 80% of the ASIC chips market.
June 30: VeChain Thor (VET) Mainnet launches. Holders of VEN (VeChain’s ERC-20 token) are able to swap at a 1:100 ratio.
July
July 6: South Korea’s Financial Services Committee (FSC) regulates crypto exchanges. In a move that both legitimizes crypto trading and hinders new market entrances, the FSC creates a new category ‘Cryptocurrency Exchange and Brokerage’ under which existing exchanges are meant to operate under. While legitimizing the industry, this also means that exchanges should seek costly permission from cybersecurity agencies and the department of financial intelligence to operate legally.
July 18: NEO’s idea of elections. While the NEO Foundation announced it had elected the first node to its network, NEO developers pointed out that token holders were not allowed to participate in the vote. In May, the NEO Foundation had already issued an official statement proclaiming that NEO values speed and efficiency over decentralization, likening the latter to “crypto-political correctness”.
July 26: SEC rejects Winklevosses’ second application to create a Bitcoin ETF The news sends BTC price down to $8000.
July 31: Binance acquires Trust Wallet in its first public acquisition. Trust Wallet, a secure and intuitive mobile wallet was quickly gaining traction as one of the go-to wallets for the cryptocommunity. The Binance blog states: “ As a technology driven company, Binance’s acquisition of Trust Wallet shows the importance of secure wallet technology for the future development of cryptocurrency as a whole.”
August
Aug. 3: Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announces Bakkt, a fully compliant futures exchange with the goal of making Bitcoin palatable to institutional investors. Bakkt partners with Microsoft and Starbucks to add practical use cases to Bitcoin ownership. Initially set to launch in November, the launch eventually got delayed until January 2019 due to regulatory issues.
Aug. 29: South-Korean stablecoin project Terra raises USD $32MM from Binance Labs, OKEx, Huobi Capital and others.
September
Sep. 10: The New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) authorizes Gemini and Paxos Standard Token to issue USD-pegged stablecoins.
Sep. 11: Binance signs MOU with Malta Stock Exchange to launch security tokens trading platform.
Sep. 26: Bitmain files for IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Bitmain, the world’s largest mining hardware supplier, filed an application to take the company public, in an attempt to raise $3BN from the traditional equity markets. The application is still requires approval from the HK listings committee.
Sep. 21: XRP overtakes Ether as the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
October
Oct. 1: Ripple’s xRapid goes live, first commercial application by financial services firms. xRapid is set to facilitate international transactions between financial institutions. The new product has payment providers Mercury FX and Cuallix amongst its first customers.
Oct. 4: Wallmart pushes suppliers to use IBM’s blockchain-based “Food Trust Solution” to track the supply chain of lettuce and spinache. An E.Coli outbreak had sickened over 200 customers just 6 months earlier. The move lended some much-needed credibility to blockchain applications in supply-chain management.
Oct. 11: SOSV and Emurgo join forces to launch blockchain start-up accelerator in New York.
Oct. 23: HTC’s blockchain smartphone, the Exodus 1 goes into pre-sale. The phone has a secure enclave that serves as a hardware-based key manager, isolated from its main processor, in similar fashion as Apple securely stores its user data for Apple Pay and Face ID.
Oct. 29: Venezuela’s Petro launch. In what might be the dud of the year, Venezuela officially launched sales its state-backed cryptocurrency, the Petro. Public sales would start November 5th, but by year’s end it wasn’t even clear if the oil reserves that are supposed to back the currency actually exist. It lead former Oil Minister Raphael Ramirez to state that “the petro is being set at an arbitrary value, which only exists in the government’s imagination.”
Oct. 30: South Korea’s Financial Services Committee (FSC) states that South Korean banks should provide regular service to crypto exchanges, if these exchanges comply with KYC/AML standards. Advances in the regulatory framework legitimize some of South Korea’s largest exchanges such as Bitthumb and Upbit. On the same day, the Central District Court in Seoul ruled in favor of the Coinis exchange, in a case where its bank Nonghyup had unilaterally closed its services to the exchange.
November
Nov. 6: SEC orders Airfox and Paragon Coin to return $27MM to investors. In what are the first cases of the SEC imposing civil penalties, the companies are further required to pay $250k in penalties, register their tokens as securities and file periodic reports with the SEC. The order opens up the possibility for investors in ICOs that the SEC deems securities to file lawsuits against the projects they invested in.
Nov. 15: Bitcoin Cash Fork. Fork turns ugly, hash war ensues. The two camps differ in their approach to solving the scalability problem, with BCH ABC (backed by Roger Ver, Bitcoin.com, Amaury Sechet, Bitmain, Kraken, Binance, Coinbase and others) seeking larger block size and BCH SV (backed by Craig Wright, nChain, CoinGeek and Bitcoin.org), the whole episode sparked a market sell-off with many coins losing 30% of their value over the succeeding month.
Nov. 16: Zilliqa sets date for Mainnet launch on January 31st 2019. The Testnet had been live since March, and Mainnet launch was originally set for Q3 2018.
Nov. 27: NASDAQ to list Bitcoin futures in Q1 2019. Confirming that it is sticking with its plans, NASDAQ is squaring things out with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to list its own Bitcoin futures in 2019. In February, the CFTC strengthened its review process to assist regulators.
Nov. 29: Closely following the pre-sale of HTC’s Exodus, Sirin Labs launches Finney, a crowd-funded blockchain phone. Named after Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney, the $1000 phone is the first to embed a cold wallet into its chipset, on top of a bunch of other security features such as behavioral-based intrusion prevention.
December
Dec.1: Zhang Shoucheng, theoretical physicist and founder of Danhua Capital, dies at 55. Professor Zhang leaves a legacy of accomplishments in fundamental science, in particular condensed matter physics. Danhua Capital is an active investor in Zilliqa, NEO, Ontology and Blockfolio.
Dec. 2: G20 signs joint declaration to regulate cryptocurrencies in line with Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards. The joint declaration lists money laundering and financing of terrorism as its main concerns, alongside with the impacts of the digitization of the economy on the international tax system. Part of the declaration reads: “ While crypto-assets do not at this point pose a global financial stability risk, we remain vigilant.”
Dec. 4: Binance shows off Binance DEX demo. Binance DEX is a decentralized exchange, set to launch early 2019. BNB gains 8% the following day.
Dec. 13: Cypherpunk legend Timothy May passes away at his home. May famously authored “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” and “The Cyphernomicon”. Inspired by the writings of David Chaum, he strongly advocated the rise of cryptographically secure digital money. May’s death was found to be because of natural causes.
Dec. 16: Bitcoin bottoms out for the year at just under $3200. Opinions remain divided if this will be the bottom price before a long-term recovery or not.
Dec. 19: Hong Kong regulators’ comments dampen hopes for Bitmain IPO. Regulators in Hong Kong signaled that IPO listings for crypto-related businesses would be premature. Other Chinese crypto unicorns such as Canaan Creative and Ebang Communications have previously been rejected by the listings committee. Canaan let its application lapse on November 17th, Ebang refiled its application on December 20th.
Dec. 22: Raiden Red Eyes released on Mainnet. Raiden Network, the second layer scalability solution for Ethereum, announces that Red Eyes is ready for alpha testing on the Mainnet.
With this, the team at Portfolio.io is looking forward to 2019, in which #BUIDL is the new #HODL, more exchanges become decentralized, crypto adoption gains mainstream momentum and we might finally see that killer consumer app.
Bob Bogaert is co-founder and COO at Portfolio.io, a fintech start-up backed by SOSV, the only outside investor in BitMEX, and Artesian Ventures. Portfolio.io allows crypto enthusiasts to build a portfolio in less than 60 seconds. Early sign-ups are open at https://portfolio.io.
ARE WE MISSING SOMETHING? Please leave your news story of the year in the comments.
//This article was first published at https://portfolio.io/crypto-exchange-rates.html
