Official Newsletter of 2/11
The weekend got off to a positive start for crypto bulls, with Bitcoin surging from $3,350 to $3,650 in a matter of minutes on Friday. Alts surged as a result, Litecoin saw a number of short squeezes and jumped back to 4th place by market cap. Sentiment in the space has been highly mixed, however, with exchange hacks and lost private keys dominating the news. On more positive notes, ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) has expressed the belief that BAKKT will be their “moonshot bet” when it comes to Bitcoin, and a leaked interview with SEC commissioner Robert Jackson Jr. suggested that a Bitcoin based ETF will eventually get approval, despite the many rejections over the past year.
(Taken on 2/11/2019 at 18:55:13 PM US East Coast Standard Time from CoinTelegraph)
Monthly Pivots
(Taken on 2/10/2019 at 18:55:13 PM US East Coast Standard Time from DailyFX)
Weekly Pivots
(Taken on 2/10/2019 at 18:55:13 PM US East Coast Standard Time from DailyFX)
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Business
Facebook Quietly Acquires Blockchain Startup
On Tuesday news emerged that Facebook had acqui-hired the team behind Chainspace , a planned ICO developing a smart contracts platform with sharing — the scaling solution also being sought for later updates to Ethereum. The Chainspace website has an announcement at the top saying simply: “We’re excited to announce the team is moving on to something new.” It seems that Chainspace will now not pursue an ICO, choosing instead to make all code and research open source. Facebook joins a long list of tech giants and major businesses more generally to move into crypto in some capacity. We published a story on Friday listing the blockchain efforts of a number of prevalent companies in this context, with some commentary as to what Facebook’s acquisition might mean for the industry. You can read that piece by clicking here.
BitTorrent Token “Sold Out” in 15 Minutes
The sale took place on Binance Launchpad on January 28th. If not for some technical difficulties, the BitTorrent Token (BTT) would have completely sold out in under 7 minutes. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao reported sales of over $7 billion USD in under 15 minutes. This frenzy could be in anticipation of BitTorrent’s new file sharing system called “BitTorrent Speed” coming this summer. The token will promote users interfacing with the system by uploading and downloading files.
Quadriga CX Case Continues to Unravel
Speculation also emerged this week that the co-founder of now infamous Canadian exchange Quadriga CX may have been operating under a fake name, and may in fact be Omar Dhanani — convicted of fraud in the US and released in 2007. Twitter and Reddit have been abuzz with posts connecting Michael Patryn, co-founder of Quadriga, with Dhanani — a member of the “Shadowcrew Six” who pled guilty to credit card fraud in 2005. No confirmation of this has emerged thus far, however, so this should be treated with skepticism. Patryn was in the news this week paying tribute to fellow co-founder Gerald Cotten, who died in Rajasthan, India on December 9th, and apparently had sole access to the exchanges’ cold wallets worth 150 million USD. Cotten filed a will 12 days before his death, sparking conspiracy theories that the death is not genuine and instead an elaborate exit scam. The Ontario Securities Commission has now opened a probe into the exchange, given the potential for harm to Canadian customers (Ontario Securities Commission).
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Technology
Majority of Ethereum Dapps have no users
LongHash reported on Thursday that 90% of Ethereum dapps (decentralized applications) have no active daily users. The site states: “We found that out of a total of 1812 Ethereum DApps, based on StateoftheDApps data, ERC20 transactions were made on only 180 DApps.” Within those 180 dapps just 13% had more than 100,000 transactions per day. This suggests that adoption of the biggest blockchain for smart contracts remains low, although it is worth conceding that the severity of the bear market could be a driving force for this.
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What’s on the Horizon?
Intercontinental Exchange’s (ICE) Digital Asset Platform “Bakkt” Will Launch Later in 2019
ICE owns 23 exchanges worldwide, including the New York Stock Exchange. Many investors and crypto enthusiasts anticipate this as the moment institutional investors will back cryptocurrencies. Many see Bakkt as the key to open the door with the ultimate goal of facilitating daily bitcoin transfers.
Further readings we found interesting!
- Bitcoin price is booming but don’t get too excited yet
https://www.longhash.com/news/ten-percent-of-ethereum-dapps-are-used-on-any-given-da
2. QuadrigaCX drama continues!
3. More delays in US Crypto Regulation
