Selloffs and Meetups
YAP hosts tonight’s talk on Basic Attention Token & Brave.
Come out tonight (it’s not that cold.)
Christopher, a member of the Basic Attention Token (BAT) team, will be providing one of tonight’s talks at the Crypto & DWeb Meetup.
BAT is tokenizing attention.
Brave Software, its designing company, already provides contribution revenue to publishers and creators. With new initiatives, Brave aims to use BAT to create a better ecosystem for ads and ad revenue.
“Most of the meetup will be networking. We will also have one or two lightning talks (between 5 and 15 minutes each). If you are interested to give one, please contact Francis Brunelle.”
Don’t worry if you’re late — the networking and informal discussions will take us well into the night.
Do you remember where our offices are? Just remember to buzz suite 700!
Bitcoin climbed above $4.000 despite the ongoing market selloff. Market sentiment remained generally negative due to wider regulatory concerns, including SEC charges on crypto-firm AriseBank and Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled for their role in a questionable initial coin offering. Though regulations ruled the week, there was some more promising news, with Nasdaq announcing a new bitcoin futures market.
Bitcoin selloff continues. Bitcoin crashed last week, dropping below $4,000. Bitcoin is now off more than 35 percent from earlier this month, and down more than 80 percent from last December. A lot of cryptocurrency insiders are blaming “hard forks,” or technical changes to the currency, for the selloff. However, skeptics see the plunge as proof that the whole crypto industry was a mirage. “I don’t think coins are going to be anywhere near as attractive as some of the other cross-asset plays,” Stephen Innes of Oanda Corp. told Bloomberg. “Gold prices are going to jump considerably higher and there’s an inverse relationship we’re starting to see with gold and coins.”
Major Canadian jewelry manufacturer to accept bitcoin. Birks Group, which has been in operation since 1879, recently announced that it will be accepting Bitcoin with the help of its partnership with BitPay. The initial rollout will occur simultaneously in its eight largest stores, with plans to gradually increase that number over time. “Birks Group has a large number of international shoppers so allowing them to pay in bitcoin makes perfect sense,” said Sonny Singh, Chief Commercial Officer at BitPay in a join press release with Birks Group. “Accepting bitcoin helps Birks Group to cater to their high-end international clients and get new customers while providing an innovative and safe payment option.”
French regulators target crypto firm. The French version of the Securities Exchange Commission, the Autorité des marchés financiers, went on the offensive against a crypto start-up, KeplerK, that intends to sell Bitcoin at retail stores across the country beginning early 2019. The regulatory platform noted, “Its distribution by a public limited company, PAYSAFEBIT SASU with a capital of 50000 euros, using the trade name KEPLERK, which does not have any authorization or approval by a French or foreign authority, is not likely to provide any guarantee to the customer base.”
Canadian payments app launches crypto platform. Popular payments application, Glace Pay, announced that it will be adding Bitcoin to its platform. The feature will allow users to pair their cryptocurrency wallets with the application to purchase Glance Dollars, which can be spent at participating merchants. “We are continually building out new payment features to ensure our platform is at the forefront of technology,” said Glance Technologies CEO Desmond Griffin in the company’s press release, adding “Pay With Bitcoin allows Glance users to unlock the value of their crypto assets for use in their everyday lives while seamlessly opening up a new cutting-edge payment method for merchants.”
600,000 Bitcoin miners shut down. The price meltdown for Bitcoin has forced between 600,000 and 800,000 miners to close their doors since mid-November, according to F2pool. “It’s hard to calculate a precise number of miners connected to us that had unplugged. But we saw over tens of thousands of them [shut down] in the past several days based on conversations we had with larger farms that we are in regular contact with,” Mao Shixing, founder of F2pool, told CoinDesk.
