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CoinDesk Crypto

SEC Is Willing to ‘Try’ a Tokenized ETF, Chairman Says: Report

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton said the regulatory body’s open to the idea of a tokenized exchange-traded fund (ETF), according to a report by Decrypt.

  • “We’re willing to try that: our door is wide open,” the report quoted Clayton as saying in a webinar yesterday with the Digital Chamber of Commerce.
  • While Clayton’s statements expressed a willingness to explore the idea of tokenized stocks, the report also noted recent actions by the regulatory body that the day those ideas becoming reality is still a ways off.
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CoinDesk

Coinbase Employees Have Begun to Take Severance Packages

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Companies can’t become “apolitical” overnight.

According to multiple Coinbase workers, the plan to offer a clean exit for mission-dissenting staffers has been in the works for six months. So far, at least three people in the 1,200-person firm have taken the severance package, one of these sources told CoinDesk on Friday.

In the past week, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published a blog post discouraging politics in the office and offered a severance package for employees who disagreed with a new mission statement. According to three employees, who all spoke with CoinDesk on the condition of anonymity, Armstrong and other managers at the San Francisco-based crypto exchange said in company-wide meetings that they had been planning this move for six months.

Related: Coinbase Reportedly Warns Some UK Users It’s Handing Their Details to the Taxman

Armstrong began to plan for the company’s new position after several Coinbase engineers closed their laptops one day over the summer after Armstrong wouldn’t say “black lives matter” externally amid social unrest over police killings of unarmed black men and women. 

Armstrong recently clarified in company meetings that he could say “black lives matter” (lowercase) and admit to societal injustice but not “Black Lives Matter” (uppercase) and associate himself with the social movement for racial equity. On the day of the walkout Armstrong tweeted:

Another source familiar with the company’s inner workings said the policy was rolled out in response to polarizing political conversations happening in all-company Slack channels and other venues rather than the walkout itself.

Employees are still allowed to have political conversations in non-general channels created by employees, this source added.  

Blog-post politics

Related: Twitter’s Dorsey Calls Out Coinbase CEO for Ignoring Users’ ‘Societal Issues’

One employee said Armstrong could have avoided controversy if he had communicated the company’s new direction only internally. (Employees learned of the decision a week prior to the public blog post, staffers said.) 

“I think that if he was trying primarily to communicate this to employees and had consulted and listened to really anyone who might be sensitive to the concept of selling this to his employees, this could have blown over and turned into something banal and corporate,” the employee said.

Still another employee said that the timing of the policy’s release was bad. It came at the end of the third quarter, amid rumors of the firm going public, and after a Louisville grand jury failed to charge police officers for murder in the controversial killing of Breonna Taylor.

“I don’t think it was targeted at Black Lives Matter in general,” the employee said of the blog post and new company mission. “We just have a lot of projects we need to get done.” 

Multiple employees said the company has distanced itself from employees by moving questions in all-hands meetings to messaging platform Slido after the summer walkout. In a companywide “ask-me-anything” held Thursday, Armstrong and company leadership explained that the new direction doesn’t mean that Coinbase is going after employees that dissent.

“Everyone reaffirmed in the AMA that they do support the blog post but were walking back some of the more extreme implications that might come with being an apolitical company and reaffirmed the commitment to diversity and employee support,” one employee said. “What people might imagine – whether the company is going to be crushing all internal discourse or ejecting employees with strongly held political beliefs – isn’t going to happen.” 

It is unclear what punishments employees might face should they not abide by the new decision. That said, leadership has made it clear that the rules around non-work discussions are loose so long as they’re not tied directly to politics. 

In response to employees asking if they could make a #spaghetti-monster-for-president Slack channel, leadership said that would be fine, these employees said.

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Market Wrap: Bitcoin Rebounds to $10.5K; Stablecoin Market Cap ‘Goes Parabolic’

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Bitcoin has performed well in the face of a bleak news cycle while stablecoin assets in the crypto ecosystem continue to grow.

  • Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,515 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 0.44% over the previous 24 hours.
  • Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,362-$10,667
  • BTC above its 10-day moving average but below the 50-day, a sideways signal for market technicians.

Bitcoin’s price stumbled in the early hours of Friday, falling to as low as $10,362 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase around 5:00 UTC (1 a.m. ET) before rising to $10,515 as of press time. 

Despite the continuous stream of negative news this past week, the crypto markets have remained resilient, according to Zachary Friedman, chief operating officer of brokerage Global Digital Assets. 

Related: Bulls Exit BitMEX Bitcoin Futures Market

“If we look back, we have seen a hack of Kucoin, a major BitMEX lawsuit and even trouble in the traditional markets through the announcement that [U.S. Pres. Donald] Trump contracted COVID-19,” Friedman said. “Historically, these three collective events would have sent markets reeling. This shows that the market is increasingly filled with more bullish investors [who] believe in the fundamentals.”

Bitcoin’s dip to $10,362 Friday is its lowest price point since Sept. 24, well before the recent torrent of bad news began and perhaps a sign of the world’s oldest cryptocurrency’s capacity to recover quickly.

Jean-Baptiste Pavageau, a partner at crypto quant trading firm ExoAlpha, anticipates some increased volatility ahead. “Liquidity is a key metric for professional traders,” said Pavageau. “While BitMEX witnessed sometimes unusual price behavior on its exchange, it would not be surprising to observe more of these spikes and crashes while the liquidity dries-up.” 

Read More: BitMEX Moves $337M in Bitcoin Ahead of First Withdrawals Since Charges

Related: Trump COVID Test, BitMEX Charges Bring October Shocks for Bitcoin

Indeed, BTC/USD open interest on BitMEX, a measure of liquidity on derivatives exchanges, has dropped since the revelation of its legal troubles, going from $589 million just prior to the news Thursday to $461 million as of press time, a 21% decline.

As open interest on BitMEX wanes, investors are increasingly moving bitcoin to other exchanges. At one point, an outflow of over 11,000 BTC went to other exchanges at 01:00 UTC Friday, including 4,786 BTC to Binance, 3,899 BTC to Gemini and 989 BTC to Kraken, according to data analysis firm CryptoQuant.

“It’s going to be a volatile couple of weeks,” added Mostafa Al-Mashita, vice president of trading for Global Digital Assets. “I would not be surprised to see another ‘black swan’ event in the next two months, although bitcoin’s price action has been surprisingly bullish considering the news,” 

Volatility in bitcoin is positive news for options buyers, and that market has 34,100 BTC in bets placed for expiration on Oct. 30.

The options market for October expiration provides some probabilities for bitcoin’s future price, as traders see a 63% chance of bitcoin over $10,000, a 50% chance over $10,500 and a 36% chance of $11,000 per 1 BTC.

“It’s a tough market at the moment, up one minute and down the next,” said Rupert Douglas, head of institutional sales for crypto brokerage Koine. “I still think there are risks to the downside. Markets don’t like uncertainty and we’ve sure got that until early November.”

Stablecoins over $20 billion

Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was down Friday trading around $344 and slipping 2% in 24 hours as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET). 

Read More: Ethereum 2.0 ‘Dress Rehearsal’ Gets a Second Shot With Zinken Testnet

The total market capitalization of stablecoins has grown from $2.6 billion at the start of 2019 to $20 billion by late September. Tether (USDT), at $16 billion, leads the way, with U.S. dollar coin (USDC) in second at $2.5 billion followed by TrueUSD (TUSD) with a $507 million market cap.

A yield farmer who chooses to go by the handle devops199fan believes stablecoins provide an important role as an increasing market for stable assets strengthen the decentralized finance, or DeFi, ecosystem. “The stablecoin market cap is starting to go parabolic,” said devops199fan. “I think we’re just getting started. In DeFi specifically, we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible in terms of financial primitives and systems.”

Other markets

Digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly in the red Friday. One winner as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

Notable losers as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

Read More: Decentralized Exchange Volume Rose 103% in September 

Equities:

Commodities:

  • Oil was down 4%. Price per barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude: $36.97.
  • Gold was flat, in the red 0.14% and at $1,902 as of press time.

Treasurys:

  • U.S. Treasury bond yields were mixed Friday. Yields, which move in the opposite direction as price, were up most on the 30-year, up to 1.479 and in the green 1.3%.
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CoinDesk

Binance, Gemini, Kraken So Far the Winners From BitMEX’s Legal Woes

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

U.S. regulatory authorities on Thursday brought a series of civil and criminal charges against BitMEX. Since then more than 41,000 bitcoin were withdrawn from the Seychelles-based crypto exchange. Where did it go, triggering a brief market sell-off? Data shows much of it went to competitors Binance, Gemini and Kraken.

  • As of Oct. 2 01:00 UTC, 11,257 BTC moved from BitMEX to these exchanges: 4,786 BTC to Binance, 3,899 to Gemini and 989 to Kraken, according to data provided by CryptoQuant.
  • BitMEX’s bitcoin outflow to these exchanges could show traders are putting a higher priority on better compliance with regulations or better-leveraged bitcoin trading products.
  • Gemini, the U.S.-based and Winklevoss brothers-owned exchange is known for strict “know-your-customer (KYC)” procedures.
  • Binance, the leading crypto exchange by spot trading volume, has surpassed BitMEX, becoming the No.1 crypto exchange in 24-hour bitcoin futures trading volume.
  • San Francisco-based crypto exchange Kraken is the first cryptocurrency firm in the U.S. to become a bank, after its application for a special purpose depository institution (SPDI) charter was approved by regulators on the Wyoming Banking Board.
  • Failure to implement proper KYC rules is among the charges against BitMEX by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
  • Once the leading crypto derivatives exchange, BitMEX’s market share has waned, with many other venues offering a variety of bitcoin derivatives trading instruments.
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CoinDesk

Bitcoin Miners Saw 11% Revenue Drop in September

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Bitcoin miners generated an estimated $328 million in revenue in September, down 11% from August, according to Coin Metrics data analyzed by CoinDesk.

  • The moderate decrease in revenue came as bitcoin (BTC) stumbled through September, closing the month down 8% after gaining over 25% through July and August.
  • Revenue estimates assume miners sell their BTC immediately.
  • Network fees brought in $26 million in September, or just over 8% of total revenue, down 2 percentage points from fees comprising 10% of revenue in August.
  • Notably, fees as a percentage of total revenue continues a strong upward trend since April after the block subsidy halving in May.
  • Increases in fee revenue are important to sustain the network’s security as the block reward decreases every four years.
  • Bitcoin’s average transaction fee bounced between $1 and $5 through September.
  • As some cryptocurrency traders are rotating funds from altcoins and stablecoins into BTC, miners can have hopes for a higher BTC price and subsequent revenue growth through October.

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CoinDesk

Belarus News Media Are Testing Decentralized Tech to Resist Censorship

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Belarus is cracking down on reporters.

The nation’s government, led by President Alexander Lukashenko, whose election was mired in controversy and has not been recognized by the European Union, announced Friday it was canceling the press accreditations for all foreign journalists immediately. The move comes as Belarus continues blocking its citizens from accessing local media websites, including the Belarusian branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in the wake of a massive, three-day internet outage and weeks of protests over the Aug. 8 election.

Now, some media outlets are fighting back. To make their mobile apps more resilient, some Belarusian news organizations are using NewNode, a decentralized file-sharing service by the California-based startup Clostra, which basically runs on the same principle as torrents. This means users store bits of content on their devices, sharing them with others in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Related: How a Hacker Launched a Decentralized Network to Track Internet Censorship

This story is much bigger than Belarus because Internet censorship is a global phenomenon. While governments around the world are getting more skilled at blocking online content, local activists and media are experimenting with new forms of resistance.

‘Self-healing network’

The principle behind NewNode is that if one user can’t access a website but another one can, they can connect to each other and exchange available data like torrent clients do. But it won’t help if there is a total internet shutdown, or if the entire mobile network is down. 

This makes the technology applicable in places like Belarus, whose Internet shutdown wasn’t absolute. Even the most severe internet outages were a result not of  “unplugging” of internet connections but rather of a bottleneck created by intense traffic filtration by the government. 

“Devices will connect to one another automatically and build a network and use it to help one another get content using whatever means of Internet access exist. It’s a distributed self-healing network that automatically scales with the number of devices,” explains Stanislav Shalunov, CEO of Clostra.

Related: Belarus Nonprofit Helps Protestors With Bitcoin Grants

NewNode is in its infancy now, and the company does not disclose the number of its users worldwide. But when over 800,000 new users in Belarus joined in one month since the election, it was a notable uptick for the company. Before the election, Clostra counted only 10 NewNode users in Belarus. Now Belarus is the largest user base for NewNode, Shalunov said. 

“We grow fastest when we can solve the biggest problems, and the shutdowns in Belarus were very significant,” he said.

Before Clostra, Shalunov worked at BitTorrent, and later co-founded another rebel communications startup, Open Garden, the company behind the messaging app FireChat. Firechat, which uses Bluetooth and WiFi to connect mobile phones into an off-line network, took off during the Hong Kong protests in 2014. NewNode uses these two plus the usual mobile internet. 

Clostra’s core team also includes former BitTorrent architect Greg Hazel and Blockstream VP of engineering Ben Teitelbaum.

Belorusian media learned about NewNode by “word of mouth,” the executive director of Clostra, Marina Feygelman, told CoinDesk, and because app stores were classifying the app as a VPN. During the internet shutdowns, VPN services surged in popularity in Belarus as people were looking for ways to stay online, and tools like VPNs and proxies helped trick the traffic filtering software employed by the government.  

Testing regime

According to Shalunov, there are currently about two dozen media publications worldwide using NewNode for their mobile apps, although most of them prefer not to publicize this fact.

“We’ve been developing our app for people in the countries where the authorities are blocking us,” said Arkady Pildes, senior product manager at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The company recently released its mobile app with NewNode built in, he said. 

Radio Liberty’s app is using both NewNode and Psyphon, a proxy that became extremely popular in Belarus during the post-election internet outage. The app can use either NewNode or Psyphon tech, depending on which can provide a faster and more efficient connection, Pildes said, and the switching happens automatically. 

NewNode is far from a perfect solution. The tech can create excessive mobile traffic for  users who are relaying data to others, putting financial pressure on them if they aren’t using unlimited internet plans, Pildes said. 

Another possible caveat is that a Bluetooth connection requires users to reveal their locations. Radio Liberty decided this could be unsafe for its Belarus users, so it did not use that option for its app. 

Tut.by, an independent Belarusian news publication whose website users were affected by the post-election internet outage, is now using NewNode tech for its new mobile app. The app on Android has been downloaded over one million times in Google Play, according to Mikita Puzik, Tut.by’s product manager.

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CoinDesk

Bulls Exit BitMEX Bitcoin Futures Market

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Cryptocurrency traders look to be unwinding long positions in bitcoin perpetual futures listed on crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX, which has been charged by regulators with facilitating illegal transactions in the U.S.

  • On Thursday, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed civil charges against the exchange while the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed criminal charges accusing four founders and executives of BitMEX of evading rules designed to stop money laundering.
  • Since the announcements, BitMEX has witnessed an outflow of more than 40,000 bitcoins, currently worth more than $422 million, according to data provided by the blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis.
  • Open positions in BitMEX futures have declined by more than 22% from $592 million to $460 million since the CFTC and DOJ announcements and are down more than 50% from the high of $1 billion seen on Sept. 1.
  • According to data source Skew, the annualized rolling three-month perpetuals (futures without expiry) basis has declined from 6% to 1.84% in the past 24 hours.
  • Basis refers to the difference between the futures price and the spot price.
  • Essentially, the BitMEX futures premium has declined from 6% to 1.84% in the past 24 hours. In other words, long positions are being squared off.
  • Futures usually trade at a premium to spot prices, and the net buying pressure for futures determines the premium.
  • The differential between the premium offered by other exchanges and BitMEX has widened over the past 24 hours.
  • That indicates increased urgency among traders to move their bullish leveraged positions away from BitMEX, which could be in for a long, drawn-out battle with the U.S. regulators.
  • “BitMEX, with over $70 billion monthly turnovers, has enough resources to keep on fighting with the CFTC and DOJ engaging with the best lawyers in the industry. They have announced their denial of allegations already, and this might turn into a quite long battle,” said Alex Melikhov, CEO and founder of Equilibrium and the EOSDT stablecoin.
  • However, BitMEX’s market share has been on the decline.
  • “Open interest is declining since the beginning of September, and the relevance of BitMEX is getting smaller and smaller,” Patrick Heusser, senior cryptocurrency trader at Zurich-based Crypto Broker AG, told CoinDesk in a Twitter chat. 

Also read: BitMEX Moves $337M in Bitcoin Ahead of First User Withdrawals Since US Charges

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CoinDesk

What to Watch at ETHOnline, This Year’s Devcon

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Ethereum’s annual developer conference, ETHOnline, kicks off Friday afternoon. Instead of hopping from city to city like past Devcons, catch the latest Ethereum updates from your laptop at home.

Friday’s segments are free online here. The conference continues every Friday including October 9, 16, 23 and 30. Each day focuses on one area of interest for Ethereum developers and investors such decentralized finance (DeFi) or scaling Ethereum. 

A hackathon with up to $100,000 in prizes also begins today and concludes Oct. 22.

Related: Bitcoin Escrow Chief Pleads Guilty to $3.25M Crypto Fraud

For anyone so inclined, here’s what CoinDesk is watching today:

  • 12:30 EDT: Rediscovering Ethereum’s Opportunities w/ Aya Miyaguchi
  • 13:30 EDT: Eth1 + Eth2 = Ethereum w/ Danny Ryan
  • 14:00 EDT: Coding an automated market maker (AMM) with Marek Kirejczyk and Bartek Rutkowski
  • 19:00 EDT: Scaling Ethereum in 2020 and Beyond with Vitalik Buterin

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CoinDesk

Blockchain Bites: BitMEX Investigation, Trump’s Diagnosis, Babel’s Leaked Audio

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

BitMEX is in hot water with the CFTC and DOJ. Thursday, a dual agency operation levied charges against the derivatives exchange and several employees for facilitating unregistered trading and violating the Bank Secrecy Act. 

Elsewhere, another European financial head has intimated the need for a “digital euro,” Atari’s cryptocurrency has a sale date and Venezuela built a national stock exchange on Ethereum. 

Top shelf

BitMEX’s big mess
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and federal prosecutors are charging crypto trading platform BitMEX with facilitating unregistered trading and other crimes. Further, several executives and employees have been charged with violating the Bank Secrecy Act, with one in custody. BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes remains at large. It is uncertain how this may affect the crypto industry, though it appears traders took it in stride in intraday trading. More than 32,200 BTC (19% of the exchange’s total funds, worth around $337 million) moved off BitMEX before the exchange’s set withdrawal time at 13:00 UTC, according to data source Glassnode.

Related: Money Reimagined: Trump, Crypto and Fairer Taxes

Digital euro
An executive at the European Central Bank (ECB) has said a future digital euro initiative could save the eurozone from relying on digital currencies issued by foreign entities. In a post on Friday, ECB executive member Fabio Panetta, formerly head of the Italian central bank, said the envisioned aim of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be to “preserve the public good that the euro provides to citizens.” The statement comes as the ECB moves to trademark the phrase “digital euro.” Though, officially, it should be said the central bank is only studying the idea, without committing to issuing a CBDC.

Babel’s leverage
Leaked recordings of a private conversation suggest crypto lender Babel Finance leveraged some user funds to long bitcoin and faced potential default risks during this year’s Black Thursday market crash in March. Seven audio files first emerged online that appear to be parts of a longer in-person conversation between Babel co-founder Del Wang and an unknown person. The company disputes this claim. Babel is primarily a savings and loan operation that, according to the recordings, also placed leveraged bets on BTC’s price. Using $750,000 raised from Neo Growth Capital (NGC) and another $4 million as deposits, also from NGC, Babel began taking out positions in early 2019, when the price dropped to $3,000, betting it could reach as high as $18,000, CoinDesk’s Wolfie Zhao reports. Things got messy this year, when a coronavirus-led panic crashed the crypto markets.

Atari coin
The Atari Group, the company behind such classic video games as Pac-Man, will begin publicly selling its Atari Token (ATRI) cryptocurrency in early November. ATRI is a self-styled entertainment industry payment method in the form of an ERC-20 token atop the Ethereum blockchain. It has been in the works since at least early 2018. Crypto casinos, “blockchain games” and the video game distribution platform Ultra.io will be among the utility token’s earliest use cases, said Atari’s blockchain subsidiary, Atari Chain. The token will list on Bitcoin.com and Atari’s own crypto exchange at the close of the public sale.

National and decentralized
Venezuela has launched a “decentralized” national stock exchange built atop the Ethereum blockchain. Enabled under a new law listed in the country’s Official Gazette on Tuesday, the exchange comes as part of new measures announced by Pres. Nicolas Maduro in a bid to sidestep tough U.S. sanctions. A draft of a wider “Anti-blockade Law for National Development and the Guarantee of Human Rights,” aimed to give the government tools to “defeat all mechanisms of persecution and international blockade,” was also announced Tuesday in a speech to the country’s National Assembly. The news comes soon after Venezuela legalized the cryptocurrency mining industry.

Quick bites At stake

Related: Trump COVID Test, BitMEX Charges Bring October Shocks for Bitcoin

Are DEXs better off?
The sudden takedown of BitMEX, an institutional part of centralized crypto trading, raises questions about the viability of decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

CoinDesk’s Will Foxley reports the value proposition of decentralized platforms is that they are – at least in theory – wholly owned by their communities, rather than their investors or a C-suite of executives.

However, they are founded by real, live humans who are subject to the whims of law enforcement agencies. Are they next?

It seems like BitMEX’s takedown was wholly its own doing, by allegedly serving U.S. customers without proper authorization from the CFTC, and eschewing proper know-your-customer (KYC) requirements up until earlier this year. 

But without a figurehead like Chief Executive Arthur Hayes, can the same accusations be leveled against platforms like Uniswap – which create open markets without regulatory oversight that anyone can enter?

“For DeFi builders it might be relevant to have from the start a clear path towards decentralized governance similarly what Ethereum and Bitcoin is today, where there is no centrally controlled entity governing these protocols by design. In the end also remember who you are building for and make safe products for all stakeholders,” Stani Kulechov, co-founder of the Aave DeFi money market, told CoinDesk.

Others, like Robert Leshner, founder of DeFi lending platform Compound, even suggested regulators might find virtue in DeFi. Though time will tell.

For now, there could be apparent security in the limited size of the DEX subsector. The $11 billion DeFi market pales in comparison to the larger centralized exchange (CEX) market, Foxley notes. But the gap is closing.

CoinDesk’s Zack Voell reports September volume on DEXs recorded its third consecutive month of doubling. Aggregate trading volume on decentralized exchanges reached $23.6 billion in September up from $11.6 billion in August.

Market intel

Coronavirus scare
The cryptocurrency and Asian stock markets sold off early Friday after U.S. Pres. Donald Trump announced he and his wife had tested positive to COVID-19. In a tweet on Friday, Trump said he and First Lady Melania Trump had begun their quarantine process. Bitcoin is also down by 1.9%, having fallen from $10,678 to around $10,400, at press time. The Australia ASX All Ordinaries fell  1.35%, while the S&P 500 futures fell about 2% on the news. “We will get through this TOGETHER!,” Trump tweeted.

Internet 2030

Self sovereign identity
In today’s internet, most of us have made the Faustian bargain of trading agency for convenience. We trust Facebook with our log-in credentials to countless other sites, the photos of our family, the contents of our private messages, and troves of personal details that can be repackaged, exploited, and weaponized – in just one tiny example, arguably tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

But most of us make that Faustian bargain. We hold our nose and click. We feel that unless we want to be an online hermit, there really is no choice. 

But what if we “owned our data,” meaning that instead of trusting the Googles and Facebooks with our precious data – a resource more valuable than oil – we are the custodians of our data, and we only share it when we choose, in certain contexts, and perhaps we can sell it or license it?

“You’re re-democratizing the internet,” says Drummond Reed, chief trust officer of Evernym, one of the organizations trying to make SSI a reality. “You’re pushing the power, literally, out to the peers.” Reed is no Pollyanna, and he doesn’t expect the Facebooks to vanish in the next decade, but he predicts that “we will see a pretty dramatic reshaping of the power distribution.”

Okay, but what would that actually mean from a user experience? SSI can be an abstract concept, making even Bitcoin look simple and easy to explain. It’s tough to visualize or appreciate.  So for this scenario, we’ll envision some ways that SSI – and ownership of your data – would change your (online) life. 

Welcome to a better internet.

Have an idea for what the future of the internet will look like, reach out to daniel@coindesk.com.

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CoinDesk

Bitcoin Escrow Chief Pleads Guilty to Crypto Fraud, Also Ordered to Repay $7.4M

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

The head of bitcoin escrow company Volantis pleaded guilty in New York on Thursday to bilking an investor of over $3 million. He also settled parallel commodities fraud charges.

Jon Barry Thompson, 49, admitted in Manhattan federal district court that his crypto companies – Volantis Market Making LCC and Volantis Escrow Platform LLC – never followed through with a promised $3.25 million bitcoin buy for one unnamed customer in the summer of 2018.

  • Thompson admitted to misrepresenting his companies’ bitcoin custody, control, purchasing practices and risk exposure in order to secure the customer’s funds.
  • He then wired the cash to a third party without first receiving the bitcoin, as he had promised the customer he would.
  • But the bitcoin never materialized and the customer’s funds were never returned.
  • Thompson could face a maximum 10-year prison term. His sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 7, 2021.

Thompson also settled charges brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Thursday. A newly filed consent order requires him to pay $7.4 million in restitution to two victims, permanently bars him from bitcoin trading, and compels him to cooperate with the CFTC in any future investigations.

  • Thompson’s pledge to cooperate may pay immediate dividends.
  • In mid-September, SDNY prosecutors filed charges against two individuals who allegedly defrauded $3 million from the “principal” of Volantis bitcoin escrow in June 2018.

Related: What to Watch at ETHOnline, This Year’s Devcon

Read more: Two Charged With Duping Investors Out of $5M With Bogus Bitcoin-Buying Brokerage

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CoinDesk

Bitcoin Escrow Chief Pleads Guilty to $3.25M Crypto Fraud

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

The head of bitcoin escrow company Volantis pleaded guilty in New York on Thursday to one count of commodities fraud for bilking an investor of over $3 million.

Jon Barry Thompson, 49, admitted in Manhattan federal district court that his crypto companies – Volantis Market Making LCC and Volantis Escrow Platform LLC – never followed through with a promised $3.25 million bitcoin buy for one unnamed customer in the summer of 2018.

  • Thompson admitted to misrepresenting his companies’ bitcoin custody, control, purchasing practices and risk exposure in order to secure the customer’s funds.
  • He then wired the cash to a third party without first receiving the bitcoin, as he had promised the customer he would.
  • But the bitcoin never materialized and the customer’s funds were never returned.
  • Thompson could face a maximum 10-year prison term. His sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 7, 2021.

Thompson also settled charges brought by the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission on Thursday. A newly filed consent order requires him to pay $7.4 million in restitution, permanently bars him from bitcoin trading, and compels him to cooperate with the CFTC in any future investigations.

  • Thompson’s pledge to cooperate may pay immediate dividends.
  • In mid-September, SDNY prosecutors filed charges against two individuals who allegedly defrauded $3 million from the “principal” of Volantis bitcoin escrow in June 2018.

Related: What to Watch at ETHOnline, This Year’s Devcon

Read more: Two Charged With Duping Investors Out of $5M With Bogus Bitcoin-Buying Brokerage

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CoinDesk

Coinbase Reportedly Warns Some UK Users It’s Handing Their Details to the Taxman

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Coinbase has told some of its users it is passing their details onto the U.K. tax authority, HMRC.

  • As first reported by Decrypt, the popular crypto exchange emailed some users saying that as part of a deal with HMRC, it must provide records on customers who had received more than £5,000 ($6,500) during the 2019-2020 tax year.
  • The email appears to have been only sent to users the exchange believed crossed that threshold; it encourages them to reach out to their accountants or tax advisers.
  • The notice comes over a year after HMRC first requested crypto exchanges send over information on U.K. residents who had moved money on their platforms.
  • Per the email, Coinbase said HMRC had originally requested records on its customers between 2017 and 2019, but a compromise limited the data to customers using digital assets to receive greater amounts.
  • In the U.K., cryptocurrencies count as an investment asset and are subject to capital gains tax, which for high-income earners can come to approximately 20% on gains.

See also: UK Government Moving to Restrict Cryptocurrency Promotions

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CoinDesk

Trump COVID Test, BitMEX Charges Bring October Shocks for Bitcoin

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

U.S. regulators and law-enforcement officials brought charges on Thursday against BitMEX, a Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange that has grown in recent years to be one of the industry’s biggest players.

According to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, prosecutors accused BitMEX of facilitating unregistered trading and other violations, including “conducting significant aspects of its business from the U.S. and accepting orders and funds from U.S. customers,” as reported by CoinDesk’s Nikhilesh De.   

The news dominated cryptocurrency news headlines and sent traders and analysts scrambling to assess the damage and implications. Some 23,000 bitcoin were apparently withdrawn from BitMEX addresses in a single hour, the cryptocurrency-markets data firm Glassnode tweeted early Friday, citing blockchain data. 

Related: BitMEX Moves $337M in Bitcoin Ahead of First User Withdrawals Since US Charges

BitMEX, led by CEO Arthur Hayes, said it intends to defend against the allegations “vigorously” adding that the trading platform was operating normally and that all funds were safe. 

Bitcoin prices tumbled after the announcement, as illustrated by CoinDesk’s Daniel Cawrey in an hourly price chart:

Cryptocurrency traders are conditioned to expect volatility whenever there’s major news involving one of the biggest industry exchanges, but despite the quick drop, prices quickly stabilized, as reported by CoinDesk’s Zack Voell.  

BitMEX is a well-known player in the constellation of global cryptocurrency exchanges, partly because it was a pioneer, in 2016, of a new product called the “perpetual bitcoin leveraged swap.” At the time, few traders in nascent digital-asset markets could have anticipated what a major impact the obscure roll-out would have on the industry.

Related: Venezuela Rolls Out Ethereum-Based Stock Exchange to Help Skirt US Sanctions

But the instrument, which made it easy for customers to trade the equivalent of $100 of bitcoin for every $1 down, proved hugely popular and successful among risk-hungry traders, vaulting BitMEX into the top ranks of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges. 

Even so, the perpetual swaps were infamous for exacerbating price swings: It’s a well-known trope among bitcoin traders that every time the market tilts one way or another, BitMEX customers’ thinly capitalized positions get liquidated in a series of rapid margin calls, exacerbating price swings that reverberated to other exchanges.    

Such episodes are so notorious that crypto traders even have a slang verb for the phenomenon: to get “rekt,” with websites and even Twitter accounts devoted to tracking their magnitude and frequency. 

If BitMEX’s role in the markets were to diminish, that might mean fewer volatility-inducing liquidations.

“Long term, it’s so much better for the spot market,” Steve Ehrlich, CEO of Voyager Digital, an online cryptocurrency trading platform, told First Mover.

Industry executives were quick to point out that some traders had apparently been shifting their allegiances recently to rival exchanges that had copied BitMEX’s “100x” bitcoin derivatives contracts. 

“Two years ago, this would have been catastrophic, because BitMEX was such a huge percentage of everybody who’s playing leveraged trading,” David Weisberger, co-founder and CEO of CoinRoutes Inc., told CoinDesk’s Muyao Shen in a phone interview. “Now, there are quite a few alternatives to BitMEX and several of them have always been more stringent about trading or not allowing U.S. clients to trade on those platforms.”

CoinDesk’s William Foxley reported that the BitMEX news reverberated in the fast-growing blockchain-based sector of “decentralized finance,” or DeFi, where programmers are developing semi-automated platforms for lending and trading. 

The systems are often cast as “uncensorable” since they mainly exist within strings of programming encoded atop the Ethereum blockchain network. The question is whether they still might be subject to the laws of various jurisdictions, since they are, ultimately the craft of “real, live humans.” 

Centralized exchanges such as BitMEX as “opaque platforms that can easily facilitate money laundering,” Robert Leshner, founder of the DeFi lender Compound, told Foxley. “By contrast, DeFi done right is a breath of fresh air – complete transparency, accountability, tamper-resistance and self-custody.”

Ahem.

Cryptocurrency industry regulations are still evolving, and the rulemakers are always a few or myriad steps behind. But they do sometimes crack down, and it’s probably not a coincidence that often they take aim at the most threatening upstarts, those that attempt to change the rules of the game. 

Bitcoin Watch

Bitcoin has come under pressure in the past 24 hours, seemingly due to the BitMEX controversy and risk-off moves in traditional markets. 

On Thursday, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and federal prosecutors announced they’re charging BitMEX for failing to implement anti-money-laundering procedures and operating an unregistered trading platform.  

Further, President Trump announced early Friday he and his wife had tested positive for coronavirus and were going into self-quarantine, ratcheting up pre-election uncertainty and sending global equities lower. 

Bitcoin has declined from $10,900 to $10,400 in the past 24 hours. The daily chart now shows the cryptocurrency is stuck in a narrowing price range. 

A triangle breakdown would signal a continuation of the sell-off from August’s high above $12,400 and expose the 200-day average support at $9,400. 

Alternatively, a breakout could invite stronger chart-driven buying pressure. 

– Omkar Godbole

Read More: BitMEX Moves $337M in Bitcoin Ahead of First User Withdrawals Since US Charges 

Token Watch

Ethereum (ETH): Ethereum developers will take a second whack at a final Ethereum 2.0 “dress rehearsal” after the first, Spadina, failed due to “critical peering issues.”

What’s Hot

A partner at Goldman Sachs, Damien Vanderwilt, is joining Galaxy Digital at the beginning of 2021 (The Block)

September volume on DEXs recorded its third consecutive month of doubling the trading volume from the previous month (CoinDesk)

The European Central Bank has applied for a trademark on the phrase “digital euro,” according to Bloomberg reporting (CoinDesk)

Nearly $8 billion have been added to the aggregate supply of stablecoins in the past three months (CoinDesk)

Analogs The latest on the economy and traditional finance

U.S. economy added 661K jobs, below 875K estimate and slowing from 1.49M in August (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Emerging-market countries could experiment with quantitative easing, suggests new study led by New York Fed economist (New York Fed)

U.S. House passes $2.2T stimulus bill that is unlikely to get through Senate (CNBC)

U.S. companies issue $1.4T over first nine months of 2020, as record issuance facilitated by Federal Reserve backstop (WSJ)

If Democrats win the presidential election that may be good for stocks, because of the likelihood of more fiscal stimulus (CNBC)

Bond-rating firm Moody’s cuts New York State and New York City to Aa2 from Aa1 (WSJ)

Rents on apartments in New York City to San Fransisco are plummeting as people shift to work-from-home (Bloomberg)

Capital expenditures needed to reorient multinational corporations export operations out of China would cost $1T (WSJ)

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CoinDesk

Ripple Wins US Patent for New Oracle-Based Smart Contract Design

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Blockchain payments technology firm Ripple has won a patent for a design that can execute smart contracts based on data collected from the outside world.

  • Earlier this week, Ripple Labs received a patent (No. 10,789,068) for a smart contract that can use oracles to connect a distributed platform to a variety of different real-world data.
  • Originally filed in June 2018, one example of a use case provided includes using the smart contracts to automatically settle options contracts when pre-agreed conditions are met, such as a company’s debt-to-equity ratio hitting a certain threshold.
  • Another example, for the oil industry, is feeding data on the density of a specific crude oil shipment to help a smart contract determine whether to make a trade.
  • Smart contracts are mostly associated with Ethereum, but other large blockchains are looking to add similar capabilities.
  • Earlier this year, derivatives exchange BitMEX, which is now facing legal troubles, awarded a $50,000 grant to a Bitcoin Core contributor to develop a Bitcoin smart contract.
  • One of the two authors of the patent, Ripple’s former CTO Stefan Thomas, previously revived a defunct project called Codius – one working to bring smart contracts to Ripple – into a new startup, Coil.
  • While a patent indicates that time and effort going into a rough draft of, in this case, a new smart contract-based derivative, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Ripple has any active plans to move ahead with development.
  • CoinDesk reached out to Ripple for comment but hadn’t received a response by press time.

See also: August’s Bitcoin Rally Led to Record Crypto Derivatives Volumes: Report

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CoinDesk

BitMEX Moves $337M in Bitcoin Ahead of First User Withdrawals Since US Charges

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Bitcoin outflows from prominent crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX are already up in the wake of charges from U.S. agencies announced Thursday.

  • The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York both announced they are charging BitMEX with facilitating unregistered trading and other illegal transactions.
  • Since then, more than 32,200 BTC (worth around $337 million) has been moved from BitMEX – 19% of the exchange’s total funds, according to data source Glassnode.
  • Further, outflows are likely to greatly increase following BitMEX’s daily withdrawal time of 13:00 UTC.
  • That’s when the exchange processed all withdrawal requests lined up since the previous day.
  • Open positions in bitcoin perpetuals (futures without expiry) traded on BitMEX have also declined by nearly 22% from $592 million to $462 million, according to data provided Skew, a crypto derivatives research firm.
  • However, liquidity, as measured by the bid/offer spread, on the exchange remains relatively stable, and the large trades can still be executed at low cost.
  • The daily average spread between the buy and sell orders (bid/offer spread) on BTC perpetuals for a $10-million quote size remains unchanged on the day at 0.34% – near the lower end of the three-week-long range of 0.32% to 0.39%.
  • Bid-offer spreads on other exchanges also remain stable.
  • According to Philip Gradwell, economist at blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, outflows from BitMEX are adding to liquidity on other exchanges.
  • “Total inflows to exchanges averaged 65,000 bitcoin this last week, so BitMEX withdrawals are adding 25% more liquidity already,” Gradwell tweeted early on Friday.
  • “More than 65% of the total outflow has been transferred to other exchanges, while the rest into unhosted wallets,” he added.
  • Stable liquidity on BitMEX and other exchanges suggests there’s no serious panic among traders following the U.S. charges.
  • According to Denis Vinokourov, head of research at the London-based prime brokerage Bequant, BitMEX’s reputation among large trading firms had already been dented by outages seen earlier this year.
  • As such, its overall importance to the broader ecosystem is not as critical as was the case a few years ago, Vinokourov said.

Also read: Bitcoin, Stocks Fall as Trump Tests Positive for COVID-19

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CoinDesk

Digital Euro Will ‘Protect’ Eurozone From Foreign Issuers, Says ECB Exec

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

An executive at the European Central Bank (ECB) has said a future digital euro initiative could save the eurozone from relying on digital currencies issued by foreign entities.

  • In a post on Friday, ECB executive member Fabio Panetta, formerly head of the Italian central bank, said the envisioned aim of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be to “preserve the public good that the euro provides to citizens.”
  • But a digital euro would also ensure foreign-based issuers, whether that’s other central banks or private companies, don’t become too integral to the eurozone’s stability – something that could even threaten the ECB’s monetary sovereignty.
  • The post comes as the central bank releases its report into the proposed digital euro.
  • Running to 54 pages, the paper argues CBDCs stand to provide citizens with a “risk-free” form of money, unlike cryptocurrencies and private stablecoins, which could require users to surrender their financial privacy to for-profit entities.
  • It would also offer citizens easier access to a payment method, thereby improving financial inclusion.
  • The report also touches on the theme of protecting the eurozone’s monetary sovereignty: A digital euro could ensure “strategic autonomy” for the bloc, as well as bolster the euro’s international standing as a reserve currency.
  • The worry that, just like with the tech giants, the European Union could end up relying on foreign providers for payments, has been palpable across the continent over the past year.
  • ECB President Christine Lagarde said in Germany last month that the EU had fallen behind countries like China in CBDC development.
  • More directly, France’s economic and finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, said last year Facebook’s libra coin actually threatened to undermine the European project.

See also: CBDCs Could Challenge US Dollar’s Dominance: Deutsche Bank

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CoinDesk

Digital Euro Will ‘Protect’ Eurozone from Foreign Issuers, Says ECB Exec

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

An executive at the European Central Bank (ECB) has said a future digital euro initiative could save the eurozone from relying on digital currencies issued by foreign entities.

  • In a post on Friday, ECB executive member Fabio Panetta, formerly head of the Italian central bank, said the envisioned aim of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be to “preserve the public good that the euro provides to citizens.”
  • But a digital euro would also ensure foreign-based issuers, whether that’s other central banks or private companies, don’t become too integral to the eurozone’s stability – something that could even threaten the ECB’s monetary sovereignty.
  • The post comes as the central bank releases its report into the proposed digital euro.
  • Running to 54-pages, the paper argues that CBDCs stand to provide citizens with a “risk-free” form of money, unlike cryptocurrencies and private stablecoins, which could require users to surrender their financial privacy to for-profit entities.
  • It would also offer citizens easier access to a payment method, thereby improving financial inclusion.
  • The report also touches on the theme of protecting the eurozone’s monetary sovereignty: A digital euro could ensure “strategic autonomy” for the bloc, as well as bolster the euro’s international standing as a reserve currency.
  • The worry that, just like with the tech giants, the EU could end up relying on foreign providers for payments, has been palpable across the continent over the past year.
  • ECB President Christine Lagarde said in Germany last month that the EU had fallen behind countries like China in CBDC development
  • More directly, France’s economic and finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, said last year that Facebook’s libra coin actually threatened to undermine the European project.

See also: CBDCs Could Challenge US Dollar’s Dominance: Deutsche Bank

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CoinDesk

Venezuela Rolls Out Ethereum-Based Stock Exchange to Help Skirt US Sanctions

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

Venezuela has launched a “decentralized” national stock exchange built atop the Ethereum blockchain.

  • Enabled under a new law listed in the country’s Official Gazette on Tuesday, the exchange comes as part of new measures announced by President Nicolas Maduro in a big to sidestep tough U.S. sanctions.
  • A draft of a wider “Anti-blockade Law for National Development and the Guarantee of Human Rights,” aimed to give the government tools to “defeat all mechanisms of persecution and international blockade” was also announced Tuesday in a speech to the country’s national assembly.
  • Already launched, the new BDVE exchange is built to enable Venezuelan investors to trade stocks, bonds and real estate in digital form.
  • It is said to run on the Ethereum blockchain digitizing traditional assets using the ERC-223 and ERC-721 token standards, according to its operation manual.
  • Authorized by the office of the National Securities Superintendence, the exchange will undergo a trial for 90 days, during which time authorities will decide whether to approve or revoke its trading license.
  • U.S. sanctions have hit Venezuela's economy hard in what Maduro calls a violation of Venezuelan’s human rights.
  • The president said the anti-sanctions law would empower Venezuela’s oil-backed cryptocurrency, known as the petro, as well as other cryptocurrencies, for national and foreign trade.
  • The news comes soon after Venezuela legalized the cryptocurrency mining industry, but at the same time specified that private operations must all work through a pool controlled by the government.

See also: Here in Venezuela, Doctors Struggle to Access Aid From Crypto Platform

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CoinDesk

Cosmos Gains Traction in India Amid Broader Crypto Resurgence

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

As demand for bitcoin surges in India, especially in urban tech hubs, smart-contract platforms like Ethereum and others are also gaining momentum.

Cosmos, promoted by the Switzerland-based Interchain Foundation, is especially finding traction with students like Aditya Nalini at the Vellore Institute of Technology in southern India. He’s one of four “ambassadors” trained by the community organization Cosmos India, founded in November 2019. The Cosmos India community grew from a handful people in 2019 to more than 1,000 participants in less than nine months, local organizers say, despite the pandemic.

Nalini now holds the majority of his modest wealth in cryptocurrency, he said via email, after initially discovering the collectibles game CryptoKitties in 2017. Although bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency, Nalini says he has never owned bitcoin and says there are many students like him. 

Related: Coinbase Launches 5% Staking Rewards for Cosmos’ ATOM

Meanwhile, there’s a bull market raging across Indian crypto exchanges. Global exchanges have also seen an increase in demand for altcoins like ATOMs. None of this is to say Cosmos is the leading cryptocurrency project of 2020. Yet, as a much younger project than Ethereum or Bitcoin, it is quickly gaining brand recognition.  

“OKEx … saw record high numbers when alt season was at its height in August,” said OKEx press manager Vivien Choi, speaking to markets that include India but aren’t limited to it. “OKEx has seen a rise in demand for ATOM especially last month throughout the globe.”

Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, which both already have strong brand identities, Cosmos is still relatively new to Indian crypto fans. This gives the project the feel of being the “next big thing.” Nalini described the Cosmos ecosystem as the “father” network, because the Cosmos interoperability project allows all the different altcoin projects to “talk and take help from one another instead of fighting for dominance.”

Instead of holding bitcoin, Nalini holds ether (ETH) and Matic tokens, in addition to ATOM.

Related: Investors Flock to India’s DeFi Scene Months After Central Bank Ban Overturned

“My portfolio currently has 60% atoms, 30% matic and 10% ether, where ETH is more to interact with dapps and play than from an investment standpoint,” Nalini said. “Being a student, it was extremely difficult building a portfolio. … I built mine by winning competitions, participating in bounties and winning giveaways.”

Read more: Matic Launches Mainnet Aiming to Bring More ‘Firepower’ to Ethereum

Local hackathons and meetups have been the engine fueling India’s crypto boom. According to Cosmos India co-founder Abhitej Singh – who is also the communications lead at the organization’s sponsor startup, Persistence One – roughly 1,000 Indian people participated in Cosmos programs so far in 2020. This work is largely funded by a grant from the Interchain Foundation, which manages nearly $104 million generated since the ATOMs token sale in 2017.

“One of the key goals for Persistence One is interoperability, hence there is a lot of alignment with Cosmos’ vision,” Singh said in an email.

Education

Beyond meetups and ambassador training, Cosmos India also operates outreach programs at the Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology (NMIT) in Bangalore and the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad.

For example, after working with Cosmos India, NMIT professor Sanjay H.A. said he will add a Cosmos case study to his blockchain engineering course next semester. 

“What I liked about Cosmos is interoperability,” he said. “Usually the sixth semester starts during January. But, due to pandemic, it may start during March 2021 for this academic year.”

Beyond university courses, meetups appear to attract a few dozen participants each, even up to 75 people at an event co-hosted with the startup Inblox Network during Bangalore Blockchain Week in February 2020. 

Read more: India May Be Starting Its Biggest Bitcoin Bull Run Yet

“Students play a significant role in driving the narrative for any new technology in India,” Singh added, speaking to academic collaborations already in process. “We aim to connect with around 50,000 students over the next year through the webinars, hackathons, tutorials and student chapters. Our goal is also to have Cosmos in the curriculum as an optional course in at least five universities.”

Upstart coins

Bitcoin is still undeniably king in the Indian crypto market. But targeted student programs may determine which rupee-altcoin pairs become mainstays on locally accessible exchange platforms. 

“Our initial volume was huge and ATOM-INR volume was among the highest ATOM pairs worldwide for a couple of days,” said Vikram Rangala, CMO at the Indian exchange ZebPay. “Interest from that group tends to shift between tokens depending on which one is active at the moment. But Cosmos also has a lot of support from long-term investors and developers here.” 

However, Rangala added this may merely be a broader bull-market effect. 

“We launched other tokens since then which may have gotten more attention,” he said.

Read more: Cosmos’ Founding Team Broke Up Early This Year. The Project Didn’t

For comparison, Ethereum’s greatest strength has arguably been its community-building strategy, including educational initiatives by Ethereum advocate Natalia Ameline. As for the Cosmos community, Nalini said more than 300 people registered in less than a week for the next Cosmos hackathon, HackAtom India.

“The Cosmos community is rapidly growing in India,” Nalini said, especially among students. 

“Ethereum and Bitcoin communities are still very large, compared to Cosmos,” he said. “But it’s also because of the first movers advantage. … At Cosmos India, something that is very unique is the inclusion of colleges and universities in the outreach program. No other blockchain community has done it so far.”

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CoinDesk

Bitcoin, Stocks Fall as Trump Tests Positive for COVID-19

CoinDesk Crypto
6 years ago

The cryptocurrency and Asian stock markets sold off early Friday after U.S. President Donald Trump announced he and his wife had tested positive to COVID-19.

  • In a tweet on Friday, Trump said he and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19 and would begin their quarantine process “immediately.”
  • “We will get through this TOGETHER!,” Trump tweeted.
  • The Australia ASX All Ordinaries is down 1.35%.
  • In the U.S. markets, S&P 500 futures fell about 2%.
  • Gold is up 0.32% on the day to stand at $1908 after falling to a low of $1888 in early Asian trading hours.
  • Bitcoin is also down by 1.9%, having fallen from $10,678 to around $10,400, at press time.
  • The price action comes several hours after a 3.7% fall on news that U.S. officials indicted BitMEX owner Arthur Hayes and other company executives on charges the crypto trading platform violated know-your-customer and derivatives trading laws.
  • Trump will quarantine as he enters the final month of his reelection bid. His major-party opponent, Democratic nominee and former vice president Joe Biden, has been touring the midwestern states following a debate with Trump on Tuesday.
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