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U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is evaluating the launch of an initial exchange offering (IEO) platform in the near future.
Kayvon Pirestani, head of institutional sales in Asia at Coinbase, revealed the news at Invest: Asia conference on Wednesday, saying: “We think there’s a really interesting opportunity there for Coinbase.”
“In a nutshell, Coinbase is carefully exploring not only the IEO space but also STOs [security token offerings]. But I can’t make any formal announcements right now,” Pirestani added.
Last month, Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck was also considering launching an IEO platform to help firms raise funds via utility tokens.
IEOs, popularized by Binance, are fast becoming a theme of 2019. Already 12 cryptocurrency exchanges, including OKEx, Huobi and Bittrex, have announced their IEO platforms this year, and 39 projects have already participated in an IEO, according to The Block's research.-
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Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst It is just a question of time before more crypto exchanges will offer IEO platforms. This is a new and expected development which will help in the growth and evolution of crypto market, and how it fits in the global regulated financial markets. Companies which want to launch a fundraising for a blockchain based product or a crypto which doesn't fit under tradicional VC or an ICO will benefit from this.- 10 1 vote
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The US government has a hidden weapon it could deploy against Bitcoin - MIT Tech... (technologyreview.com)
The US could someday try to crack down on cryptocurrency by calling certain users financial institutions. Critics say that would be a terrible idea.
by Mike Orcutt
If you are interested in the future of cryptocurrency, you should probably get to know the Bank Secrecy Act, a nearly 50-year-old law that requires financial institutions in the US to help law enforcement agencies police money laundering.
The government could someday try to use the law to impose strict controls on how—and whether—certain blockchain-based currencies can be used.
Take it from David Murray, a vice president at the Financial Integrity Network, a consulting firm in Washington, DC, that focuses on illicit finance. In testimony this week before a Senate subcommittee, Murray called on the government to expand its powers under the BSA to combat the use of cryptocurrency by human traffickers.
“Virtual assets are vulnerable to illicit finance because they offer rapid and irrevocable settlement and the potential for anonymity,” he said. Traditionally, efforts to weed out illicit finance have focused on banks and other financial intermediaries. But public blockchain networks like Bitcoin pose unique challenges for law enforcement.
The BSA, for instance, mandates that financial institutions collect certain information about their users and file reports to the US Treasury Department when transactions are larger than $5,000 or otherwise qualify as “suspicious.
” But since a global network of computers—not a centralized institution—validates Bitcoin transactions, who are they supposed to regulate?
To tighten its grip on cryptocurrency, Murray said, the Treasury Department should broaden the BSA’s definition of a “financial institution” to include certain cryptocurrency “service providers” as well.
While cryptocurrency exchanges and crypto-asset storage providers are already covered by the BSA, other important participants in blockchain systems remain outside the law’s scope, and that should change, Murray argued.
One group he mentioned specifically was “virtual asset transaction validators.” Different blockchain systems work in different ways, but in all of them, participants who run the software the network uses are required to validate new transactions.
Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies call them “miners” because they receive newly minted digital money in exchange for this activity. Murray said the US should regulate miners as so-called money services businesses.
But regulating miners would “basically make the technology nonviable,” at least in the US, says Peter Van Valkenburgh, director of research at Coin Center, a blockchain policy advocacy group in Washington, DC. It’s also probably not even feasible.
Given the global, pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin and similar systems, it would be difficult if not impossible to identify and locate all miners, who could just move to other countries with less strict rules.
Besides, says Van Valkenburgh, it doesn’t make sense to force Bitcoin miners to keep track of their customers the way a financial institution would, since they don’t really have customers.
“They have no idea who has requested transactions on the blockchain,” he says, adding that they are “just running the protocol” in hope of a reward.
Van Valkenburgh notes that the Treasury Department has long had the power to broaden the BSA’s definition of a financial institution to include cryptocurrency miners, but thus far it has explicitly chosen not to.
The international body in charge of policing money laundering, the Financial Action Task Force, has also chosen to avoid regulating miners, instead focusing on cryptocurrency exchanges.
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that this could change, perhaps in the wake of some future crime that involves the use of cryptocurrency.
If US authorities ever do try to expand their powers under BSA to crack down on cryptocurrency, though, they’ll be in for a fight. Van Valkenburgh argues that using the BSA to regulate cryptocurrency software developers and individual users would be unconstitutional.-
Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst BTC can't be regulated. Crypto exchanges and users, however, have to abide by the local and international laws to avoid money laundering and other criminal acts. This is a reality under the incoming 4th IR where all kind of relationships (financial, economic, social, etc) would change (for better) in an increasingly tokenised global society.
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Since its inception, blockchain has promised to make trusted third parties redundant. In practice, though, whether blockchain is actually decentralized depends on what is governed and how this governance is enacted.
As more businesses explore blockchain this distinction becomes increasingly important. There are many expected benefits from decentralization and those benefits may elude us if decentralization fails in practice.
How blockchain governance is enacted—what people do in practice—can differ considerably from how blockchain governance is envisioned—what people aspire to do.
There is no one commonly agreed upon definition of blockchain, but according to one often used in the common discourse, a blockchain is a distributed ledger shared by multiple parties who can add transactions to the ledger.
This implies that changes are reflected consistently for all parties. If reconciling contradictory ledgers is costly, this may be beneficial. Blockchain’s proponents expect it to be virtually immutable without being centralized, meaning that blockchain would not require a trusted third party that decides upon the ledger’s content.
Bitcoin, the first blockchain implementation, has succeeded in allowing for digital payments without having to rely on any trusted third party.
Such decentralization is expected to bring cost savings (through disintermediation), and empowerment to participants, since the parties using the blockchain do not need to trust a powerful third party to act in their best interest. But these benefits are realized only through decentralization.
If decentralization fails to materialize, we return to the problems of power and trust. We can understand this contradiction by identifying the different ways Bitcoin– as a prototypical example of blockchain– is governed, both in its envisioned form and in practice.
Four dimensions of Bitcoin governance
Governing new transactions
Millions of people use Bitcoin and anyone can submit a transaction. But in practice there are some elements of centralization. Users pay sometimes hefty transaction fees to encourage quicker validation of transactions. Consequently, users unwilling to pay high transaction fees may either choose to not transact at all or have to wait longer to get their transactions validated.
Governing consensus
New transactions need to be validated to become part of the blockchain. A consensus mechanism specifies how to get multiple nodes to agree on whether a transaction is valid and should be added to the blockchain. In Bitcoin, it is envisioned that anyone can validate and add transactions.
Only one user is allowed to do so at a time. Users repetitively compete for this right by letting their computer look for an unknown number. Participation in this process, known as mining, is resource intensive and costly. The winners receive bitcoins in return.
Consensus mechanisms allow for decentralizing the validation of transactions. They are crucial in arguments that the Bitcoin system could replace banks and function without trusted third parties safeguarding transaction ledgers.
Despite envisioned decentralization, the high cost of mining has led to considerable centralization of consensus in practice. In order to share the risk of spending the resources but failing to win the competition, groups of miners form mining pools. This resulted in just a few mining pools validating most transactions.
At the same time, mining pools charge miners for participation, with larger mining pools charging more. Therefore, they attract fewer miners and grow more slowly. It is unlikely that the environment would end up fully centralized with just one mining pool. So while in practice achieving consensus is more centralized than it was envisioned, a certain degree of decentralization is still retained.
Governing updates
Once the blockchain is operating, updates to the blockchain protocol may be needed or desirable. In Bitcoin, it is envisioned that anyone can develop and suggest protocol updates.
In practice, however, these changes are typically proposed by only a handful of developers and the discussions are highly centralized, with a small number of commenters provide significantly more comments than the rest.
Governing the design
Before, before the blockchain starts operating at all, the blockchain protocol needs to be designed. This governance dimension differs from the other dimensions in two ways. One is that the design is enacted before the other three dimensions.
Second is that there has been little debate on whether the initial design should be decentralized or centralized — which is surprising given the enthusiasm around decentralization in blockchain. In practice, the protocol development is typically highly centralized and coordinated.
In the case of Bitcoin, the initial design was proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown entity that could be an individual or a small group of people.
This secrecy itself indicates that the process of developing the 2008 white paper could not have been very decentralized. Distinguishing between envisioned and enacted blockchain governance
The Bitcoin example shows us how real-life blockchain governance can differ significantly from how it is envisioned. For transaction submission and validation, as well as protocol updates, enacted governance appears to be considerably more centralized than envisioned governance.
Even if decentralization is envisioned, it may not materialize. We can see that in practice the dimensions that are design-related (protocol development and updates) tend to be marked by particularly centralized governance, while those that are related to the actual use of blockchain (transaction validation and submission) tend to be somewhat more decentralized.
Since blockchain technologies debuted, we’ve learned that despite how they were envisioned, governance is often more centralized in practice since decision-making power is often costly to acquire and exercise.
Expertise, reputation, time, or money can all be required to gain decision-making power. The higher these costs are, the fewer are the people who want to participate, which contributes to centralization in practice.
Bitcoin is a permissionless blockchain. For permissioned blockchains such as IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric, which restrict who can propose protocol updates, validate transactions, and submit transactions blockchain governance is envisioned to be more centralized than for permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin’s. Weighing the potential for decentralization
The promise of blockchain is decentralized governance. However, managers need to carefully consider two things. First, decentralized governance is not a necessary feature of blockchain; it needs to be enacted.
Second, the benefits of decentralized governance may not always be worth the associated costs. Protocol developers may be able to work more effectively on their own or in small teams. Even the decentralization of transaction validation may not always be superior, as Bitcoin’s slow and energy-intensive consensus mechanism demonstrates.- By Admin
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Use Case: Blockchain Poised to Transform Traditional Nigerian Lottery - Dispatch... (dispatchweekly.com)The global lottery industry generates billions in sales every year. But despite being worth so much money, the industry is riddled with pressing issues, which include the lack of transparency and the growing doubt about the actual randomness of the draws.
This concern comes from the fact that a broad range of platforms use pseudo-random number generators often audited by questionable authorities. This is leading to lottery companies seeking alternative ways to create draws.
To help increase a lottery’s transparency, fairness, and credibility, operators are starting to use the latest technology.
The Naija Lottery in Nigera, is one of the most recent examples, as they partnered with Quanta to introduce blockchain technology to the traditional lottery market. The blockchain lottery operator will use smart contract-based technology to make the number generation more transparent in order to increase the fairness of the draw.
Part of the deal between the two companies is to bring decentralised ledger technology to the traditional lottery market, especially across Africa and Nigeria, which could prove to be a lucrative business opportunity. In 2016, Nigerians spent $395.5 million (₦154 billion) per day on lotteries and other games, which increased to just under £1 billion (₦ 308 billion) in 2017.
According to a Lisbon Technical University study on Crypto Bit News, the growth of lottery sales depends on a country’s GDP per capita. And since the Nigerians are currently spending a lot of money on lottery tickets, with 13 out of 20 people saying that they participate in some form of gaming, now is the time to build on its momentum using blockchain.
Nigerian leaders are already working hard to build a safe and trustful platform to ensure fairness and transparency, and remove traces of corruption and inefficiency.
As blockchain does not involve a middleman and transactions are much more transparent, this will increase fairness in the gaming industry, improving the overall experience for the customers.
This adoption of blockchain technology in the lottery industry follows a global trend of using the latest technology to transform gaming industries. DAO Casino created a platform that runs on an Ethereum blockchain with the aim to reduce “fraud risk; hidden fees; high cost of entry for game developers; operational overhead; player access to funds; player withdrawal delays; and general lack of trust.
” The company will use the blockchain used for Ethereum to create smart contracts.The rise of blockchain also mirrors the increasing use of cryptocurrency as an accepted form of currency.
This is best represented in how it is now being used in international lotteries. The Express reports that as Bitcoin become more mainstream this has led to the creation of the world’s first licensed Bitcoin lottery by Lottoland.
The lottery has been a success since it launched with Lottoland putting the current Bitcoin Lotto jackpot at 2,040 BTC (₦4 billion). What makes this lottery different is that the value of the jackpot reflects the current price of the cryptocurrency.
With cryptocurrencies like DasCoin becoming more widely used in Africa, it is not hard to believe that cryptocurrency lotteries will become more commonplace across the globe.
In fact, the integration of blockchain into the Nigerian lottery could be the first step to an actual Nigerian cryptocurrency lottery.-
Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst Interesting that many actual use cases for tokens/cryptos and blockchain are used in games and gambling. This is because blockchain gives more transparency and at the same time security against corruption and fraud, in an industry that moves huge amounts of money. Good luck for Nigeria lottery, "betting" for the blockchain!
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Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain startups exploded onto the London financial technology scene over the last few years, but now, due to a combination of potentially tougher new regulation and the UK's looming exit from the European Union, things could be about to take a turn for the worse for the fledgling bitcoin and crypto sector.
It could be about to all go wrong for London's bitcoin, crypto, and blockchain startups.
GETTY IMAGES
The U.K.'s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who has taken over from Theresa May after she spent two fruitless years trying to negotiate a Brexit deal with the E.U., has steered the country towards a feared so-called no-deal Brexit scenario, potentially causing chaos–though perhaps boosting the bitcoin price.
While Johnson has clashed with the U.K.'s parliament over the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, it remains on the table, fueling business uncertainty.
If the U.K. does eventually leave the E.U. trading bloc without a deal, financial technology companies would lose access to the bloc's single market–while bitcoin and cryptocurrency startups may struggle to justify a London office without an easy route into Europe.
"The uncertainty around Brexit has already taken a major toll, particularly for non-U.K. companies doing business in the U.K.," said Felix Shipkevich, a New York-based lawyer specializing in digital currency and financial technology.
Financial technology businesses have already been found to be moving from the U.K. to the E.U. in preparation for Brexit, according to report from capital markets think tank New Financial, out earlier this year.
"If fintech businesses in the U.K. can’t access international individuals working in areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain as easily after Brexit, this could cause a contraction in the sector because currently, up to a fifth of the skills used by the fintech sector in the U.K. have come from the EU," Sarah Hall, senior fellow at the U.K. in a Changing Europe research group, told bitcoin and crypto trade news website, Cointelegraph.
Last month, the U.K.'s financial services watchdog warned potential investors that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have "no intrinsic value," with some taking the caution as a signal the country could be moving towards a bitcoin ban.
Just last week, the Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who has previously poured scorn on bitcoin and its crypto peers, said a global digital currency could replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency–and likely directly compete with bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies.
The bitcoin price has climbed this year, despite the U.K.'s financial industry watchdog warning it has "no intrinsic value.
"COINDESK
Meanwhile, one promising crypto startup has already run into difficulties, according to reports. Nodal Labs, a blockchain-powered freelance marketplace, has missed payments to staff with a boardroom battle underway for control of the floundering crypto company, according to AltFi, an alternative finance and fintech news website.
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Billy Bambrough
I am a journalist with significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business around the world. As the founding editor of Verdict.co.uk I reported ...Read More-
Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst This article seems more FUD than any other thing. Brexit will have consequences in all sectors both for UK and the EU, but we believe the crypto and blockchain sectors, as for other new techs, any problem which may appear will be rapidly solved with time. Start ups have had enough time to prepare themselves for any possibility too.
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BIG BIG SHOW!
CNBC CRYPTOTRADER brings you 4 big guests in studio.
Charlie Shrem, Yoni Assia, Gabor Burbacs and Saum Noursalehi.
Is Bitcoin a hedge against a recession?
Are alts dead? Can we bury them?
Patrick Byrne Resigns!! What about Tzero.
Coinbase buys parts of XAPO!-
Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst We are not BTC maximalists. But we believe BTC could be, long term, a good asset to invest on times of economic uncertainty. Alt coins however need more time to grow and evolve. We expect the crypto market to be very different in five years from now in terms of Alt coins. Investors need to be cautious and judge where to invest in the crypto landscape, thinking not in speculative terms but on long term goals.
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