Month: July 2018

In Its First Public Acquisition, Binance Buys Decentralized Trust Wallet

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Major crypto exchange Binance has made its first public acquisition, having bought Trust Wallet, according to an announcement July 31. Launched in 2017, U.S.-based Trust Wallet is an open source, anonymous, and decentralized wallet that supports Ethereum (ETH) and over 20,000 different Ethereum-based tokens (ERC20, ERC223, and ERC721). While the details of the deal are not disclosed, Binance told TechCrunch that it paid in a mixture of fiat money, Binance stocks, and its own BNB token. Trust Wallet will remain autonomous in most of its operations, while Binance will help…

Asset Management Firm Northern Trust to Start Crypto Custody Business

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Northern Trust Corp., a leading global asset management firm with $954 billion in total assets under management, is planning to start a custody service for digital assets, Bloomberg reported July 31. The company’s head of corporate and institutional business Pete Cherecwich told Bloomberg that the company has started developing a strategy to secure custody-held digital assets such as cryptocurrencies. He said the firm aims to offer a product similar to existing custodial services while charging lower fees: “The fees right now the custodians are charging are pretty high, not the…

Why Tokenization Is Still a Chimera: Expert Take

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In our Expert Takes, opinion leaders from inside and outside the crypto industry express their views, share their experience and give professional advice. Expert Takes cover everything from blockchain technology and ICO funding to taxation, regulation and cryptocurrency adoption by different sectors of the economy. If you would like to contribute an Expert Take, please email your ideas and CV to george@cointelegraph.com. The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Cointelegraph.com Tokenization is nothing new The term “tokenization” is mainly associated with…

Stellar Cryptocurrency Lives Up to Name With 40% July Gains

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Bitcoin’s 26 percent rally left many a cryptocurrency in the dust over the course of July. Indeed, the bitcoin dominance rate, a widely used indicator that tracks the percentage of the total crypto market cap contributed by bitcoin, rose to 48 percent, up from 42 percent, to record a 7-month high over the 31-day period, a function of money shifting from alternative cryptocurrencies into bitcoin. That said, not every alternative cryptocurrency saw gains. Ether, the cryptocurrency that powers the ethereum blockchain, and the second-largest cryptocurrency by total value, as an…

OTC is Much Larger Than Bitcoin Exchange Volume: Where Real Whales Trade

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TABB Group, an international research company, has disclosed in its extensive analytical report that the over-the-counter (OTC) market of bitcoin is significantly larger than the global bitcoin exchange market. OTC Versus Exchanges: Whales Against Retail Traders For many years, the majority of bitcoin analysts predicted billions of dollars to be traded on a regular basis in the OTC market, by billionaire investors, institutions, and miners. While cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, Huobi, OKEx, and UPbit process hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trades every day, the liquidity on these…

90% of Blockchain Initiatives by US Firms Will Never Become Operational

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About 90 percent of currently active U.S. companies’ blockchain initiatives will ultimately be abandoned. This statistic comes from a study by Forrester Research, cited by Bloomberg in an article July 31. The U.S. market research firm Forrester Research predicts that most of blockchain-powered projects initiated by American companies will be put on hold in 2018. Specifically, Forrester Research estimates that in a whopping 90 percent of cases, the projects will “never become part of a company’s operations.” The researcher also claims that “some companies,” which have been striving to incorporate…

Crypto Daily News | NFL Strikes Crypto Deal; Bitcoin Drops Below $8,000

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In today’s edition of Crypto Daily News, we’ll cover the NFL’s latest deal in crypto, Thomson Reuters’ partnership with Crypto Compare, and Bitcoin (BTC) dropping below $8,000. Crypto Daily News: July 31st, 2018 NFLPA Strikes Crypto Deal Announced this morning, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) plans to encourage its members to provide commentary, live streams, and other content on the FanChain platform. The NFLPA hopes that former and current players will be able to earn revenue for themselves outside the games they play. The NFLPA has purchased a…

Nobel Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman Expresses Skepticism About Crypto, Predicts Collapse

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Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has expressed his skepticism about the value of cryptocurrencies in a New York Times Opinion piece published July 31. Krugman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008, explains his position as a “crypto skeptic” by noting the high transaction costs and an “absence of tethering” associated with cryptocurrencies. Krugman describes how the history of money has been slowly moving away from gold and silver coins, to banknotes, and now to credit cards and other “digital methods,” all of which served…

Former US President Bill Clinton to Give Keynote Speech at Ripple’s Fall Tech Conference

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Ripple’s global payments tech conference, Swell, will start off this fall with a keynote speech from 42nd President of the United States Bill Clinton, according to Ripple’s July 31 blog post. Former President Clinton’s keynote and Q&A in San Francisco on Oct. 1 will be moderated by Gene Sperling, the National Economic Council Director and Advisory under both Presidents Clinton and Obama. The blog post notes that former President Clinton helped to “usher in a period of extreme growth and adoption of the Internet, shaping what it is today,” as…

US Blockchain Investment in 2018 to Date has Outstripped 2017’s Total

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Fresh analysis from KPMG shows that blockchain investment in the U.S. in the first half of 2018 has exceeded the overall total seen in 2017, according to its biannual “The Pulse of Fintech” report released today, July 31. KPMG is one of the world’s largest auditing firms, collectively known as “The Big Four” — alongside Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PwC. KPMG suggests that blockchain tech is “moving beyond experimentation” to draw “significant” attention from investors in the first two quarters of 2018, noting that investments were typically more focused…