Category: Exchanges

The Chamber of Digital Commerce, a blockchain advocacy group, wants a U.S. court to distinguish between an investment contract and the underlying asset used by Telegram during a 2018 initial coin offering (ICO). The Digital Chamber submitted an amicus curiae brief – a filing made by someone who is not a party in the litigation – in Telegram’s ongoing fight in court with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which alleged the messenger platform violated securities law during its $1.7 billion ICO. The chamber urges the SEC to draw…

DAVOS — Switzerland’s banking industry has long been known to privately safeguard wealth, so some bankers see bitcoin as a natural fit for the nation’s financial sector. Although such bankers may still be a minority, Zurich-based SEBA Bank AG opened in November 2019 with a universal banking license and a suite of services ranging from fiat storage to crypto custody, a crypto-connected debit card that automatically converts to fiat on the backend for regular shopping and crypto-trading options through the bank’s mobile app.   SEBA CEO Guido Bühler said the bank raised…

Huobi Group is opening its first digital asset brokerage platform, offering trading products and services to institutional clients and high net-worth customers.  Announced Tuesday, the Gibraltar-based Huobi Brokerage is also the first product launched under the company’s Global Institutional Business (GIB) division, according to a company statement. Formed in November 2019, the new division was created as part of Huobi’s effort to better serve institutional investors in the global market.  The statement said the platform will enable institutional investors to use crypto services such as liquidity pools, a regulated fiat…

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Paxos announced Tuesday a new feature allowing customers to automatically wire transfer funds from their bank accounts into either Paxos Standard or Binance USD stablecoins. Conversely, any PAX or BUSD sent to the designated address will be automatically wired back to the individual’s bank account in USD. Zach Kwartler, senior product manager at Paxos, told CoinDesk this functionality, dubbed Auto-Transfers, should be available with any bank in the U.S. “The blockchain and the real financial world need to be closer together,” he said. “For us, our vision is to use…

The Swiss government has attempted to strike a more conciliatory tone on the Facebook-led Libra project, weeks after the country’s now-departed president called the project a failure. A government memo, seen by Bloomberg, emphasizes that the country’s regulators have not ruled out the possibility that Libra could one day receive their approval. Swiss officials will continue to monitor the project, the note reads, paying special attention to “the form which Libra may take in the future.” Published Jan. 15, the memo suggests the Swiss government wants to soften its stance…

A regulated European startup plans to bring fiat currency transactions onto the Algorand blockchain. Iceland-based Monerium, which has a European Economic Area (EEA) e-money license, has entered into a non-exclusive partnership with Algorand. Announced Tuesday, the deal will see the two companies collaborate on developing “real-world use cases that are enabled by advanced blockchain technology” using Monerium’s “programmable” e-money, according to W. Sean Ford, Algorand’s COO. Monerium allows clients to develop blockchain-based financial services, such as cross-border settlements, using any fiat currency of choice, such as the euro, pound sterling…

Noelle Acheson is CoinDesk’s Director of Research and producer of CoinDesk’s Institutional Crypto newsletter. These opinions are her own. Let’s talk about containers – not the massive cargo ships that cross oceans, but vessels such as bottles, boxes and bins. Things that hold stuff. A reliable container does just that, it holds. It doesn’t transform its contents. In finance, the vessel is the custody service that stores a fund’s assets. A good custody service reliably “holds” securities and bonds in its client’s name, often providing additional services but never influencing…

A project which conducted a 2016 initial coin offering (ICO) has voted to liquidate its $64 million treasury, returning funds to investors. Project Ragnarok, a measure to return ether to ICO investors from the Digix project’s treasury – which was held independently of the company in a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), DigixDAO – has passed with over 95 percent support. Only 52 votes were cast, according to the proposal on the Digix community site. With the passage, a contract will be executed, unstaking and giving back 0.19 ETH per DGD…

Open interest in bitcoin futures listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) have doubled in the first few days of the year, as noted by data analytics firm Skew. About $235 million worth of positions (5,329 contracts) were open on the CME on Jan. 17 compared to $110 million seen in early December. Open interest is the sum of all contracts that have not expired, been exercised or physically delivered. Open interest has spiked alongside price, confirming an upward trend. Bitcoin bottomed out near $6,430 in mid-December and rose to…