Category: ICO

Securitize Opens IRAs to Digital Securities Investors With Partnership

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Digital asset issuer Securitize has facilitated what it says is the first direct IRA investment in security token offerings (STOs). Alternative investments gateway AltoIRA purchased an initial investment in security tokens representing CityBlock Capital’s $20 million venture fund, with tokens issued by Securitize. The arrangement is set to open up new opportunities for retirement investors seeking exposure to digital securities, an alternative investment, said Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo. “At the moment [digital securities] are not widely distributed,” Domingo said. “That makes it more complicated for investors to access them, creating…

Resurgent Bitcoin Will Likely Shrug off Long-Term Bear Cross

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View Bitcoin’s short-term technical charts indicate scope for a test of the 200-day average at $9,100. A breakout on a longer duration chart has opened the doors for a rise to $10,000 and above. An impending long-term bearish crossover on the three-day chart is a lagging indicator and is of little concern. The short-term bullish case would weaken if prices print a UTC close below $9,200. Bitcoin is better bid at press time and could maintain its recent upward trajectory despite a long-term bearish indicator making its first appearance in…

Kraken Futures to Expand Into Russia After New Hire

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Kraken Futures has hired its first Russian representative in a bid to ramp up its operations in the world’s largest country by land mass. The regulated futures provider, acquired by Kraken last year when it was called Crypto Facilities, brought on Aleksey Bragin last month and now intends to grow its Russian presence with in-person visits and Russian-language social media groups. The London-based subsidiary currently offers bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, litecoin and XRP futures contracts and sees some $17 million in daily volume for the bitcoin futures alone. “Russia is…

Why Compliance Is the Biggest Team at Bitcoin ATM Startup Coinsource

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Coinsource, a well-known bitcoin ATM company, purchased a booth at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Given increased interest from the IRS in bitcoin ATMs, we were especially curious about how users reacted when Coinsource increased its know-your-customer (KYC) requirements. “Our compliance department is actually the largest department in our entire company,” Coinsource’s Derek Muhney told CoinDesk in the video above. Money-laundering concerns have long dogged the bitcoin ATM sector. Muhney said Coinsource moved to require KYC of everyone two years ago, though the company had always…

This Blue Chip Crypto Insurance Consortium Lacks One Thing – a Sizable Loss

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In a rare interview, London-based insurance firm Arch says a sizable but containable loss would demonstrate how well its $150M crypto storage policy would react. Only a handful of cold storage crypto policies have been written at this time; high net worth individuals are the main driver for the business. Lloyd’s of London has set up a crypto subgroup within its Product Innovation Facility which includes mega-broker Marsh. Marsh says it has a hot wallet crime cover product in the pipeline. An insurance company saying it hopes to pay a…

CME Takes Its Bitcoin Options Live, Competing With ICE’s Bakkt

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Chicago exchange CME Group has announced its highly-anticipated bitcoin options are now open for trading. Options on CME’s bitcoin futures contracts launched on the CME Globex around 15:00 UTC Monday. Each contract, quoted in U.S. dollars, represents five bitcoin and is cleared centrally to avoid counterparty risk. CME relies on trade flow data from several of the large bitcoin exchanges to accurately track bitcoin’s price. Bitcoin derivatives have been available on multiple cryptocurrency exchanges since at least 2014, but CME was one of the first platforms to offer investors regulated…

Bitcoin Makes Biggest Weekly Price Gain Since October

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View Bitcoin jumped more than 11 percent last week, confirming a falling channel breakout (bullish reversal) on the weekly chart. The breakout has opened the doors for a re-test of October highs above $10,000. For the next 24 hours, the focus is on $8,200, a level that has proved a tough nut to crack in the last few days. A strong rejection above $8,200 could yield a temporary drop to sub-$8,000 levels. Bitcoin logged double-digit price gains last week, confirming a reversal from a six-month downtrend.   The top cryptocurrency…

‘The Internet Was Illegal’ and Other Early Stories With Zooko Wilcox

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The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Earlier this week, the Let’s Talk Bitcoin! show enlisted CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen and early cypherpunk Zooko Wilcox for a conversation on the history, challenges and long term development path of early, formative technologies. which we often hear modern blockchain movements compared against.  From the pre-internet days, through the free/open source movement, linux’s successes and challenges on the desktop, the peer-to-peer movement, cypherpunks, linux maximalism, fundamentalism as a concept as well as some brief excursions through some history and politics…

Ethereum Classic Successfully Completes ‘Agharta’ Hard Fork

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Ethereum Classic successfully completed the “Agharta” hard fork at block number 9,573,000 at 06:26 UTC on Sunday, according to etcnodes.org. Similar to the network’s last backwards-incompatible upgrade in September, Atlantis, Agharta makes ethereum classic more interoperable with sister-chain ethereum. As part of the hard fork, the Constantinople and St. Petersburg upgrades deployed in tandem on the ethereum network last February will be enabled under Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposal (ECIP) 1056. The 22nd largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, ethereum classic and ethereum engaged in a messy divorce following the 2016 DAO…

Is Bitcoin in 2020 Really Like the Early Internet?

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It’s a cliche at this point to compare bitcoin to the “early days of the internet,” since they are both examples of emerging technologies. But does the cliche actually hold true? If we work with a vague definition of the World Wide Web going live in 1991, then within the first decade that ecosystem grew faster and had more demand for compliant use cases than bitcoin arguably has today, one decade in. In 1994, the New York Times reported that companies were “rushing” to set up shop via the World…