Bancor Trade Recommendation
The Bancor/Bitcoin (BNT/BTC) pair dropped to as low as 0.00017359 on September 12, 2018. At that price, the market lost over 84% of its value from this year’s high of 0.00110062.
It looked as if the pair had more room to plummet. This is because bears managed to breach historic support of 0.000185. However, bulls held their ground and lifted BNT/BTC above the support. This created a bear trap and gave the market the strength to carve a bottom. More importantly, it provided bulls the fuel to kickstart a bull run.
Technical analysis shows that BNT/BTC is positioning to take out resistance of 0.000227. Breach of this resistance would trigger the breakout from the symmetrical triangle pattern on the 4-hour chart.
On top of that, we can...
The Privacycoins Battles and Why Dash Is Not Really That Private
Based on blockchain technology, most cryptocurrencies have an open and public ledger. While this is required for these systems to work, it comes with a significant downside: Privacy is often quite limited. Government agencies, analytics companies and other interested parties — let’s call them “spies” — have ways to analyze the public blockchains and peer-to-peer networks of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, to cluster addresses and tie them to IP addresses or other identifying information.
Unsatisfied with Bitcoin’s privacy features, several cryptocurrency projects have, over the years, launched with the specific goal to improve on them. And not without success. Several of these privacycoins are among the most popular cryptocurrencies on the market today.
However, as detailed in this month’s cover story, Bitcoin’s privacy features have recently seen significant improvements as well and are set to further improve over the next months and years. This miniseries will compare different privacycoins to the privacy offered by Bitcoin.
In part one: Dash.
Background
Dash (DASH) is among the most popular but also the more controversial cryptocurrencies in the space today.
Originally a codebase fork from Litecoin (which is in turn a codebase fork of Bitcoin), Dash was launched by its founder Evan Duffield in January 2014 as Xcoin. The project was quickly rebranded to Darkcoin, seemingly in reference to Dark Wallet, a now-defunct, privacy-focused bitcoin wallet project. Darkcoin rebranded a second time in early 2015, to the current name Dash, which stands for "digital cash.” At the time of writing, Dash claims a 12th spot on the cryptocurrency market cap lists, down from a top five spot for some time in early 2017.
Much of the controversy surrounding Dash stems from the early days of the project. While the coin was not premined, it was instamined. As the cryptocurrency went live, miners created 2 million coins in a matter of days. Quite a significant amount, with a projected supply currently scheduled for a total of 22 million, and some 8 million coins in circulation today. According to Duffield, himself one of the early miners, the instamine was an accident. But instead of fixing the problem — for example, by changing the protocol rules or relaunching — it was decided that the coin would continue despite the instamine.
Since then, Dash has turned into (what it calls) a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, and prides itself on being the first successful example of such an organization. The DAO centers around Dash “masternodes” — DASH nodes that stake (proof of ownership) at least 1000 DASH — and should help the network in certain ways, for instance by confirming “instant transactions.” In return, these masternodes receive 45 percent of newly generated DASH.
Another 10 percent of every block reward is reserved for the Dash treasury. What happens with these funds is decided by the masternodes by vote. In practice, this money funds the Dash Core Group, effectively the company behind Dash, today headed...
eCommerce Startup Ticket Monster (TMON) Raises $32 Million to Create Crypto Stablecoin
South Korea ecommerce marketplace Ticket Monster (TMON) revealed it had closed a $32 million funding round for its new stablecoin.
TMON, which boasts a considerable $4 billion in total sales, is seeking to create an in-house cryptocurrency to compliment its existing token, Luna, which acts as collateral on its blockchain platform.
Contributing to the round are some of the cryptocurrency industry’s best-known names, including Binance Labs, OKEx and Huobi Capital, as well as funds including Polychain Capital.
“From experience, I know that faster, more secure transactions...
Being a Woman Entrepreneur In China's Get-Rich-Quick Crypto Culture
Sa Wang has co-founded several successful companies in the tech and blockchain space, first at popular Chinese self-service kiosk startup Dora, and now at top 50 crypto project and blockchain protocol IOST.
We hear a lot about women (or the lack thereof) in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.
Confirming what many of us already suspected, CoinDesk's Q2 2018 State of the Blockchain Report found that only 4 percent of crypto investors are women. In tandem, reporters regularly call the "blockchain bros" on the carpet for elbowing women out of yet another lucrative emerging industry.
But this has been a predominantly West-centric conversation, casting the spotlight on gender inequality and underrepresentation at Western crypto companies, Western blockchain conferences, and Western meetups.
Thus far, news articles, Twitter threads, and Medium posts have largely neglected the diversity of female experiences in other parts of the world, such as China, South Korea and Japan, where the crypto space is equally — if not more — dynamic and growing.
Take China, for instance. Despite banning ICOs and bringing bitcoin trading to a virtual standstill, in 2017, China was responsible for over half of the world's blockchain-related patent applications — with the U.S. coming in a distant second. The top three cryptocurrencies by market cap launched in 2018 — Zilliqa, Ontology, and IOST — are all Chinese.
With such a strong Asian presence in the blockchain world, why do we rarely hear about Asian women in crypto? What can the rest of the world learn from our experiences?
Chinese women in crypto
In order to understand what it's like to be a Chinese woman in crypto, first you must understand the Chinese crypto space itself.
Despite China's ban on crypto trading, there is a ravenous appetite for crypto wealth — traders have simply started placing their bets in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. The regulatory crackdowns have done little to stifle the hundreds of scam crypto projects in China (many of them deployed overseas), while newly minted bitcoin millionaires — mostly male with no education or merits necessary — abound.
In contrast to the West, where conversations are slowly evolving towards a more nuanced discussion of the merits of blockchain technology and institutional adoption, Chinese crypto enthusiasts largely maintain a single-minded speculative focus: Will this coin be listed on a Korean exchange soon? What is its market cap? Should I buy? Should I sell?
This get-rich-quick mentality makes it very difficult for serious blockchain advocates — especially females, who already have to fight for a voice — to cut through the noise and evangelize a longer-term (and much less sexy) message.
As Carylyne Chan of CoinMarketCap writes in her fascinating and detailed account of Chinese crypto culture:
"Scam cases… have engendered many tragedies, and created a more insidious impact: For those who truly believe in the blockchain, such scams are smearing the blockchain technology...
Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Just Might Have a Solution for the Crypto Funding Problem
There are free-riders in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
At least, that's the contention of a new paper, shared with CoinDesk on Monday, written by ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Microsoft researcher Glen Weyl and Ph.D. of economics at Harvard, Zoë Hitzig.
And free-riders pose a problem.
Described in the paper, free-riders are people or businesses that profit from the under-provision of public goods. And, on top of that, "the more people [these public goods] benefit the more they will be under-provided." It's an issue that plagues development even outside the cryptocurrency space, but the authors are – at least – initially focused on how the idea creates harmful incentives for the funding of blockchain projects.
Whereas currently, crypto development teams rely largely on donations, the altruistic whims of their creators, and ICOs — the paper details a new financing method to support a "self-organizing ecosystem of public goods."
Titled "Liberal Radicalism: Formal Rules for a Society Neutral among Communities," the method described – a system written in code – seeks to allow groups to allocate funds for the maintenance of public goods and services without becoming vulnerable to the "free-rider" problem.
The mechanism is similar in principle to Quadratic Voting, a form of stake-based voting championed by Weyl in a recent booked, "Radical Markets."
While Quadratic Voting allows participants to vote with crypto tokens according to how much they care about an issue, Liberal Radicalism (LR) expands the same concept to how communities contribute to public goods, such as software development, cryptocurrencies and journalism.
And it works by increasing the funding of projects incrementally depending on the number of participants and the degree to which they care about the issue at hand.
"Individuals make public goods' contributions to projects of value to them. The amount received by the project is (proportional to) the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received," the paper states.
And while the authors have ambitions for the technology that are far-reaching (including applying the code to municipal projects and campaign financing) cryptocurrency communities, with their open-minded attitudes towards experimentation, are a "particularly appropriate" testing ground for the technology.
Speaking to CoinDesk, co-author of the paper Hitzig said that interest is already building between many different groups. That currently includes about "a half dozen" cryptocurrency communities looking to potentially implement the technology, as well as "other innovators and philanthropists."
As such, Hitzig told CoinDesk:
"Once we circulate the paper we expect that experimentation will begin in earnest shortly thereafter."
The crisis of liberalism
The new paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between Buterin and Weyl since the publication of the latter's "Radical Markets" book.
As detailed by CoinDesk, the duo co-authored a blog post in May, in which the authors discussed their shared interest to "harness markets and technology to radically decentralize power of all sorts and shift our reliance from authority and to...
Australian Securities Exchange Delays Their Switch to Blockchain
The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has announced that it will delay its transition to use blockchain for equity transactions by six months, the Sydney Morning Herald reports September 4.
As Cointelegraph has previously reported, the ASX has been working to implement blockchain as of December 2017 to replace its current system for processing equity transactions.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the decision to delay the move comes as the exchange plans to devote more time to user development and testing. The launch date for the switchover has now been moved from the fourth quarter of 2020 to March-April...
Germany’s 2nd Largest Exchange Deutsche Borse Launched a Cryptocurrency Trading Platform
The race for crypto dominance is heating up in Germany after the country’s largest stock-exchange operator announced the creation of a new blockchain unit. The announcement came one month after Borse Stuttgart, Germany’s second-largest exchange operator, launched a new cryptocurrency trading platform.
Deutsche Borse Launches Blockchain Unit
The Frankfurt-based Deutsche Borse AG has created a centrally-steered unit dedicated to ‘DLT, Crypto Assets and New Market Structures,’ according to a press release that circulated Monday. The 24-person team, led by Jens Hachmeister, will further advance Deutsche Borse’s work in the blockchain arena.
“Deutsche Borse has been active with the technology in a first phase of ideation and exploration,” Hachmeister said in a statement. “We invested in various initiatives to create a sound understanding of the trends, the technology and its potential within the traditional segments of our value chain.
In order to use the full potential of the technology for our businesses, to generate efficiencies and create revenues, a centrally steered approach is necessary to make a greater impact,” he added.
Last month, Deutsche Borse acquired a minority stake in HQLAx, a liquidity and collateral management firm that is developing a new platform for blockchain-based securities lending.
Mainstream...
Litecoin’s Charlie Lee on the Crypto Bear Markets
Litecoin (LTC) creator Charlie Lee has dismissed short-term price trends as the upshot of “speculation,” stressing that long-term valuation is a truer measure of crypto’s success, in a CNBC interview August 27.
When asked to what extent price is a meaningful metric for a given cryptocurrency, and whether or not it reflects the current state of its network, adoption, or viability, Lee responded that:
“In the long-term, [price] tells us the success of cryptocurrencies, but short-term it doesn’t really tell us much. For example this year, there’s been so much adoption in Bitcoin and Litecoin, but their price has dropped 60-70 percent. It’s because it’s so volatile, it’s all about speculation these days, but in the future the price will reflect the success of the currencies.”
Lee noted that it was “hard to predict” when 2018’s bear market would turn, saying that having been in...
Korea’s 2nd-Biggest Cryptocurrency Exchange Bithumb Resumes User Registrations
Crypto markets are stabilizing and improving. Enabling companies to begin focusing on their next phase of growth.
Bithumb, South Korea’s second-biggest crypto exchange by daily trading volume behind UPbit, will officially resume registrations for new investors as early as this week.
NH Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in the country, is set to sign an agreement with Bithumb on August 30 to provide virtual bank accounts to Bithumb users, which will allow new users to trade on the trading platform.
In South Korea, cryptocurrency exchanges are required to operate virtual bank accounts so that users can withdraw and deposit Korean won without having to directly deal with their respective banks for efficiency and security.
What Bithumb’s Registration Resumption Means
Since early 2018, as its partnership with NH Bank was dematerialized and it experienced a $40 million security breach which disabled deposits and withdrawals on Bithumb for a whole month, Bithumb has not been able to accept new traders on its platform.
As CCN previously reported, an official from Nonghyup Bank told Business Korea:
“We have decided not to renew the contract because Bithumb still has problems in protecting consumers and information and preventing money laundering.”
As seen in its decline in profits in the third quarter of 2018, the trading volume and user activity of Bithumb stagnated due to its inability to support new users and facilitate trades in July.
But, this month, the government of South Korea approved UPbit, Bithumb, Korbit, and a few other cryptocurrency exchanges for having...
Binance Backs TMON Unicorn Founder's $32 Million Crypto Stablecoin Financing
Yet another stablecoin is attracting big investors.
Announced Tuesday, the founder behind a $1.4 billion startup unicorn called TMON is revealing he has raised a $32 million seed round to build a stablecoin called Terra. But while a number of startups have deployed stablecoins – cryptocurrencies engineered to track the price of another asset, usually fiat currency – Terra comes with a notable addition: an existing user base.
Created by Korean entrepreneurs Danial Shin, who founded and chairs TMON, one of the top e-commerce websites in South Korea, the Terra project is launching with a significant number of partners that already reach 40 million customers. Those partners, who will together form the Terra Alliance, a group of e-commerce sites that are interested in incorporating the stablecoin into their business, include Woowa Brothers, Qoo10, Carousell, Pomelo and TIKI.
According to a spokesperson for the project, those companies, combined, take in $25 billion in sales.
"We've banded together all the e-commerce platforms in Asia that are not called Alibaba or Amazon to push Terra into the hands of many many people," Shin told CoinDesk.
It's no wonder that the round includes quite a few notable crypto investors, including Polychain Capital, FBG Capital, Hashed, 1kx, Kenetic Capital, Arrington XRP, Binance and others who were not disclosed.
"We are pleased to support Terra, which sets itself apart from most other blockchain projects with its established and immediate go-to-market strategy," said Polychain's Karthik Raju in a statement.
Echoing that, Ella Zhang, head of Binance Labs, said in a statement:
"While we see many stablecoins coming out, Terra's journey is especially meaningful as they are designing one of the few price-stable protocols with existing, working and strong go-to-market strategy and usage."
That use, according to Shin, is in acting as an economical digital payment system, compared to credit cards.
He told CoinDesk, that a significant portion of TMON's annual losses take the form of credit card fees. And he's sure other retailers experience the same.
That...