So far, this year has been marked by bad news for institutional investors interested in pursuing cryptocurrencies.
One of the most lauded and most highly anticipated crypto investment instruments, the crypto Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), has faced steady regulatory headwinds as the SEC continually rejects attempts to bring ETFs to market.
Since many crypto enthusiasts see institutional investment as the next frontier for crypto adoption, these setbacks are frustrating. However, that doesn’t mean that all opportunities for institutional investors are impossible.
In that regard, it’s been a big week for Bitcoin as a series of leaks reveal that major financial institutions, including Morgan Stanley and Citibank, are creating or developing investment products intended to provide their substantial customer base with access to digital assets.
Morgan Stanley is preparing a crypto product
This week, Bloomberg reported that Morgan Stanley is preparing an investment product that will provide their customers access to Bitcoin derivatives. Citing an anonymous source, Bloomberg contends that Morgan Stanley will provide customers with “synthetic exposure” to Bitcoin markets by enabling investors to take long or short positions on the digital currency.
In this way, Morgan Stanley is joining several other mainstream financial institutions striving to produce mechanisms for their clients to trade in Bitcoin without providing direct access to digital currencies. Bloomberg’s source notes that Morgan Stanley will charge spread fees to accommodate the inherent risks in brokering Bitcoin products.
Tezos is a distributed, peer-to-peer, permissionless network that seeks to improve on older blockchain protocols such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
One of its differentiating features is its on-chain governance that promises a self-amending blockchain – the protocol can evolve by upgrading its own code after coin holders have approved the changes.
This avoids some of the political and technological issues that have affected other blockchains, such as the Ethereum hard fork following the DAO hack, and the hard fork drama that happened in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
The project had a two-week uncapped ICO in July 2017. It collected approximately $232 million worth of cryptocurrencies and set a record for the largest ICO at the time. It currently has a market cap of over $782 million (as of October 31, 2018) and ranks among the top 20 cryptocurrencies in the world in terms of market cap.
There are 3 key layers in Tezos – network layer, transaction layer, and consensus layer. The components are modular, which makes it easy to upgrade by swapping modules in and out seamlessly. Other networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, can be represented within Tezos by implementing the proper interface to the network layer.
Self-amending: Tezos can be upgraded without the need for forks in the blockchain because of its self-amending feature. On-chain governance also means XTZ owners vote on the direction of the blockchain – the election cycle provides a formal process for any proposed protocol changes.
Liquid Proof-of-Stake: Tezos uses a proof-of-stake consensus model where every stakeholder can participate in validating transactions on the network and be rewarded accordingly.
This table summarizes the differences between Tezo’s proof-of-stake consensus model and delegated proof-of-stake:
Tezos Comparison
Formal verification: The Tezos blockchain facilitates formal verification, a technique which mathematically proves the correctness of the code governing transactions. This helps secure smart contracts and avoid bugs in the code.
Turing complete smart contracts: Tezos supports Turing complete smart contracts and provides a platform for building smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps).
It should be noted that in the original white paper, it was stated that the Tezos network would launch in “summer 2017”. However, the network was not launched until June 30, 2018, almost a year after the initial promise.
The delay was partly due to the infighting between the foundation board members which led to the ICO funding being unutilized for a while.
XTZ is the native cryptocurrency for the Tezos blockchain. With Tezos, any coin holders can participate in the validation process by making a security deposit. This is a process calling “baking”. They are rewarded for contributing to the network and ensuring its security and stability and can lose their deposit if they exhibit dishonest behavior.
Initially, the inflation of the circulating supply is set at a maximum of 5.5% per annum. Each block is “baked” by a stakeholder and endorsed by 32 other random stakeholders. Coin holders can delegate their stake to a baker who can bake the coins for the holders for a fee. Click here for a list of bakers.
Transaction fees on the Tezos network are optional and users can send transactions with zero transaction fee. However, we believe that if the network is congested, bakers will prioritize transactions with higher transaction fees.
Part of the newly minted XTZ coins will be rewarded to the contributors that won the proposals voted on-chain. The contributors will use the funding to execute the proposals.
Tezos was created by Arthur Breitman and his wife, Kathleen Breitman. They released the position paper and whitepaper in 2014 and the project had been in development ever since. The biographies of the two co-founders are summarized below:
Arthur Breitman – Arthur was born in France and studied at École Polytechnique in math, physics, and computer science. He went on to a career in quantitative finance, working in various positions at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. He also worked as a portfolio manager for White Bay Group, a family office.
Kathleen Breitman – Kathleen co-founded Tezos in October 2016. Prior to that, she worked in strategy and consulting at R3 CEV (a distributed ledger startup), Accenture, and De Dicto and in various positions at Bridgewater Associates, The Wall Street Journal, etc. She obtained her BA from Cornell University in...
Amazon and ConsenSys-Built Kaleido Launches Full-Stack Marketplace
Blockchain software-as-a-service (SAS) project Kaleido has launched a marketplace to provide its users with a “full-stack enterprise platform.”
Their “Blockchain Business Cloud” now features a “new marketplace [of] trusted tools and services from Kaleido, AWS, and members of the new partnership program, all offered as plug-and-play.” The suite of services will feature oracles, wallet and ID services, supply chain tools and even legal contract software.
According to a company statement, “Clients now have access to native AWS integrations, popular services such as HD wallets for privacy and ID registries for organizational identity, as well as industry products such as Chainlink for smart contract oracles, Viant for supply chain management, OpenLaw and Clause.io for real-time legal contracts, and many others—all...
According to the ministry’s tweet, the system is designed to issue and verify the authenticity of university-issued degrees. The new government-backed consortium will initially be comprised of six public universities and their diploma-verifying system is set to operate using the NEM (XEM) blockchain. According to the ministry, the new system was developed by a team led by a professor from...
Bitcoin is not without its vocal band of critics and naysayers. The Nouriel Roubinis and Paul Krugmans of this world would have you believe that Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation is 100 percent doomed to fail.
Bitcoin Doesn’t Need Men with Guns
Earlier in the year, Bitcoinistreported on Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times where the Nobel Prize winner in Economics took aim at cryptocurrency asking what problems virtual currencies solve. This week, Economics professor Saifedean Ammous offered a robust reply to the flawed rhetoric espoused in Krugman’s piece.
For starters, Bitcoin $6393.00 +0.02% doesn’t need men with guns to enforce its value. According to Krugman:
Fiat currencies have underlying value because men with guns say they do. And this means that their value isn’t a bubble that can collapse if people lose faith.
If the above is true then the current situation in places like Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran, Turkey, and even Argentina shouldn’t be happening. This author is going out on a limb to say each of...
The Israel Securities Authority (ISA) has started to use blockchain to improve the cybersecurity of its messaging system, online newspaper Times of Israel reports today, October 3.
The government regulator has reportedly embedded the technology into a system dubbed “Yael,” used to deliver messages and other information to entities that fall under ISA oversight.
The ISA has further plans to implement blockchain in two other systems, including an online voting system that enables investors to participate in ISA meetings remotely, and a system called ‘Magna” that stores all the reports filed by ISA-regulated entities. The blockchain solution used by ISA was reportedly developed by IT firm Taldor, according to the Times of Israel.
In the Crusher of the Month series, we will write about a coin/token that we have the most conviction in each month. The time frame will be around 1 month, or until we publish the next Crusher of the Month. In October 2018, our Crusher of the Month is AION.
More Than Just an Interoperability Project
Most people know AION as a project focusing on interoperability, but the AION team is also hard at work to make sure the AION root chain will have usage.
In addition to create new blockchains, monetize inter-chain bridges, run cross-chain decentralized applications, AION coins are also the fuel used to secure the overall network. We believe that the market is discounting the potential usage the AION blockchain will have for running decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts.
The Aion FastVM is a modified Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and Aion virtual machine (AVM) is a performant, lightweight, and stable virtual machine that leverages key characteristics of the Java Virtual Machine. Solidity apps will be supported, but there will also be a new option for running apps in a Java language.
“This is a real test to come level in the playing fields amid evolving techs, which includes blockchain, and not disadvantage any of them”
, Aijt Pai, U.S. FCC Chair stated.
Blockchain regulation is one of the major developments going on in the tech industry now. The distributed ledger technology has been touted by many to be the savior to tracking of records, supply chains, voting, retailing, travel and a whole lot more. But for the tech to go fully functional in some places, there have to be ground rules to regulate how the tech can be used or not used.
The government agency that is responsible for the regulation of radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable – the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – voiced to the Indian Express that it might be essential to grow the realm of the telecom regulator (FCC) to include the evolving tech.
“So one of the challenges is to figure out how we find a level-playing field that promotes investment and innovations for all these firms without disadvantaging any one of them. The second issue is that these are very dynamic industries and one can foresee in coming decades – things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, quantum computing will have significant impact on how communications networks...
Let’s start with a simple question. What do you think your clients prefer to do: read a book or watch the movie?
Content creation is the king tool to attract traffic to a website. But what still seems to be unclear is that the king already has a queen: the video.The relationship between content and video has been forged little by little where it is more than obvious that the generation of content is increasingly maintaining a close relationship with video and this relationship is so popular for users that audiovisual material already accounts for 78% of the content that users consume weekly. This is something that ICOs cannot ignore.
Most of the successful projects that have been funded via ICOs have explanatory videos where they highlight the value proposition of their project, show interviews with their members and detail ways of using the platform and tokenomics. These descriptions are framed in a one-minute video like an ‘elevator pitch’, although videos of longer duration can also be made for users who want to delve into specific topics of the project.Video marketing advantages:
Easy to consume: watching a video does not require as much effort by the user, just a simple click and play. Video content is more entertaining than reading text and attracts the user’s attention for much longer.
Easy distribution: currently there are easily accessible channels...
In a recent OmiseGO AMA session, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin announced that soon the Ethereum network would be able to process one million transactions per second, with Sharding and Plasma technology playing a vital role.
This advancement in the scalability issues of blockchain based technologies has been something which Buterin has long discussed. Whilst these decentralized networks have the potential to become a part of the everyday world, they are limited by the capacity of transactions per second.
The Ethereum blockchain at the moment can “processes around 15 transactions per second” Buterin stated in the conversation. Whilst this is far more advanced than the capability of Bitcoin, for example, the capability of Ethereum is far smaller than “PayPal, VISA and the major stock exchanges which go up to about 80,000 transactions per second” according to Buterin.
Whilst Buterin knows too well that the current level of transactions processed by the Ethereum blockchain is high for the platform and industry, he also knows that the scalability of Ethereum has some major issues.
The layer one property improvements that Sharding can address in these scalability issues allows the blockchain to process these transactions a lot...
