Major South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb

is reportedly cutting up to 50 percent of its workforce, a report from CoinDesk Korea stated on March 18. According to the report, an unnamed official has confirmed that the exchange will reduce its staff from 310 (at the start of March) to around 150, and is offering a voluntary redundancy plan and training

support to employees:

“Voluntary retirement is part of our support program for former employees and is intended to provide assistance and training for job placement. Apart from that, [Bithumb’s] trading volume has decreased compared to the previous year, [so] we are trying to provide internal measures. We will continue to add necessary personnel for various new businesses.”

To press time, Bithumb has not responded to Cointelegraph’s request for comment. Amid the crypto winter, Bithumb’s reported move to reduce its head count has been preceded by a host of other firms in the sector; mining giant Bitmain, blockchain software firm ConsenSys, decentralized social network Steemit and crypto exchanges Coinsquare and Huobi are among those to have made significant cuts in recent months.According to CoinMarketCap (CMC), Bithumb has seen roughly $1.3 billion in trades over the 24 hours before press time. The exchange was removed from CMC’s global exchange rankings in January 2018, due to the site’s concerns over reportedly “extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world” on the platform and its fellow South Korean exchanges.

Article Produced By
Marie Huillet

https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-major-south-korean-crypto-exchange-bithumb-to-lay-off-up-to-50-of-staff

Major United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase

announced a new market structure for its professional trading platform, Coinbase Pro, in a blog post published on March 15. Per the announcement, the changes aim to increase liquidity, enhance price discovery and ensure smoother price movements. The changes include a new fee structure, reportedly designed to increase liquidity, updated order maximums, new order increment sizes, the turning off of stop market orders and added market order protection points.

According to the post, Coinbase Pro and Coinbase Prime — the firm’s institutional trading platform — will cease their support for stop market orders. The announcement further explains that all stop orders must now be submitted as limit orders and include a limit price. On the other hand, the market protection points that will be introduced both to Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Pro users will amount to 10 percent for all market orders. The statement explains that market orders that move the price more than 10 percent will stop executing and return a partial fill.

Lastly, the post warns the exchange’s user base that the platform will be offline on March 22 from 6:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. PDT. The changes were met with some skepticism and negativity from the crypto community on social media. Economist and trader Alex Krüger complained on Twitter about “Coinbase Pro raising fees for smaller clients by 33% while lowering fees for larger clients.” The same user also further commented that “in a rational world, most Coinbase users would now move to Binance.”

In the same Twitter thread, Krüger also questioned Coinbase’s decision to disable stop market orders, claiming that stop-limit orders sometimes fail to execute because of slippage, suggesting using far off limits on limit orders as a workaround. Still, Krüger also admitted that those changes should lead to increased liquidity and trading activity. Another crypto trader on Twitter suggested that the new fee structure is seemingly targeting new users entering the cryptocurrency space,

concluding:

“Pretty random day to hike all the fees up, Coinbase anticipating a new bull run perhaps?”

As Cointelegraph recently reported, Coinbase Pro announced support for altcoin Stellar Lumens (XLM). Just yesterday news broke that publicly traded U.S.-based company Riot Blockchain has filed with the Securities and Exchanges Commission to launch a new regulated cryptocurrency exchange, called RiotX, in the U.S. by the end of Q2 2019.

Article Produced By
Adrian Zmudzinski

https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-pro-increases-fees-updates-market-structure-to-increase-liquidity

ICO fundraising is still strong despite increased attention

on the part of regulating bodies and saturation of the market. Still, compared to an average seed round venture investment (even considering bias we get due to our dataset’s nature), amount raised stands quite high. This could easily be explained. Not only a bulk of investors are coming from the crypto world, with their understanding of it (or self-confidence) deep enough to invest in Blockchain-related projects more eagerly, but with “it is new Ethereum/Bitcoin” being a recurring theme in projects’ pitches.

All of the market participants were more enthusiastic about investing into “new economy” projects rather than into projects we could label as “traditional,” often with no apparent need for cryptocurrencies/Blockchain technology at all. As for fintech projects, this area has become quite naturally the first field for testing of Blockchain capability for real-world problems. According to research by The BB Fund, based on the data tokendata.io, more than $5.3 bln was raised via ICO in 2017 with $5.1 bln attracted for the last nine months.  There were 1,331 analyzed and only projects raising over $1 mln were considered. According to the research, 60 percent of ICOs have been profitable so far: median return is 2x.

The categorization is quite subjective and is organized as follows:

“Blockchain” category represents all Blockchain infrastructure-related projects. “Cards & Payments” stands for a very broad category of projects, from merchant-serving payment processors to crypto wallets with built-in p2p transfers and other functions. “Decentralized Market” consists of projects, which usually relied in their description on familiar cliché “Decentralized XYZ” – ranging from services’ markets (shipment, logistics, taxi drives) to goods markets (real estate, electricity) and universal markets, aiming any type of good/service imaginable.

While the majority of these projects do not benefit from Blockchain, implement things already implemented and suffer from lack of resources, some of them seem interesting and could be able to survive and prosper. “Crypto Market” category includes any type of exchange or exchange-like vehicles dedicated to crypto. “ICO platform” may refer not only to such platforms but also to accelerators, startup clubs and any sort of a project, which claims it is developing an ecosystem of investors, teams and crypto enthusiasts.

“Identity Verification” and “Advertising” are broad categories, too, with the first one including projects with an emphasis on verification – from people’s identity to identity of food products and content. The second segment includes everything advertising-like – lead generation, promotion, brand influencers’ network. Among other categories we would like to specifically mention businesses referred to as being “commodity”-backed. This term, again, doesn’t always stand for a commodity in common sense (gold or zinc oxide), but also for any tangible real-world asset, which either used as a sort of collateral or may be handled as such.

This distribution not only reflects bigger interest toward Blockchain infrastructure/fintech projects but also higher costs of development of them due to bigger development workload (Blockchain), license and integration-attributed costs (fintech). While valuations and investment attracted are rarely substantiated, investors more willingly allocated larger amounts of money to projects with high capital costs. Also, we could observe sorrowful tendency of poorer-quality projects to originate in Decentralized Market/Betting segments, with seemingly no diversification and original ideas behind them in many cases.

ICO market may be hard to predict at times

A system of simultaneous linear equations describes price dynamics of crypto assets, whether they are more “traditional” coins or ICO-related newly issued tokens, pretty well. While overall demand for crypto assets is defined by endogenous factors (mostly news, investor sentiment and manipulation of “whales”), this being the main factor, defining the value of all crypto markets.

Even if you are not quite familiar with a concept of correlation, you could have already noted that most of the assets usually move in the same direction, every time with exception of a few. This is a phenomenon very familiar for stock market investors too, especially for those involved in trading assets on markets with a high level of political turbulence, for example. You could easily find dependency between the volume of ICO money raised in a given month and ETH price (which are assets mutually influencing each other)- for Bitcoin and Ethereum interdependence in prices is also very characteristic.

However, in the case of ICOs, it is difficult now to attract long-term investors by promising them return some moment in the future– there should be a plan on the startup side how to get to this future as fast as possible at a steady pace. While Blockchain, ICOs, tokenized economy brings completely new technologies and business models to the world, investment principles and basics remain the same: long-term play, serving the real market demand, addressing pains and wishes of people.

Recently Vitalik Buterin wrote:

“All crypto communities […] need to differentiate between getting hundreds of billions of dollars of digital paper wealth sloshing around and actually achieving something meaningful for society.”

ICO market gives a lot of opportunities for speculations and quick profits, especially due to early-stage “pre-sale” discounts and premiums, and only a few players are ready to play in a long-run. Your investment philosophy should be based specifically on a long-term strategy. The strategy being the development of technologies on the emerging and unbanked markets (Asia, Africa, LatAm), infrastructural implementations to enable and/or disrupt the traditional systems (including bank-as-a-service models and open banking principles) and convergence of crypto and traditional financial worlds, including Blockchain implementation by government bodies.

ICO market as a way of fundraising- promising projects as well as scammers

So far, we could observe several moves on the side of the industry, its main players incentivized and welcomed. They could allow for Blockchain-related technologies and companies to make a breakthrough and for investors to profit. Not only commodity sector, but also some advertising, payments and lending companies make their way into respective industries with the leverage of an ICO. Such as ETHLend (lending), Ripio (micro-lending), UTRUST (crypto payment gateway), BitClave (smart advertising and promotion) and NVB (native video advertising via vlogs and content discovery platform), to name a few recent examples.

For many of these companies, smart contracts and tokens are the only nuisance and it is highly doubtful they would make any use of Blockchain technology (or would be happy with something absolutely decentralized). Venture fund investors, family funds, banks and investment companies start to invest in Blockchain-related projects or Bitcoin funds. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, actually, as liquidity flows blazingly fast in comparison with many other ecosystems. USV, Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, Lux Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Jefferson River Capital LLC and Forsters LLP, Citi, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Thomson Reuters, BoA, HSBC, Temasek Holdings etc. – it is hard to name all the family offices, venture funds and banks, which invested in companies developing Blockchain technologies and crypto.

While for those, who raised small and easily convertible sums via ICO fraudulent behavior and negligence it may seem a viable (even punishable by law) way, big players are forced to look for new ways of monetization, products and models, which could pay for all this (rather expensive) story. The biggest ones could probably become investors themselves (which would be bad for current token holders, but not so bad for the ecosystem as a whole), looking for projects to outsource the task of profit-making. This may seem crazy, but with so much money at stake and their future earning often tied to the buying power of their own tokens, companies are forced to look for ways of wealth creation like never before.

Article Produced By
Vladislav Solodkiy

https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-market-players-are-enthusiastic-about-investing-in-new-economy-expert-blog

Ripple (XRP) CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the recently-announced

digital asset from United States banking giant JPMorgan Chase lacks the interoperability that would make it a significant innovation. Garlinghouse made his remarks during an interview at the 4th Annual DC Blockchain Summit in Washington D.C. on March 6. As Cointelegraph has reported, JPMorgan Chase announced the forthcoming launch of its new blockchain settlement offering in mid-February: a stablecoin dubbed JPM Coin, to be backed 1:1 by the bank’s USD reserves. Alluding to multiple industry commentators’ suggestions that the bank’s coin could be a direct competitor to Ripple’s XRP, Garlinghouse dismissed the coin’s usefulness due to the fact that it remains a proprietary in-house asset, and that its exclusivity is likely to lead each major bank to issuing its own coin. This, according to him, will lead to the exact same fragmentation that characterizes the

financial services industry today:

“This guy from Morgan Stanley was interviewing me last week, and I asked him, so is Morgan Stanley going to use the JPM Coin? Probably not. Will Citi use it? […] Will PNC? And the answer is no. So we’re going to have all these different coins, and we’re back to where we are: there’s a lack of interoperability.”

Garlinghouse further weighed in on JPM Coin’s apparent exclusivity, quipping that:

“Let’s think about this. [JPM] announced the JPM Coin for institutional customers. If you give them a dollar as deposit, they’ll give you a JPM Coin, that you then can move in the JPM ledger. Wait a minute, just use the dollar! I really don’t understand […] what problem that solves.”

Throughout the interview, the sole thing that Garlinghouse conceded to JPM Coin was the potentially positive effect “for the blockchain and crypto industry to have players such as JPM leaning in.” “That’s the one good thing I’ll say about this,” he joked. As previously reported, the research arm of top crypto exchange Binance has similarly judged that as a proprietary and centralized network, JPM Coin is unlikely to be tapped by competitors in the banking sector, who may well choose to release their own native digital tokens in future.

In terms of inter-bank settlement, Binance Research further argued that as a closed network solution, JPM Coin is for now unlikely to directly compete with XRP — given the latter’s ambition to serve as a multi-bank “mediator currency between both fiat/crypto currencies and any fiduciary product.” Binance nonetheless stated that internally, JPM Coin could have a significant material impact in improving the cost and time efficiency of traditional financial services. Garlinghouse has previously stated that JPM Coin “misses the point” of crypto, arguing that introducing a closed network today is like launching AOL after Netscape’s IPO.

Article Produced By
Marie Huillet

https://cointelegraph.com/news/ripple-ceo-says-jpm-coin-lacks-interoperability-just-use-the-dollar-i-dont-get-it

Estonia-based digital trading platform DX.Exchange

has added tokenized Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) to its services, according to press release shared with Cointelegraph on March 6. The move involves the tokenization of popular ETFs, such as SPY, which represents the S&P 500, and QQQ, which backs the Nasdaq Composite at a 1:1 ratio. UWT (crude oil) and UDOW are among other ETFs offered on the platform. The ETFs offered can now be purchased both for cryptocurrencies and fiat during trading hours as well as after-hours.

According to the press release, the introduction of tokenized ETFs on DX.Exchange complies both with the latest guidelines issued by the European Securities and Markets Authority and with the EU Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II. The chief operating officer of DX.Exchange, Amedeo Moscato, stated that he believes that the latest move by the EU-regulated company opens the world of popular financial assets to crypto holders.

His statement reads:

“As of today, there’s over 130 Billion USD worth of Crypto that can now be invested in Digital Stocks and ETFs. Crypto investors who wished to hedge part of their crypto portfolio had only USD stable coins or limited options. Now they can invest in real world assets on the blockchain.”

DX.Exchange states that adding ETF trading to the platform will attract investors seeking to benefit from a lower-cost venue for executing their trades. Moreover, the decision will reportedly allow smaller retail investors or investors from developing countries to enter the market. DX.Exchange first appeared as a concept in May last year and was launched in January of this year. The company uses Nasdaq’s Financial Information Exchange protocol to deliver its products.

As Cointelegraph wrote, the company initially proposed that crypto holders purchase tokens backed by stocks in various major companies, including Amazon, Baidu, Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia and Tesla. The trading at the Estonian exchange is currently only available for traders in the European Union. However, the company plans to make trading available to United States-based customers in 2019, according to a tweet from its co-founder and CEO in early January.

Article Produced By
Ana Berman

https://cointelegraph.com/news/nasdaq-powered-eu-digital-exchange-dx-adds-tokenized-etfs

Parity CEO Jutta Steiner has said that the new controversial Create2 Ethereum (ETH)

function would have prevented the Parity multisig freeze. Steiner spoke on the subject during an interview with Fortune published on March 5. As Cointelegraph reported in November 2017, a user “accidentally killed” the Parity multisig library by activating a vulnerability to become the owner of the library, and then self-destructing it. The incident involved 587 wallets holding 513,774.16 in Ethereum, at the time equivalent to about $152 million and about $65 million today. Create2, the new function added to Ethereum with the Constantinople update that has been rumored to introduce a new attack vector — a claim since denied by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin — could have prevented this attack, according to Steiner.

As she noted during the interview:

“If that functionality Create2 had existed at the time, there wouldn’t have been a vulnerability, basically.”

This function also grants Parity a new argument to use when trying to convince the community to support a hard fork that would reverse the reportedly accidental hack. At the end of April, a vote to reverse the Parity incident and unfreeze the multisignature wallets ended with 55 percent of the votes choosing not to reverse it. The vote was also accompanied by an overwhelming controversy in the Ethereum community, as participants with large amounts of ETH had distinct advantage in influencing the direction of the vote due to the vote staking process. However, as Steiner now puts it, since that the tooling has been fixed, “wouldn’t it be the right thing to do to also fix the issues that arose when we didn’t have the tooling?”

A recent TrustNodes report points out that the Edgeware smart contract platform based on Polkadot, which is a platform similar to Ethereum and capable of running Ethereum smart contracts and DApps, could be of help to Parity as well. The chain is proof-of-stake (PoS), which means that new native coins, called Edge, are minted by staking them. As the project’s minting process for its native token can be done by locking ETH in a smart contract, TrustNodes notes that Parity’s accidentally locked funds may be eligible for the project’s lockdrop contract. Through the initial lockdrop distribution, three percent of the supply is reported to be handed over to Parity.

According to TrustNodes’ calculations, the locked funds paired with the “dots” tokens held by Parity (also eligible for staking) would grant the company close to 10 percent of the entire supply. Also taking staking rewards in the account, TrustNodes estimates that the actual percentage of Parity’s holdings would increase. Polkadot is a blockchain framework meant to create scalable and interoperable blockchains by linking between many types of blockchains, and is slated for release at the end of the current year. The protocol was one of the largest affected parties in the November 2017 Parity funds freeze.

Article Produced By
Adrian Zmudzinski

https://cointelegraph.com/news/parity-ceo-jutta-steiner-new-ethereum-function-would-have-prevented-the-parity-freeze