Digital assets sell off continues as total market cap plunged to August 2017 levels below $110 billion

Regulatory News

G20 Leaders Pledge Crypto Regulation in Lines with FATF

Released after last week’s G20 summit in Buenos Aires,“Building consensus for fair and sustainable development” declaration, point 25 in particular highlights that cryptocurrencies are in need of greater regulation.

We will step up efforts to ensure that the potential benefits of technology in the financial sector can be realized while risks are mitigated. We will regulate crypto-assets for anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism in line with FATF standards and we will consider other responses as needed”.

FINMA Introduces Relaxed Fintech License

Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has introduced a new fintech license with “relaxed” requirements that are applicable to blockchain and cryptocurrency-based firms. This license will allow approved “innovative financial companies” to accept public deposits of up to 100 million Swiss francs, provided the funds are not invested and no interest is paid on them.

6 South European Countries Gather to Lead Blockchain Adoption

France, Spain, Malta, Cyprus, Portugal and Italy signed a joint declaration to promote the adoption of blockchain technology in order to transform the economy in the region of South Europe and to become a leading region in the sector.

“We believe that any legislation on Distributed Ledger Technologies should take into account the decentralized nature of such technology and should be based on European fundamental principles and technological neutrality. It should also allow innovation and experimentation in order for the public and private sector to better understand the Distributed Ledger Technologies and to develop use cases”

US Congressmen Introduce Two Bills to Fight Crypto Manipulation

Bipartisan congressmen Darren Setto (Democrat) and Ted Budd (Republican) have jointly introduced two bills in order to prevent price manipulation and boost acceptance of the technology. The first bill is calling for appropriate research on how manipulation takes place and how to stop it and the second asks regulators to carry out research on crypto regulations in jurisdictions across the globe and recommend any legislative changes to promote the growth of adoption of cryptocurrencies in the U.S.

US Government Seeks Ways of Forensic Analysis to Track Privacy Coins

Department of Homeland Security is exploring the ways to utilize forensic analysis for proven-oriented coins like Monero or Zcash. According to the proposal, while privacy features are certainly desirable, “there is similarly a compelling interest in tracing and understanding transactions and actions on the blockchain of an illegal nature.”

Crypto market news

Leading Ethereum Classic Developers Shuts Down

Ethereum Classic’s leading development team has announced that they won’t be contributing code to a network due to financial struggles. "Unfortunately ETCDV cannot continue to work in the current situation and has to announce shutdown of our current activities.”

ConsenSys Lays off 13% of Employees

A company which is working to build an internet of dapps (decentralize applications) purely on Ethereum is letting go of 13% of its staff. After 4 years in existence, ConsenSys has grown to more than 1000 employees, has 50 ventures and its estimated annual cash burn is around $100 million.

6 Venture Funds with Accelerator Plan to Invest $100 Million in Ohio Blockchain Startups

Ohio-based accelerator JumpStart, together with 6 other venture funds plans to invest $100 million into Ohio’s blockchain startups with an additional $100 million ready to deploy over the next 3 to 4 years. The news has arrived just one week after Ohio announced that businesses can now pay their taxes with Bitcoin.

Huobi Receives Gibraltar DLT License

Th world’s 3rd biggest exchange Huobi, has gained a Distributed Ledger Tech (DLT) license from Gibraltar regulators to launch an international platform for either institutional or retail investors. Huobi can also officially act as a custodian of its clients’ assets.

Bitcoin ETF Decision Expected to Be Postponed until Late February 2019

The Securities and Exchange Commission delayed making a decision on VanEck’s bitcoin ETF application until February 27th, 2019. This is the final possible date by which time the future of VanEck’s ETF will have to be resolved.

“The Commission finds it appropriate to designate a longer period within which to issue an order approving or disapproving the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider this proposed rule change,”

Poloniex Launches Institutional Trading Services

Goldman Sachs-backed crypto exchange Poloniex is opening trading services for institutional clients. Support of different trading pairs, API interfaces, no BTC/USDC fees, and OTC trading are among the benefits.

Last Week in Funding

Crypto trading platform ErisX has raised $27.5 million via Series B from Bitmain, ConsenSys, Fidelity, Nasdaq Ventures, Pantera and others. UK crypto custodian startup Trustology has received $8 million and again struggling ConsenSys is one of the backers. A team led by a Turing award winner which aims to build a DAG-based smart contract platform has raised $35 million from Sequoia China, Baidu Ventures, and Huobi.

Coinbase Lists 4 Coins and Considers 30 More Listings

The largest US-based crypto exchange Coinbase has announced 4 new additions to its trading platform Coinbase Pro. Civic, District0x, Loom Network and Decentraland. A couple of hours post announcement, Coinbase revealed that there 30 more assets which are under consideration right now.

Constantinople Hard Fork Scheduled for Block 7,080,000

Speaking at a bi-weekly core developer meeting Friday, the developers assembled agreed on block 7,080,000 (Jan 14th-18th) on the Ethereum blockchain as an activation point at which users will be able to elect to upgrade to the new code. Originally planned for November, Constantinople aims to install 5 backwards-incompatible changes like cutting the block reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH or delaying the so-called “difficulty bomb”.

NKB Group’s Token Offerings Monitor

Token offerings raised ~$300 million in November, $544 million in October and $390 million in September.

SECURITY TOKEN NEWS

Ledger Partners with Neufund

Crypto Hardware wallet producer Ledger and equity and fundraising platform Neufund are partnering to create a security token framework and let users store and manage asset-backed tokens issued on the Neufund platform via Ledger’s desktop app.

Tokeny and Security Token Network Partnership

Luxemburg based security token issuance platform Tokeny is partnering with news and analysis medium Security Token Network to help deliver security token offerings (STOs) and promote broader industry adoption. Tokeny will provide its clients with token issuance solutions including token management, deployment, and governance, while Security Token Network’s mandate is to to accelerate the mass adoption of security tokens via its network.

Nexo Announces First Dividend Payouts

Crypto-backed loans startup Nexo will be sharing 30% its profits since they launched a product 6 months ago. In total more than $912,000 (4.8% dividend yield) will be distributed in the form of dividends among owners of almost 310 million tokens.

Leaders Gathers to Scale Security Token Efforts

GSX Group, tZero, SharesPost, GSX, NEM and others have announced the launch of a common framework to facilitate market interoperability of security tokens called Millbrook Accord (MA). MA is creating Verified Token Framework (VTF) which aims to put forward practical solutions in order to facilitate a more seamless process for verifying identities, navigating jurisdictions, and ensuring compliance among token holders, exchanges, and platforms.

HyperLink Capital Introduces SFT Protocol

Secured Financial Transaction Protocol is a set of open sourced compliance smart contracts, written in Solidity for the Ethereum blockchain, which will allow the tokenization of debt and equity based securities.