Author: David Canellis

David is an Australian writer, reporter and news researcher with a degree in Writing and Literature. He spends most of his time navigating the endless flood of information related to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies with a goal to provide premium, trustworthy and unbiased content to the general public. In his spare time he enjoys music and travelling. He can be contacted on Twitter @dcanellis

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Robinhood’s Crypto App is Slowly Taking Over the US, Expands to Two More States

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Popular US cryptocurrency platform, Robinhood, has announced the expansion of their app to two new US states — New Mexico and Wisconsin.

The Robinhood platform is particularly popular among investors as it offers commission free trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Users can also track market data of 16 other cryptocurrencies including Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, NEO, Monero, Zcash, Stellar Lumens, Dash, Ethereum Classic, QTum, OmiseGo, Bitcoin Gold, Lisk and Dogecoin.

There is currently no official word on if or when other cryptocurrencies will become available for trade.

In total, the Robinhood App is now available in 8 states including Colorado, California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and the two new additions, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

According to rough estimates, the Robinhood App is now available for over 8 million people across the US.

Robinhood is a US-based financial services company that launched in 2013. Recent valuations price the company at just over US$5.6 billion. Their expansion into cryptocurrencies could only have been seen has logical, considering that in 2015, 80% of their user base was millenial and the average age being 26.

Users can also become premium members via a paid subscription which gives access to margin trading.

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Bezant Sets Record as Fastest-Selling Token in Asia’s History

Target hit in the center by arrows

The pre-sale target (US$16.8 million) for new decentralized payment and service platform, Bezant, was hit in just over an hour. This makes it the fastest selling token in Asia’s history.

The platform seeks to help e-commerce merchants, content creators and online influencers in reaching their target audiences and provide a means of secure, fast and reliable payment for everyone involved.

After their pre-sale target had been reached, Bezant opened a ‘pre-sale bonus round’ to raise another US$4 million, and even that was completely funded in less than five minutes.

The interest surrounding this particular ICO should surprise nobody after reading the roster its leaders: they include  Daesik Kim, the co-founder of Bithumb, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, as well as key developers of Kakao, another big player in the South Korean internet sector.

Daesik, who is Bezant’s Chief Cryptocurrency Officer, had this to say on their success so far:

We couldn’t be more pleased with the results – reaching nine figures with practically zero marketing spend – and would like to thank the community for its confidence and support. I’m proud to lead Bezant’s token sale effort and this is just the first of many milestones on our roadmap that we are working tirelessly to achieve. Bezant is a game changer in the content and influencer industry as our team, with the support of seasoned industry heavyweights, builds a vibrant and thriving ecosystem for creators and consumers alike.”

Bezant wants to ‘unleash original digital content’ by providing creators alternatives in monetizing content without involving traditional financial institutions – all through the blockchain. Their target market includes e-commerce merchants and mobile app developers.

By the end of this year, it is projected that consumers will spend more than US$110 billion through mobile app stores. Three years after, in 2021, e-commerce sales are believed to exceed US$4.5 trillion.

Bezant hopes to facilitate this growth through its platform in a decentralized manner, giving a higher percentage of the profits generated to the individuals who create the content, rather than the global tech giants.

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Major Foreign Exchange Broker Oanda Bought Out, New Owner Plans Cryptocurrency Trading

cfd written on blackboard

Oanda, the storied online foreign exchange broker, has been bought out by CVC Capital Partners, and it looks as though they’ll be offering cryptocurrency trading by the year’s end.

Although, it won’t be for regular retail investments. They plan on listing cryptocurrency contracts for difference (CFDs), a style of leveraged trading for futures, playing on the movement of prices without ownership of the particular digital asset.

The expansion into cryptocurrency trading may not be all that surprising, considering direct competitors eToro and IG Group both currently offer the trading of cryptocurrency CFDs.

Oanda has reportedly been conducting tests internally all year and implemented the quotation of Bitcoin prices way back in 2013.

CVC Capital Partners has some 37 years experience in private equity management, currently controlling around US$52 billion worth of assets across Europe and Asia.

Oanda’s launch of CFDs for cryptocurrencies could legitimise the digital assets in the eyes of some tentative traditional investors, as they would be available for trade alongside precious metals, commodities and bonds.

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Bitcoin Gold Responds to Bitmain’s New ASIC Miner for Equihash

asic miner rig

Bitcoin Gold (BTG), one of the most popular Bitcoin forks, has gone on the record to reinforce the projects dedication to being ASIC-resistant.

The announcement, entitled ‘A Response to the ASIC Threat’, is directly related to news put out by Chinese crypto-mining giant Bitmain, who confirmed release of its new “ASIC” miner capable of mining Bitcoin Gold.

ASIC stands for “application-specific integrated chip”, essentially a computer chip designed for a single set of processes, In this case, Bitmain’s new chip is designed to compute a specific algorithm – the Equihash algorithm – which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Gold use for mining purposes. ZCash (ZEC) also uses the Equihash algorithm.

Part of the statement reads:

ASIC-resistance is central to our mission. Bitcoin Gold, BTG, was conceived while watching the struggle between ASIC miners and the rest of the Bitcoin community. The fundamental reason for BTG’s creation was to help wrest back the crypto space from the relentlessly monopolizing tendencies of ASIC mining. How? By returning mining power to commodity hardware that is more universally accessible to people around the world: GPUs, or “graphics cards,” which nearly anyone can acquire and use.”

The original codename for Bitcoin Gold was “BTCGPU” – GPU relating to consumer-level graphics card chips.

To prove their dedication to fighting industrialised mining, the development team is prepared to either modify the algorithm used by Bitcoin Gold or even propose an entirely new one for mining purposes.

This comes just weeks after the developers of privacy coin Monero (XMR) declared war on ASIC-mining, Changes were implemented that resulted in a hard fork which created four additional blockchains.

CNBC reported, using estimates from Wall Street investment firm Bernstein Research, Bitmain turned a profit of somewhere in the range of US$3 billion and US$4 billion in operating profits from the sale of their ASIC-mining chips and their cryptocurrency mining operations in 2017. Mainstay graphics card maker Nvidia posted similar profits.

It has only taken Bitmain four years to achieve these numbers, while Nvidia has been operating for twenty-four.

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Kraken Appears to be Setting Up Shop in Ireland

coast of ireland

Popular cryptocurrency exchange and margin trading platform Kraken has posted a job advert this week, seeking candidates from the European country of Ireland to fill key business positions.

The listings may serve as an indicator that the company is looking to establish an office in the country. There’s precedent for this in the technology sector too – many international technology giants, including Apple, have set up shop in Ireland to take advantage of their corporate-friendly tax framework.

Kraken processes around US$250 million worth of cryptocurrency trades every day.

For those interested in joining Kraken’s Irish office, there are a few positions currently listed, including Customer Account Manager and EMEA Recruitment Manager.

In addition, you can also keep an eye at the Kraken LinkedIn page and popular recruitment platform Monster for further openings.

Kraken recently closed their New York office citing regulatory hassles and their CEO, Jesse Powell, made headlines after publicly refusing to comply with information requests by the state’s Attorney General.

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EOSIO (EOS) Breaks into Top 8 Most Active C++ Projects on Github in Preparation for New Major Release

purple neon eos coin

A total of 43 authors have pushed over 800 commits to the EOSIO code repository, firmly placing the budding platform into the top 8 most active projects written in the c++ language being developed on github.

The flurry of development will culminate in the release of “Dawn 4.0”, the latest iteration of the open source smart-contract powered software for blockchains.

Ten related upgrades have been detailed in a recent Medium post by core block.one developer Daniel Larimer, but arguably the most interesting is the changes to EOSIO’s RAM Allocation Model.

This specifically relates to those investors who will be staking their coins as a means to be delegated as block producers. In the “Dawn 3.0” release of the platform, RAM was automatically reserved (RAM, in this instance, refers to database space) as new accounts registered their tokens for staking.

Being a limited resource, this theoretically drives up the price of RAM perpetually. In turn, a market would be created for speculators to buy and hold RAM in preparation for times of congestion. It could then be sold for a profit to block producers eager to process pending transactions.

The previous solution was capping the price of RAM to the price it was purchased for. “Dawn 4.0” will see this cap removed,  essentially creating a free market for the buying and selling of RAM. This could see supply and demand calculate the price of bandwidth.

Both the price and market cap of the EOS token has essentially quadrupled over the past month, and impressively most of those gains have been kept over the week just passed.

The code related to “Dawn 4.0” will be committed to the official github repository on May 11.

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Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Approaches a $US30 Billion Market Cap Ahead of Hard Fork on May 15

bitcoin cash on the background of the chart

The market cap of prominent blue-chip alt-coin Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has grown an additional ten percent in the last 24 hours, almost reaching US$30 billion, as the market awaits a hard fork planned for May 15. The price has also grown by around 10% across the same timeframe, breaking US$1,600.

Bitcoin Cash itself was borne from a hard fork of Bitcoin in a quest to boost its efficiency by increasing the block size from 1MB to 8MB. This hard fork, which will mark the dawn of a new full node blockchain named ‘Bitcoin ABC’, quadruples that number, resulting in a block size of 32MB.

Essentially, the block size limits the number of transactions per second that are able to be computed. Bitcoin still operates with a block size of 1MB, but solutions such as the Lightning Network would make this less relevant to its efficiency as the network attracts more usage. The Lightning Network would allow for transactions to be processed off-chain, allowing for an overall higher transactions per second.

But Bitcoin ABC is not just an increased block size. The hard fork will herald the introduction of smart contracts. Smart contracts are quite controversial for Bitcoin enthusiasts, as Satoshi Nakamoto eventually rejected building them into his blockchain citing security issues. The Bitcoin ABC development team are of the opinion that those issues are no longer a concern.

All major mining operations processing blocks on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain support the fork and will switch to the new protocol when it eventuates.

Currently, there is no definitive list of which exchanges will be supporting Bitcoin ABC. It is assumed that this will change in the coming days.

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NEOs Decentralised Exchange Switcheo to Release Version 2.0, Supports Instant Trades

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It’s only been a month since Switcheo, a decentralised exchange powered by the NEO platform, launched its MainNet. Impressively, they’ve managed to implement enough changes generated from user feedback to prepare a TestNet for a second major release.

Switcheo Exchange v2.0 TestNet will be going live on the 8th of May, with the MainNet version being launched a week later.

Improvements scheduled for v2.0 include several UI upgrades related to the transaction window. More substantially, though, this version of Switcheo will come complete with immediate trade confirmations. The current version takes at least 30 seconds for the NEO blockchain to confirm a trade and the client may not update for a full minute.

While being decentralised is an obvious draw-card for Switcheo, a full minute before trade confirmations may have turned some traders off. Also, as soon as the immediate execution and confirmation of trades is supported, trading bots could make use of the exchange, which means higher volumes and more liquidity could be on the horizon.

Ivan Poon, CEO of the Switcheo Network, has said:

At Switcheo Network, our main purpose is to build a Decentralized Exchange with an intuitive user interface, while hiding all its complexity behind it. Allowing our users to trade as if they are on a Centralized Exchange.”

If everything goes to plan with the v2.0 TestNet, it seems they could be very close to fulfilling this purpose.

Switcheo boasts being the world’s first multi-chain decentralised exchange. It supports the trade of NEO, GAS and all NEP-5 tokens.

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IOTAs Market Cap Breaks US$7 Billion Following Project Q Release, Exchange Listing and Incoming Ledger Support

tree that looks like upwards green arrow

IOTAs market cap has surged past US$7 billion following the long-anticipated release of details regarding Project Qubic, the IOTA Foundation’s mysterious and elusive major update to the IOTA protocol.

Project Qubic will officially bring outsourced computing, smart contracts and “oracles” to the IOTA network. While specifics are scarce, oracles are understood to be points in the Tangle that are capable of bringing in outside data and initiating smart contracts automatically when that data meets certain criteria.

A completely futuristic hype video was released, but no more details are set to be revealed until well into June.

David Sønstebø, Founder of The IOTA Foundation shed some light on the official Discord server:

Qubic is a project we have been working on for quite a while internally in the IOTA Foundation and is one of our main priorities for 2018 and 2019. Details will remain scarce until the date revealed on the website, when a lot more material, specifications and further information surrounding the uniQueness of Qubic will be made available. Qubic, using IOTA as a backbone, will be the foundation of plenty more projects that we have in motion already, but more importantly, it will be a platform for the greater community and ecosystem to create things we can’t even imagine yet.”

The release of these details combined with the previously reported listing on decentralized cryptocurrency exchange COBINHOOD has made for an increase in market cap of around 20% in the past seven days.

This makes it of the biggest gainers in the cryptocurrency top 20 in the past week by recording an increase in price of just over 17%.

Additionally, a member of the IOTA Foundation also confirmed in an interview earlier this week that prominent hardware wallet Ledger is to support the token in the very near future.

IOTA hit it’s all-time-high earlier this year when its price reached US$5.69 before a 70% retracement, albeit in sync with the entire cryptocurrency market.

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OPSkins and WAX Collectible Assets Now Have Their Own Crypto Wallet

black wallet

Earlier this week we covered two deals signed by the Worldwide Asset eXchange (WAX) and their digital crypto-collectible marketplace, OPSkins, to support the trade of assets derived from premier blockchain collectible-driven games CryptoPuppies and Ether Online.

Now we can report that the OPSkins marketplace and the Worldwide Asset eXchange platform as a whole have the official support of their very own secure cryptocurrency wallet: Trust Wallet.

The partnership means that users will be able to access items held on the OPSkins marketplace directly from the Trust Wallet browser and even make purchases directly using WAX tokens and other supported cryptocurrencies.

Trust Wallet is an Ethereum-focused mobile wallet that supports Ethereum (ETH), ERC20, 223 & 721 tokens. It is designed to enable users direct interaction with any decentralised app (dApp) running on the Ethereum blockchain safely and securely. Users can send and store digital assets with complete control, as private keys are stored completely on the users device, never online.

Founder of Trust Wallet, Viktor Radchenko, had this to say on their latest deal:

We are thrilled to partner with WAX and expand our Trust dApp Marketplace. The Crypto Collectible ecosystem is constantly evolving and more assets are created each day. Having a well-established company like WAX joining us shows how much we are committed to our long term vision — making dApps more accessible and less intimidating for mobile users. With this partnership, we welcome all WAX and OPSkins users into the Trust community and promise to provide outstanding customer support to every new member.”

The OPSkins marketplace will soon be accessible directly from the Trust Wallet dApp browser. All items listed on the exchange will be available for purchase using any funds stored in the wallet. All non-fungible tokens (read: crypto-collectible assets) purchased can even be managed directly through the Trust Wallet.

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