Auditing firm Grant Thornton published an attestation report on the USDC stablecoin. According to the audit, Circle—the issuing company—had $251,211,209 in custody accounts against 251,211,148 tokens in circulation at the end of the previous year.

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On January 16, the network of the third-largest cryptocurrency by capitalization was supposed to activate the Constantinople upgrade. Less than a day before the long-awaited hard fork, however, the Ethereum team announced their decision to postpone the upgrade indefinitely. The reason was a critical vulnerability found in one of the scheduled updates. DeCenter reviewed the Constantinople hard fork plan and the reasons for its postponement.

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The founder of the Mythos Capital cryptocurrency fund, Ryan Sean Adams, believes that “banks today are like newspapers in the early ’90s,” meaning that the development of the Internet has led to the fact that large amounts of information received by people started migrating to the computer screen, and later—to the smartphone. But the print press still exists, trying to survive, including through better printing, the inclusion of goods samplers, as well as other tricks that support interest in it. Almost 30 years have passed since the appearance of the Internet in society, but the print media survived. But will banks survive in the collision with new technologies, such as the blockchain and, actually, cryptocurrencies?

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📨 #DeCenterDaily

❄️ Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has frozen a portion of funds that had been stolen from Cryptopia and then transferred to the platform.
via The Block

👨🏻‍💻 ICORating analysts released the Exchange Security Report, according to which, 16 percent of the world’s major cryptocurrency exchanges scored an A.
via Cointelegraph

🤝 Coinbase has acquired Blockspring, an Andreessen Horowitz–backed startup that designs tools for retrieving and managing data from APIs.
via CoinDesk

👨‍🎓 Academic staff from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University teamed up to design a cryptocurrency that would be capable of processing thousands of transactions per second.
via Bloomberg

🇺🇿 After legitimizing cryptocurrency activity last fall, the state of Uzbekistan is now considering new moves in the Central Asian digital assets arena.
via Forbes

Cryptocurrency payroll service provider Bitwage has entered into a partnership with a Texas-based firm Simply Efficient HR. The move will now enable regular payroll employees all over the U.S. to receive salaries in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

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Total trading volume on the cryptocurrency exchange Huobi’s derivatives market has crossed a $20 billion mark.

The figure constitutes a twofold increase over the past 15 days.

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Make sure you check out the latest #CryptoCaselawMinute! https://goo.gl/t8Y1j8

The list of cryptocurrencies is constantly growing, despite their volatile rates. Today, according to CoinMarketCap, there are more than 2,000 crypto coins, which are present in the investment portfolios of crypto holders in different amounts. Due to the abundant supply on the market, users need to exchange one coin for another. Digital assets are converted by third-party exchanges. But the blockchain industry, which in its principle denies the presence of intermediaries, cannot exchange, for example, Litecoin to Ether with the help of third-party companies. On January 9, the Qtum blockchain project presented atomic swaps for the direct exchange of cryptocurrencies. DeCenter reviewed the structure of this technology and found out its potential for further development.

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Deloitte, a top-notch audit, consulting, tax, and advisory services provider, has teamed up with The Institutes RiskBlock Alliance to develop blockchain solutions for the insurance industry out of Canada.

The tandem is currently actively collaborating with the local regulators.

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📨 #DeCenterDaily

📉 According to a recent research report, U.S. cryptocurrency investors incurred $5.7 billion in unrealized losses last year.
via Bitcoin.com

🇳🇱 Netherlands’ Minister of Finance has received official advice that cryptocurrency businesses should be subjected to licensing.
via Cointelegraph

🇰🇷 Two executives at a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange have been sentenced to jail for faking trading volume.
via The Block

🇨🇱 Taxpayers from Chile must report their cryptocurrency-related profits to the country’s domestic Internal Revenue Service.
via Cointelegraph

🗓 Online retailer Overstock plans to launch its security token trading platform as soon as the end of the week.
via CoinDesk

Cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift has revealed details about legal requests it received from law enforcement agencies in 2018.

Learn more here: https://goo.gl/5ef27D

Cryptocurrency wallet provider Blockchain is aiming to strike a partnership with a stablecoin project by the end of the year. The move will likely enable users to store the selected stablecoin in their wallet.

“I think all major stablecoin projects at the moment believe they need us. The question is which one do we decide that we need?” the firm’s CEO Peter Smith told The Block.

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A Tokyo-listed company will start trialing its settlement system using Blockstream’s Liquid Sidechain. The product will allow for the issuance of stablecoins, including a Japanese yen-pegged one.

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While some are trying to view the future of cryptocurrencies through kittens on the blockchain, and others dream of contactless payments for everything with Bitcoins, Travis Kling, the former head of Point72 Asset Management (a hedge fund that controls $12.4 billion of assets), offers his vision of the world economy using cryptocurrencies. And these assumptions are not groundless.

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Check out our latest Past Week in Crypto article!

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📨 #DeCenterDaily

📃 Wyoming legislators introduced a bill, which, if passed, would classify digital assets as property within existing laws.
via Forbes

📈 The volume of on-chain transactions on the Ethereum network reached an all-time high in December 2018.
via Cointelegraph

💵 Japanese financial services provider SBI Group has invested $15 million in a Swiss startup that makes a one-of-its-kind cryptocurrency hardware wallet.
via CoinDesk

🔄 HBUS, the partner exchange of Singapore-based Huobi Group, underwent rebranding in an attempt to grow its U.S. clientele.
via The Block

🗣 Cryptocurrencies fail fundamental tests of financial services, according to a senior adviser to the governor of Bank of England.
via Bloomberg

• Coinbase has acquired 13 companies since it was founded
• The exchange’s venture arm, Coinbase Ventures, has made investments in 27 startups

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According to the 2018 Cryptocurrency Exchange Annual Report prepared by blockchain research organization TokenInsight, the share of decentralized exchanges (DEX) in the global cryptocurrency exchange market accounts for 19 percent.

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Despite the dramatic decrease of the first cryptocurrency’s price, daily Bitcoin transactions on darknet markets doubled throughout 2018.

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Online sources that provide legal services are already testing smart contracts, and some experts predict that cryptocurrencies will oust the mediation of lawyers in the same way that they are ousting payment operators and banks. Let’s try and answer this: Why is it not too late for lawyers to side with blockchain?

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Cryptocurrency news outlet Cointelegraph put together an article analyzing transaction throughputs of various blockchains and checking whether the actual figures live up to those claimed by developers.

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