The ICObench rating service has released its quarterly report covering the state of initial coin offerings. The analysis shows that in Q4 of 2018, the number of concluded campaigns exceeded that of the previous quarter, while the amount of raised funds dropped by 25%.

Attached is the full report.

The U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York has ruled that the Winklevoss brothers, founders of a cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, must pay back $45,000 in legal fees incurred by entrepreneur Charlie Shrem.

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This week’s #CryptoCaselawMinute takes a look at the cases that involve the topics of money transmission, arbitration, and misrepresentation.

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South Korea’s major cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb has officially launched an over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk under the Ortus brand.

“… there is no real solution for an aggregated liquidity provider or a trusted interdealer where Institutions can trade these assets. To fill this market gap, Ortus will operate to allow institutions to buy and sell digital assets through a network of global liquidity providers and benefit from a competitive and best price execution service,” said company’s director.

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Credit Suisse, one of the world’s largest investment banks, has completed a blockchain trial for fund transactions.

“With the successful completion of real, live transactions, we were able to prove that considerable benefits can be achieved with distributed ledger technology,” said Pascal Nageli, chief digital officer at Credit Suisse Asset Management.

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📨 #DeCenterDaily

🔍 Canada’s largest securities regulator has started looking into the infamous Canadian cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX.
via Reuters

🗓 The launch date of the Intercontinental Exchange’s long-awaited Bakkt platform remains unclear.
via Cointelegraph

🇧🇷 A Brazil-based cryptocurrency exchange Mercado Bitcoin has won a case over the closure of its bank account.
via Bitcoin.com

🇲🇺 An African state of Mauritius will introduce licensing of digital asset custodians in an attempt to become the region’s fintech hub.
via CoinDesk

💧 IBM has started piloting the blockchain technology for monitoring groundwater usage in the U.S. state of California.
via Forbes

Addressing the students of the University of Missouri School of Law, Hester Peirce—one of five commissioners on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—expressed her views on the relationships that entrepreneurship and innovation have with regulation.

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A California-based asset manager Reality Shares has filed a prospectus to list an exchange-traded fund that would include Bitcoin futures and sovereign debt instruments tied to national currencies.

Initially, the company intends to invest in futures contracts trading on Cboe and CME, but at some point, it may expand to other marketplaces as well.

The fund has limited the amount of money it would potentially put in digital assets to 15% as it believes the SEC may still not be willing to greenlight a full-blown crypto ETF.

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Security firm ESET has discovered a malicious application that impersonated MetaMask, a browser extension for accessing Ethereum-powered decentralized applications, on Google Play Store.

The malware was designed to steal users’ credentials and private keys and also replace a Bitcoin or Ether recipient address with that of the attacker.

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Starting from March 1, the law SF0125 on “Digital Assets” enters into force in the U.S. state of Wyoming, which has delighted many supporters of cryptocurrencies. As early as the beginning of December 2018, DeCenter found out that a group of experts was gathering in Wyoming to take part in drafting the cryptocurrency law. On December 4, DeCenter sent a letter to the organizers, expressing support for their undertaking. Four days later, a response was received from Steven Lupien, executive director of the Wyoming state working group on changing the rules for the treatment of special types of assets, in which he expressed gratitude for the solidarity.

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Before implementing the Confidential Transactions technology, Litecoin developers will release the Litecoin Improvement Proposal (LIP)—akin to those existing in Bitcoin and Ethereum communities—to gather public opinion.

Source: https://goo.gl/BVrLLx

📨 #DeCenterDaily

💵 Despite the returning of funds, investors who used Bitcoin and Ether—and not the U.S. dollar—to buy into the failed stablecoin project Basis at the pre-sale report significant losses due to the cryptocurrency market slump.
via The Block

📉 Median transaction fees on the Bitcoin network have dropped to the 2014 levels.
via Cointelegraph

🤝 General Motors Financial has partnered with a blockchain startup Spring Labs aiming to combat identity fraud.
via Forbes

🗓 Square CEO Jack Dorsey has said “it’s not an ‘if,’ it’s more of a ‘when’” regarding the company’s possible integration with the Lighting network.
via CoinDesk

🇵🇭 Major Philippines bank Union Bank has announced the launch of the country’s first two-way cryptocurrency ATM.
via ccn

Blockchain surveillance firm Chainalysis raised a whopping $30 million in Series B funding. The company seeks to invest new capital in its product development and a new research and development facility in the U.K.

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Morgan Creek Digital has secured $40 million in funding from two large pension funds that have more than $5 billion in assets under management. A newly established venture capital fund will invest in the blockchain industry.

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Ripple, Barclays, the Mastercard Foundation, and MIT Media Lab have backed a $1.7 million round for SendFriend, a remittance firm that will use the XRP cryptocurrency as a bridge currency for settling payments.

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At the end of January, the head of the global interbank SWIFT network Gottfried Leibbrandt announced the launch of a joint project with the R3 blockchain banking consortium. As part of the partnership, a new payment standard will be launched, which will use the Corda blockchain for payments. How does the new initiative differ from previous attempts by SWIFT to integrate DLT solutions into its infrastructure, and why could this be a new milestone in the development of the crypto industry?

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Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has acquired the Chainspace blockchain project, which was founded by researchers from University College London. The secret deal, according to Cheddar, took place at the end of January, and it was initially unclear whether social media only hired the developers or bought the startup. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is not the only social media platform embracing the blockchain tech. Why did Facebook become interested in blockchain development, and why was there demand for decentralized social networks?

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📨 #DeCenterDaily

💴 Japan-based IT giant GMO Internet has announced that it will issue a Japanese yen-pegged stablecoin dubbed GYEN by the end of the year.
via Cointelegraph

🗓 Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume, plans to release its decentralized exchange for public testing on February 20.
via Twitter

👁‍🗨 According to a recent analysis, more than 85% of the Monero network is currently dominated by ASIC miners.
via Bitcoin.com

👋 A co-founder of China-based Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer Canaan has decided to step down from his position as a board member due to having a different opinion on the firm’s strategy.
via CoinDesk

👩‍⚖️ LocalBitcoins, the world’s largest peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange, has announced it will comply with the European Union’s new anti-money laundering directive.
via The Block

QuadrigaCX, an infamous Canadian cryptocurrency exchange that has been making headlines of late, lost another CAD 500,000 last week.

EY, a “big four” professional services company that is currently monitoring Quadriga’s proceedings, reported that the exchange inadvertently transferred over 100 Bitcoins into a cold storage that it does not have access to.

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A European-based fintech startup SDK.Finance has recently teamed up with Oracle aiming to improve payments processes and eliminate intermediaries.

But the list of software giant’s blockchain partnerships does not end there.

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A recent piece published on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website argues that the ruling that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission made against a decentralized Ether and Ethereum-based tokens trading platform EtherDelta might be unconstitutional.

“The SEC stated that EtherDelta’s creator had violated securities laws because he ‘wrote and deployed’ code that he ‘should have known’ would contribute to EtherDelta’s alleged violations. EFF today sent a public letter reminding the agency that writing and publishing code is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment,” the article says.

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