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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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?

Learn More Now »

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?

Read More »

📨 #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.

Find Out More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read Now »

The Lightning Network protocol for micropayments has grown by 15% over the last month, which accounted for an increase in active nodes to 6,130. The number of channels has also risen to 24,500, with the network capacity now standing at more than 655 BTC. This was stated on the 1ML statistics website. The data is constantly changing, and the figures are likely to grow further. DeCenter figured out what sparked an intense interest in the technology that was introduced back in 2016.

Find Out More »

Above is the number of security token offerings (STOs) per year. Please note that the 2019 figure is a projection. For more information on this relatively new and increasingly popular way of raising funds, check out Bloomberg’s article: https://bloom.bg/2E5izxY

📨 #DeCenterDaily

🔙 A California-based asset manager Reality Shares has withdrawn its exchange-traded fund proposal that, if approved, would have included Bitcoin futures.
via CoinDesk

🇺🇸 The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has named cryptocurrency surveillance practices one of its top examination priorities for registrants.
via Cointelegraph

👁‍🗨 NASDAQ has announced the launch of two new indices tracking Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) prices.
via Bitcoin.com

📉 Japanese IT giant GMO Internet’s cryptocurrency exchange and mining business reported major losses in 2018.
via ccn

🇮🇱 An Israeli civil rights NGO Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) has demanded that Coinbase ban a foreign terrorist organization Hamas from accepting donations via the platform.
via The Jerusalem Post

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by total assets and market capitalization, has launched its own cryptocurrency dubbed JPM Coin. The token runs on Quorum, which is a version of Ethereum, and will enable the company’s wholesale customers to settle transactions in an instant.

“Each JPM Coin is redeemable for a single U.S. dollar, so its value shouldn’t fluctuate, similar in concept to so-called stablecoins.”

The number of possible use cases is likely to increase, according to the head of J.P. Morgan’s blockchain projects. Pilots are scheduled to begin in a few months.

Learn More »

China-based web search giant Baidu is launching an operating system called Baidu Blockchain Engine, which aims to facilitate the development of decentralized applications and is based on the mix of cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence.

Read More »

According to a recent report, KT Corporation, which is South Korea’s market-leading telecommunication services provider, has been granted the right to design a local cryptocurrency to be used in one of the cities in the country.

Read More »

On December 10, 2017, Cboe—the world’s largest options market—listed futures contracts on Bitcoin. Within a few hours, the price of the derivative jumped by 25%, and the price of Bitcoin, “built-in” in this futures contract, was 10% higher than the market average. At first, the cryptocurrency did not keep up the pace at which its price rose on the free market with the demand for futures, and then, on December 17, it broke through the maximum, setting a historical record of $20,085. A few hours later, on December 18, Bitcoin futures also appeared on another Chicago-based exchange, the CME Group, while the value of the underlying asset in a contract there was five times higher than on Cboe, at five against one Bitcoin. As a result, the effect of the high price of cryptocurrency No. 1 was able to hold out for several days.

Learn More Now »

The year 2018 showed that it is impossible to get rich quick on mining, as the market is plummeting, farms are no longer profitable, and mining pools are closing due to unprofitability. Many experts predicted the industry’s inevitable death, but mining has still lived on to 2019, and many still manage to earn on it. We tried to figure out whether one should pull the plug out of the socket or just wait out the difficult period.

Read More »

📨 #DeCenterDaily

👛 Coinbase, a leading U.S.-based digital asset exchange, has enabled its users to send Bitcoin SV to an external wallet. The platform, however, does not support purchases or sales of the cryptocurrency.
via Cointelegraph

💸 Banking giant HSBC has managed to reduce foreign exchange trade settlement costs by 25% thanks to its blockchain-based solution.
via Reuters

💵 Digital currency asset manager Grayscale attracted $30.1 million in capital in the last quarter of the previous year.
via The Block

📉 According to statistical data from Coinschedule, the amount of money initial coin offering (ICO) projects raised has plummeted from $5.8 billion in March 2018 to $291 million in January 2019.
via Bitcoin.com

🇮🇩 To participate in cryptocurrency futures trading, the citizens of Indonesia are now required to hold a deposit of at least $5.7 million.
via ccn

Larry Cermak, head analyst at The Block:

“With Binance kicking off the ICO purge with delisting five projects, I suspect that this is going to be a recurring theme in 2019. And when some of these horrible projects get rightfully delisted from all the large exchanges that’s when the lawsuit floodgates will really open.

The exchanges are now incentivized to delist projects because the volumes are so low that the little revenue they generate is not worth the reputation risk of listing a project that will be criminally prosecuted.”

Read More »

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made an announcement today that it was commencing the process of reviewing a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund rule change proposal that was filed jointly by NYSE Arca and Bitwise Asset Management earlier this year.

The regulatory agency is obliged to deliver its initial decision on the application within 45 days starting from today.

Learn More »

This week’s #CryptoCaselawMinute covers the new SEC v. Blockvest opinion, the Breitmans’ briefing response to the lead plaintiff in the Tezos action, and a new lawsuit about an ICO consultant who made big promises but failed to deliver.

Read Now »