Note: I was in Shanghai last week participating in a UBS event. Next week I will fly to Beijing to participate in a small set of meetings with some cryptocurrency-related companies. Despite the ban on spot exchanges and ICOs, there is still quite a lot of activity on the edges.
I am kind of partial to the Ethereum house deed reddit AMA (read the actual comments) and the short article from JP Koning.
Links:
- Sirin Labs raises $157.8 million in ICO for its Finney blockchain phones and PCs (VB) that’s a lot of bling to build some new phones
- Produce industry keeping tabs on blockchain (The Packer) more of what we have seen in the past
- Twitter: announcement from Fairx on Stellar money transfer (with Michael Dowling from IBM)
- Twitter: Nasdaq withdraws its Intellicator proposal (more from Themis)
- ECB Concerned Bitcoin Could Potentially Impact Financial Stability (Financial Magnates) for the usual reasons
- Why Blockchain will revolutionize the banking industry (BNC) with a quote from Charlie Cooper at R3
- Is Bitcoin a bubble? Gender split says probably. — from Duncan Stewart, director of research at Deloitte Canada
- Blockchain Technology: The next great infrastructure for commerce, the community and the world (CIO Review) — a friend in DC says this is the typical buzzword type of article that is shuttled around to policy makers, confusing them
- Bitcoin could boost Japan’s GDP, Nomura analysts say (CNBC)
- E-Trade begins CME bitcoin trading as of Tuesday evening (CNBC) futures trading for both CME and CBOE have been pretty lackluster
- North Korea accused of hijacking PCs to mine Monero cryptocurrency (The Register) maybe true, i know a reporter that is doing a story on this
- Amazon and Salesforce are reportedly making ‘significant progress’ moving away from Oracle technology (CNBC)
- “Must see Interleger slide presentation by Evan Schwartz at 34c3 conference” (from XRPChat)
- Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Predictions For 2018: Nick Morgan, Attorney, Paul Hastings (Block Tribune) worth reading due to Nick’s previous role at the SEC
- CIO Insights Reflections: Cryptocurrencies and blockchains – their importance in the future (Deutsche Bank wealth management) very recent
- Regulatory Heat On ICOs Expected To Intensify In 2018 (Law 360) unfortunately need a subscription, but Law 360 has been publishing some good stuff on this topic
- Huobi Group and SBI Group reached a strategic partnership agreement to jointly develop Global Digital Asset Markets (PR) a month old but even more relevant as they are now moving into the US
- There’s a new hottest cryptocurrency of 2018 so far: stellar (CNBC)
- Ken Chenault’s Parting Warning: Banks Made Big Error on Payments (Bloomberg) short and simple: banks should not have sold off Visa/Mastercard
- Onward and Upward for Hyperledger in 2018 (HLP) a year in review from Brian Behlendorf
- BofA Includes Bitcoin Trust in Broader Ban on Investments (Bloomberg)
- CLS: politics and technology will be main drivers in 2018 (FXWeek) needs a subscription
- ENDOW Releases Preliminary Recommendations to ‘Chart New Course’ for WY’s Economy (PR)
- Speculators raised net short bitcoin positions in Dec 26 week: CFTC (Reuters) 30% decline since the peak a month ago, coincidentally when Futures trading started
- Blockchain-based banking startup Babb names Paul Johnson as CIO (Finextra) Paul Johnson lead Aldermore, one of those British challenger banks
- BBVA bank responds to Ripple leak controversy (Finder)
- CryptoKitties, Explained … Mostly (NYT) it’s a clever idea and they didn’t do an ICO
- Dash to bring cryptocurreny payments to retailers in Spain (Finextra) with Bitnovo… let’s look at the stats in a year to see if anyone actually uses it for payments
- Opera browser updated to stop crypto-currency mining (Hot for security) cpu cycle theft: a lot of security experts are finding that various extensions are mining coins in the background, on behalf of someone else
- U.S. derivatives regulator to review bitcoin futures risks (Reuters) the CFTC and SEC still disagree and are not on the same page
- Symphony chat platform faces outage due to unplanned maintenance (Reuters)
- Bank Blockchain Integration: A Challenge Overcome — oped from John Whelan at Santander
- “How ethical is your jewellery?” (Elle magazine) surprisingly the word “blockchain” doesn’t appear
- CFTC chair Giancarlo speaks out on cryptocurrencies (Finextra) the CME uses four exchanges for its reference rate, one of which is Kraken… Kraken was offline for 2 straight days this past week
- ‘Blockchain’ Mentions in Press Releases Have Soared This Year (Bloomberg) hard to believe there were only 5 mentions last year versus 110 this year (in the first 4 days)
- The Latest Bitcoin ETF Proposals Have Some Major Red Flags (Themis Trading) most of the ETFs have already pulled their filings
- Mainstreaming Blockchain in Business and Government: Separating Hype from Reality (event)
- GTR’s top 5 trade finance stories of 2017 (GTReview) you’ll never guess what #1 is
- ” Viant, GSK partner for blockchain in pharmaceuticals — CMS moves to increase the use of digital health solutions — Hospitals to save big from teleservices” (BI press release)
- Decentralized Authentication with Civic, lessons learned (PR)
- Goldman Sachs plans to trade cryptocurrencies by June 2018 (American Banker) unconfirmed rumor still
- Tencent gets a licence to sell mutual funds to WeChat’s 1 billion users in China (SCMP) pretty big deal, hard to get these licenses
- Overstock leads $2.2 million funding round in blockchcain voting platform Voatz (Finextra) is voting really that big of a deal? would Broadridge leave money on the table?
- Stealing cryptocurrencies from electrum wallets via CORS (Twitter)
- Western Union Slapped With $60M Fine Over AML Lapses (Pymnts) if law enforcement treated cryptocurrency exchanges the same way, the fines could be just as large
- DLT performance considerations (from Ian Grigg)
- Venezuela’s ‘Cryptocurrency’ Isn’t Really A Cryptocurrency At All (Forbes)
- Bitcoin is teaching libertarians everything they don’t know about economics (Washington Post) funny and true
- ViaBTC Announces Shutdown of Crypto Mining Contract Market (CD) my mining friends in China say this is just part of an elongated process that began in the summer with the crackdown on spot exchanges
- Trulioo GM On Where KYC Falls Short (Pymnts) discussing kycc / kyb
- Smart Contract Group Accord Project In Landmark Global ID Standards Deal (Artificial Lawyer)
- I just warranty deeded my house into an Ethereum smart contract. AMA (reddit) good thread
- Bitfury as Big Brother: Mining Company Tracks Bitcoiners (Bitcoin.com) they are now trying to compete with Chainalysis, Elliptic, Blockseer
- Andrew Keys: Ethereum Has 30 Times More Devs than the Next Blockchain Community (ConsenSys media) probably true
- Nvidia Curbs Data Center GPU Use – But Crypto Miners Are Excluded (Coindesk) seems like a not-so-good idea, I destroyed a couple of good GPUs mining… they stay on at full blast 24×7, a highly depreciating activity
- Switzerland’s Crypto Valley Association creates code of conduct for ICOs (Finextra) “code of conduct” and ICO seem like an oxymoron
- Spectre attack on Intel SGX (Twitter)
- How a Hackathon Birthed the CryptoKitties Origin Story (Bitcoin Magazine)
- “The Bitcoin network’s hashrate is growing so quickly that blocks are 10% faster than designed in average. In total, the Bitcoin network makes more than 16,000,000,000,000,000,000 guesses per second to discover a new Bitcoin block.” (Twitter) this is due to the Poisson process
- French: Quebec wants bitcoin miners to come use its hydro power (JDQ)
- BNP Paribas Asset Management completes fund transaction blockchain test (Finextra) the vendor is Funds DLT which is a subsidiary of ScoreChain, I pinged Pierre but haven’t heard back yet
- HSBC appoints blockchain specialist (Global Custodian) subscription required
- Brazil may write new laws with data stored on the ethereum blockchain (Quartz)
- Geoprise Launches GM-X ERP on MultiChain Blockchain Platform (PR)
- XRP and bitcoin as bridge currencies — from JP Koning — pretty decent writeup
- SETL And OFI AM Process Blockchain Transactions On IZNES Fund Record-Keeping Platform (PR) doesn’t say much in terms of details
- 6 Questions to Ask When Considering Blockchain Solutions for Enterprise (ConsenSys media) from Jeremy Millar
- Expanding The Potential Of Supply Chain Visibility With Blockchain (PYMNTS)
- Bank of America reports 84% increase in Zelle P-to-P payments (American Banker) it really wasn’t even turned on in 2016 so of course there is a spike
- Blockchain, Drones Are Strategies for Survival at Japan’s Tepco (Bloomberg) when you’re relying on a “blockchain” to turn your company around, that’s probably not a good sign
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