Day: September 29, 2017

It might seem that lately, the world of high-finance want nothing more than to drop a proverbial load all over Bitcoin but CEO of leading global financial services firm Morgan Stanley, James Gorman, offered words to support the contrary on Wednesday. Speaking at a conference hosted by The Wall Street Journal, he said he considered Bitcoin … Continue reading Morgan Stanley CEO, James Gorman, Offers More Rational Words on Bitcoin

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The first stage of the PlusCoin has clearly been a success so far. Investment expectations have been surpassed, and the grassroots movement of everyday people behind the “People’s cryptocurrency” is in full swing. Cryptocurrency is getting more accessible for people all around the world. With fewer than five days left until the beginning of stage … Continue reading As Stage Two of PlusCoin ICO Approaches, DS Plus Expands Advisory Board, Announces New PlusCoin Bonuses

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According to public records, another company has filed with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to create two bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF) based on Bitcoin derivatives. ETF firm Proshares Capital Management aims to get its bitcoin-futures products listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with a proposed maximum aggregate offering price of $1M per ETF.

Also read: Ledger Holdings Generates $11.4 Million to Open U.S. Bitcoin Options Exchange

U.S. Firm Proshares Files for Two Bitcoin ETFs

Proshares is an ETF management firm that launched in 2006 and offers over 140 alternative funds that cover a broad spectrum of investments. The company has products listed on the NYSE, Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE), Nasdaq, and other mainstream trading platforms. Now the Maryland-based business is creating its “Proshares Trust II” a bitcoin ETF that derives its Net Asset Value (NAV) from derivatives rather than holding the currency in reserves.

Proshares further states in its Form S-1 filing that the Bitcoin-based funds are not appropriate for all investors and investing in the shares involves significant “risks.”

“The funds are not appropriate for all investors and present many different risks than other types of funds, including risks relating to investing in bitcoin futures contracts, exposure to bitcoin, and, in the case of the Inverse Fund, risks associated with the use of leverage,” explains Proshares S-1. “The performance of the bitcoin futures contracts in which each fund invests, and therefore the performance of the funds, can be expected to be very different from the price of bitcoin.

The value of a fund’s investments in bitcoin futures contracts may not be correlated with the price of bitcoin and may go down when the price of bitcoin goes up (and vice versa).

Other Mainstream Bitcoin Investment Vehicles and Attempts

The Proshares ETF filing follows other companies trying to create these bitcoin-based mainstream investment vehicles. Just recently, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved the firm Ledger X’s Swap Execution Facility for bitcoin options. Additionally, the well-known CBOE Holdings Inc. plans to add bitcoin futures to their product list. However, financial management firm, CME Group, said it would stop its plans to list bitcoin futures. The recent filing also follows Grayscale Investments and Van Eck Associates withdrawing proposals for two U.S. based funds.  

Bitcoin Technology and Regulatory Guidelines Continue to Evolve

Proshares says it understands that bitcoin is a nascent technology and explains how different the bitcoin economy is throughout the entire S-1 filing. For instance, the firm says “bitcoin is a new technological innovation with a very limited operating history, and the price of bitcoin on the bitcoin exchange market is highly volatile, which could have a negative impact on the performance of Bitcoin Futures Contracts and the performance of the Funds.”

Bitcoin is available for trading 24-hours a day and, as such, the price of bitcoin may change dramatically when the market for bitcoin futures contracts is closed or when shares are not available for trading on the exchange.

In addition to emphasizing that bitcoin is still a very new technology, Proshares also notes that regulatory guidelines towards the decentralized asset are still in the gray area too.

“The global regulatory landscape for bitcoin and other digital assets has been inconsistent and continues to evolve,” Proshares concludes. The U.S. regulatory landscape may give Proshares some trouble with its filing submitted this past Wednesday due to the recent proposal withdrawals of other U.S. ETF attempts. According to Van Eck Associates, the SEC asked the firm in a formal letter to withdraw its trust amendment until bitcoin derivatives instruments exist.   

What do you think about Protoshares filing for two new bitcoin-based ETFs? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock, Proshares, and the SEC S-1 filing. 

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. 

The post The Bitcoin ETF Holy Grail — Another Firm Attempts the Odds Against SEC appeared first on Bitcoin News.

China’s ICO ban won’t be the end of ICOs, nor will it doom FinTech. Here’s why.

With the prevalence of two-step authentication systems that use phone numbers to access email and virtual money accounts, phone hijacking is on the rise as a way to siphon funds from online cryptocurrency wallets.

The SEC charged two companies and a businessman with anti-fraud violations after he allegedly launched ICO campaigns backed by nonexistent assets.

Cryptocurrencies and their potential for growing use shouldn’t be ignored, according to IMF chief Christine Lagarde.

Don’t miss the latest price overview and trading suggestions.

Japan’s largest1 Bitcoin and blockchain company, bitFlyer, Inc. (“bitFlyer”, HQ: Minatoku, Tokyo; CEO: Yuzo Kano), announced its official recognition by the Japan Financial Services Agency (FSA) as a registered virtual currency exchange2 3. bitFlyer was founded in January 2014 and launched its virtual currency exchange services in April of the same year. In just four years, … Continue reading bitFlyer, Inc.: Notification of Virtual Currency Exchange Registration

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Russia and the United States are not on friendly terms much of the time. There has historically been a lot of political tension between both superpowers, and that situation may not change anytime soon. However, both countries are now collaborating to build the moon’s first space station. It’s an interesting idea, even though it remains to be seen how feasible such a venture truly is in the long run. Building a lunar space station is not something one can expect to complete overnight either.

Russia and the US Bury the Hatchet for now

Over the past few years, there have been multiple incidents involving the US and Russia. Ranging from “hacking” elections to another political tug-of-war, the relationship between both nations has seemingly soured quite a bit of late. Not everything is doom and gloom where Russia and the US are concerned, though, as both nations agree on certain things as well. Building a lunar space station, for example, is one thing both countries would like to achieve in the very near future.

To that end, both nations plan to collaborate on this project, which will be led by NASA. Building a lunar space station requires collaboration, as no nation on Earth can successfully do so on its own as of right now. If such a venture can bring the US and Russia together in a constructive manner, it is definitely worth paying attention to. According to The Guardian, the goal is to build a crew-tended spaceport and put it in lunar orbit. From this spaceport, the wider exploration of space can commence.

It has to be said that NASA has been pretty vocal about its space exploration ambitions over the past few years. According to the administration, sending humans to Mars by 2030 is still a very realistic goal. Colonizing Mars is also near the top of its priority list, although a lot more research is needed before that goal can be achieved. Returning to the moon is the first step along the way, as it has proven to be rather difficult to do so. After all, no human has set foot on the moon for quite some time now.

Interestingly, some of these plans are the direct result of Barack Obama’s presidency. While he ditched plans to return to the moon by 2020, Obama shifted the focus to visiting Mars by 2030. It is evident the moon and Mars are two important frontiers when it comes to space exploration. Establishing a lunar station will be of great help in this regard, as it could eventually be used to explore Mars and potentially other planets in the future as well.

However, it seems the Donald Trump administration will prioritize the moon over Mars once again. It is pretty interesting to see different politicians coming up with different plans of action in this regard. A spaceport orbiting the moon sounds like a more logical choice, all things considered, although we shouldn’t give up on the concept of exploring and potentially colonizing Mars either.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, recently announced that a cooperation agreement with NASA had been signed. Developing international technical standards will be one of the first priorities of this joint venture. Once those standards are in place, construction of the space station can begin. The future station’s docking unit will be built according to Russian designs, according to our sources. That is a pretty interesting development, but it makes sense given Russia’s extensive experience in the development of such hardware.

The virtual reality parks operator ARena Space is announcing an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) launch for its global market entry. The Pre-ICO will start at the end of September 2017. The company aims to raise $600K. The ICO will start in November 2017, with a target goal of between $3.35M and $30.35M. The investments will … Continue reading ARena Space Will Launch the World’s First Entertainment Parks ICO

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GMO Coin, a subsidiary of the Japanese Internet services giant GMO, has enabled bitcoin cash and ether trading, alongside bitcoin. To commemorate the event, the exchange has launched a promotional campaign for each coin.

Also read: Russian Regulators Disagree on Crypto Regulation, Postpone to Next Year

BCH and ETH Trading Now Live

GMO Internet’s bitcoin exchange, GMO Coin, announced on Wednesday that it has enabled the trading of bitcoin cash (BCH) and ether (ETH), citing enough liquidity and strong customer demand. “ETH Trading” and “BCH Trading” tabs have been added to the member page of their website.

For each BCH transaction, the minimum order is 0.01 BCH and the maximum is 5 BCH, with a daily limit of 20 BCH. For each ETH transaction, the minimum is 0.01 ETH and maximum is 10 ETH, with a daily limit of 50 ETH.

To commemorate the new additions, the company has launched a cash-back campaign for bitcoin cash of up to 25,000 yen depending on the amount of BCH traded on the exchange. The campaign runs from September 27 to October 31. For ether, the company launched a 50%-off spread fees campaign during the same time period.

Following the August 1 split of the Bitcoin network, the exchange started crediting their customers with BCH on August 4 in a 1 to 1 ratio of their bitcoin holdings. BCH withdrawals followed on September 1.

GMO Coin’s parent company, GMO Internet, offers a comprehensive range of internet services worldwide. Its internet infrastructure business has 8.47 million customers and ranks number one in Japan. The Group consists of 129 entities as of the end of July this year. GMO owns the largest forex exchange broker in the world, GMO Click.

Other Services Offered

Besides bitcoin, bitcoin cash and ether, GMO Coin will add litecoin (LTC) and ethereum classic (ETC) next month. Ripple (XRP) will be added in November.

The company will also provide other services such as expanded trading tools and bitcoin payment services. The latter will compete with other bitcoin exchanges which are already offering them, including Bitflyer, Coincheck, Zaif and Bitpoint.

Furthermore, parent company GMO Internet announced early this month that it has entered into the bitcoin mining and chip manufacturing businesses. The company plans to produce and sell 7nm ASIC chips and operate a bitcoin mining farm in Scandinavia. It plans to invest 10 billion yen in the next few years on the operations as well as chip research and development.

What do you think many of GMO’s customers will be trading bitcoin cash and ether? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and GMO.

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

The post GMO Enables Bitcoin Cash and Ether Trading With Promotional Discounts appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Snovio, a lead generation and sourcing platform, announces its Token Sale starting 3 October 2017 to raise $15 million to make a pivot towards the innovation the lead generation market needs.

Snovio Minimum Viable Product

Snovio released the platform’s beta version in April 2017. Since that time, Snovio has built the database of 400,000 unique B2B leads and extended the service functionality with the following features:

• Email Verifier that checks email addresses to ensure that the email list is valid and bounce-free.
• LinkedIn Email Search used to find and save emails and more valuable data of LinkedInners.
• Domain Search and Bulk Domain Search through which the users can extract emails along with names and job positions from various domains. It is reinforced with Prospect Search, Company Search and Linker (boolean search) being extremely handy when it comes to leads in specific fields.

Improvements and Innovations Ahead

As stated by Alexis Kratko, Snovio CEO and Founder, the platform aims to facilitate the process of lead generation and sourcing for all possible seekers of information. To do that, Snovio is going to transform the established methods of lead generation into the new decentralized one, power the platform by Blockchain and embed the smart contract.

• Decentralized Search

Snovio’s crowdsourcing data collection technology will be based on a decentralized network of an unlimited number of contributors who will add new data to the system and update already existing information using Snovio Chrome Extension. The platform will reward data suppliers with SNOV tokens in the amount of 70% of the sold lead cost. Thanks to blockchain technology and smart contract, Snovio contributors will explore the transparent and fair revenue distribution model.

• Marketplace

After the Token Sale, the platform will evolve into a Marketplace. A customer will place a data supply order and set a reward in SNOV tokens for the order fulfillment. A contributor or several contributors, being interested in receiving a reward, will perform a data search and submit the collected data back to the customer who will verify them and accept the order. After this, the contributors will receive the reward.

• Mailing Service

Aside from working on data enrichment techniques, the team is also developing a mailing service that will enable the customers to create and launch an email campaign and automated triggered email series.

Upcoming Token Sale

A total of 2,5 billion SNOV tokens based on Ethereum blockchain will be generated and capped, and 60% of them will be available for purchase within 30 days from the token sale launch date. The success threshold is set as $5 million USD, while the hard cap – $15 million USD.

Pre-sale through the White List is already live and will continue till 2 October 2017.

Learn more about Snovio and upcoming Token Sale at:

Official website: https://tokensale.snov.io/

White Paper: https://tokensale.snov.io/docs/WhitePaperEn.pdf

Twitter: https://twitter.com/snovio_ico   

Telegram: https://t.me/snovio_ico  

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Snovio_ICO/  

Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2111272  

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ICOsnovio/  

Medium: https://medium.com/@ico_snovio  

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.