Day: December 19, 2017

Julian Assange has urged donors to make contributions to Wikileaks by using cryptocurrencies in order to skirt the financial ‘blockade’ by national governments. #NEWS

Ethereum (ETH) has continued to push North, having gained 77% this month alone. The market cap now stands at US$73.2 billion with US$3.4 billion in trading volume over the past 24 hours.

Respected hedge fund strategist-turned cryptocurrency investor, Dan Morehead, has come out with some incredibly bullish sentiments about Bitcoin. He believes that in the long-term, today’s sub $20,000 price point for a single Bitcoin will seem like a bargain. He told CNBC:

“For the big blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple, we’re in the first innings of a multi-decade thing… And there’s going to be some ups and there’s going to be some downs, but we’re still really early.”

He elaborated on the non-linear nature of the uptrend, stating that the price could easily have halved by this time next week. Morehead went on to remind viewers of Tuesday’s “The Coin Rush” feature on the CNBC network that if a market grows quickly, it can also shrink fast. To highlight this, he cited the price difference between today and the month just passed. However, the Wall Streeter-turned cryptobull who first bought Bitcoin in at $72, remains positive about it’s future.

When asked what the “intrinsic value of Bitcoin” was, the former Goldman Sachs, and Tiger Management trader replied:

“If you add up all the different use cases, it’s a payment rail, like a digital gold, and a way to get round correspondent banking, you come up with a number that’s an order of magnitude, or two higher than today’s price.”

The interview then touched on Bitcoin mining. Morehead commented on the period of rapid expanse in which the number of units securing the network was doubling every six weeks. He referred to it as like “Moore’s Law on crack.” He went on to explain that as the incentive and competition on the network increases so too does the price of mining the coin itself. This in turn increases the value of each coin.

Perhaps most bullish of all was his estimation that only 5% of institutional investors on the planet have any access to blockchain technologies at all. He anticipates that in the next 18 months, that will no longer be the case.

With interest seemingly growing for further futures markets, the thinking is that additional financial products will begin to appear around the cryptocurrency space in 2018. Of course, the influx of funds will drive the prices much higher than today’s.

The post Dan Morehead on Crypto: Dan Morehead on Crypto: “We’re in the First Innings of a Multi-Decade Thing” appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Coinbase has launched support for Bitcoin Cash and credited its customers who held Bitcoin on the exchange when the hard fork occurred on August 1. #NEWS

Coinbase launched bitcoin cash exchange trading Tuesday, but operations were anything but smooth. The feature was abruptly pulled after going live.

Not many tokens are taking steps to clarify how they’re handling their own funds. Storj, however, did just that with a surprise announcement Tuesday.

Cryptocurrency exchange CoinBase announced today that they will allow full support for Bitcoin Cash. The news comes following a bull run in the price of the version of Bitcoin which forked off from the main chain in August. According to TrustNodes, the company recently added Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to their Application Programming Interface before swiftly removing it again after speculation began. Some figured that CoinBase were testing BCH functionality ahead of their proposal to allow users who held BTC with them at the time of the fork to withdraw their additional coins this January. Meanwhile, others correctly hinted that one of the planet’s most famous crypto exchanges were ensuring that their launch of full support for the alternate version of Bitcoin was seamless.

The news was delivered via the exchange’s Medium blog page just moments ago. They claim to be rolling out full support. This will include depositing, withdrawing, and buying and selling when the liquidity reaches the necessary level to allow such functionality. This should be “within a couple of hours”. Their statement said:

“All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account. Your Bitcoin Cash balance will reflect your Bitcoin balance at the time of the Bitcoin Cash Fork, which occurred at 13:20 UTC, August 1, 2017.”

They went on to claim that they’d long since been analysing the community, support, stability, market price, and trading volume of Bitcoin Cash, and were sufficiently impressed to add the coin to their elite but limited list of cryptocurrencies. They also affirmed that they will use the ticker BCH and will allow full support to the following fiat currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, and SGD.

In the statement, CoinBase claim that they believe their “customers should benefit from forks”. However, one rapid response on Medium was speedy in highlighting the hypocrisy of adding Bitcoin Cash to the platform and neglecting to include Bitcoin Gold, which at the time of writing was trading at around $353 per coin. It’s also telling that they have not integrated SegWit support yet. This second layer scaling system on the original chain effectively increases the blocksize too. This would allow users to transact using less fees when dealing with the original BTC coins. Clearly, they’re selective about exactly which benefits their customers should be entitled to.

The news seems to be driving further demand for Bitcoin Cash which was already bolstered by CoinBase’s API trial earlier this week. In the last forty minutes, the price of BCH has increased by nearly $700, reaching an all-time high of $3,513.58.

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CryptoKitties is a new blockchain-powered online game where users can buy and sell collectable virtual cats on a marketplace as well as breed new kittens. While a virtual cat collecting game may seem insignificant and somewhat silly, CryptoKitties is actually the first large-scale decentralized application on the Ethereum network — and a driving factor behind why CryptoKitties are considered valuable is the concept of ‘digital scarcity’.

Everyone and their dog seem to be trying to cash in on cryptocurrency at the moment. Perhaps the clearest indication of this is the rapid increase in stock price a once-fruit juice company who have undergone something of a re-brand experienced today. SkyPeople Fruit Juice changed name to Future FinTech (FTFT) back in June. The company haven’t mentioned the terms blockchain, Bitcoin, or cryptocurrency in any of their literature since but financial research group FactSet have reported that their market value shot up to a massive $12.5 million on Tuesday. At the close of trading, the price per stock was up an impressive 64 percent and valued at around $3 a share.

Whilst the company have said that they would focus on financial technology rather than pulping pineapples, there was no indication whatsoever that this would mean they’d be working on blockchain solutions and cryptocurrency projects. The documents they published last month mention that they’d be moving towards trading commodities and facilitating e-commerce platforms. Interestingly, they still carry images of fresh fruit all over their November company presentation making the name change seem bizarre at best.

According to the document Future FinTech’s goals include:

• “Robust expansion plans to include development of orange and
  kiwi plantations and new production and trading facilities.”
• “Strong consumer demand for company’s products due to rising
  health consciousness and China GDP growth”.
• “The Company is proposing a corporate restructuring to be voted on
  at a Special Meeting of Shareholders expected on Jan. 30, 2018”.

You’d expect a company consciously trying to cash in on Bitcoin-mania would have included at least one other buzzword to excite potential investors but the lack of peer-to-peer, decentralisation, distributed ledgers, or smart contracts suggests that the name change might not have been a publicity stunt.

Whether or not Future FinTech intended such a response on the market remains unclear. However, at one point during Tuesday, the price per share in the tiny former fruit juicers was up a whopping 200 percent on the day. The trading volume of course tells a similar tale. Today, over 28 times more shares were exchanged in comparison with the 30 day average. According to CNBC, David Rudnick, the investor relations representative at Future FinTech, was not available for comment.

Image: PixaBay

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Embleema Inc. announces the formation of its Advisory Board and the appointment of two members effective immediately: Frédéric Duchesne, President and CEO of Pierre Fabre Pharmaceuticals; and Bernard Gilly, Ph.D., Founder and President of iBioNext.

“I am humbled and grateful to have Bernard and Frédéric join our Advisory Board,” said Robert Chu, Founder and CEO of Embleema Inc., “Each one of them is a globally recognized leader in their respective area and have an impressive track record of growing billion-dollar businesses. Having Frédéric and Bernard in our Advisory Board will provide us a tremendous advantage in articulating and executing our growth strategy.”

Mr. Frédéric Duchesne serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pharmaceuticals Division of Pierre Fabre, serving patients in more than 130 countries. He is also a Board Member of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). Prior to joining Pierre Fabre in 2010, Frédéric held senior executive positions at GSK and BMS in Europe, the UK and France.

Mr. Bernard Gilly, Ph.D. has over twenty years of experience in the financial and biotech sectors. He co-founded several disruptive technologies start-ups and is currently Chairman of Pixium Vision (2011), EyeTechCare (2012), Gecko Biomedical (2013) and Chronocam (2015). From 2005 to 2009, he founded and was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fovea Pharmaceuticals, a privately owned biotech company, which was acquired by sanofi in 2009. After the acquisition, he became Senior Vice-President of the Ophthalmology Division of Sanofi until 2012. Prior to Fovea, Dr. Gilly was a partner at Sofinnova Partners from 2000 to 2005.

Embleema’s Advisory Board will provide strategic guidance to the company in terms of assessing the healthcare and technology markets, identifying growth opportunities, and defining strategic and tactical plans.

About Embleema Inc.

Embleema Inc. is a healthcare technology company based in New York, applying blockchain technology for the benefit of patients. Its first blockchain platform PatientTruth allows patients to securely store and control their longitudinal medical history and drive a new decentralized health economy. Embleema is fully committed to drive standards for open-source healthcare blockchain software allowing mass adoption of PatientTruth by the entire healthcare ecosystem, including patient advocacy groups, payers, providers, healthcare product manufacturers, and healthcare authorities.

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In the digital age identity is a nightmare. There’s no other way to put. We’ve all been through password hell. We’ve all had alerts on our phones telling us we’ve just requested to change our password when we didn’t or received unsolicited phishing emails trying to get information under false pretenses.

There have been solutions offered up to end the pain but none are total solutions.

You can store all your passwords behind one master password for example, but you are still relying on a password. You back that up with two-factor authentication, until someone gets hold of your phone number by nefarious means and is able to launch a porting attack where a criminal tricks your phone company’s customer service staff into sending the access code to a device under their control.

And for corporations, the problem of securing customer identification data and other information they store can be equally burdensome.

VALID puts you in control

Enter VALID, the brainchild of Swiss digital identity and e-government services provider Procivis.

VALID is what’s known in the trade as a provider of self-sovereign identity, which is another way of defining an individual or corporate entity that has full control over their digital identity and which they can store securely locally to them, such as on a smartphone. If digital information is the new oil that greases the gears of our economies, then putting consumers in control of their identity is going to be crucial for both the identity holders and data consumers.

Marketplace makes your data your asset

And as valuable as security is, that’s not the end of the story. Putting your data for your own benefit is where things get more interesting.

If we can gain control over how our identities – and the information associated with those identities – are used, it holds out the prospect of empowering every individual citizen to decide for themselves who uses their data and a mechanism to demand a payment in return for that usage.

VALID has brought into being a marketplace to connect self-sovereign identities with data consumers, such as advertisers, who would like to access that data.

Regulation makes VALID a necessity

This might sound all very blue sky and in the future. Actually, the opposite is the case as the question of managing identities is already a pressing regulatory concern in Europe. In May 2018, that’s to say in just six months’ time, the European Union’s privacy regulation framework, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), comes into force.

GDPR confers on individuals the right to know who is using their data, to get a copy of that data and requires companies sending marketing materials to consumers to have explicit permission to do so from the targeted persons.

For companies, record keeping on all its interactions with customers, present and future, becomes mission critical. If a company does not have an accurate audit of its customer base it could damage its ability to conduct its business.

In the UK policy think tank Reform produced a report in December urging the government to use blockchain technology to help citizens secure their interactions with public bodies. Specifically, Reforms argues that decentralised ledger system ‘control of public service identity can be moved from government to the individual.’

Well-positioned in Europe… and the world

Procivis and its VALID marketplace are well-positioned to provide the solutions that companies, individuals and governments will need. The identity specialists already work with governments around the world to help them execute plans for digital identities.

Its eID+ electronic identity system was accredited by the Swiss government on 4^th December 2017 with its official launch planned for Spring 2018 following the successful completion of pilot testing. The backbone of the ecosystem is a blockchain-based digital identity solution

The three-step approach of VALID is comprised of verification of self-sovereign ID, a digital vault for your sensitive personal information securely encrypted and the marketplace where you can monetize your personal data. At the centre of that ecosystem is a mobile wallet for individuals and a web interface for the data consumers, which could be public bodies or companies.

Initial token offering in January 2018

VALID will be launching its initial token offering (ITO) in January 2018 after further discussion with early-stage backers, who include Eva Kaili, Member of the European Parliament and president of Bitcoin Association Switzerland and serial entrepreneur Malik El Bay, former chief executive of modum.io, the blockchain-based pioneer that provides a solution to maintain the data integrity of supply chains. El Bay led Modum’s token sale in which it raised $13.5 million.

Partners include Swiss law firm with an international footprint Froiep, crypto trading platform, mobile wallet and community hub Lykke and German-based Queo, a group of companies offering services in IT and software consulting, brand management, project planning and more.

The aim of VALID is to make your data your asset and with your help they will do just that. There are other players in the field, such as uPort for example, but none has government accreditation I the way VALID does. For more information on the VALID wallet, marketplace and token, check out the whitepaper and join the Telegram channel.

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