Day: December 19, 2017

The team behind Radar Relay, a decentralized token exchange built on top of the 0x protocol, has raised $3 million in venture funding.

SophiaTX’s Token Generation Event (TGE) has officially come to a close. The project, led by CEO Jaroslav Kacina, has made some noise in the blockchain world as of late. A true testament to that was proven in the first round of their TGE when they generated 30,000,000 SPHTX tokens in just over 24 hours.

That first round set the bar pretty high and the team seems to have rose to the occasion, raising a total of $23,470,356.50 (according to coinmarketcap rates on Monday, December 18, 2017), despite BTC hitting new all time highs, some major exchanges having transaction problems, and the Ethereum network being bogged down.

The total amount of tokens generated came out to 49,145,275.140035644 SPHTX. One of the unique features of their TGE was that all 150 Million SPHTX tokens will be distributed (not burned) as promised to all participants on a pro-rata basis. Even more good news comes Friday, when their token, SPHTX, will be listed on QRYPTOS, then EXX exchange, and more coming soon.

Their TGE is finished, but SophiaTX is just getting started! Team announced an Early Adoption Program, where those who register can become one of the first to get their hands on SophiaTX and see how it can transform their business or project. This incredible opportunity is open for registration now on their website.

“2018 is going to be a busy year for us and we look forward to the road ahead. As we begin the year, we will focus on optimizing our Testnet Blockchain and web browser, as well as converting our proof of concept into many use cases and business scenarios, which we are very excited about.” explains Jaroslav Kacina, CEO of SophiaTX and Equidato Technologies AG.

According to SophiaTX’s timeline on their website, 2018 will bring the release of their wallet, marketplace and development platform, along with the launch an SDK (software development kit) ready for business integration. Year 2018 will see a lot of SophiaTX innovations including IoT integration, a mobile application, advanced encryption, a full web client, and more. The team also announced they plan to publish many more updates showing their progress throughout various stages of their evolution.

“We immensely appreciate all of your support and thank you for helping us achieve an outstanding result from our TGE. The team here at SophiaTX will remain busy in 2018 and beyond, putting the funds we raised to good use ensuring only the best quality products for our clients.” said Jaroslav Kacina.

About SophiaTX

SophiaTX is a blockchain platform and marketplace for businesses of all sizes, and the first open source platform to primarily integrate blockchain technology with enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, and others. 74% of transaction revenue worldwide touches SAP systems, and SophiaTX provides a business-appropriate blockchain for B2B collaboration and communication.

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A sparkling, beautifully cut and polished diamond presents class, elegance, sophistication and value, but more than this, it represents financial stability. Diamond is the asset having potential of being leveraged for monetary gain. CEDEX, a certified, blockchain based diamond exchange and trading platform bridges the gap between an existing diamond ecosystem and financial markets. Possessing expert and profound industry knowledge, the team at CEDEX intends to empower investors to invest and trade in diamonds through a simple and streamlined process, similar to that of traditional asset classes.

CEDEX Technology

CEDEX uses Ethereum blockchain. Apart from underlying distributed ledger, Ethereum integrates Turing-complete programming languages on protocol-layer to enable smart contract capabilities. CEDEX is build upon four pillars; the DEX proprietary technology, blockchain, diamond tokenization and CEDEX Coin.

DEX – Proprietary Algorithm Of CEDEX

At the core of CEDEX lies DEX, a proprietary machine-learning algorithm for diamond tokenization.  DEX was formed to overcome industry’s biggest challenges while classifying diamonds into specific asset class.

DEX envisions to connect diamond holders who wish to liquidate their assets, with traders seeking to hedge or diversify their investment to include diamond as their investment asset. The blockchain technology integrated within DEX makes the process secure and transparent. Hence, the biggest benefit offered by DEX is that it eliminates obstacles in transferring diamonds into an asset class, which include lack of coherence in diamond value and unsatisfactory level of transparency.

DEX & Artificial Intelligence

The DEX algorithm is based on artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that enable systems to automatically learn and enhance the experience without being programmed explicitly. DEX accurately ranks diamonds as per their open market value by making use of the gemological data, global diamond inventory data and diamond financial indexes data.

It implies that traders can trade on CEDEX platform confidently, without being a diamond expert. DEX’s analytical data helps them making informed decisions regarding which stones to invest in, ensuring the best value for money.

 About CEDEX Token Sale

The CEDEX Coin presale will start from January 12, 2018, followed by the main-sale on January 13, 2018, provided the pre-sale ends within 24 hours. Else, the main-sale will start from February 9, 2018. A total of 100,000,000 CEDEX Coins will be issued and 50,000,000 will be offered for public sale. Any unsold tokens will be destroyed.  Users can buy CEDEX coins in Bitcoin, Ether or fiat currencies on the market rate. CEDEX will reserve 20-25% of CEDEX Coins for marketing and future development of the platform.

The Token Sale is going to bring the following special bonuses for the investors:

• Pre-sale: Bonus of up to 10% of total CEDEX Coin – 0.3 CEDEX Coin for each CEDEX Coin
• Day 1 of sale: Bonus of up to 40% of total CEDEX Coin – 0.15 CEDEX Coin for each CEDEX Coin

The CEDEX platform is expected to benefit investors looking to make their diamonds a more liquid asset and gain maximized yields due to price appreciation via the DEX.

Risk-averse investors will be able to have a stable store of value for preserving their capital and reducing their portfolio’s volatility.

To know more about the platform and participate in its upcoming Token Sale, please visit https://cedex.com/

The post DEX – The Proprietary Algorithm Of CEDEX For Diamond Tokenization appeared first on NEWSBTC.

With Bitcoin’s recent correction from $20,000 down to $18,000, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has rallied, currently valued at over .15 BTC and over $2,700. With uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin increasing due to launch of CME futures and ever increasing network congestion, investors are flocking to BCH as a hedge against Bitcoin.

Since its inception on August 1 of this year, Bitcoin Cash has maintained an inverse relation to Bitcoin. After touching $20,000 on Sunday, Bitcoin has gone through a gradual decline, currently trading around $17,700. This correction can be attributed to uneasiness surrounding yesterday’s launch of Bitcoin futures trading on CME, the largest derivatives market in the world.

While this recent volatility is insignificant compared to last week’s trends, when CBOE launched Bitcoin futures, causing price fluctuations of almost 20% throughout the day, Bitcoin supporters and speculators are hedging with other cryptocurrencies in fear of Wall Street manipulation.

Backed by major personalities Roger Ver, Craig Wright, and Jihan Wu, supporters of Bitcoin Cash point to Bitcoin’s network congestion, censorship within the community, and method of development as signs that Bitcoin has strayed from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision, and that Bitcoin Cash is the true coin.

While most are skeptical of the legitimacy behind the BTC fork, savvy investors have traded BCH in anticipation of Bitcoin downtrends, where BCH has historically flourished. This recent run up is no different, and likely will continue only so long as Bitcoin’s downwards movement continue.

In the near future, however, both supporters and skeptics have reason to be concerned about the direction the price of BCH is headed. Over the summer, Coinbase announced that users that who held Bitcoin during the block in which Bitcoin Cash was forked would have access to their funds on January 1, 2018. Just under 7 million BCH have been claimed, and when Coinbase users have permission to move their BCH, it’s to be expected that the circulating supply of BCH will increase dramatically. Without a major source of new money to purchase these newly circulated Bitcoin Cash, it is likely that the price will drop drastically.

Because of this, short term BCH buyers are taking massive risks in purchasing Bitcoin Cash now. If they aren’t able to sell out before others do in preparation for Coinbase users, they will see significant BTC losses on their current positions.

Russia has launched its first official Blockchain implementation for government, in a partnership between Sberbank and FAS. #NEWS

Bitcoin’s price has dipped below $18,000, marking a decline of more than $1,300 since the start of the day’s trading.

Now that net neutrality is dead here in America, you may be left wondering: is there anything I can do to fight this? Well, there’s a pretty strong case to be made for virtual private networks (VPNs) in light of the news, and there’s an even stronger case to be made for decentralized web protocols that run on the blockchain. Both VPNs and crypto platforms like Substratum and Golem could allow people to circumvent the potential manipulation of data access that net neutrality’s repeal may invite.

Bye Bye Neutrality

If you haven’t heard the news yet, we hate to break it to you, but the United States Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality last week in a 3-2 vote.

The Obama-era regulations were put in place to ensure that internet service providers treat all internet data and traffic equally. This meant that service providers could not dictate what web content they provided and how fast this content could be accessed.

But with net neutrality gone, these mandates are relics of the past. Without them, providers can now discriminate between what content and data they privilege or disclaim.  They’ll be allowed to charge website and content providers premiums for faster loading times. If a website doesn’t (or can’t) pay for one of these fast lanes, that ISP’s customers will face longer loading times and crippled access to said website as a result.

Asking content providers to pay for fast lanes could open the door to charging customers for content packages. In Portugal, for example, a lack of net neutrality protections has given way to an ecosystem of subscriptions that consumers must purchase on top of internet costs in order to access certain websites.

It also means that providers can directly block access to applications, sites, and services that they don’t wish to accommodate. If AT&T decided to drop support for, say, comcast.net’s email services, they’d be within their legal rights to do so.

Could VPNs Offer a Solution?

Opponents of net neutrality have long held that virtual private networks could provide shelter to consumers wishing to weather the fallout of net neutrality’s termination.  

In a nutshell, a VPN is a server that runs as an encrypted gateway to the world wide web. You still need a traditional ISP to connect to a VPN, but once you’re connected, the VPN encrypts all your internet activity and data. Only you and the VPN itself can see what you’re using your internet for, and while your ISP can see that you’re using a VPN provider, your IP address will be hidden and replaced by that of the VPN. If you’re in America and you’re using a VPN based in Canada, for example, your internet usage will be tracked back to Canada.

The privacy features VPNs offer make them an attractive tool to potentially combat ISP data manipulation. If ISPs start privileging certain sites over others or begin charging for fast lanes, a VPN tunnel’s encryption could allow internet users to avoid these changes.

If a VPN hides your network traffic, ISPs can’t see which websites you’ve been accessing. Thus, your service provider cannot block or target your use of specific websites. Since they can’t tell what you’re using your internet for, they have to treat all traffic the same, as in the good old days of net neutrality.

Potential Limitations and Concerns

Some observers have speculated that, while ISPs cannot control individual traffic run through VPNs, they could still place a hold on VPN services. Theoretically, providers could throttle all of a VPN’s traffic, effectively doing with an entire network what they couldn’t do otherwise with specific data.

Throttling a VPN’s entire service is possible, but it would come with its own difficulties. From an enterprise standpoint, many corporations and their customers use VPNs for their work and business relations, so ISPs would likely face backlash from America’s corporate sector if they wanted to firmly control these encrypted gateways.  

VPN providers have the ability to combat this possibility as well. They could effectively cycle their IP addresses constantly, forcing ISPs to take on the hassle of keeping an updated list of all new IPs in order to fully police content.  

Among the most prominent doubters of VPNs’ efficacy in a post-net neutral world is Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin. In a December 16 tweet, he argued that “VPNs cannot do anything here, because the ISPs can just treat VPN traffic as ‘unknown’, and do not apply any discounts to it.”

Buterin believes that “[t]he one solution in the decentralized space that could help if anything at all would be full-scale adoption of mesh networks.” A mesh network is an infrastructure of nodes and bridges that relay information without relying on a single node for its data source.

Enter Substratum and Company

Decentralized networks like Substratum could be the skeleton key to unlocking an unrestricted internet outside of net neutrality. Substratum acts like a mesh network for the internet and its information.

With Substratum, users will be able to access internet content through an encrypted network without needing a VPN or the Tor browser. The network consists of a series of individually peer-run nodes, and once you access one of these nodes, all of your internet data is encrypted. So, much as with a VPN, ISPs will not be able to monitor your internet activity or the websites you access, and as we noted earlier with VPNs, this would make ISPs powerless to throttle or control your access to specific websites.

Unlike VPNs, however, internet gateways are split up between multiple nodes. So instead of accessing web content from a centralized server like you would with a VPN, with Substratum, your access point comes from a handful of servers, not just one. This would make it extremely difficult for ISPs to control all of the traffic on Substratum’s network like they could with VPNs, as there’s no single, unified source for them to target.

It’s also possible that Golem, a decentralized computing platform, could offer solutions to reinstate a de facto net neutrality.  

The Golem project is trying to build a global supercomputer on the blockchain. With Golem, anyone can use their spare computer processing power and hard drive space to run one of the Golem network’s innumerable nodes. Theoretically, this protocol could develop an ISP infrastructure of its own using a globalized network of Wi-Fi hotspots. If this were achieved, it would create a decentralized internet service free from centralized providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.

It’s quite probable that blockchain technology could revive net neutrality for American citizens going forward. Decentralized web platforms like Substratum may be able to bypass an ISP’s data policing, and if Golem can construct an internet infrastructure of its own, you won’t even need to subscribe to traditional ISPs to access the web. This potential feature, however, is still a long way away from becoming a reality, as Golem doesn’t even have its network live yet. Substratum’s solution, on the other hand, is more feasibly in reach, as its network is scheduled to launch next month.

The price of the digital token underlying Augur’s ethereum-based prediction market has risen sharply in the past day, market data shows.

Following in the footsteps of CBOE, the CME Group launched its own highly anticipated Bitcoin futures on Sunday evening. Come Monday morning, cryptocurrency’s overall market capitalization reached another milestone at US$600 billion, making the jump from US$500 billion in just five days.

Wall Street’s Newest Toy

Adding to Bitcoin’s bullish December run, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s futures opened with a price of US$20,000 for its January 2018 contracts.  

The successful opening comes just a week after CBOE began trading its own Bitcoin futures. Both of these United States-based exchanges were cleared for trading by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission earlier this month. These contracts track the price of Bitcoin from an index that draws from multiple private exchanges, but the trades do not include actual Bitcoins, as the futures’ value comes solely from Bitcoin’s price movements.

According to CME data, upwards of 220 January contracts were sold within the first hour (and a handful more were sold for February, March, and even June). While this figure is noteworthy, it’s tame compared to the 800+ trades in the opening hours of CBOE’s futures that crashed the exchange’s website.

Initially, CME’s January futures began trading at US$20,650, a good US$1,000 more than the exchange’s reference rate for Bitcoin’s market valuation at the time. The February, March, and June contracts also traded over US$20,000, even as the January futures began slipping into the US$19,000 range.

At the time of writing, the January contracts have reached a volume of 847 trades, with a 24-hour high of US$20,865 and a low of US$18,165. Between January, February, March, and June, each month’s future is currently trading just above US$19,000.

The Market in General

While futures trading was brimming with $20k optimism in CME’s first hour, Bitcoin’s present-day market played it safe amidst the newest futures opening.  

After reaching a new all-time high of US$20,089, Bitcoin began a steady decline back to US$18,355. Since this dip, the Bitcoin price has remained in the range of US$18,000-$19,000. Meanwhile, the rest of the market has continued its holiday boom, as crypto’s overall market cap topped US$600 billion in Monday’s early hours. 

The majority of the market has benefited from December’s bull run, but a few of the big winners stand out. Tron, for instance, is up 2,000% from its asking price at the beginning of December. Stellar Lumens is another big gainer, moving up to #13 on CoinMarketCap after rising from US$0.07 to an all-time high of US$0.29 over the course of the month.

Within the market cap top 10, Cardano, Litecoin, and Ripple have been the best performers this December, increasing 400%, 220% and 200%, respectively.

Still, the rest of the top 10 coins have little to complain about. In the past 24 hours, 6 out of the market cap’s top 10 reached new all-time highs. Excluding Bitcoin, this list includes Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Cardano, NEM, and Monero.

As the performance of the CBOE and CME futures suggests, institutional money has become increasingly attracted to cryptocurrencies. In addition to these futures, Nasdaq and Cantor Fitzgerald expect to launch their own commodities in 2018. As big-name players continue to get involved, cryptocurrency markets could continue to see healthy growth in the months to come.