Day: March 1, 2018

SportyCo, the decentralized sports investment and funding ecosystem, has released a beta version of their platform. The SportyCo platform enables prospective athletes to receive donations from fans and supporters. The full release version of the platform is expected at the end of March. This will also enable small investors to finance prospective athletes for a percentage of their future earnings.

The token crowd sale was successfully concluded less than three months ago during which approximately 70 million non-mineable SPF tokens were released to crowd sale participants, ambassadors and the SportyCo team. Since then the team has already launched the platform and are on track with their roadmap.

The project is supported by several sports stars, such as football legends Ronaldinho and Roberto Carlos, former NBA center and Cleveland Cavaliers scout Primož Brezec, and ski jumper Noriaki Kasai. SportyCo is also advised by notable names from the cryptocurrency industry, including Charlie Shrem, Phillip Nunn and Robby Schwertner, among others.

The new platform, launched in Beta, comes with three up and coming athletes collecting donations for furthering their respective careers. Gasper Kemperle is an up and coming Slovenian skier, whose achievements include 3^rd place at the FIS U18 Championship. Diego Silvio Franzot, a 17 year-old football player from Italy, is currently studying and playing at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, USA. Jaka Gorjan is one of the biggest talents of motorcycle racing at just eleven years old. He has plans to win an Italian and European championship this year.

Other athletes will be joining these three during the test period with the full platform set to launch at the end of March. Along with the main release will be an investment module which allows small sports investors to not only donate, but also invest into prospective athletes via long-term smart contracts.

The ethos of SportyCo is that every promising athlete deserves a chance to follow a professional career and every investor should be able to back the athlete they believe in. Their mission is to open up the $1.3 trillion sports industry to small investors, democratizing sports investment, and opening a new chapter in the sports industry.

For more details check out the SportyCo Website and come chat with the team on Telegram.

The post SportyCo Athlete Funding Platform Launched in Beta appeared first on NewsBTC.

Key Highlights

• Ripple price moved higher recently and traded above the $0.9000 resistance against the US dollar.
• There was a break above a connecting bearish trend line with resistance at $0.9110 on the hourly chart of the XRP/USD pair (data source from Kraken).
• The pair traded as high as $0.9488 where it faced sellers and declined once again.

Ripple price was not able to capitalize on gains against the US Dollar and Bitcoin. XRP/USD is back below the 100 hourly SMA and the $0.9200 support.

Ripple Price Support

There was a minor upside move initiated from the $0.8700 swing low in Ripple price against the US Dollar. The price moved higher and broke the $0.9000 resistance. There was also a break above the $0.9200 resistance and the 100 hourly simple moving average. Buyers pushed the price above the 50% Fib retracement level of the last drop from the $0.9597 high to $0.8749 low.

During the upside, there was a break above a connecting bearish trend line with resistance at $0.9110 on the hourly chart of the XRP/USD pair. However, the upside move was capped by the $0.9500 resistance. A high was formed near $0.9488 from where the price started a fresh downside wave. The decline was substantial as the price moved below the 50% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $0.8754 low to $0.8488 high. Moreover, there was a close below the $0.9200 level and the 100 hourly SMA.

It seems like the price was able to capitalize on gains above $0.9200 and declined. It is currently trading near the same broken trend line at $0.9080, which is acting as a support. As long as the price is above $0.9050, it could make another upside attempt.

Looking at the technical indicators:

Hourly MACD – The MACD for XRP/USD is now back in the bearish zone.

Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI for XRP/USD has moved below the 50 level.

Major Support Level – $0.9050

Major Resistance Level – $0.9200

Charts courtesy – Trading View

The post Ripple Price Technical Analysis – Can XRP/USD Gain Momentum? appeared first on NewsBTC.

The news in November reported that Uber co-founder and chairman Garrett Camp would join other billionaire philanthropists in giving half his wealth away after what he described as an “eye-opening” experience while traveling in Africa.

What was not reported was that the experience also triggered the idea for a new kind of cryptocurrency.

Instant, Affordable, Borderless Currency

Camp who only began seriously looking at cryptocurrencies last year found the entire idea wanting in many ways. He decided it would be best to re-design the system from a different philosophical standpoint.

Working with the best minds from universities, science foundations, and research institutes, similar to how the internet was formed, he is calling the project ‘Eco’ because it is easy to remember and to say in almost any language.

Camp is one of many tech leaders getting into the cryptocurrency ring. Most notably of late Pavel Durov founder of the chat app Telegram has reportedly raised over a billion dollars in an ICO for his TON network. While Mark Zuckerberg has talked about the need for Facebook to move towards encryption and cryptocurrency.

Camp’s goals are different though, he is creating a cryptocurrency that operates on almost contrasting principles to existing coins from the foundation up.

Eco, a Philosophically Different Kind of Token

Firstly, the Eco’s blockchain, or shared ledger, is being designed to run on verified nodes as opposed to a network of anonymous machines. This will forfeit some aspects of security but gain efficiency through coordinated governance.

Secondly, ‘miners’ won’t be competing against each other as tokens will be shared equally throughout the entire system of verified nodes whenever a new block is confirmed. This discourages people from throwing as much computing power as they can at the system and thus cuts down on energy consumed.

The way Camp intends distribution is as different as his idea for “mining”. Unlike Durov, who seemed to be testing the limits of how much money he could wring from an as yet programmed network, some of the initial Eco tokens will be given away to get things started.

The “ICO” plan is to distribute half of the trillion tokens to be generated over several years to the first billion users. Of that, a fifth of the tokens will be set aside for verified nodes. A tenth to pay operational expenses for Camp’s Eco Foundation. Another tenth for advisers and contributors and a final tenth for  “strategic partners worldwide.”

The project is still in the design phase and Camp is inviting experts in many fields to join in on creating the ‘Eco’. The white paper actually has a call out to experts written into it.

If you are an expert in technology, security, economics, governance, policy or design and are interested in helping build Eco into a global currency, please email us at [email protected].

When speaking about the future of the project Camp expressed a cautious optimism saying “I think it could have as much or even greater impact (than Uber) if it succeeds,”.

The post Uber Founder Plans to Change the Philosophy of Cryptocurrency appeared first on NewsBTC.

Walmart is seeking a patent for a “smart package” that would use blockchain technology to track physical goods through their shipping journey.

Louisiana’s attorney general is reportedly investigating a group of former staffers for using official resources to mine cryptocurrencies.

Alex Grebnev, a former banker at Goldman Sachs, is creating a platform that will permit traders to deal more comprehensively with cryptocurrencies. The platform, called Oxygen, intends to target private and institutional investors seeking to cut repurchase agreements, or “repos,” among themselves. According to Forbes, Oxygen is set to be launched later this year. 

If the operation is successful, the crypto-space will move even further into the mainstream: This past December, Chicago-based exchanges CME Group and Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) launched Bitcoin futures contracts.

Grebnev, who while working at Goldman Sachs dealt with stocks and derivatives for almost ten years, is working with cryptocurrency exchange Changelly, with plans to launch Oxygen on Changelly’s infrastructure — in turn permitting the repo platform access to the exchanges 1.6 million clients. At launch, Oxygen will accept ERC20 tokens, the popular token standard of Ethereum. After it hits the market, Oxygen plans to integrate Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as well. 

How Does it Work?

In a repo, one entity sells an asset (cryptocurrencies in this case) to another at a certain price at the start of the transaction and pledges to repurchase the asset from the initial buyer at a future date, at a different price. If the seller fails to buy back the asset, the buyer can put it on the open market, which makes the asset a kind of collateral during the repo.

Cryptocurrency holders would generate profits from lending their coins through Oxygen to a second party. In return, they would receive another coin as collateral until their initial token is returned. The second party would use the borrowed coin for short-term trading or transactions and will have to pay a fee as part of the deal.

Grebnev predicts the platform will stabilize the cost of borrowing cryptocurrencies, whose price fluctuations can deter investors who want to bet on falling prices, known as taking a short position. He expects repo agreements to be struck for periods ranging from hours to a year or two.

With regards to the growth and development of cryptocurrencies as an asset class, Grebnev had the following to say:

“The cryptocurrency market is developing very fast, but it should also be developing on a professional level, with the application of real-world concepts. There are already a number of users utilizing the crypto market and in order for it to develop, real world applications must be brought into the crypto world. This is why we are applying the repo market to the crypto market – users can  profit without losing their assets.”

The post Ex-Goldman Sachs Banker Creates First Crypto Repo Platform in Collaboration With Exchange Changelly appeared first on NewsBTC.

Cryptocurrency payments appear to be finding a niche within the real estate industry. There are already several documented examples of people wishing to trade a property in exchange for digital currency. Some experts are predicting that the trend will continue and we will see more of these deals in future.

Buying a Home With Bitcoin is Easy

There are some key advantages of using cryptocurrency to pay for property. The most prominent of which would be a lack of middlemen required to complete a sale, as well as the ease and low cost of sending large sums of money from one party to another. Director of Communications at the Coin Center, Neeraj Agrawal, told the LA Times:

“Within the context of real estate, it makes sense to use cryptocurrency in those types of transactions… Cryptocurrency is a way to send large amounts of money pretty easily with relatively low fees and little interference from middlemen.”

For these reasons, Agrawal feels that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency payments are more likely to be useful when buying large items like homes or vehicles than small ones such as the oft-used example of a cup of coffee.

True enough, the last few years have seen more people willing to accept cryptocurrency payments for property. This has led some of the most enterprising brokers to explore how they can make the process as simple and smooth as possible for their clients. Andrew Canter, CEO of real estate firm Canter Companies, explains about his decision to get involved with Bitcoin:

“We realised there is so much new wealth in the crypto space… There are a lot of new buyers and a lot of people that have seen their wealth fluctuate over the last year.”

Being such a new method of payment, some are experiencing various challenges trying to either buy or sell using cryptocurrency. A real estate agent who represented buyers in two deals for properties in Manhattan Beach, LA was one such example. Justin Miller of Beach City Brokers found that established escrow and title companies were anything but accommodating to his requests for information or assistance when he was putting crypto deals together. He recalls his experience:

“No one wanted to deal with bitcoin. They didn’t understand it.”

Meanwhile, Josh Cincinnati of the Zcash Foundation found that he encountered his own challenges when he tried to buy a home in Virginia with cash from cryptocurrency investments. He was told that banks wouldn’t accept the money to approve a loan because they were unsure of its origins. He was requested to prove that the funds were indeed from legitimate trade. In response to this, Cincinnati submitted a detailed account of every transaction he’d made in the last two years. This still wasn’t enough and he was forced to explore alternative methods.

Hopefully, such stories will soon sound as ridiculous to the banks and real estate agents refusing to touch Bitcoin as they do to people in the know.
Mike Michalski of RE/MAX Estate Properties spoke of the simplicity with which crypto can be confirmed as belonging to someone and why some were reluctant to deal with it:

“Proof of funds for a bitcoin sale literally requires the buyer to sit down with a smartphone, open a blockchain app that displays the total value of their bitcoin and show that to the seller… Both the buyer and seller wanted to make the deal happen, but this is all new. There’s just not a lot of understanding or documentation.”

With cryptocurrency providing many of its earliest investors with great wealth, it’s likely that the numbers of those wishing to transact in Bitcoin for real estate will grow. In 2017, there were plenty of examples to suit both ends of the market. The Kalinka Group in Moscow posted one mega-mansion for sale in Bitcoin last September. Meanwhile, a resident of the dilapidated UK seaside town of Grimsby advertised a somewhat more modest home for cryptocurrency.

With stories like that in the LA Times involving a Portuguese citizen who only received interest in his home after updating the listing with a price in cryptocurrency becoming more commonplace, it seems that 2018 will see a continuation of the trend.

The post Cryptocurrency Proving a Popular Means of Payment for Real Estate appeared first on NewsBTC.

This week the popular cryptocurrency service Coinbase revealed a slew of announcements concerning certain aspects of the business. The exchange details its Segregated Witness (Segwit) rollout, plans to disable Paypal, new tax tools, and the hiring of 500 customer support agents.

Also Read: Israeli Supreme Court Forbids Bank From Denying Service to Bitcoin Exchange

Segwit and Taxes

Coinbase representatives Tina Bhatnagar and Zach Abrams revealed some business changes that are being applied to the San Francisco based company this year. Abrams first details the company’s support for Segwit will be complete this week. According to the product manager, Segwit compatible BTC sends and receives for all customers will soon be available.

“We are continuing to invest in our bitcoin infrastructure, and we will be working on implementing additional bitcoin scalability improvements like transaction batching and improved UTXO management,” explains Abrams.

Following the quick update on the Segwit rollout, Abrams reveals that Coinbase is releasing some tax reporting tools as well. Coinbase plans to launch the tools this week as well that make “paying taxes as easy as possible.”

“To do so, we will be providing a ‘Detailed Transactions Report’ that will accompany our Gains/Losses report,” says Coinbase. 

As many customers have noted, our Gains/Losses report is only accurate if you have only bought or sold digital assets on Coinbase — So this additional, detailed report is aimed at helping those who have sent / received digital assets or bought / sold on other exchanges.

Temporarily Disabling Paypal, Credit Card Issues and 500 New Customer Service Agents

Another announcement made by the San Francisco firm is the disabling of Paypal services. On Wednesday, March 7th Coinbase plans to stop Paypal services and is “overhauling” the entire experience. The exchange does detail it will fully re-enable Paypal services at some point “later this year.” Coinbase then addresses credit card services and detailed how TD Bank announced it would not be allowing cryptocurrency purchases. TD Bank is following suit with Citi, Bank of America, Discover, and Capital One, explains the exchange, and recommends customers remove those types of cards from their platform.

“If you have a TD Bank credit card tied to your Coinbase account, we would recommend switching to a bank or debit card,” Abrams explains.

Lastly, the head of customer support at Coinbase Tina Bhatnagar has also revealed the exchange has new improvements coming soon. According to Bhatnagar Coinbase is hiring 500 agents to help with increasing capacity, upgrading tools, adding social support over the next 90 days.

“My first, and most obvious observation was that we needed more people to handle the inbound volume of support requests and a solid plan to handle any spikes in volume,” Bhatnagar details.

We will be onboarding approximately 500 agents over the next three months to handle the inbound call volume — Our first group of 90 new agents will start on March 5th and we will be adding a group of agents every week until we hit our goal of 500 in late May.

The company has grown quite large since its inception in 2012 with over $50Bn USD in cryptocurrencies traded and a total of 10Mn users in 2018. Since then the company has had seven funding rounds which raised $225.3Mn. It seems the cryptocurrency brokerage service is putting some of its capital injections to use this year.

What do you think about the announcements Coinbase has made? Let us know what you think in the comments below. 

Images via Shutterstock, Coinbase, Medium, and Pixabay. 

At Bitcoin.com there’s a bunch of free helpful services. For instance, have you seen our Tools page? You can even lookup the exchange rate for a transaction in the past. Or calculate the value of your current holdings. Or create a paper wallet. And much more.

The post Coinbase Reveals ‘Overhauled’ Changes and Tax Tools appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Germany: Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies won’t be taxed when used to make purchases. #NEWS

Former FDIC head Sheila Bair believes cryptocurrency prices should be left to the market to establish, according to Barron’s.

FundRequest, a decentralized marketplace built for open source collaboration, has announced a partnership with Indorse, a reward-based decentralized professional social network where users can control their data, to match talented and certified open source developers with available projects, bounties and jobs.

FundRequest is a decentralized marketplace that provides a unique protocol for funding open source development and collaboration. It allows anybody to fund projects across the entire open source space, accelerating growth and at the same time providing a democratic system that allows development to reflect what users really want. FundRequest ensures that contributors to open source development are financially rewarded for their work and their partnership with Indorse will bring even greater benefits.

Indorse utilizes the Ethereum blockchain to bring validity to the skills economy. Users can create a professional profile on the network and receive accreditation for their skills, abilities and employment history. Using both peer evaluation and artificial intelligence-based chatbots, the veracity of these skills is assessed and written onto the permanent, immutable public ledger.

The combination of the two systems will provide people with a legitimate professional record to showcase their Indorse profile on FundRequest while simultaneously allowing Indorse users to search for programming jobs and bounties on FundRequest.

“Partnering with Indorse is a perfect symbiotic relationship for our goals with FundRequest,” said Karel Striegel, CEO FundRequest. “We will give Indorse users access to projects and jobs in the blockchain and open source communities, meanwhile we will have access to vetted, top quality developers to work on the projects on our platform.”  

The Indorse platform will create a record of all the work a developer has contributed, meaning that the community can democratically select the best developers for each project. At the same time developers are provided with a permanent record of their contributions and receive full recognition for their efforts. It’s a mutually beneficial system where Indorse users will be able to find work through FundRequest proposals, and FundRequest users will be able to use the Indorse platform to have their skills and accomplishments validated.

The collaboration will closely tie the projects together. Users will be able to display and link their Indorse profile on the FundRequest platform, and reversely show their FundRequest activity on the Indorse system. Efforts are also being made to streamline sign-up processes between the two platforms.

The partnership between the two platforms will potentially be hugely beneficial for the open source community and also help provide skilled blockchain developers for projects that need additional talent. A developer’s contribution history recorded on the FundRequest system is verified again before being permanently written to the Indorse blockchain, providing two layers of verification and minimizing the chance of fraudulent behavior. Developers are also greatly incentivised to contribute to open source projects, not only through financial incentives, but in order to build a professional resume on the Indorse blockchain.

Businesses already registered with Indorse will be able to use the FundRequest platform for a range of services, from debugging and outsourcing development to creating bounties.

In addition, with FundRequest’s roadmap indicating integration with a broad range of services in the near future, including the home of software development, GitHub, the collaboration with Indorse will be one of the first steps in building a robust ecosystem around open source development.

To learn more about both companies, visit:

www.fundrequest.io

www.indorse.io

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.