Australia has taken the lead when it comes to cryptocurrency regulation, and has done so with many positive and balanced intentions #ANALYSIS

A new cryptocurrency app due to be released in the autumn is reputed to be the first to provide traditional stock exchange features. The app, Bison, is being released by Fintech company Sowa Labs, a subsidiary of Boerse Stuggart Digital Ventures. Boerse Stuggart is Germany’s second-largest stock exchange after Boerse Frankfurt.

The new app is promoted as enabling “an easy entry into the crypto world”. Dr Ulli Spankowski, Sowa Lab’s managing director, said, “Bison simplifies trading with digital currencies. It is the world’s first crypto app, behind which is a traditional stock exchange. ”

Dr Spankowski argues that in Germany, fast trading of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether has been “anything but easy”, claiming that the new app will break down barriers, enabling fast trading in German, then later in English, once fully developed.

Crypto survey

Sowa Labs conducted a survey of 1,019 German crypto traders asking for their opinion on virtual currencies. Of the respondents, 81% were male, 19% were female, and 54% were 35 years old or younger. Of these, 16.9% owned a single cryptocurrency, whilst 18.2% confessed to owning several. More than 80% of respondents opened their first trading account from 2017 onward.

Germany and cryptocurrency

Germany, along with France who is more supportive of ICOs,  has been vocal within the EU in supporting blockchain technology and has joined 21 other countries in supporting initiatives with the aim of reinforcing local innovation. Germany is focused on making a unified European Union stance on cryptocurrencies and wants France to come on board. It is expected that regulatory conventions in both of these countries will directly affect the concerted effort by the EU to arrive at a unified cryptocurrency and blockchain policy.

This year the German ministry of finance declared that there wouldn’t be sales tax on purchasing with Bitcoin and that the digital currency would be regarded as the equivalent to legal tender for tax purposes when used as a means of payment.

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The price of Bitcoin seems to have switched to a bullish momentum after spending a period of two months on a downward path that shed about $5,000 of its value. The market rebounded across the $8,000 line on Friday and crossed $8,400 already. Bears argue that a short squeeze is behind what they call “a market correction”, but the tax season provides a reliable explanation for a bullish outlook.

Analyst Predicts Bitcoin Will Surge After Tax Day

The cryptocurrency market took the world by surprise as it surged in late 2017 with great strength. Bitcoin investors were, too, surprised as big gains also meant a large tax liability. Market participants who have sold cryptocurrencies or used them as a means of payment, as well as those who mined virtual currencies, are likely obliged to pay their due taxes. The IRS is expecting people within the ecosystem to declare their capital gains and income generated with cryptocurrencies.

The tax season has been driving the price of Bitcoin as many investors were forced to sell a few to pay their taxes, according to analysts. As Tax Day is two days away, on April 17, 2018, traders are calculating what is at stake in order to predict the next bullish run in the digital currency market.

Tom Lee, Head of Research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, estimates that cryptocurrencies increased in value by $590 billion during 2017, 30% of which were captured by U.S. holders, totaling $177 billion. He calculates the tax liability for U.S. bitcoin investors amounts to $25 billion, using a 27% tax rate on a $92 billion taxable gain. Lee, however, is not accounting for self-employment taxes from mining.

Lee has also predicted the market impact of the tax season. Bitcoin’s market cap is impacted by $20 to $25 for every $1 in U.S. dollar selling. The numbers check out as the market cap of Bitcoin was valued at $135 billion by the end of March, according to data provided by coinmarketcap.com. The market cap shed $20 billion over the next two weeks, to $115 billion, before the rebound that started on Thursday. Tom Lee argues that $1 billion of U.S. based Bitcoin selling is enough to account for the $20 billion plunge. Based on these estimates, the head researcher at Fundstrat Global predicts the price of Bitcoin to reach $91,000 by early 2020.

Credit Karma, an American multinational personal finance company, told CNBC that fewer than 100 people have reported cryptocurrency gains out of 250,000 filers as of Friday, April 13. Those numbers, however, may put the whole “tax season” argument in question. A better read on any impact may be obtained by mid-next week, once Tax Day is due.

Image Courtesy of Shutterstock

The post Bitcoin Already Crossed $8,400, Analysts Expect it to Surge Again After Tax Season appeared first on NewsBTC.

Eho-Tex, a technology start-up from Riga Technical University is launching an ICO to raise funds for their innovative smart-textile product for horses. The EHO company is raising $1,750,000 in its ICO with the help of experienced Blockchain specialists from Scandiweb.

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Specifically for EHO, the company commits to using proceedings from EHO tokens sale for product development and marketing. Then all products, mobile app premium features and any other generated value will be sold only for EHO tokens. A secondary option of paying with fiat will also be available, however proceedings on this account will be periodically channelled to the exchange for the purchase of EHO tokens without regard to its price starting with the lowest sell positions.

“For me the concept of private money and channelling all sales of the company through the token is a break-through concept that can completely change the world we live in”, shares Antons Sapriko, the CEO of Scandiweb and adds “while conventional ICOs usually represent a sale of a fraction in a protocol, what if we extend the concept of protocol to include off-chain interactions? What if we just look at any company as, say, Disneyland, which issues its private money to finance the building of the infrastructure and all the rollercoasters and then commits to issue tickets only in exchange for its the private money that was sold during ICO and proceedings were used to build everything according to the plan.” Antons Sapriko, CEO, Scandiweb

EHO team has won admission to top startup incubators and accelerators in the Nordic region as well as City Mayor prize as the most innovative product. With 60 million horses worldwide comprising an industry worth 300 billion dollars with emerging markets like China demonstrating the growth of 1,500% in horse clubs within few years capturing negligible 0.5% of the horse industry, EHO would produce $300 million worth of merchandise and it is not the limit.  EHO is positioned to become the only source of the data so valuable for thousands of horse owners, sports clubs and horse industry service providers.

EHO is a team of two scientists, researchers and inventors, who patented smart textile technology back in 2015 and were joined by two entrepreneurs to make a successful product out of this innovation. Smart textile is a fabric with embedded sensors which measure pressure or stretch and transmit data to a mobile device. The field of application is immense, from smart socks helping you to improve your walking and running habits or to track your seating and standing time, to any sports or art e.g. piano or violin playing, where posture is the key to the mastery.

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an organization where organizational decisions are made electronically by hard-coded rules (smart contracts) or through the voting among its members.

The original concept of DAO was first released in the year 2016, which is sometimes referred to as DAO 1.0. The World’s first DAO was called “The DAO” – that was meant to operate like a venture capital fund for the crypto and decentralized space.

It would allow anyone with a project to pitch their idea to the community and receive funding from the “DAO”. Anyone who owned DAO tokens could vote on projects, and receive rewards if the projects turned a profit. The lack of a centralized authority reduced costs, made the process more democratic and transparent while giving more control to the investors. Every process in the DAO was automated and could run on smart contracts.

“The DAO” project got so much attention that it managed to raise $150 million breaking all the previous crowdfunding records. A decentralised organization, one which was not limited by geographical barriers or unnecessary restrictions, was an idea exciting enough for anyone in that time to bet on.

But despite a great beginning, the journey of Ethereum based project “The DAO” turned sour when it got hacked. Finding a loophole in the smart contract, some hacker was able to drain “The DAO” of its funds that led to a commotion in the Ethereum community which eventually forced its creators to hard fork the blockchain to send the hacked funds to an account available to the original owners.

For the following months, the whole concept of DAO sunk into oblivion, up until the year 2017 when entrepreneurs across the world brought this concept and idea again to light and they began calling it DAO 2.0.

DAO 2.0 was expected to be a better-refined version of DAO 1.0, one which would literally have every operation of an organization digitized as well as decentralised. One which would allow anybody to create, operate and manage a fully secure, decentralized and democratic organization that could work borderless and permission-less based on cryptographic proof rather than trust, without the need of a trusted third party or costly intermediaries.

DAO 2.0 gained momentum with the rise of Aragon in beta phase, which offered a solution for establishing a borderless organization on the Ethereum blockchain and successfully raised $25 Million. The product is still in its beta stage (one year since the crowdfunding) and moving very slow. Since Ethereum has been trading in high numbers, the cost of running the Aragon dApp is high, and hence, likely to see low adoption.

However, EtherInc (also called eInc), a blockchain based startup from Australia, has managed to successfully launch its product in LIVE mode on its own blockchain.

eInc is an Ethereum fork to create, manage and operate decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). eInc is a community-driven decentralized blockchain project for creating a digital organization based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, that can operate borderless, permission-less, democratically and transparently with the consensus of its shareholders, without the need of a trusted third party and/or costly intermediaries.

Similar to Ethereum, eInc Blockchain can be utilized for building and running other dApps too. The eInc blockchain claims to be better, faster, secure and inexpensive to run dApps than the Ethereum blockchain.

Most of the technical details as well as the functioning of this project has been mentioned in the whitepaper, some of the key features which it offers include:

1. Ability to add founding members, assign roles, and associate grade to build a robust team structure that ensures that key people can instantly execute certain actions. One can define granularly how certain actions in an organization are decided and triggered.
2. Issue and assign stock with different vesting schedules and voting power of the shares to the founding team. One can easily distribute ownership and bring different stakeholders into an organization.
3. Create and put forward organizational proposals for issues that need a voting. Voting is secure, transparent, and impossible to forge.
4. Easily pay salaries to employees or make payments to third parties, based on accepted proposals.

While these were the common features which most DAOs were offering, eInc does tend to bring an added feature or innovation which actually does make it truly the next DAO 2.0.

With eInc, one can:

1. Create a Group of Companies: The USP of the eInc blockchain is its ability to start and run multiple organizations under one umbrella. For example, you can set A as the parent company and B, C, D as the sister organizations which are governed and controlled by A. You can acquire other organizations, you can sell one or multiple sister organizations or take actions on them from the parent organization seamlessly.
2. Conduct Trustless ICOs that are scam-proof: An eInc can easily raise funds through ICOs which are immune against scam and fraud. Funds once raised are locked in an escrow and are only released through voting of members, thus, ensuring the funds are utilised properly with the consensus of its shareholders.
3. Run dApps faster, securely and inexpensively: Previous DAO attempts on Ethereum blockchain have failed to see the light of the day given the heavy GAS charges on Ethereum blockchain. With eInc blockchain, one can, currently, start a DAO in less than $1 USD in less than 5 minutes. eInc also lets one reserve a unique name for its organization that cannot be claimed or issued to anyone else.

eInc is bringing a decentralized revolution to world by empowering organizations everywhere to do business without barriers.

Top advisors from ICOBench such Vladimir Nikitin (Ranked 2 on ICOBench), Nikolay Shkilev (Top 10 on ICOBench) and more have also recently backed the EtherInc project.

You can join the Telegram channel to get the latest updates: http://t.me/eincHQ.

The post The Resurgence of DAOs: How an Ethereum Fork (eInc) Is Scripting It appeared first on NewsBTC.

After successfuly reaching their softcap, startup presented the development process of their AI-driven platform

Eligma, a Slovene project that proposes a simpler and smarter search process for things we want to buy online, concluded its public presale and reached the project’s softcap a week before the start of their token sale. An online platform which relies on artificial intelligence and blockchain technology is developed by a team of crypto believers , who announced they will be locking the price of Ethereum for the purpose of their crowdsale that starts on April 17 at 800 $, with the price of their token ELI set at 0,10 $.

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The whole crowdsale campaign period, the team has been working hard at development of the platform as well. After having presented the solution and the plan to enable cryptocurrency transactions for everyday shopping with their system Elipay, the Eligma team also presented the alpha version of their AI-driven category predictor – a module that presents the basis for their innovative discovery feature. Its discovery concept will rely on an algorithm that first recognizes the product’s category and then uses an AI agent that is specifically trained with all the characteristics of the products in that category. In that way it can offer precisely what the user needs.

Alongside the presentation of the developed first stage of the Eligma’s discovery feature, CEO Dejan Roljic stated: “Our revolutionary technology will enable us to introduce a new market solution reflecting the needs of the contemporary buyer and making the online shopping concept a lot simpler. It is our ambition to make our solution global and set a new benchmark for all existing online sellers.” The other two functionalities to be developed are an automatic inventory of one’s property that suggests the best time to resell one’s unwanted possessions, and a loyalty system rewarding Eligma users with ELI crypto tokens. The last feature is also well underway, with the tests starting mid-April, with call for first testers of the system in the upcoming days.

A pre-crowdsale campaign full of encouraging announcements

In the last two months Eligma has released several announcements that show the confidence of the team in the product they are developing. Their advisory board is vast and experienced: from Andy Baynes, former Executive at Apple, Nest and Google, Prof. Dr. Herman Eul, former Intel Corporate Vice President, Herman Gyr, founding partner of Enterprise Development Group (EDG), Peter M. Moricz, co-founder of ChainX to the latest addition, crypto advocate and the founding partner of the Bitcoin Foundation, Charlie Shrem and many more. They presented their testing lab, which is set in the region’s well known BTC City, one of Europe’s largest and most diverse shopping centers – real life Bitcoin City, where they plan to test their cryptocurrency transaction system Elipay, before they make it available globally. Their CEO Dejan Roljič also secured the team The Best Pitch Award on Crypto Summit in Zurich end of March. They just published a team video, with the three co-founders explaining the vision behind Eligma.

If you are interested in more about this exciting project, connect with the team on their channels and social media.

• Join the Eligma Group on Telegram – https://t.me/eligma.
• Follow the development on

o Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/eligmacom),

o Twitter (https://twitter.com/eligmacom) and

o LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/eligma/).

• Read the latest news on the Eligma Blog – www.medium.com/eligma-blog.
• Subscribe to Eligma Newsletter – www.eligma.io.

Popular mobile phone app Robinhood is looking to offer the ability to trade cryptocurrencies in addition to stocks on US exchanges. The app initially set out to bring investments in public limited companies to a wider demographic without the limitation of fees and minimum balances. The app uniquely collects interest on balances similar to a bank instead of taking a commission on trades. It offers a variety of features, a few of which are security measures and real-time market data.

Robinhood Crypto

Robinhood Crypto was launched in February, supporting real-time market data for 16 cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only two currently trading on the application, with a view to support more. A spokesman did say to “keep in mind that supporting market data for individual cryptocurrencies does not necessarily mean we plan to add buying and selling”.

Access is limited to customers in Montana, California, Missouri, Massachusetts and New Hampshire with more states available later. The company hopes to release the application globally, with plans initially for Australia. By bringing all investments together in one application which is more accessible, this could encourage integrity in the cryptocurrency market. Having a familiar application could make the transition to larger exchanges less daunting and also providing a streamlined solution for round the clock trades for those with experience.

Robinhood Crypto will not support ICOs at this time, which could contribute to safer investments for newer traders, mitigating the need for thorough research.

Features and security

Buy or sell orders can start at any amount above 0.00001 BTC and 0.001 ETH. Traders have several order options with additional functionality. Market orders can be protected from price moves with order collars (up to 1% for buys, 5% for sells). Limit orders can be placed in USD or fractional amounts.

Coins traded on the platform will be stored in a combination of cold or hot (offline or online) storage to provide enhanced security. As of now, Robinhood does not support withdrawing or depositing crypto to external wallets as a preventive measure against illegal activities. There is a view to allowing withdrawals in the near future.

Various steps have been taken by the company to provide enhanced security. Rotation of security staff, restricted access, and regular third-party security tests will look to ensure user investments stay safe.

Security is a growing concern in the crypto market with the limited availability of qualified staff. In recent months, the industry has seen some large-scale hacks to exchanges, such as the recent ones of Coincheck and Coinsecure. Exchanges’ inabilities to store clients investments securely could have a detrimental effect on the market.

The post Robinhood Phone App Introduces Secure Streamlined Bitcoin Trading appeared first on BitcoinNews.com.

Popular Blockchain gaming startup TriForce Tokens had launched a social engagement platform for gamers, known as Raid Party. The UK-based gaming startup is siming to become the new top dog in decentralized gaming by offering something unique, in it’s monetization of online gaming and by rewarding it’s users by giving them FORCE tokens to play the games they love.

To get an idea of the community interest in this project, over 21,000 registrations were recorded in the first week of the week following the start of the platform. This number was most likely aided by the fact that the platform is already in its early phases and has working applications being built upon it.

TriForce Tokens is currently undertaking talks with numerous indie game developers, with several already signed up to integrate with the Raid Party/TriForce partnership. The project has already achieved a number of valuable partnerships on the road to its token generation event.

What is TriForce About?

The triforce Token main focus is to unite players and indie game developers, by providing them with simple, profitable and safe ways to gather a substantial user-base and create a more lucrative business model.

TriForce Tokens aim to achieve this with its uniquely designed reward structures within apps such as Raid Party.

TriForce Tokens is in the process of developing its technology as an indie game incubator for the Latin America market through its partnership with levelup.com, the largest Latin-American games publisher.

Right now there is no other startup offering quite the same potential for any real-world application.

Leading Games Industry Advisers

The TriForce Tokens actions have been attracting lots of attention in the gaming world, including the likes of Industry big shot and former world champion of CS: GO, Danny Montaner. Danny is also known as a former manager to the world’s largest and most popular gaming organization, Faze Clan. The former Counter-Strike veteran approached TriForce CEO Pete Mardell, voicing his strong affinity with what the UK-based gaming platform was aiming to accomplish.

Vadim Bulatov

Vadim Bulatov, currently Head of Social Marketing at Wargaming.net, the creator of World of Tanks, World of Warplanes and World of Warships, is also a valued adviser.  The gaming veteran approached TrForce Tokens Vadim also approached Pete Mardell, following the project’s vision of community collaboration and recognizing that cryptocurrency is positioned to revolutionize the gaming world at a business level.

Ramon Toledo

BUSCA CORP President-Founder Ramon Toledo and his team are currently working with the TriForce team and expect to make the FORCE token much more than just a trading token. They believe that the FORCE token can underpin an entire ecosystem of online gaming, solving real-world issues through long-lasting strategic partnerships.

David Drake

Chairman at LDJ Capital, David Drake is one of the most recognizable, successful and celebrated venture capitalists in the investment business. David instantly recognized the potential of TriForce Tokens in early 2018 when he first met the company leaders. David Drake is a pioneer for crowdsourcing in the US, having founded the US Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates (CFIRA) and US CrowdFunding Professional Association (CfPA).

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Bank of England’s governor Mark Carney has declared during a speech in Toronto that digital currencies are no risk to the financial environment.

At the Public Policy Forum’s Canada Growth Summit held on 12 April, Carney suggested that digital currencies were “no risk” to the financial world as yet, despite the “huge amount” of illicit activity attached to them. His comments, echoed in a letter he sent to the recent G20 summit in Argentina, argued that as yet, these currencies are no risk as they are not attached to the financial system and still small.

Former Bank of Canada head Carney has continued to push for tighter regulation for cryptocurrencies over past years, suggesting that without regulation they are open to abuse when exchanged against fiat currencies, saying, “there’s plenty of serious abuse or at a minimum, they are very porous to a cyber attack and theft and they just do not meet the standards.”

In Carney’s home country, the Bank of Canada as recently stated that globally aligned policies governing cryptocurrencies are needed. The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) stated this month that it was currently gathering information on several cryptocurrency trading platforms after receiving complaints about their activities.

This OSC move comes amid the rise of exchanges to trade digital currencies, as well as initial coin offerings to launch new ones. Sharp rises in prices for the new currencies last year created an upsurge of interest in Canadian startups.

The Bank of England governor has always been skeptical about introducing digital currencies into the financial system. He stated earlier this year that the cryptocurrency ecosystem could be incorporated if the same regulatory approach and “rigorous standard” used in conventional financial systems were applied to cryptocurrencies.

Carney’s views on cryptocurrencies have softened in recent months, commenting recently that digital currencies like Bitcoin should be regarded as assets.

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