Day: April 28, 2018

The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, world renowned investor and head of Berkshire Hathaway, was asked about his views on cryptocurrency, especially that of bitcoin. While not as dour and hateful as his Vice Chairman of just two months ago, Mr. Buffett is not convinced bitcoin is anything more than gambling, a game.

Also read: Bitcoin Markets Steady for Another Gox Dump, 16,000 Coins Moved by Trustee

Oracle of Omaha Doesn’t Believe Bitcoin is an Investment

Ahead of the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting, a near religious experience for legacy, mainstream investors, Warren Buffett was once again asked about his views on cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin.

“You aren’t investing when you do that,” Mr. Buffett, 87, told Yahoo! Finance recently, referencing the world’s most popular decentralized currency. “You’re speculating. There’s nothing wrong with it. If you wanna gamble somebody else will come along and pay more money tomorrow, that’s one kind of game. That is not investing.”

Mr. Buffett is actually quite reasonable compared with his longtime partner, Charlie Munger. Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman told an assembled Los Angeles audience in mid-February, “I never considered for one second having anything to do with [bitcoin], I detested it the minute it had been raised. The more popular it got, the more I hated it. It’s just disgusting that people have been taken in by this.” He’d go on to compare bitcoin to a “noxious poison.”

Don’t Really Have Anything that has Produced Anything

Traditional finance’s most famous investor is a tad more muted about crypto, but no less skeptical. “There’s two kinds of items that people buy and think they’re investing,” Mr. Buffett continued. “One really is investing and the other isn’t.”

With revenues at nearly a quarter trillion (yes, trillion) USD, Berkshire Hathaway has a lot of influence, especially in popular retail investing. As of this writing a single share of its Class A stock runs a cool $295,995 per, a price more the glassy-eyed of the bitcoin ecosystem say it too will reach one day. Mr. Buffett’s personal fortune hovers around $80 billion (yes, billion). He famously does not invest in what he doesn’t understand. Crypto would seem to fall into that category.

“If you buy something like a farm, an apartment house, or an interest in a business,” he insisted, “You can do that on a private basis. And it’s a perfectly satisfactory investment. You look at the investment itself to deliver the return to you. Now, if you buy something like bitcoin or some cryptocurrency, you don’t really have anything that has produced anything. You’re just hoping the next guy pays more.”

What do you think about Mr. Buffett’s comments? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Pixabay, Berkshire Hathaway. 

Looking for a Bitcoin Cash Block Explorer? Check out Bitcoin.com’s BCH Block Explorer today to find transactions, blocks, and other important blockchain data. 

The post Warren Buffett: Bitcoin is Gambling, a Game, Not an Investment appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Not every company can be like Amazon, fulfilling customer orders within a specified period of time (e.g., 2 business days). But what if they could?

Think of the supply chain as the engine that powers our global economy, moving our goods and services across different ecosystems. But as our connections grow, our logistics systems remain outdated and underutilized. Non-Amazon related businesses around the world face pressure to deliver on time and in full, but don’t have the necessary tools to execute contracts, take payments efficiently, and track deliveries, ensuring that goods arrive when they should.

Consequently, the supply chain faces billions of dollars in lost revenue as the result of late, lost, or inefficient deliveries.

Enter the ‘Movement Ecosystem’ (MOVA).

The Demand Yields Itself To Smart Contracts

Amazon has taken the market by storm, comprising 5-10% of UPS’s revenue. With such a huge network, the company has recently entered into the transportation and delivery markets, acknowledging that companies need to bridge the gap between customer orders, performance, and delivery time.

If Amazon can do it, why can’t anyone else? Having finally decided on the Austin, Texas market for its second headquarters (HQ2), Amazon again took the market by storm and is leading the space in expanding its supply-reach.

Well, Lachlan McDonald, founder and CEO of MOVA, believes others in the industry can do the same, and he aims to be the next to do so. Having spent the majority of his career in the oil and gas industry, McDonald has focused his time and energy on transformational work, looking into what drives these markets in terms of supply chain management.

McDonald believes the solution lies with smart contracts and utilizing a single blockchain for the entire industry.

How Do You Leverage A Smart Contract To Move Goods From Point A To Point B?

These businesses are sophisticated and have very intelligent people, but the problem is as soon as they try to communicate their ideas to the outside world, everything breaks down.

Lachlan McDonald, CEO/Founder of MOVA

So the question becomes, how do we create a smart contract that reduces the friction of the outside world, and gives measurable savings to both parties, providing each with a tangible, economical service?

Clear Terms

The advantage of using smart contracts in this space is that everyone knows what they are signing up for ahead of time. McDonald told me that utilizing GPS technology and building it into a smart contract allows suppliers to enter what information they need to, and identify what goods need to be moved and when. “At the end of the day, GPS technology operates as an independent variable,” says McDonald.

Taking the Amazon “track-n-ship” model to the next level, MOVA leverages the Ethereum blockchain to link producers and shipping providers with these automated contracts, allowing goods to be tracked in real time with GPS technology. For other suppliers and consumers, payments are instantaneous, with built-in incentive mechanisms for both suppliers and distributors.

McDonald’s platform utilizes smart contracts and mobile apps to monitor and manage supply chain logistics. The MOVA App features GPS integration to track goods as they move along the chain and creates a dual incentive model that benefits transporters and producers with bonus mechanisms for optimal delivery and compensates users for deliveries not made on time or in full.

Having the ability to set predefined shipping terms, customer information, and order information creates a database that a company can continue to use, modify, and build off as business continues to grow and the customer base continues to expand.

Accountability

When goods don’t reach their target destination on time, or even at all, who is to be held accountable? By utilizing smart contract technology, the question becomes how to incentivize people to be held accountable for their own behavior. McDonald takes things a step further and asks whether a company even has the data required to hold an individual or business accountable. Lastly, there needs to be an ability to enforce the contract, in the event that terms aren’t met.

Efficient Trucking

By utilizing the full potential of the trucks on the road, MOVA provides a global platform linking producers, movers, retailers, and consumers, letting them access and auction logistics capacity and use real-time performance data to drive business forward.

Creating a Global Logistics Marketplace On The Blockchain

The ultimate goal is to extend the blockchain across the global supply chain without creating fifty million systems. By initially focusing on the oil and gas sector, McDonald believes that by addressing a space that has a long, complex, and valuable supply chain, the utility will make itself known. “However, the scalability covers all industries—anything that moves, this tool can be utilized for,” says McDonald. This doesn’t just benefit smaller mail couriers, but also very large and complex resource companies, with market caps of $15+ billion.

McDonald says that MOVA recently signed a contract for an operational trial with Hastings Deering, one of the largest CAT dealers in the world, located in Australia.

What It Is Now

MOVA is a platform where people can go and utilize performance tools, pull monthly management reports, and see everything that moves and what the real performance was. You can actually pinpoint and track where fault lies, whether it’s an employee’s doing, or something back at the warehouse.

The core advantage of this as a performance tool is that the vast majority of the benefit goes to both parties. “MOVA aims to pump as many transactions and get as many customers through, rather than price-gauge existing customers,” says McDonald. It has to work for as many people as possible.

The Future

The vision involves implementing GPS and performance tools, then managing to link up huge amounts of suppliers, customers, and primary actors in the system. The traditional model is to capitalize on the data, monetize it, and keep it to yourself (think Facebook). A lot of blockchain developments are replicating that model. The question becomes how to make every truck on the road more efficient. How do you do that?

Overcoming Barriers To Shipment

All these barriers exist—everyone settles for the lowest or weakest link in the system, where goods sit at warehouse staging areas waiting to move. There’s not a lot of smarts in the supply chain, depending on the capacity of guys you’re using—and it’s difficult to go out and get new guys, because how do you know they are good performers? It costs money to tender.

MOVA will increase the market access of both customers and trucking companies. Trucking companies can access a global platform of new customers, allowing everyone to look at how they have dealt with their primary actors.

To implement a rating system is to auction off efficiently—a truck that’s going to Cincinnati half-full isn’t good for customers or the environment. By bridging the gap, you can share data on what’s being moved, reducing the barriers to getting new customers and vendors, creating a new global marketplace for capacity – the actual capacity sitting on the trucks. The best way to fill those trucks to capacity is to see customer orders down the street that you would never have seen in the past, making it more cost-effective for customers, and reducing the carbon footprints of every truck on the road.

How? Moving the right tons, at the right time.

Recent figures released by Global GPU producers have shown that demand for products related to blockchain and cryptocurrency mining is on the rise, and company stocks and profits have benefited as a result.

Processing and chip units giant Nvidia and computer tech company AMD are two of the world’s biggest GPU producers and both companies have reported an increase in demand for their products. Devinder Kuma AMD CFO has suggested that the company’s computing and graphics segment reviews “was USD 1.12 billion, up over 95% due to strong sales of Radon and Ryzen products”, the former driven by gaming and blockchain demand. Kuma says that he expects the trend will continue into the future.

Global giant, South Korea’s Samsung, has returned a 58% year on year growth with profits of KRW 15.6 trillion or USD 4 billion for the first quarter of 2018, after taking on mass production of ASICS chips for Bitcoin mining. Samsung suggests that crypto mining has partly contributed to the reported growth. Executive vice president of Samsung’s investor relations, Robert M Yi, points out that the earnings increases were driven by:

“…strong demands in server and graphic cards memories as well as earning improvement in both the System LSI and Foundry businesses led by an increasing demand for chips used in flagship smartphones and cryptocurrency mining.”

Another chip producer claims to have benefited from crypto mining processors after releasing first-quarter figures. Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC has reported a similar increase in demand for this type of equipment.

However, despite these companies posting Q1 profits, a Taiwanese report just released by Forbes shows April figures painting quite a different picture. The report claims that partners of both AMD and NVIDIA have experienced a massive drop in graphics card shipments in April. The reduction is reportedly due to the recent sharp drop in the value of cryptocurrencies, making mining less profitable.

image source: https://pixabay.com/en/entrepreneur-idea-competence-vision-1340649/ – geralt

The post Major GPU Suppliers Show Increased Profits from Bitcoin Mining appeared first on BitcoinNews.com.

Bitcoin prices and cryptocurrency spot markets, in general, have been recovering after the downturn that took place from mid-December 2017 up until three weeks ago. At the time, when BTC derivatives products were introduced to the public, futures contracts got off to a slow start. Now bitcoin-based futures markets from the Chicago Board Options Exchange (Cboe) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) have seen a significant uptick in product sales for the trading sessions during the month of April and May.

Also read: Bitcoin Markets Steady for Another Gox Dump, 16,000 Coins Moved by Trustee

Bitcoin Futures Products from CME and Cboe Start Seeing Significant Trade Volume

In March, news.Bitcoin.com reported on bitcoin-based derivatives products from CME and Cboe starting to pick up in volume. CME contracts at the time had around 1,000 contracts per day and zero sold for the month of May as it stood. However, that month Cboe saw a great influx of volume as March expiries closed above 10,000 contracts and May products were starting to sell steadily. Fast forward to this week as cryptocurrency spot markets start seeing some signs of recovery, bitcoin futures products are selling like hotcakes.

Last Wednesday’s Futures Volumes Were Nearly Three Times the Average Daily Volume

This past Wednesday Cboe’s bitcoin futures (XBT) spiked in volume as more than 18,000 contracts were traded for May. Furthermore, public data shows June and July Cboe XBT products have starting selling as well but there are zero sold for the month of August.

The next three months of predictions show price stability as contracts hover around the $8,900-9,100 region per XBT. Right now daily May volumes are around 3,700 contracts and 24-hour statistics have been between 3,000-6,000 products a day. Last week’s 18,000+ record beat Cboe’s first milestone of 15,000+ contracts when the futures markets first launched but slowed down considerably since then.

“[The] average daily volume (ADV) runs about 6,600 in XBT Bitcoin Futures. Yesterday’s volume was nearly three times ADV,” Kevin Davitt Cboe Options Institute senior instructor explained this Thursday.

Yesterday was the highest daily volume for bitcoin futures since their introduction here at CBOE nearly five months ago. The lead month May futures traded 18,210 contracts, and across the term structure, a total of 19,000 bitcoin futures traded here yesterday. The previous high-volume session was January 17 with just less than 15,500 contracts traded.     

Last Week’s Volumes Were Different to January’s Bitcoin Futures Volumes

The same day CME Group saw a similar uptick in bitcoin futures volumes for its April 2018 contracts. Wednesday saw 11,000+ contracts on CME’s bitcoin markets according to public data. Cboe’s Davitt says that January’s volume coincided with the first set of contracts but this past Wednesday’s volumes did not, the Cboe senior instructor explained. Nor did it have a 15-20 percent range in futures he would otherwise have expected, he added.    

What do you think about Cboe and CME’s bitcoin futures markets seeing considerable contract volume this past week? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Pixabay, CME Group, Cboe, and CNBC charts. 

Looking for a Bitcoin Cash Block Explorer? Check out Bitcoin.com’s BCH Block Explorer today to find transactions, blocks, and other important blockchain data. 

The post Bitcoin Futures Markets See a Big Uptick in Trade Volume appeared first on Bitcoin News.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) will update their guidelines to better reflect the evolving cryptocurrency industry, John Price, one of their commissioners, revealed in his speech at a fintech conference in Sydney on April 26. Price further cautioned any company planning to conduct an ICO against thinking of it as a way to avoid government regulation, while also expressing the commission’s commitment to fostering innovation in the fintech sector without sacrificing consumer protections.

Prohibition Of Deceptive Conduct

Having released Information Sheet 225 last year, the commission felt the need to update it to better reflect the current market and to include more details on cryptocurrencies. The commission is very keen to clamp down on deceptive marketing tactics that have become worryingly popular.

Regardless of the structure, however, there is one law that will always apply – you can’t make misleading or deceptive statements about the product. This is going to be a key focus for us going forward.

The update will include questions that the commission feels are necessary to be asked by all investors which will encourage sound business decision making, Price said. It will also highlight the applicability of Australian corporate and consumer law, even in cases where an ICO has been created and offered from overseas. The update will also detail how the Australian financial laws that prohibit misleading and deceptive conduct will apply in the cryptocurrency industry, Price added, insisting that this will be an area on which the commission will place great emphasis.

The commission is working with other regulators, both domestically and internationally, to gain clarity on how to better regulate the cryptocurrency industry. Some of the key areas the partnerships are focusing on are anti-money laundering and taxation. It’s also engaging with other stakeholders in the ICO sector to better address their interests, with Price revealing that the commission has met and engaged with more than 200 enterprises or individuals involved in the sector over the past year.

Blockchain And ICOs Revolutionizing Financial Services

Added Price:

The development of innovative technologies like blockchain and ICOs has the potential to revolutionise how our society engages with financial products and services, but with revolution comes risk.

He outlined some of the most pressing concerns that will need to be addressed in order for the industry to grow, with the growing perception of ICOs as a quick and unregulated way to make some quick money being at the top of the list. This attitude continues to have a negative impact on the long-term success of the industry. Another concern was the misguided notion that Australian regulations can be bypassed if the entire process is carried out overseas. Price had a stern warning for those who are of that mindset.

I cannot stress enough that if you are doing business here and selling something to Australians – including issuing securities or tokens to Australian consumers – our laws here can apply.

He ended his speech by advising everyone present to acquaint themselves with the updated guidelines and to get in touch with the commission to discuss their business models as early during the process as they can so that it can offer any assistance required.

Outraged community members launch website and Telegram group, alleging that Bitcoin.com is misleading buyers into purchasing Bitcoin Cash instead of Bitcoin #NEWS

Darling Brew reaches yet another major milestone in their sustainability journey by partnering with impactChoice to offset emissions across all their production lines.

28 April 2018, Isle of Man – impactChoice, the company behind EARTH Token and the Natural Asset Exchange today announced yet another customer success, as Darling Brew becomes Africa’s first sustainable craft brewery to achieve operational carbon neutrality, launching Africa’s first line of carbon-neutral beers.

Darling Brew’s entire production emissions (Scope 1 & 2) are being offset, together with upstream emissions associated with the production of packaging materials used by the Brewery and downstream potential landfill waste-related emissions linked to the disposal of the Brewery’s packaging products. This equates to 687.96 tonnes of CO2 being offset over the next year of production, which is equivalent to the amount of CO2 sequestrated by over 17,000 tree seedlings in their first 10 years, and that is just the first year’s projection.

“It’s not about doing what we like with our operations and just offsetting our impact,” says Kevin Wood, owner and founder of Darling Brew, “It’s about our commitment to continuously be reducing our carbon footprint as much as possible whilst using the offsetting process as a way of further redressing our impact.”

The unique carbon mitigation solution provided by impactChoice enables Darling Brew to apportion carbon emissions associated with the brewing process of each individual product line-item and then mitigate these through the purchase of certified Carbon Credits.

“Our journey with Darling Brew began in 2016, working to mitigate emissions associated with one product line, so it is extremely gratifying to see them reach their goal of extending this across their entire operation and whole range of beers,” says Allan Saunders, Managing Director, impactChoice, Isle of Man, “They stand head and shoulders amongst their peers when it comes to reducing negative impact on our environment. We look forward to working with Darling Brew as we broaden our horizons to protect all the Earth’s Natural Assets with EARTH Token and the Natural Asset Exchange (NAE),” he continued.

In addition to carbon offsetting, Darling Brew is working to reduce their water and energy consumption, waste to landfill percentage alongside also implementing a series of sustainability initiatives in their brewery, including water efficient fittings, waterless urinals, ongoing recycling and food waste management and the use of upcycled furniture and recycled wood in the brewery.

“We are excited to progress on this journey,” says Kevin Wood. “going carbon neutral is a massive step for us, but certainly not the last.”

The financial benefits of the Carbon Credit purchases will be received by Kariba REDD+, one of the world’s largest ongoing conservation projects, covering some 785,000 hectares of prime forest around Lake Kariba in northern Zimbabwe that sequesters more than 5.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year that works with local communities, offering them a range of sustainable conservation and farming alternatives such as beekeeping, tree cultivation, and low impact brick making.

About Darling Brew

Darling Brew is one of South Africa’s first well established and award-winning microbreweries, in operation since 2010. They brew a wide range of great craft beers that are loved for their flavour, high-quality ingredients, and slow brewing process. Each beer in the range has unique characteristics and an inspiring story dedicated to the endangered creature it honours and supports through various conservation programs.

Darling Brew is available across South Africa in bottles and available on tap at approved outlets. Five Litre (5l) party kegs are also available from selected distributors. Their range represents great value for money, superior quality, excellent taste and a magical experience.

About impactChoice

impactChoice is a leading provider of environmental sustainability solutions. The impactChoice Natural Asset Exchange (NAE) blockchain platform and EARTH Token (EARTH) creates a unique opportunity to invigorate the Natural Asset Market and enable all stakeholders in the value chain to participate. Transforming Environmental Sustainability from a financial burden to a business incentive by finally providing all contributors with tangible assets that will appreciate in value as the market grows.

Visit https://earth-token.com/ for more information on the EARTH Token project.

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.

What do you think now that Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have all banned any paid advertising around ICO marketing?

I get this question a lot and personally I think it’s great! I’m not just saying that because I have to. These bans were precipitated by unwanted actions and they are exactly what the ICO marketing world needs.

Users Can Feel More Protected

Unfortunately many people have been fooled by ICO scams and millions of dollars have been lost as a result. Companies and social networks like Facebook and Google are acting in the public’s best interests—indeed, in the best interests of the blockchain industry—by putting in place the bans and other measures that will prevent scams and fishy campaigns from seeing the light of day.

Scams Have Fewer Opportunities to Build Hype

Earlier this year, a startup called Prodeum reached headlines, not for their amazing project, but because, after setting out to raise $6.5 million and successfully winning their audience’s trust, they vanished with their profits and their website content was simply replaced with the word ‘penis’.

Scams like Prodeum will now have a drastically reduced ability to attract a wide pool of ICO contributors thanks to the new advertising bans, and the entire blockchain industry stands to benefit as the dud projects are filtered out.

Effective Advertisements for Swindles Disappear  

Advertising works—and this isn’t always a good thing. Being right in the midst of the cryptocurrency and ICO space, I was being targeted everyday with information and advertisements about the next ICO set to disrupt the industry.

I literally saw hundreds of ads, and while I enjoyed seeing these these out of pure business and marketing curiosity, I began to appreciate that you simply could not blame a layman for falling for any of the scams.

Space for Great Projects Opens Up

Just because an ICO reaches your attention, doesn’t mean it’s great or has a real use case. Indeed, it takes a fair amount of effort to find a great ICO project and avoid the scams.

The community was screaming for regulation and I’m glad these bans came in. It has created space for real projects with real use cases and it has invited solid marketing and design thinking to become the differentiator instead of deep advertising budgets.

I hope I’ve now convinced you to support these bans and the work they do to keep users safe. Perhaps you’d now like to know how to market an ICO to your audience with these regulations in effect? Stay tuned for my second instalment where I’ll share my top tips to get around publisher bans.

Above, we discussed how ICO advertising bans have created space for genuine ICO with real uses to dominate the market and relegate blockchain scams to the past.

But how do how get around the bans and market to your audience without using the major digital advertising channels? Our top tips provide the answers you been waiting for.

• Make sure you’re ready for an ICO
  The first step is to make sure you’re ready. Have you considered if your project is right for an ICO? Have you got a team you know are committed for all the right reasons? Check out our blog to find out if you are in fact ready to launch your token sale!
  

• Back to the basics. Focus on your product
  While publishers have banned ads surrounding ICOs and cryptocurrency, you are still able to market your core product and solution. The door is still open to educate potential contributors. If you are building a strong product that solves a genuine problem, this should be enough of a hook to gain the interest from the community you want.
  

• Don’t forget the power of brand recognition
  It’s as simple as it sounds—if people see you once, they’ll recognise you the second time. After they see you a few times across different mediums, they might decide to investigate the project themselves.
  

• Get out there and meet real people
  We have spent some seriously big budgets on AdWords, double-click and social media. By freeing this budget up you can, and you should, use it to go global—literally.
  There is undoubtedly a cryptocurrency or blockchain expo, summit or meetup happening somewhere today, take a moment to do a quick search on some of the best events out there, purchase your tickets and spread your team in all directions.
  While you will reach much lower numbers with your brand and solution, nothing beats having a face-to-face conversation and seeing your logo or flyer around an event with potential investors. This adds authenticity and credibility to your project in a space that is hinged on trust! It will also will give you some great content to share to your social and community channels.
  

• Invest in public relations
  Yes, PR does work and you should not only be focusing on cryptocurrency and blockchain media outlets. Get your message in industry, business and local media publications.
  The same applies for influencers. Find a list of influencers that echo your message and brand. A strong list of credible influencers will take you a long way because nothing is more powerful than word-of-mouth advertising.
  

• Be advertising savvy
  Remember, when your ad gets rejected, there’s a good reason for it. You have probably triggered a keyword that the bot army is closely monitoring. Be smarter with the keywords you use, the design you create and the landing page you bring people to.
  You may want to think about creating an secondary educational landing page that doesn’t mention the word ‘ICO’ to prevent any crawling issues or simply link people to a Medium blog which explains the benefits of your product and let users explore from there.
  

• Focus on building a community
  Building a community can be tough, but if you have the right product nothing will stop you from growth hacking a genuine community within 2 to 5 days. We know this as we have done it for Shping, Invox, MoxyOne and even for eBitcoin where we have grown their Telegram community from 5000 members to 55,000 members in just 7 days.
  Nope, we didn’t purchase them! Instead, we got real people interested in cryptocurrency to join and sign up with their details so we can continue communicating with them. What’s the secret? An airdrop.
  

• Go old fashioned, go bounty
  A bounty program isn’t all about gold; a strategically executed bounty guarantees there’s an army cheering you on from the sidelines.
  Maximise the reach of every piece of content you create and allow the bounty hunters to share it with their network in their languages. It’s a small reward for a large return.
  

• Take the time to seek private investments
  Let’s take a minute to be realistic, the ICO space has catapulted beyond our imaginations circa early 2017. It’s simply not the same.
  Any successful ICO today would have put the time and effort into seeking private investments from their network and global events. The majority of funds today are raised from private investments, so go hustle!

There’s a multitude of avenues you can pursue to ensure the success of your ICO. If you’ve got a solid team and a strong product, there’s no reason why you can’t prosper even with the advertising bans coming into place. Put your head down and hustle—it’s the same as starting any other business.

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.

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of talk regarding financial service providers experimenting with Ripple technology. That list includes some big names including Western Union, MoneyGram, and MercuryFX. This latter company has confirmed that their recent trial with xRapid was successful. Going into production will be their next step.

MercuryFX is Pleased With xRapid

Conducting a proper trial with emerging technologies is always the first step in any industry. For financial service providers, these trials are even more critical, especially when bridging the gap between traditional finance, blockchain, and digital assets. MercuryFX is one of the many companies looking closer at what Ripple can bring to the table in this regard. In particular, the company’s xRapid solution is of great interest to these service providers.

For those unaware of what xRapid does, it is a new source of liquidity for moving vast sums of money across borders. Under the hood, xRapid makes use of the native XRP asset to provide this liquidity and ease of use. As such, any company experimenting with xRapid is exploring the potential success of XRP, even though they may not necessarily be directly involved with buying, owning, or using XRP.

It is primarily this latter point which has been a topic of substantial debate. While xRapid will boost the overall liquidity of any service provider making use of this technology, it remains to be seen how central the role of XRP will be. While xRapid and XRP are connected rather tightly, the service providers who make use of xRapid may not be too interested in XRP.

In Q1, along with other xRapid pilots customers, we have proved that #xRapid can lower liquidity costs & increase payment speed and transparency using #XRP. We are looking forward to continued successful testing and going into production.https://t.co/hlYDcFyG7o

— Mercury-fx Ltd (@mercury_fx_ltd) April 26, 2018

Even so, the important takeaway is that MercuryFX trialed this liquidity solution and deemed it satisfactory. Although it remains unclear what this trial entailed exactly – no further specifics were provided – the company has deemed it good enough to enter the production stage in the very near future. For now, their main focus is on “continued successful testing”. Once those tests are completed, going into production will be the next step in development.

According to the Ripple blog, the company will continue to grow the number of xRapid pilots and move existing pilots into production. While that sounds like a positive development, it does not say much as to what the existing clients are experimenting with. We do know live transactions are involved in every pilot, but no further information has been made public at this time.

There is one important development regarding xRapid to take into account: the market share of XRP has doubled. XRP II, LLC has extended new XRP loans to market makers as well. These loans will help provide additional liquidity for xRapid, which will make cross-border payments even faster and more efficient in the future. If XRP can become less prone to market volatility, the solution will – most likely – gain even more appeal among financial service providers.

On May 15, Parsec Frontiers, an online game about humanity’s colonization of the stars and planets in the Milky Way, starts the crowdsale of its tokens. The project has already succeeded in early presale stage. The team raised more than 700 ETH in January  during the closed sale round, while the soft cap for the sale was 400 ETH.

There is not much time left before the stars will be open for travelers! Galaxy exploration starts in December 2018, when the first Ark ships leave the Earth, and about 900 spaceships will frequently leave the Earth for the following three months. After this, all additional spaceships must be crafted by players. The game is planned to be feature complete in December, 2019.

“We are targeting regular space/strategy MMO game fans, to reach beyond the traditional crypto gamer crowd that buys crypto kittie tokens on Ethereum,” comments Henning Rokling, the project founder. “We are creating a full blown MMO for hardcore strategy gamers, with blockchain as an underlying technology.”

Why Parsec Tokens?

Parsec Credits will be the only accepted currency for the spaceship and space station auctions. And the crowdsale is the  last chance to buy this currency, as all unsold tokens will be burned. if you are late to buy Parsec Credits, you will have to go on an exchange to get involved in the game.

To incentivize holders of Parsec Credits, a deflationary mechanism relating to all in-game value transactions will reduce the money supply in the economy. Trading exchanges on space stations and planets are either operated by the game’s backend or are owned by players who has purchased an exchange.

Every transaction on a trading exchange will be subject to a transaction fee paid by the seller from the achieved sale price. The fee has a fixed portion of 3% paid to the server wallet, and an optional portion of up to 2% paid to the exchange owner’s wallet as per the exchange owner’s discretion.

The game thus contributes 2% of all transactions proportionally to all token holders by reducing the total money supply in the economy.

More details are available in project White Paper.

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.

As the DIM Foundation ventures closer to releasing their new Hybrid Stock Exchange, a trading platform based on blockchain technology, they are all set to adopt innovative features to sustain the needs of the ever growing industry.

April 28, 2018

Most people that are familiar with the Stock Market are aware of the need of acquiring an ISIN. The International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) is a 12 character code that uniquely identifies a specific security, such as stocks. It is the most popular securities identifier and is used globally.

With the pre-registration for issuers and users soon to be opened, the inaugural DIM Ecosystem introduces the International Blockshare Identification Number (IBIN), a 13 digit, unique serial number used to identify a corporation or organisation for listing on the Hybrid Stock Exchange. It will be this unique IBIN that will be used as a reference to buy, sell, trade and hold equity, with all details retained on the Blockchain. Each unique IBIN will function as the reference to buy, sell, trade and hold equity, with all details stored securely on the Blockchain.

The DIM Foundation is a non-profit organization that recently grabbed the attention of the crypto world by creating and distributing the two different versions of the DIM cryptocurrency (DIMCOIN and DIM Currencies). The Data Interchange Module (DIM) cryptocurrency is a p2p, quantity-committed, secure, private and robust digital medium of exchange. DIMCOIN is a speculative digital coin built upon the NEM blockchain protocol. On the other hand, the DIM Currencies serve as a medium of exchange in the DIM Ecosystem.

An online stock exchange, Hybrid Stock Exchange provides the small to medium enterprises a platform where they can engage in online stock and equity exchanges and access international capital from investors. Cryptonized assets such as intellectual property or company shares will be available on the HYBSE platform.

DIM Currencies and cryptonised assets can be managed across the globe via computers and handheld devices with the help of a state-of-the-art block chain wallet called DEPOTWALLET. The registration process is simple and easy because there is no need to have any banking details to open an account with DEPOTWALLET.

With the mainstream equity markets suffering from downsides such as over-regulation, red-tape, excessive fees and long waiting periods, HYBSE‘s blockchain-based platform looks to eliminate hurdles and allow issuers as well as investors to conduct business on a secure and efficient platform. Lower operational costs, transparency, quick learning, easy web interface, P2P trading, robust security, and the availability of a large pool of financial instruments are some of the many benefits enjoyed by HYBSE users. Tradable securities on HYBSE currently include cryptonized shares, cryptocurrencies, exchange-traded commodities, exchange-traded fund, index, and more.

In the coming weeks, issuers on the DIM Ecosystem will be able to apply and register for their IBIN at no charge. This limited time offer will be available until August 31, 2018. Anyone interested in finding out more may check the DIMCOIN Social Media for the upcoming announcement.

For any questions and information, please visit the DIMCOIN social platforms:

Telegram: https://t.me/dimcoinICO
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DIMCOINICO/
Twitter: @DIMCOIN_

About DIM Foundation: The DIM Foundation is a non-profit organization that is responsible for the creation, management and distribution of the DIM (DIMCOIN and DIM Currencies) and DIM TOKEN. All the profits received by the foundation will be utilized to further improve the DIM in order to increase its value.

HYBSE has a license of Dealers in Securities in Vanuatu with the license number 17911

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.