Day: August 2, 2018

Just like most coins in the top 10, NEO is sliding with Bitcoin. So far, it is down 19 percent on a weekly basis and as the dump continues, bears are likely to break below $25, our main support line and the lower limit of the $20 trading range. Remember, this erosion is happening at the back drop of solid fundamentals that are technically supportive of price.

From the News

• Perhaps the announcement by the San Francisco based DCEX that it has plans of adding NEO and Cardano on top of their 15 cryptocurrencies on offer is a stand out. The exchange itself has XRP as its base currency and is just one of the many exchanges that see value and efficiency of adding XRP. Alphapoint will power the exchange.
• In a medium post, NEO said they will be partnering with an internet security audit firm, CertiK. As they collaborate, CertiK will look into NEO blockchain and implement what they call “formal verification framework” in their smart contracts. Besides, the security firm shall audit NEO’s smart contracts and verify all digital identities within the platform. NEO said this security audit was necessary as most of their development came from individual coders and as such to have protective mechanism in place against potential attacks is but paramount.

 NEO Partners With CertiK for Next Secure Smart Economic Model https://t.co/FH4dnnENnS

— NEO Smart Economy (@NEO_Blockchain) August 1, 2018

• SmartT is the latest dApp built on the NEO blockchain and runs on the nOS client. The later allows transactions to be sent directly to the NEO blockchain through simple Java Scripts, simplifying coding as a result. The brains behind it is Asif Raza and SmartT is an event ticketing dApp and the first to make use of Master Contract Token (MCT). MCT is a utility token.

Meet Asif Raza – A community developer who is using both nOS (@nOSplatform) and $MCT (@MCT_Token) to build SmartT, a decentralised smart ticketing platform. https://t.co/dsZ5C5qt1M

— NEO News (@NEOnewstoday) July 30, 2018

NEO Technical Analysis

Weekly Chart

NEO Weekly Chart by Trading View

On a weekly basis, NEO is down 20 percent and the reflection of that capitulation is clear in the weekly chart. Note that after breaking below April lows on week ending June 10, NEO has been on a slump in literal sense.

Yes, there were attempts of higher highs in the first two weeks of July but afterwards, bears took over. At current prices and bear velocity, we might see NEO prices printing below $25 for the first time this year.

Daily Chart

NEO Daily chart by Trading View

As highlighted in our previous technical analysis, NEO prices are technically bearish. Before this recent depreciation, we needed strong conclusive close above $40. That’s previous support now resistance and a bear break out level of June 10. It’s an important price level in my opinion.

Now, for buyers to be in charge, we must see moves above this $20 consolidation and trends above $40. However, that is steep for buyers. Instead odds are sellers might sync in with the main trend, close below $25 or July 2018 lows.

Notice that sellers are also past the one month support trend line of July 2018. This means there is a multi-level support break if we consider June 10 break below.

Once prices breach $25,we suggest taking shorts on every retracement testing $25 with first targets at $15.

Disclaimer: Views and opinions expressed are those of the author and aren’t investment advice. Trading of any form involves risk and so do your due diligence before making a trading decision.

The post NEO Technical Analysis: NEO Market Cap Shrinks 85.7% From 2018 Peaks appeared first on NewsBTC.

Square Cash has published its quarterly earnings report, which it is required by law to submit to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The report shows how much Bitcoin it has transacted since launching its Bitcoin buying and selling service and how much profit it has made from it.

In the first half of 2018, Square Cash facilitated USD 71.1 million of Bitcoin transactions, and saw slight growth in Bitcoin transactions from USD 34.1 million to USD 37 million from Q1 to Q2. Overall, Bitcoin transactions account for 4.8% of Square Cash’s USD 1.48 billion of total revenue in the first half of 2018.

Square Cash is a popular payments service that can be used to send money to friends instantly. It added Bitcoin support in November 2017, which may have been part of the reason Square’s stock market cap rallied USD 8 billion. However, Square Cash is barely pulling in profits from its Bitcoin business, since it keeps fees as low as possible to attract customers. It says in its earnings report, “We consider our role in the Bitcoin transactions to be facilitating customer access to Bitcoin”.

Square Cash’s Bitcoin profit margin is less than 1%, with earnings of USD 643,000 in the first half of 2018. Bitcoin profits nearly doubled between Q1 and Q2, from USD 223,000 to USD 420,000, but this is tiny compared to Square Cash’s overall profits of USD 571 million in the first half of 2018.

It’s hard to measure exactly how much actual Bitcoins Square Cash transacted in the first half of 2018 since Bitcoin’s price is very volatile but it could be roughly approximated that the USD 71.1 million of Bitcoin revenue translates to BTC 10,000 of volume during the first half of 2018. This is a very low volume compared to major Bitcoin exchanges, which have billions of dollars of Bitcoin trading volume daily.

It’s possible that the 2018 Bitcoin bear market has slowed the growth of Square Cash’s Bitcoin service, and it will be interesting to look at their numbers again after the next rally, since Square Cash is one of the easy ways to buy Bitcoin in the United States.

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Monero was found to be carrying a bug which allowed theft from digital currency exchanges, according to the researcher who found the security hazard. In order of severity, the bug was ranked nine out of a possible 10. Bug bounty hunter Jason Rhineland disclosed that the exploit may be currently underway.

Bug Bounty Hunter Discovers Vulnerability in Monero Wallet

Jason Rhineland, a Canadian PhD candidate in Economics at Queen’s University with a primary research interest in agent-based modeling of economic phenomena, has submitted a post on HackerOne where he disclosed a business logic error in Monero.

It seems that an already fixed wallet balance display bug also extended to exchanges with a potential impact of theft of all coins deposited in an exchange wallet, according to Rhineland.

“PR #3985 fixed a wallet balance display bug, which seems innocuous enough, but this bug also extends to exchanges: a transfer of, e.g., 1 XMR to an exchange with a duplicated TX pub key will show up on an exchange as a 2 XMR deposit, which then allows the attacker to withdraw 2 XMR from the exchange’s wallet. An attacker could exploit this repeatedly to siphon of all of the exchange’s balance.”

The bug allowed creative cybercriminals to fake transaction data in order to trick virtual currency operators’ support staff into crediting their user account manually with XMR. Each additional line of code multiplied the amount of Monero shown on the account, leaving staffers obliged to fulfill any user calling to process the transactions manually. Monero-based coins were also vulnerable to the same bug, as was proven by the hacking of ARQ coins from the wallet of cryptocurrency operator Altex.

Altex Exchange Suffers Big Losses Due to Bug in Monero

Altex has already told its users and overall virtual currency ecosystem about the issue. Facing an undisclosed amount of cryptocurrencies due to the monero codebase and having its development team on holiday, the small operator chose to suspend trading and kept writing updates.

“That bug caused a big loss in coins for the exchange and we have put our main currency under maintenance so the people who exploited the bug can no longer withdraw. After a really long investigation, we found out that we still lost a big amount. This was caused by the coins software, it was not a bug in our system.”

The HackerOne bug bounty program published five other vulnerabilities in Monero in the last 24 hours – every single one already fixed –  including a Denial of Service attack vector able to clog the Monero blockchain.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

The post Monero Wallet Bug Sees Altex Exchange Suffer Major Loss appeared first on NewsBTC.

The Research Institute of Tsinghua University has recently partnered with China Internet Nationwide Financial Services to establish a blockchain research center

Boerse Stuttgart Group is developing a suite of crypto services including an ICO platform.

UBS doesn’t believe bitcoin constitutes money or a viable asset class yet, but it could in the future.

Bitcoin hovers around yesterday’s levels, while other coins see more notable losses up to 11%

Vanuatu has approved a stock exchange license to a crypto exchange making it the first such event in the South Pacific island’s business history.

The Vanuatu archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is 1,750 kilometers east of northern Australia, 540 kilometers northeast of New Caledonia, east of New Guinea, southeast of the Solomon Islands, and west of Fiji.

The exchange, DSTOQ, after launching yesterday described itself as “the first fully licensed stock exchange for trading security tokens and investing in real-world assets using cryptocurrencies”. However, the new license is only valid in European jurisdictions due it being a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.

This is not the first time that the tiny jurisdiction has hit the press as another crypto revelation earlier this year was the news that Vanuatu would patriate new citizens to the islands for the sum of USD 200,000 payable in Bitcoin, a report refuted by the Vanuatu authorities. This is not totally unheard of, as earlier this year, the Thai government offered “elite” residency visas for wealthy foreign citizens, allowing them to live in the country for around USD 3,000 a year, not that cryptocurrency was mentioned.

Two of Australia’s big four banks now have offices in Vanuatu and Forbes has it listed as a potential if not a well-hidden tax haven.

The are other minnows waiting to jump in and get a slice of the fintech pie. Another such location is tiny San Marino enveloped by its neighbor Italy. A partnership this year established between Estonia-based blockchain developer Polybius with the consulting firm Olympus Advisors hopes to put San Marino on the crypto map.

“We are the world’s oldest Republic and we are proud to begin a transformation led by technology,” said San Marino’s Secretary of State for Economic Development Andrea Zafferani. “We believe this partnership will have a significant impact on the economy, growing the innovation sector which is at the core of our development strategy. The Republic will also acquire a state of art set of regulations to become a world-leading blockchain hub.”

Sergio Mottola, executive chairman of San Marino Innovation, claims that the republic is keen to embrace digital innovation and knows that the government’s legislation will support the growing blockchain environment.

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Coinbase have announced additional support for customers using pound sterling in conjunction with their services. The leading digital asset brokerage stated that the improved functionality will allow U.K. customers to transact with greater efficiency when using their native currency.

Coinbase Speeds Up UK Banking Services

Popular digital currency brokerage platform Coinbase has announced improved banking support for customers transacting in pound sterling.

The idea behind the move is to allow customers based in the U.K. to deposit and withdraw to their bank accounts in less time. The improvements to the service were announced in a blog post earlier today.

Previously, the only way to buy or sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, or Litecoin on Coinbase using pound sterling was for the company to send funds using international bank transfers. This process involved exchanging pounds for euros at some point while taking several days to do so.

Thanks to the improvements announced today, U.K. customers will be able to buy and sell the digital assets supported by the platform directly with their own currency. It is believed that this should enable same day deposits and withdrawals from the platform straight to British bank accounts.

The blog post goes on to explain the latest improvements:

“We’ve worked hard over the last few months to add GBP support for Coinbase customers across several of our product offerings in the UK. We’ve also taken major strides towards our goal of making Coinbase the most trusted and compliant brand in the space.”

The steps mentioned above include securing an e-money license from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), as well as the platform being the first in the space to obtain bank account services provided by a major U.K. banking institution.

The improvements to the service are live from today for a select number of U.K. customers. There are plans to continue extending this to all remaining users in the British Isles in the coming weeks. The goal is to eventually allow individual Coinbase users, active traders using Coinbase Pro, and institutional users on the newly launched Coinbase Prime platform to all benefit from the brokerage’s improved U.K. banking functions.

Late last month, the platform announced that it was giving users in the EU and Australia the opportunity to purchase e-gift cards at a number of different retailers with cryptocurrency. The move signals the company’s strategy to improve the use of crypto around the world.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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Coinbase announced the appointment of its first-ever chief compliance officer on July 31. The new member of the ever-expanding Coinbase team, Jeff Horowitz, joins the crypto exchange after spending decades in regulatory and compliance roles at some of the most renowned companies in the US. His appointment comes at a time when Coinbase is making inroads into the mainstream financial services industry through Coinbase Custody and its acquisition of a broker-dealer.

The Best of Both Worlds

Horowitz joins Coinbase from Pershing LLC, a subsidiary of BNY Mellon. Pershing is an investment firm that provides brokerage custodial services, clearing and settlement solutions, and wealth management solutions to its clients, with over $1 trillion of assets under management. Prior to Pershing, Horowitz worked at Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). His expertise is in compliance and anti-money laundering, a critical area for Coinbase as it seeks to delve into the securities industry.

Coinbase’s president described Horowitz as the best candidate for the job given his experience.

Hiring Jeff is recognition on our part that navigating compliance complexities on a global scale requires a concerted, cross-functional effort, guided by leaders with experience that spans policy, financial services, and corporate governance.

While most crypto exchanges are happy to provide a trading platform for digital assets, Coinbase has been initiating moves that could see it become one of the most diverse financial services firms in the US. The San Francisco-based company is reportedly in talks with the relevant regulators to obtain a federal banking license. Coinbase also acquired three companies last month which will give it the ability to trade securities, a crucial offering if the SEC decides to classify some of the popular cryptos as securities.

Coinbase also recently revealed that its investigation into claims of insider trading just before it listed Bitcoin Cash didn’t amount to much and that no wrongdoing was discovered. The allegations arose after Bitcoin Cash witnessed an unprecedented number of buy orders in December, just a few hours before Coinbase announced that it would be adding support for the cryptocurrency. The announcement by Coinbase was quite sudden and unexpected, as the exchange had previously announced that it would list BCH in January. Once the listing was announced, the price of Bitcoin Cash more than doubled in just a few hours, and naturally, many began to question the decision by Coinbase and the sudden spike in buy orders just before the announcement.

The allegations piled on, and fearing damaging their reputation as an ethical crypto exchange, Coinbase hired two legal firms to look into the matter, and according to the exchange, all its employees were absolved of any wrongdoing. This has not done much to settle the doubts of many crypto traders who found the events leading up to the listing a bit too convenient for a coincidence.

Coinbase is not letting this get in its way as it seeks to maintain its position as the leading crypto exchange in the US. The exchange recently announced that it was considering five more coins for listing including Zcash, Basic Attention Token, and Stellar Lumens. Coinbase also recently announced that it had partnered with London-based WeGift to allow its European customers to buy virtual gift cards with cryptos. The virtual gift cards can be used to pay for products from retailers such as Uber, Nike, Ticketmaster and Clarks.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

Following a detailed study, South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service has advocated the development of an integrated blockchain system for stock transactions