Crypto News, June 8 2018: Red Day

Highlights: U.S. Financial Commissioner bullish, LCC becomes latest 51% target, and the BTC #HODLGANG loses a few members.

CTFC Commissioner Bullish on Blockchain

Source: CFTC.gov

Rostin Behnam, the Commissioner of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, delivered an address to the United Nations on June 4th in which he expressed strong positivity about blockchain technologies. Calling his agency the “Wyatt Earp” of blockchain use case explorations, he detailed his pro-active stance on adoption and asserted that digital currencies will almost certainly be ubiquitous in the future. In short, he sees value in blockchain technology as a possible solution for systemic problems, including corruption, poverty, health care, and others. Read the full remarks at the source link above.

Litecoin Cash Targeted in 51% Attack

Source: Reddit

Litecoin Cash (LCC) was the victim of a 51% attack last week. Responding on Reddit, LCC said that it had contacted exchanges and increased the confirmation count as immediate measures and was looking into consensus-based solutions for the future. It seems their most likely next move is a hard fork.

Waves Platform Update

Source: Waves

The Waves Platform released a major update today. Among the new features: Data Transactions, fair PoS, and burn transactions, which will all release in June; and “sponsored transactions,” an update to the way nodes are paid, which will release in July.

Sia Update: Video Streaming

Source: Sia

Decentralized storage platform Sia has added video streaming to its services. Users can store videos for a lower cost as compared to other cloud services, according to Sia. Doing so requires running a local Sia instance, instructions for which can be found at the source link above.

Ripple Rebrand

Source: XRP

XRP is undergoing a rebrand. Voting on user-submitted logo designs closed yesterday; it sounds like they’re looking for any evidence of vote manipulation before releasing the finalists.

Partnership: IMVU and Kin

Source: Medium

Kin, the proprietary digital currency of chat client Kik, will partner with the IMVU platform. The merging of the two marketplaces will allow IMVU users to earn Kin in addition to the native IMVU credits, expanding their capabilities. Notably, almost 70% of IMVU users are female, potentially diversifying the cryptocurrency markets a bit. IMVU claims it sees 15 million transactions a day from people doing this.

Civic Announces Collaboration with Effect.AI

Source: Civic

Civic, specializing in secure identity management, will offer its technology platform to Effect.AI, a NEO project aimed at decentralizing AI services. Effect.AI will leverage the Civic protocol to assign permissioned user levels to workers on their platform.

Deloitte & ICON Announce Collaboration

Source: Medium

Advisory group Deloitte intends to collaborate with ICON “to develop, empower and commercialize blockchain based projects.” Deloitte will provide services like financial and risk consulting and will help facilitate global growth of new applications for blockchain technology, presumably while also evangelizing ICON products.

VeChain Testnet Launch

Source: Twitter

The VeChainThor testnet has launched, according to the official Twitter. The source code is also available on Github.

Announcement: FoodGuardians

Source: Food Guardians

FoodGuardians, a food delivery service, was announced today. FoodGuardians offers a proprietary method for ensuring freshness of produce and other perishable grocery items, with a blockchain infrastructure for traceability and supply chain management.

Waltonchain Announces Fashion Chain Project

Source: Twitter

Waltonchain will look to decentralize the fashion marketplace in a new sidechain project. No dates have been announced for Fashion Chain, but they do have a whitepaper. Unfortunately, it’s in Chinese, so we have no idea what it says. (Nice pictures, though.)

Ontology Mainnet Launch Date

Source: Medium

Ontology, a public multi-chain project, will launch its mainnet at the end of June. Holders of the NEP-5 ONT token will need to complete a token swap. Instructions for doing so automatically and manually can be found in the Medium post above. The token swap will be supported by Binance and is scheduled for June 30, 2018.

New Binance Listing: Streamr

Source: Binance

Binance has opened trading for Streamr (DATA), with BTC and ETH pairs available.

Bithumb Cleared of Tax Evasion Suspicions

Source: Twitter

An IRS investigation into cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb found no evidence of illegal activity. They did find the exchange liable for $30 million following an audit, however.

Putin Sees Value in Cryptocurrency

Source: Chepicap

Vladimir Putin suggested that cryptocurrency may be a viable option for Russia to get around currently imposed economic sanctions. Putin has been characteristically pro-regulation when it comes to cryptocurrencies, although the Bank of Russia and the Department of Finance and Treasury do currently utilize elements of blockchain in operations.

Ant Financial Raises $14 Billion in Investment Funding

Source: Ant Financial

Ant Financial announced today that it has secured $14 billion in Series C equity funding for global expansion and technological innovation. It plans to continue investing in research and development of its blockchain in addition to AI, IoT, and security solutions.

AngelList Spin-off Raises $12 Million

Source: CoinDesk

Republic, a crowdequity spin-off of AngelList, announced it has raised $12 million for a token pre-sale. Supported by Binance and NEO, the project hopes to ultimately raise upwards of $90 million. Republic will aim to provide equity options of all kinds - including digital asset returns - to investors looking to put money into ICOs.

Mastercard Files Blockchain Patents

Source: CoinDesk

Mastercard has filed a patent for verifying user credentials on a public blockchain, aimed at curbing card skimming at ATMs and point-of-sale systems. They have also filed a patent for a blockchain platform which would allow travelers to send their itineraries and reservation requests directly to merchants. No official intentions to develop either technology have been announced.

Bitmain Considering IPO

Source: Business Insider

Bitman, the world’s largest producer of Bitcoin mining chips, is considering an initial public offering as it looks to move into AI hardware production. We’re wondering why a “P” and not a “C,” but perhaps that’s just a matter of time.

Baidu to Launch Blockchain Game

Source: CoinDesk

Baidu, a Chinese search company, has announced it is launching a game for the blockchain. The game is set in space, with users building in the universe with tokenized “elements” available through airdrops. The primary goal of the project appears to be demonstration of performance and capability of the blockchain tech. No official launch date has been set.

BlockFellows Launches Free Blockchain Courses

Source: BlockFellows

Beginning June 18, 2018, BlockFellows will provide free academic blockchain courses. They will offer four courses of varying skill levels, utilizing open-source materials from UC Berkeley and other unspecified sources.

EOS Daily Drama: Block Producer Chat Logs

Source: Reddit

Reddit user deathlyblack posted a pastebin of what appear to be chat logs from the EOS block producer Telegram channel. The transcript is a little hard to follow, but highlights include a consensus to print more tokens for themselves (the block producers) prior to launch.

Warhol Painting Auctioned on Blockchain (Sort Of)

Source: BittMint

Maecenas, a “fine art blockchain program,” will auction off portions of ownership of Andy Warhol’s 14 Small Electric Chairs painting. The idea is that buyers will own a certain percentage of the painting, with a total of 49% available. The percent ownership entitles them to a return on investment should the painting ever actually be physically sold. 49% of the painting is valued at around 737 BTC, meaning that for just $5.2 million, you can continue to not possess an original Warhol. What a time to be alive.

Win an Intel® Core™ i7 CPU

Source: Intel

Intel is giving away a 8th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 8086k Limited Edition Processor. As of the time of this writing (12:00pm PST), there are just over 5 hours left to enter.

Chainalysis: BTC HODLers Giving Way to Speculators

Source: Chainalysis

Chainalysis, a financial analytics provider for the crypto-economy, published findings today regarding the $30 billion BTC sell-off from holders to speculators between December 2017 and April of 2018. According to their results, new speculators are increasing the amount of Bitcoin available for trading, thereby pushing down the value. The paper also discusses BCH and their comparative loss of transactional use cases. If you’ve got a few minutes, the source link above is well worth a full read.

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