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‘BRILLIANT’ BITCOIN: Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has gone public with his belief that cryptocurrency offers an improved alternative to conventional money.
In a podcast interview with investment firm ARK Invest on Feb. 19, Musk said he believes bitcoin's structure "is quite brilliant," adding: "It [cryptocurrency] bypasses currency controls. … Paper money is going away. And crypto is a far better way to transfer value than a piece of paper, that's for sure."
Speaking on the downsides of cryptocurrency, in the case of bitcoin for instance, Musk said he believes its use of a large computing network to secure its ledger is "computationally energy intensive."
So, for a firm that aims to boost the adoption of sustainable energy, it may not be “a good use of Tesla’s resources to get involved in crypto,” he added. Full story
AREN'T YOU GLAD? The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission settled unregistered securities charges against Gladius Network, which raised $12.7 million through an ICO in 2017.
No penalty was assessed, since Gladius reported itself to the SEC in 2018, agreed to refund investors who ask for their money back, and will register the tokens as securities, the regulator said.
"Today’s case shows the benefit of self-reporting and taking proactive steps to remediate unregistered offerings," an SEC official said. Full story
TWIN ETFs: Speaking of the SEC, there are now two bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) proposals awaiting approval before the commission.
The latest, from VanEck/SolidX and filed with Cboe BZX Exchange, appeared in the latest edition of the Federal Register this morning. The second, from Bitwise Asset Management and NYSE Arca, appeared on Feb. 15. Both proposals must wait 45 days for an initial decision.
Gabor Gurbacs, director of digital asset strategy at VanEck, told CoinDesk he believes a bitcoin ETF will serve the public interest if approved.
The company has been actively working with regulators, as well as other major market participants, “to bring simplicity, transparency and professional market standards to digital assets,” he said. Full story
MYSTERY PAYOUT: Ethereum mining pool Sparkpool received an unusual payout of over 2,100 ether (worth around $300,000) just for mining one block on the ethereum blockchain Tuesday – a figure that’s about 600 times the network’s standard block reward.
Miners who secure blocks are programmed to be awarded 3 ETH (about $500) for every new transaction block added to the ethereum blockchain. On top of this, there is also a small payout attached to transactions incentivizing miners to validate and include new transactions in a mined block.
Yet, with only 210 validated transactions, Sparkpool received 2,103.1485 ETH at block number 7,238,290, according to data from ethereum block explorer Blockscout. Market observers said it could be a random fluke, with one ethereum user (or perhaps more) accidentally attaching abnormally high transaction fees to their payments.
In an update Wednesday, Sparkpool said it is is temporarily freezing the 2,100 ETH and waiting for the sender to reach out for a solution. Full story
DEX MILESTONE: Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has rolled out public testing for a decentralized trading platform built on its own blockchain network.
The company announced on Wednesday that the new platform – called Binance DEX – is open for users to create their own wallets and interact with the trading platform's interface.
In addition, Binance revealed a blockchain explorer for the testnet of its proprietary public network called Binance Chain. This supports the DEX so that traders can participate as individual nodes and hold their own private keys to their crypto assets.
While the launch of the testnet is a major step towards a final roll-out of the decentralized exchange, Binance said it now needs to gather feedback from the community before it can reveal a timeline for the final launch.
“With Binance DEX, we provide a different balance of security, freedom, and ease-of-use, where you take more responsibility and are in more control of personal assets,” said Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao. Full story |
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 CoinDesk’s Crypto-Economics Explorer aggregates data points across the industry to measure the size and opportunity of crypto markets. In addition to price and market cap, CoinDesk’s explorer provides users with a comprehensive way to view the crypto-economic forces that shape an asset’s market maturity, growth, and potential. Network interest is important in determining the activity occurring within a blockchain’s internal ecosystem. Today, we observed one metric within network interest: on-chain transaction counts among two prominent privacy oriented cryptocurrencies: ZEC and XMR. Over the past two years, ZEC has consistently had more transactions than XMR. This past summer presented a flipping of this trend resulting in XMR having more transactions than ZEC. XMR has a mean of about 4k and ZEC has one of 5k. ZEC has higher highs with a max of about 12k and lower lows with a min of 1.6k than XMR’s max of 8k and min of 2.2k. XMR has a standard deviation of 1,194 compared to ZEC’s 2,522. The start of 2019 saw XMR counts diminish while it briefly looked like ZEC might break ahead. XMR counts came back to keep the lead but there’s a possibility of seeing ZEC reassert itself as the higher transaction count privacy coin in the future. Until then, XMR holds the title. Check out the CoinDesk Crypto-Economic Explorer here to see this table and more. |
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| BUYERS ARE BACK: Bitcoin's 20 percent rise in the last two weeks is backed by a sharp rise in trading volumes to levels last seen in May 2018. As a result, the inverse head-and-shoulders breakdown witnessed on Monday and the subsequent rise to $4,000 Tuesday look to have substance, and BTC could soon extend gains toward December highs above $4,300. Full story |
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BEST OF THE BEST
ETORO: Almost half of millennial online traders polled have more trust in crypto exchanges than the U.S. stock market, according to a survey from investment platform eToro. On the other hand, 77 percent of older “Generation X” respondents trust stock exchanges more, it found. The survey polled 1,000 online traders. “Younger investors' experience with the stock market has seen a great deal of loss of trust, with the fall of Lehman Brothers because of irresponsible practices followed by the worst recession since the Great Depression,” said Guy Hirsch, managing director at eToro U.S. “As more investors become educated on the benefits of blockchain, we'll continue to see this trend play out," he added.
THE REST BLOOMBERG: Emaar Properties PJSC, Dubai’s biggest publicly traded real estate developer, has denied reports that it plans to accept payments in cryptocurrencies, according to Bloomberg. “Emaar does not accept payment in digital currency. Emaar only accepts payment in government-issued currency, primarily in U.A.E. dirham and U.S. dollar,’’ a company spokesperson told the news source. Some media and blog reports cited an alleged Emaar circular to real estate brokers as saying that the developer will accept payment in digital currencies such as bitcoin and ether through a broker in Switzerland, the report added. COINBASE BLOG: Crypto exchange Coinbase is adding support for bitcoin cash (BCH) to its Wallet app, meaning users will soon be able to directly control their BCH private keys from the app.
The Coinbase Wallet will be updated over the next few weeks to add BCH support to all users on iOS and Android, the exchange said. Support for the cryptocurrency will be on by default, and users will just have to tap the “receive” tab in the app and select “bitcoin cash” to receive BCH directly in the wallet.
The app currently supports ethereum (ETH), ethereum classic (ETH) and "over 100,000" different ERC-20 tokens and ERC-721 collectibles built on ethereum, the exchange said. Bitcoin support was added earlier this month. |
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WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER  |
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Musk talks crypto