Crypto LVL

2021-01-25 20:00:34 ​​New Exchange To Offer Sharia-Compliant Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP Trading.

The Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) has issued a license to CoinMENA, a Bahrain-headquartered new crypto exchange preparing for its launch, allowing the business to offer its services across the region in compliance with the Sharia law. CoinMENA aims to make its platform available in Bahrain, as well as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman.

The exchange said it will offer bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), XRP, litecoin (LTC), and bitcoin cash (BCH).

“As CoinMENA grows, we will be providing access to additional digital assets and expanding the jurisdictions we operate in, with the view of becoming one of the leading digital assets exchanges on a global scale,” Dina Sam’an, Co-Founder and Managing Director of CoinMENA, was quoted as saying in an announcement. The company aims to launch the platform "soon."

The CBB has issued a Category 2 Crypto Asset Services Company License to the company which states that the exchange complies with the rules of Sharia, or Islamic law. This paves the way for the platform in a number of Middle Eastern markets where Islamic finance dominate’s their economic landscapes. The sharing of profit and loss, and the ban on the collection and payment of interest are two of the foundations of Islamic banking.

“Each transaction must be related to a real underlying economic transaction,” according to an analysis by the Vancouver-based Corporate Finance Institute. “Parties entering into the contracts in Islamic finance share profit/loss and risks associated with the transaction. No one can benefit from the transaction more than the other party.”

By expanding cryptocurrency trade into the world of Islamic finance, CoinMENA could tap into a market that was estimated to be worth about USD 2.1tn last year, according to a report released by S&P Global. Islamic finance has a strong foothold in the Middle East, but is also growing in other regions of the world with significant Muslim populations.

“Sharia-compliant assets represent 14% of total banking assets in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia region and 25% of banking assets in the Gulf Cooperation Council region, suggesting that Islamic banking continues to be systemically important in these countries,” according to the report. Open / Comment

2021-01-22 20:00:48 ​​Bitcoin Spikes Above USD 32K as MicroStrategy Boosts Morale With a New Deal.

The world's number one crypto moved up and above USD 32,000 again as US-based business intelligence company MicroStrategy revealed its relatively small USD 10m bitcoin (BTC) deal.

On Friday afternoon, 14:37 UTC, bitcoin climbed from the USD 29,400 level to which it had dropped earlier in the day, and is trading at USD 32,565, after it appreciated almost 3% in the last day. It dropped 12% over the course of the past week, and went up nearly 37% in a month.

This rise comes as MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor announced that the company made an additional purchase of bitcoin: they bought approximately BTC 314 for USD 10m in cash in accordance with its Treasury Reserve Policy, at an average price of approximately USD 31,808 per bitcoin, said the CEO. BTC trading volume reached USD 62.77bn in the past 24 hours.

He added that MicroStrategy now holds approximately BTC 70,784, which at the current price translates to the value of USD 2.3bn.

In December last year, MicroStrategy confirmed it raised USD 650m by selling convertible senior notes due 2025 in order to buy more bitcoin. By that point, the company had already acquired approximately BTC 40,824. Meanwhile, in October, MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor revealed that he spent around USD 175m on his personal BTC stash.

The Cryptoverse was quick to comment on this major purchase. "Seems like a lot of people don't get it," argued popular BTC enthusiast and investor WhalePanda. "You keep selling your Bitcoin to large institutional investors on every dip hoping we'll go back down to USD 20k or lower. That's not going to happen. Make them all market buy." Open / Comment

2021-01-22 18:01:20 ​​First Grey Hat Hackers Ideas Competition

The high-profile event in 2021! Mr Leo Andreo leads the Hacken community in organizing the First Grey Hat Hackers Ideas Competition

The prize pool will be 35,000 USD.

The leading cybersecurity company Hacken will support the community’s initiative First Grey Hat Hackers Ideas Competition by providing 50% of the prize pool and applying its expertise at the ideas’ valuation stage.

Submit your product or service idea and get the attention you deserve by winning the competition! Who knows, maybe your project will become the next great sensation! Open / Comment

2021-01-19 20:00:48 ​​Hong Kong Crypto Robbers Strike Again: Gang Makes off with 450k Tether Haul.

Trading crypto in person is becoming increasingly risky in Hong Kong – with a second trader this month robbed by violent thugs after agreeing to swap cash for tokens offline.

Per the South China Morning Post and Apple Daily’s Hong Kong site, the latest victim was attempting to make an offline tether (USDT) transaction worth some USD 0.45m in the busy Chong Yip Street.

The media outlets stated that a female trader had sold a man USDT in two previous transactions worth around USD 77,000 and USD 90,000 each in previous transactions and had arranged for her uncle to wait outside an office building on the street while she conducted the third – much bigger – deal.

But instead, when she met the man for the third time, she received the nastiest of surprises, when she reportedly came face-to-face with a gang of three “20- to 30-year-old” thugs armed “with knives and sticks” who robbed her of the cash the man had given her in exchange for her USDT 450,000 transfer, as well as her mobile phone.

The man then forced her into an empty office room and locked her inside, although she was reportedly otherwise unharmed when police arrived on the scene.

The violent incident comes just days after a 37-year-old male bitcoin (BTC) seller in the equally busy Chai Wan district was locked into a car by a gang of men also led by a bogus buyer. The man was eventually bundled out of the car – but not before surrendering BTC 15 (around USD 558,000) and his mobile phone to the raiders. Open / Comment

2021-01-16 20:00:51 ​​Associated Gas Pilot Could Lead to Huge Boon for Russian Bitcoin Miners.

Russian Bitcoin (BTC) miners could be in for a massive, unexpected environmentally friendly windfall if a pilot leads the nation’s energy giants to embrace crypto mining en masse.

Further details have been unveiled about a plant operated by the oil arm of Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, which late last year invited miners to set up shop at an oilfield in the Khanty-Mansi region. The miners have been at work with a month-long Bitcoin mining effort.

Pumping oil from fields like these produces associate gas – not the intended target of the oil extraction.

Typically, such gas is flared – essentially just burned up – releasing pollutants into the atmosphere. But associated gas can also be converted on-site into electrical energy. And given the fact that the Khanty-Mansi region is located conveniently (from a mining perspective) in Western Siberia, famous for its icy winters, cooling costs are also low in the region.

The pilot, per Ugra-News, is seeing Gazprom Neft provide enough power to allow a setup of 150 Antminer ASIC S9 devices to mine a haul of BTC 1.8 (USD 64,000) in the space of a month, using power provided by 49,500 cubic meters of associate gas. The Gazprom subsidiary carried out the energy conversion process.

The media outlet says that “preliminary estimates” from 2020 show that in 2020 about 34 billion cubic meters of associated gas were produced in the region last year.

The miners at the oilfield paid “less than USD 0.04” per kW of energy. Businesses typically pay at least double that amount for electricity on average elsewhere in the country, according to Global Petrol Prices data.

But the ramifications of the pilot could be even bigger, as the pilot is in its early stages and there are at least nine such oilfields in the region. The media outlet quotes Natalya Komarova, the long-serving Governor of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, and a former MP, as stating,

“The region has several competitive advantages for hosting [crypto miners]. Among the favorable factors are low air temperature, which significantly reduces energy consumption, the availability of land plots that meet the basic requirements for the location of [mining] centers, a system of telecommunications and transport infrastructure.”

The pilot also has support in parliament from the likes of Pavel Zavalny the chairman of the parliamentary energy committee – a man who also happens to be the President of the Russian Gas Society. Zavalny was quoted as saying, albeit with several caveats about other potential uses of crypto and tokens’ legal status,

“Crypto mining is one of the ways to monetize cheap electricity where there is a surplus, or where the cost of electricity production is higher than market prices. In this case, it is economically more expedient to monetize bitcoin and exchange it for material goods in exchange. This is a competitive way to monetize the electricity generated.” Open / Comment

2021-01-13 20:00:43 ​​ECB President Attacks Bitcoin Again As Digital Euro In Works.

After claiming that bitcoin (BTC) is highly volatile, illiquid and speculative, Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central bank, now called for global regulation of this most popular cryptocurrency.

“(Bitcoin) is a highly speculative asset, which has conducted some funny business and some interesting and totally reprehensible money laundering activity,” Lagarde said at the Reuters Next conference today, as reported by this news agency.

According to William Mougayar, an entrepreneur, investor, blockchain researcher, and advisor, these statements by Lagarde are an "ultimate display of misunderstanding cryptocurrencies potential."

"Bitcoin & crypto are already regulated by proxy. Anti-money laundering applies to everything, and while many financial instruments are speculative, none are more transformative than cryptocurrencies," he tweeted, while one of his followers replied that "they understand cryptos absolutely. They are just feared of it because they can't put the money in their own pocket like taxes or other donations."

In either case, as legendary investor and BTC bull Paul Tudor Jones warned recently, as cryptoassets fight a bloody battle for survival and the top, the authorities will, as they did before, lead their own fight against private cryptocurrencies.

Meanwhile, the ECB’s Governing Council is exploring the possibility of issuing a new central bank digital currency (CBDC), a digital euro, in an attempt to respond to the accelerating trend toward digitization in payments. Also, a recent paper authored by a group of economists and policymakers from the ECB stated that introducing “a CBDC sooner rather than later could give rise to a significant first-mover advantage to its issuer.” Open / Comment

2021-01-10 20:00:43 ​​Bitcoin Mining in 2021: Growth, Consolidation, Renewables, and Regulation.

Bitcoin (BTC) mining has had a couple of less profitable years. After the highs of late 2017 and early 2018, profitability declined by March 2020 to as little as USD 0.0693 per day for every 1 THash of mining power (having been USD 3.139 in January 2018).

However, with the bull market of late 2020, the price of bitcoin has risen strongly, and with it mining profitability has steadily crept up to USD 0.222, representing a rise of 200% since May’s Bitcoin halving. Given that analysts claim bitcoin’s price still has some way left to rise, this is obviously encouraging news for the mining industry, which looks set to have a consistently better 2021 than 2020.

This is what pretty much everyone within the mining industry estimates will happen, that they expect the sector to expand vigorously in 2021. They also expect to see a degree of market consolidation within the space, and while it’s unlikely that the new year will provide mining with technical innovations, it’s possible that we’ll witness a gradual shift to renewable energy sources, as well as the emergence of regulation that specifically addresses mining.

Bitcoin price growth = mining growth
The 200% rise in mining profitability since May is an instructive figure, given that the price of bitcoin rose by more than 230% over the same timeframe. This is pretty strong evidence that bitcoin price rises continue to drive mining profitability, despite 2020’s halving.

In other words, assuming that the price of bitcoin will rise to, say, USD 100,000 by the end of 2021, the mining industry will expand in parallel.

This is pretty much the consensus view among industry participants, although Tim Rainey, Chief Financial Officer of US-based powerplant-cryptomining hybrid Greenidge Generation, said we may see a temporary contraction at the beginning of 2020. Open / Comment

2021-01-07 21:30:00 ​​Strike Visa Cards To Launch in US, EU, and UK Within First Half of 2021.

Strike, a popular bitcoin (BTC) banking service by US-based Bitcoin Lightning startup Zap, aims to have their Strike Cards rolled out in countries on two continents in the first half of 2021.

Per the rollout plan as presented by Zap founder Jack Mallers, Strike will be issuing the Strike Card in the US already in Q1 2021. After that, they plan to issue Strike Cards in the EU and UK in Q2 2021. Also in the second quarter, more fiat currency pairs will be added to Strike.

The card is described by the website as "a real debit card with real rewards for the real world." In June, it was announced that Zap was admitted to Visa’s Fast Track Program and that it would be launching its card within a year. Per Forbes, Mallers said that he was working with Visa on several projects, but that only the credit card is public, and that the company is contractually obligated to launch a card within 12 months.

"So we’re coming out with the Strike card, traditional debit card tied to Strike. Strike will be interoperable with the Visa Direct network, and you get an account routing number. So Strike will act as a vertical bank," said Mallers in a recent The Investor’s Podcast Network's Bitcoin Fundamentals episode. "So we can do anything a traditional bank can do for you. And you just line up your direct deposit to Strike just like anything else. And within your settings, you can say, hey, of every paycheck, I’ll take 15% in bitcoin, I’ll take 20% in bitcoin, and you treat it like your savings account."

The founder further added that when it comes to the Visa partnership, "the vision for this is simple. Let’s say my local grocer doesn’t yet work in an interoperable fashion with the Lightning Network. I should still be able to spend that USD 5,000 balance that is my Strike balance. And so it’s our bridge to the rest of the world. They connect us to the rest of the world. And there’s a lot of cool things we could do with it, different rewards or whatever else."

He added that Strike has "no concrete plans of Bitcoin rewards."

In the same post in which Mallers discussed the cards, he announced Strike Global, stating that Strike has partnered with Bittrex Global and will be launching in over 200 countries. It has added support for tether (USDT), USD coin (USDC), EUR, GBP, and CHF, among other options, adding that all Bittrex users, more than a million of them, will be onboarded onto Strike and Lightning. All this is planned for the first quarter.

By the time the cards are issued in Europe, Stike aims to establish a Bitcoin-native neo-bank; partnerships with major exchanges and companies, including Bittrex, CMT, and Visa; instant and free international fund transfers; stablecoin support; Strike Payday, and others. "I have more partnerships and products to announce and release," Mallers wrote. Open / Comment

2021-01-04 21:00:26 ​​Trezor December Sales Were 'Off the Charts'.

SatoshiLabs, the maker of the Trezor hardware wallet, saw a major increase in the popular wallet's sales in the last month of 2020, and one of the reasons for the boost in numbers was their competitor Ledger's ongoing data breach incident, according to the company's Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

"We have experienced a massive increase in our sales during the last two months of this year,"
The company declined to provide any numbers. In either case, per the CTO, there were three factors that contributed to this increase, but he emphasized that it's "almost impossible to isolate the distinct effect of any one." These are:

1) a strong Holiday season which started with Black Friday;
2) bitcoin (BTC) price rally, which eventually led to it crossing the previous all-time-high value set in 2017, and which brought an undeniable increase in demand for hardware wallets;
3) the publishing of Ledger’s customer data on a hackers forum.
"December is traditionally a peak season for most businesses," said Rusnák, and although the company doesn't share exact numbers, "we can say that this December sales are absolutely off the charts when compared to earlier months or previous years." The CTO added that:

"The only period that was similar to what we are experiencing now was December of 2017 when bitcoin crossed the [USD] 10000 value for the first time."

As reported, their main competitor, Ledger found itself in boiling hot waters when, following a data breach it had suffered in summer 2020, a database reportedly containing more than a million email addresses of Ledger users and more than 270,000 physical addresses and phone numbers, was dumped on Raidforums, a website for sharing hacked databases, in the second half of December. Also as reported, it seems that the scammers who got their hands on the Ledger users' information have also been trying to scam Trezor users.

Similarly to what Ledger is doing, SatoshiLabs is also educating people on how to protect their cryptoassets from phishing attacks. "We are doing everything possible to minimize the potential impact of such leaks by automatically scrubbing all personal data from Trezor e-shop after 90 days from purchase," said Rusnák.

Meanwhile, in September 2020, Swiss hardware wallet provider Shift Crypto said it had disclosed a vulnerability in Trezor, after which SatoshiLabs paid a bounty fee to Shift Crypto and claimed it had fixed the issue in their previously upgrades.

As for their other endeavors, a few weeks ago, a cryptoasset rate comparison tool that streamlines crypto purchase and exchange transactions. SatoshiLabs also established Tropic Square last spring, the intention of which is to create the first fully-auditable and transparent secure chip. After a period of market research, the company is moving onto the development phase and the prototype of the chip - tentatively named TASSIC - Transparent Authenticated Secure Storage Integrated Circuit - is estimated to be available at the end of 2021. Open / Comment

2021-01-01 20:00:27 ​​Colombian Watchdog Says Companies Can Convert Capital to Bitcoin.

Big American companies like MicroStrategy have made the headlines this year with their bitcoin (BTC)-buying policies, but companies in Colombia may be set to follow suit – after a corporate watchdog in the nation green-lighted the practice of holding capital reserves in crypto.

In an official notice, the Superintendency of Corporations (Superintendencia de Sociedades), the nation’s corporations regulator explained that following a consultation, firms in Colombia are now legally permitted to use their capital to buy cryptoassets such as bitcoin (the only token explicitly named in the document) – so long as they abide by regulations outlined in the existing commercial code.

The watchdog added that providing the tokens companies bought could qualify as “intangible assets,” and “meet criteria that makes them recognizable on inventories as intangible,” firms were now free to take the crypto plunge.

The ruling is a major turnaround for the watchdog, which in early 2018 was still warning companies of the dangers of crypto investment, opining that tokens were too “volatile” to qualify as assets.

However, the new document contains a number of warnings about crypto, showing that the Superintendency has not yet altogether abandoned its previous position, writing that crypto “is not money or legal tender,” and cannot be used “as a form of payment.”

The watchdog also warned that no central bank or international monetary organization had recognized crypto as a form of money, and that tokens were in no way to be considered as a substitute for cash.

Meanwhile, as reported, the Colombian government has opened applications for companies wishing to trial crypto transactions in a new regulatory sandbox. Open / Comment