GildCoin - Crypto News

2020-12-15 20:00:32 ​​Billionaire Turns to Bitcoin Mining To Help His Troubled Business

The Ukrainian oligarch and former Dnipropetrovsk Oblast governor Ihor Kolomoisky had reportedly launched a crypto mining operation at a troubled steel processing factory in the United States – and he may only just be getting started.

Per Radio Liberty, “current and ex-employees” of the plant, CC Metals & Alloys (CCMA), located in Kentucky, has switched off its furnaces – once used to produce alloys such as ferrosilicon.

But the report’s authors and its anonymous sources claim that the plant’s owners “have begun with a new way of earning money to cover their losses in the steel alloy market: namely, crypto.”

The sources added that “a few years ago,” Kolomoisky and his fellow Ukrainian, Miami-based partners Mordechai Korf and Uriel Laber ordered a disused warehouse once used to store specialized alloys to be repurposed and “filled with hundreds, if not thousands” of rigs used to mine cryptoassets.

If the report is indeed true, the CCMA crypto mining is no anomaly. A growing number of crypto miners have set up shop in the Tennessee River Valley area in recent years, hoping to take advantage of the region’s notoriously low electricity prices.

A current employee claimed that “entire truckloads” of computer hardware were brought to the CCMA warehouse, which the employee claims “works independently of the plant itself, and it has not been affected by job cuts.

And the same media outlet claims that a spokesperson for Korf and Laber told it back in July that the plant had asked a “third party” to set up a “computer center” at the plant that would use “artificial intelligence and blockchain technology” to help “diversify” profits – but did not specify how much the Ukrainian businessmen had spent on the project, or who they had contracted to carry out the work.

The Korf and Laber spokesperson indicated that more crypto mining projects were already in the pipeline, adding,

"Both artificial intelligence and blockchain technology are high-energy industries and are expected to grow exponentially over the next decade, reaching a market value of USD 20 billion. Based on the success of the first pilot program, we will be able to expand this line of business. Having many sources of income is a prudent move for CCMA.”

Crypto mining has become increasingly popular for those wishing to make use of shuttered facilities in former industrial powerhouse states now going through harder times. In 2018, Politico reported that miners in Washington were setting up shop in former fruit warehouses and abandoned carwashes.

Site Selection reported, also in 2018, that bitcoin (BTC) miners were looking to Montana, meanwhile.

And Fortune recently explained that a public utility in Chelan County, Washington, has had to deal with “a crush of mining companies asking to tap into the county’s ample hydroelectric resources.”

Kolomoisky – one of the country’s richest people – is the co-founder of PrivatBank, one of Ukraine’s largest banks, although he has recenetly faced controversy regarding his financial dealings with the financial entity. He also has close business ties with Ukrainian football club Dnipro. Open / Comment

2020-12-11 20:00:42 ​​Business Giants Invest USD 60m in Blockchain-powered

A group of South Korean and Japanese business giants including Hanhwa Investment & Securities, SoftBank and SK have joined more established blockchain investors to complete a Series B investment round worth over USD 60m in South Korean firm Chai, the provider of a blockchain-powered payment gateway.

Chai completed a USD 15m Series A in February this year.

The firm is a partner of stablecoin issuer Terra, and makes use of Terra’s blockchain and stablecoin offerings to, it claims, offer lower transaction fees and provide its users with discounts.

Chai launched in South Korea last year – and claims to have over 2.5m users. A partnership deal with BC Card, one of South Korea’s biggest credit card issuers, has also boosted its profile.


Some 2,200 merchants in South Korea have partnership deals with Chai, with the latter looking to expand its reach in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has seen South Koreans turn to contactless pay, with a 17% increase in contact-free payments since the start of the crisis per central bank figures.

The government has also pledged to foster contact-free payment platforms as part of a bid to reduce eliminate the damage caused by pandemics and other modern risks.

Per a press release report from Fn News, the investment round marks a new South Korean record for a fintech firm, and was led by Hanhwa Investment & Securities, part of the Hanwha Group conglomerate, which has some USD 166bn worth of assets.

SoftBank, meanwhile, operates the Vision Fund, the reportedly world’s biggest IT-focused venture capital fund, with capital of over USD 100bn.

SK is one of South Korea’s big two mobile and internet carriers – and is another of South Korea’s so-called chaebol, or mega-companies.

Commercial bank KEB Hana’s investment arm also took part in the round, as did the venture capital firms InterVest, Aarden Partners and K2 Investment Partners – as well as blockchain accelerator Hashed.

The latter’s CEO and managing partner Simon Kim said that he was “excited to see how blockchain is fueling further advancements in fintech services,” and was “looking forward to Chai’s expansion” outside South Korea and “into the global market.” Open / Comment

2020-12-04 20:00:19 ​​OMG Rallies as OMG Network Sold To a New Owner

The OMG Network – operator of the Ethereum (ETH)-based OMG token (formerly OmiseGo) – has a new owner, news that has sent the token’s price up by almost 8% in the past 24 hours.

At pixel time (09:21 UTC), OMG, ranked 43rd by market capitalization on Coinpaprika, trades at USD 4.05 and is up by almost 8% in a day and 16% in a week. The price rallied by 44% in a month and 462% in a year.

In an announcement, GBV, which describes itself as a full-service investment company working with Genesis Block, claimed it had “acquired” the OMG Network, although it did not reveal how much it had paid to secure the deal.

The OMG Network was launched by the fintech app payment firm SYNQA as a subsidiary in 2017. It has since been working on Layer-2 scaling infrastructure for the Ethereum blockchain network. Layer 1 is the base protocol (the Ethereum blockchain), while Layer 2 is any protocol built on top of Ethereum.

The move is GBV’s first in the crypto market, a fact that appears to have worried some online commenters.

On Twitter in a thread responding to a post from the OMG Network, one investor claimed that they were “really worried to see that my investment is sold to a company I really don't know about.”

Another, however, claimed that Genesis Block was the “quiet giant of Asia” and had partnership deals in place with the likes of Binance and the FTX exchange.

And another still expressed no shortage of cynicism about the deal, claiming that SYNQA was “offloading OMG so it doesn't have to deal with tokenholders,” and adding that “as a holder, this doesn’t look great.”

Genesis Block describes itself as a “premier over-the-counter trading company for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies,” and has called GBV its “sister company” in a tweet. The former was established in 2017 and is headquartered in Hong Kong. Open / Comment

2020-11-30 20:00:33 ​​Undetected Inflation: Your Fiat Money Devalues Faster Than You Think

Marshall Reinsdorf is a senior economist in the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Statistics Department and past president of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.

Lockdowns, working from home, and physical distancing caused people to spend larger shares of their household budgets on food and housing, while fewer people bought nonessentials, like airline tickets and clothing. And with incomes down as millions have lost their jobs, spending on nonessential items will likely remain depressed.

The consumer price index (CPI) does not reflect these abrupt changes in spending patterns because the CPI weights are not continuously updated. For example, the CPI could be pulled down by a decline in the prices of nonessentials that are no longer purchased.

A new IMF staff paper uses spending estimates derived from credit and debit card data to adjust the CPI weights to match spending patterns during the pandemic. The study finds that inflation during the first three months of the pandemic was actually higher than we thought.

The chart of the week looks at the difference over the February–May timeframe between a COVID-19 price index that adjusts the CPI weights based on the impacts of COVID-19 on spending in Canada and an index with unchanged CPI weights. The diamonds in the chart show the difference between the two indexes by region. In seven of the eight regions shown, the CPI is below the COVID-19 index. Looking at the average for all regions combined, the gap is 0.23 percentage points.

The main positive contributors to the gap between the COVID-19 index and the CPI are food and transport, each contributing 0.16 percentage points to the world gap. Rising food prices contribute to the faster growth of the COVID-19 index in all eight regions. Falling transport prices, which have a larger weight in the CPI than in the COVID-19 index, also contribute to the faster growth of the COVID-19 index in all regions except sub-Saharan Africa.

The main negative contributors to the world gap are housing, which contributes –0.03 percentage points, and clothing, which contributes –0.08 percentage points. Housing has a higher weight in the COVID-19 index than in the CPI, but its price index is so close to the overall CPI that increasing its weight does little to move the COVID-19 index away from the CPI. The downward effect of clothing is due to seasonal price increases having a smaller weight in the COVID-19 basket.

Despite the finding that CPI weights underestimated inflation in the early months of the pandemic, a quick update of the CPI weights to reflect the spending patterns during the pandemic would be impractical. Furthermore, introducing weights that are based on a short timeframe can reduce an index’s accuracy over the longer run. A better approach would be for statistical agencies to develop a supplementary index whose weights reflect spending patterns during the pandemic. This would give policymakers a better picture of the effect of inflation on the prices that consumers are actually paying. Open / Comment