Central Bank of France Teases “Digital Euro” with Ethereum and Ripple and more…| Crypto Market News
Thrilling market news with CoinMetro’s CEO, Kevin Murcko in This Week in Crypto!
Crypto Market News Highlights
Crypto Firms Brace as World Bank Predicts 20% Crash in Global Remittances
If people have less money, then they are going to send less money to people that they usually send money to — makes sense. Kevin doesn’t know why crypto firms would ‘brace’. Maybe XRP, since they have ties in to some remittance companies.
Generally speaking, even though blockchain is almost the definition of a good remittance system, it’s not so much talked about as a remittance system. You don’t see many crypto news stories talking about remittance unless it’s tied to XRP, and maybe XLM.
At the end of the day, people are losing their jobs and people have less money. Especially lower paying jobs. A lot of immigrants cross the borders and they usually take the lower paying jobs. Most of the affected jobs in the lockdown, are lower paying jobs. So less money is being sent back home. In terms of recovery, lower paying jobs will definitely come back in force quicker. But remittances are going to fall in both frequency and amount.
Crypto Derivatives Exchange BitMEX Forced to Halt Operations in Japan
Unlicensed, synthetic derivatives. They should have halted some time ago, but now they are being forced to. They probably got another letter.
Japan cracked down on FX 6–7 years ago, and they set laws that are equivalent to what the US has. Essentially “if you are not regulated in this country, you can’t solicit or bring on retail business in this country”. And Japan started to enforce it. They haven’t enforced it as much as the US, when it comes to the CFTC, futures and commodities trading. But they do enforce it. It makes sense — they have a law, BitMEX is supposed to follow it. And they don’t.
Binance, Coinbase were the most active industry hirers in 2020’s first quarter
Well, they’re two of the biggest players in the industry. Companies are gearing up for what they believe will be a more active market now that people are looking for passive income and perhaps looking to take some of that stimulus money that they don’t need, and put it into crypto.
They were probably some of the biggest hirers regardless. They have some of the biggest workforces. Makes sense that they are still hiring throughout this. Even CoinMetro is hiring more people. We brought on two new people in the last couple of weeks, and three new people in the last month and a half. And we’re still hiring.
Antonopoulos: Chainalysis Is Helping World’s Worst Dictators & Regimes
Yeah, no. All that Chainalysis and any other of these “on chain data aggregators” does, is that they take data that anyone can actually get, and they simply aggregate it.
Like we have talked about weeks ago, about the fact that blockchain in itself is kinda creating this “access for everyone”. If you trade commodities or if you trade equities, you don’t get the inside information, and if you do, you don’t get it as fast as the other guy.
With blockchain, everybody has the same access to the same data. But there is so much of it, and so raw, that most people can’t decemiate it. Chainalysis is simply taking that data, and giving it companies to use in a meaningful way — AML screening, KYC.
Now they’re “providing this to the world’s dictators and regimes”. No. They’re not getting any data that didn’t exist before. They’re simply getting it in a repackaged manner to allow them to make decisions.
Kevin gets the privacy advocates, and also that things like crises like the fear based pandemic we are sitting in right now — no government will let one of these go by without removing some of our freedoms. That’s generally how any type of government works. But come on guys. Really? There are arguments on both sides, and neither side will win over the other side entirely. But to think that a company that takes public data and aggregates it to make it understandably for a specific use case, is somehow “helping dictators” is a little too far fetched even for the most ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Chinese Court Declares Ethereum Legal Property With Economic Value
They did it with Bitcoin, and Kevin remembers how everybody lauded it on twitter and he had to be the one voice of reason and say “guys, the only reason they’re classifying it as legal property is not because they like it, it’s so that they can legally seize it as part of a property seizure”.
So at the end of the day — this is not necessarily bad news, but the motives are not pro-Ethereum, just like they weren’t pro-Bitcoin.
OpenLaw Launches First ‘Legal DAO’ for Distributed VC Investments
The idea behind DAOs is quite cool, but ‘legal DAO’ is a bit of a stretch. Kevin likes to use the term ‘lazy solution’. The idea that anywhere in the world right now, you can create a truly distributed autonomous organization — which means basically created entirely onchain and has no jurisdiction tied to it and that you can autonomously run it — well, it’s just not possible. So a legal DAO is definitely a lazy solution, a way to try and make it partially what it should be, without doing what it is meant to be.
DAOs make a lot of sense for certain things, they don’t make other sense for other things. And generally speaking, for most operations, there is no way to do it yet. But they’re trying to make a step in the right direction.
Japanese crypto regulators approve Huobi Token
It’s an exchange token, generally tied in something on the face similar to other exchange tokens. Doesn’t really surprise Kevin that it would be approved. Huobi actually might have a license in Japan, thus if they got a license and their own token was classified as a security, then they wouldn’t have gotten the license in the first place. So it makes sense that their token would be approved.
CoinMetro also has a unique exchange token. Read all about CoinMetro’s XCM token!
Noted Tax Haven Cayman Islands Sees New Bills to Bring Local Crypto to FATF’s Heel
After Brexit, Cayman Islands went onto the graylist and was threatened to be put on the blacklist.
The travel rule is nothing to worry about, guys. Everybody that is trying to make out these complex solutions on chain to comply with the travel rule, they don’t really understand it. All the travel rule says is that “I’m a regulated exchange and so are you, if a client moves money from me to you, I have to tell you where that money came from”. That should not be difficult.
Central Bank of France Teases “Digital Euro” with Ethereum and Ripple
There are lots of papers out talking about Central Bank Issued Digital Currency. It is going to happen, 100%. Things like the Coronavirus and Libra may have propelled it into the conversations, but it has been in the conversation since at least 2016. That’s the first time that Kevin talked with someone specifically about these digital sovereign fiat currency on chain.
The ECB has to do it, France can’t do it alone. If France and Germany decide to do it, then the ECB probably would follow. But at the end of the day, it’s going to happen. Will it happen in Europe first? Probably not. Will it happen in Europe? Most definitely.
Goldman’s chilling S&P 500 Crash Prediction Makes Bitcoin Vulnerable In Mid-2020
If anybody out there is thinking that the global and macro economic effects that are happening right now, are somehow going to reverse themselves as soon as people come out of lockdown — they’re delirious. We will see depressionary type levels in many markets. Kevin tweeted about this the other day — equities on the whole are fictitious. People thought that Bitcoin and crypto were going to decouple from markets. It hasn’t.
Bitcoin went down to 3–4k and popped back up. And it’s back at levels it was before the fall. A-ha. But at the same time, if it was truly decoupling itself and was an asset that did not follow the rest of the world during times of crisis, then we’d be at 100k already.
Kevin would say that every bubble that has happened in crypto up until today, has majorly retail driven. Retail may be getting stimulus checks and some of these people may still have a job and some money, and they’re buying Bitcoin thinking that everything is going to blow over soon. But look, majorly retail money is not going to flow into any asset in the very near future.
Kevin expects a second wave of crashes. Either to at least test the lows, and more than likely, to pop through those lows. If we go macro on Bitcoin and go back, we are obviously still in a very bearish market since 20k. If you go all the way back to when it was 1 cent, we’re bullish and simply in a recovery zone right now. Arguments can be made on both sides.
Since the 20k high, we are not bullish. That’s for sure. As markets mature, fundamentals play a more and more important role. In a hype driven market, fundamentals play a role, but only micro fundamentals that have to do with that industry. As the market gets bigger and initially starts to mature, it remains hype driven — which we still are — but fundamentals play a bigger role. And the world, fundamentally, is in shit.
Kevin would say, “buyer be aware”. Don’t rush into things.
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