CoinMetro’s CEO, Kevin Murcko brings you the most recent crypto market news during the weekly AMA every Friday.
Crypto Market News Highlights
Binance Is Not Under Our Jurisdiction, Says Malta Regulator
A long time ago, in one of the “This Week in Crypto” shows, Kevin said that at some point, Malta was going to disown Binance.
Malta actually had the prime minister shilling Binance at one point. So, after doing so much shilling, they couldn’t just kick Binance to the curb.
Now, we have the MFSA (Malta Financial Services Authority) saying that Binance holds no licenses in Malta, and are not under Malta’s jurisdiction. However, they haven’t filed any complaints or fines against Binance.
We’ll see what happens from now on out, but we have the official stance that Binance has never been running their operations from Malta.
This doesn’t really come as a surprise. Malta was threatened to be put on a greylist by the FATF last year, due to lacking oversight into AML. Binance was almost guaranteed a part of that.
Find out what CoinMetro’s AML, CTF and KYC practices are.
CME Bitcoin Futures Daily Trading Volume Hits 2020 Low — That’s a Bullish Sign
They are basing this on similar methods from analysing traditional market flows. Kevin doesn’t think this is a way to measure Bitcoin futures, considering that holding futures — of which many will be a synthetic — does it really have the same underlying weight to the underlying asset?
Kevin doesn’t think this is necessarily a bullish sign. Not bearish either, but it doesn’t point in any direction, it simply shows low volume.
Lawsuit Alleging Ripple’s XRP Is Unregistered Security Moves Forward
This is a private lawsuit by an XRP investor, not filed by a state or government. The investor is trying to say that something they bought into is an unregistered security.
This would carry significantly more weight if it was “the United States of America versus Ripple”.
It’s allowed to move forward, but Kevin wouldn’t put too much weight behind this. If there are some civil engorgement or penalties levied against Ripple, that would open the door for some type of SEC action. But at this point, that remains a big open question.
Steven Seagal Charged by SEC for Promoting 2018 ICO
They offered to pay him $250,000 in cash, and $750,000 worth of their token. He was paid about ~$150,000 of this. Does Steven Seagal really cost that much? They could have gotten someone a little higher on the shelf for that money.
This goes to show that the ICO “reign of terror” from the SEC, them not going after only issuers, but also people promoting these issuers. Promoters were shilling things on Twitter for example, without saying “I was paid to make this promotion”. This is the argument from the SEC.
People say that ICOs are dead, but Kevin doesn’t think that’s true. If you can raise money from nothing, people will do it. ICOs will be back in the future, but likely under a more regulated umbrella.
Blockchain Pioneer Caitlin Long to Build Crypto Bank in Wyoming
Wyoming famously passed a bunch of localized legislation specific to Wyoming.
The term “crypto bank” doesn’t make sense. The whole reason that crypto became infamous, and now famous, was to get away from the centralization of banks.
Every time there is innovation in FinTech/Finance in general, it gets eaten by traditional finance, and they make the choice whether they are going to use it or kill it.
As soon as Kevin heard about the ability to make decentralized networks for cross-border payments, he thought that this will be adopted by traditional finance. The ideas about separating ourselves from the banks, is not going to come to fruition.
The definition of the term “bank” will change in peoples’ minds.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao: Bitcoin SV Founder Craig Wright ‘Is a Fraud’
Kevin very, very rarely agrees with CZ, but this would be one of those times.
Some people say “Craig is an intelligent guy, he made good predictions”. It’s not hard to make good predictions. Especially when you make 5000 predictions. One of them will come true.
Craig is not Satoshi. He did not create Bitcoin. He did not write the original whitepaper. He is a fraud, and has been proved to be a fraud many times.
Report: Iranian General Advocates Crypto Use for Skirting Sanctions
This Iranian general probably doesn’t know much about crypto.
With privacy coins like Monero, or mixers, one can hide the transfer. In terms of laundering money, cash is much easier to launder. Cash has much less data points than crypto does. For crypto, even for someone with the best money laundering skills, there will be enough data at some point to give probable cause to the fact that money was linked to certain individuals. The data is public and can’t be erased.
So, skirting sanctions with crypto is a stupid idea.
Swiss Stock Exchange Invests in Institutional Trading Platform for Digital Assets
Famously, SIX had a whitepaper roughly eight months ago, about having something similar to what CoinMetro/Ignium is trying to do with the CSD. Seems like they figured out that it’s not so easy to do, and now they are branching out and buying different pieces of that ecosystem.
Just goes to show. We had people question CoinMetro in the past, asking why we didn’t do things like Binance. Making a product as fast as we can, making as much money as possible.
You can be successful doing that, and you can fail doing that. If you fail, you have no value in your company, because you own nothing. A shitty software that no one is going to buy.
So, making products unique to your brand adds a lot of value. SIX probably had too much trouble or didn’t want to takethe time to create these products, so instead they are buying pieces.
CFTC Holds A Meeting to Learn All About Stablecoins
Kevin was just in Montenegro recently, teaching the Central Bank and the Capital Market Authority about stablecoins. This is a trend that seems to be happening around the world. Every single Fed/State-run bank will be issuing their own digital currency.
The CTFC knows this and are probably trying to look into if these are classified correctly, if they would fall under their jurisdiction as futures/commodities.
Kevin thinks that it all depends on the underlying asset, and the structuring of the token itself. In most cases, putting a trust account using fiat currency, it wouldn’t fall under the CTFC. In some cases, they possibly could. Like a gold-backed stablecoin. CTFC is the regulator for gold.
So, tey are trying to understand which of these assets are going to fall under their jurisdiction, and how they are going to regulate this.
Dusk Network Plans to Tokenize Equity for Thousands of Dutch Companies
The big story here is that they partnered with a registrar, and automatically when you create a company you will get tokenized shares instead of digital shares certificates. This actually doesn’t do anything, except bring these things on the blockchain.
It’s not solving any of the problems that currently exist. But this gets us closer to those that are doing settlement, and have natively tokenized assets.
But Kevin thinks it’s cool to see someone working on that problem, and will look into reaching out to these guys. Maybe there are some Dutch companies we can bring into the CSD.
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Tune in every Friday for “This Week in Crypto” with CoinMetro’s CEO Kevin Murcko on our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/coinmetro
