July 1, 2019 @ 6:12 am By Cali Haan  |  

Gemini, one of 18 New York-based cryptocurrency companies licensed and regulated in the state, is opening a new office in Chicago in order to “meet growing institutional demand,” exchange co-founder Tyler Winklevoss writes in a recent blog post. “Our Chicago office will serve as an… Read More

July 1, 2019 @ 3:40 am By Cali Haan  |  

A crypto scam featuring the image of the Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, has been circulating on Facebook and may have conned thousands of people, local news outlet The National reports: “The fake news story scattered legitimate information, including factual details… Read More

July 1, 2019 @ 2:34 am By Cali Haan  |  

Crypto users have long pervaded the rumour that the price of Bitcoins tends to increase on Friday and fall on Monday, and recent qualitative research from Bloomberg seems to confirms that observation “(S)urges in weekend activity since the beginning of May account for about 40%… Read More

June 30, 2019 @ 1:25 pm By Cali Haan  |  

Blockdata, a 2018-founded company maintaining a database of “objective information about the companies, projects, products, and tokens that comprise the blockchain ecosystem,” has produced an interesting report about stablecoins called “An overview of the current state of stablecoins.” Blockdata found that so far, at least… Read More

June 30, 2019 @ 8:01 am By Cali Haan  |  

Data at App Annie, the Apple App Store and Google Play downloads shows that consumer interest in crypto apps and “dApps” (purported “decentralized applications”) has flattened in 2019 even though the price of Bitcoin tripled this quarter, Bloomberg reports. The data is relevant, says the… Read More

June 29, 2019 @ 8:40 am By Cali Haan  |  

Clone websites designed to capitalize on the hype surrounding Facebook’s recently announced Libra cryptocurrency (not due for release until 2020) and divert investor funds to scammers are already cropping up across the net, cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows (DS) reports in a recent block post. The… Read More

June 29, 2019 @ 8:10 am By Cali Haan  |  

On Thursday, a hacker “exploited a vulnerability in (the Bitrue exchange’s) Risk Control team’s 2nd review process to access the personal funds of about 90 Bitrue users,” according to a tweet thread from Singaporean crypto exchange Bitrue. This initial attack was quickly repeated on the… Read More

June 28, 2019 @ 9:37 am By Cali Haan  |  

Europol has announced that a 14-month-long investigation into a €24 million “typosquatting-based” cryptocurrency theft has netted 6 suspects in the UK and Netherlands. The five men and one woman were arrested “in simultaneous warrants” in Bath Staverton, Amsterdam and Rotterdam yesterday morning. An estimate 4 000… Read More

June 28, 2019 @ 8:39 am By Cali Haan  |  

Etienne Goosse, director general of the European Payments Council (EPC), has told Reuters that Facebook’s new cryptographic payments program, Libra, is forcing banks in the Eurozone to rapidly develop an instant payments network for banks in the zone. The EPCs goal is to help harmonize… Read More

June 27, 2019 @ 5:27 pm By Cali Haan  |  

American crypto exchange Coinbase went dark Wednesday at the same time as the price of Bitcoins plummeted approximately $1800 dollars in 15 minutes, Coindesk reports. At the company’s Twitter account, Coinbase attributed the outage to cloudflare. [status] Identified: We are currently investigating this issue. We… Read More

June 27, 2019 @ 8:10 am By Cali Haan  |  

A trader on Synthetix, “a decentralized protocol focused on creating synthetic assets,” took advantage of a price feed (oracle) glitch governing smart contracts on the platform to mint $37 million in synthetic ethers, Crypto AM reports. According to a blog post by Synthetix, the manoeuvre… Read More

June 27, 2019 @ 1:42 am By Cali Haan  |  

Blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis, which recently expanded into providing KYC/AML support services to cryptocurrency businesses, has added another member to its powerful compliance team. According to a company release, Michael Mosier, former high-ranking employee at the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Office of Foreign Assets Control… Read More

June 26, 2019 @ 11:42 pm By Cali Haan  |  

The team behind Paragon coin has issued a notice informing “Paragonians” that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has ordered a 60-day extension of the claims process the regulator compelled when the company was found to have violated the Securities Act by selling “PRG”… Read More

June 26, 2019 @ 2:38 am By Cali Haan  |  

Yesterday, Stephen Moore, Donald Trump’s controversial, former pick for a 14-year post on the US Federal Reserve Board, told Yahoo Finance that Facebook’s new Libra crypto venture is, “on balance…a good thing.” Moore said the coin implies “competition” for central banks: “It’s interesting, because [Facebook’s Libra]… Read More

June 26, 2019 @ 1:23 am By Cali Haan  |  

There has been much trepidatious commentary issued since Facebook announced its Libra Coin cryptocurrency venture last week. Politicians have warned that Libra, a payment system purportedly intended to help bank the unbanked and grant them access to low-cost remittances (while profiting Facebook), could run afoul of… Read More

June 25, 2019 @ 10:09 pm By Cali Haan  |  

Patrick Gaulthier, vice president of Amazon Pay told attendees at Fortune’s Brainstorm Finance 2019 event earlier this month that retail giant has no immediate plans to involve itself with Facebook’s Libra coin venture or start an Amazon crypto. “It’s fresh, it’s speculative,” he said regarding Libra…. Read More

June 25, 2019 @ 5:45 pm By Cali Haan  |  

Two computer programmers in Israel, brothers Eli and Assaf Gigi, have been arrested in Jerusalem and accused of operating a sprawling phishing scam that helped them steal 120 000 bitcoins from the Bitfinex trading platform in 2016. According to Israeli crime reporting site Posta, “They… Read More

June 25, 2019 @ 2:36 am By Cali Haan  |  

Banking technologists Martin Walker, Keith Pritchard and Professor David L Yermack debated the promise and realities of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies on a panel that opened the most recent Mapping the Financial Frontier Conference. The conference was held at Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta,… Read More

June 25, 2019 @ 1:29 am By Cali Haan  |  

Reserve Bank of Australia chief Philip Lowe told participants in a Q&A session June 20th that he does not expect Facebook’s new Libra cryptocurrency network to be fully implemented any time soon. “There’s a lot of water under the bridge before Facebook’s proposal becomes something… Read More

June 24, 2019 @ 9:27 pm By Cali Haan  |  

Last week’s announcement of “Libra,” Facebook’s move into creating a cryptocurrency payments infrastructure to underpin its social network, was met with considerable fanfare and may have induced a rally in the price of Bitcoins. But several pundits on Yahoo have noted that so far, banks… Read More