The global coronavirus lockdown has put a strain on Venezuela’s internet, which could logically make crypto participation difficult.

As much of the world hunkers down in quarantine, people logically turn to internet-based services for work, as well as a way to pass the time. This mass movement has put significant stress on available data usage capacities in Venezuela, Movistar told Bloomberg for its March 27 article.

A daughter company of Telefonica SA, Movistar is the nation’s main telecom provider. 

Global precautions cause global strain
In an effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, much of the globe presently sits quarantined in a single location.

Within the first seven days of a shelter-in-place movement, Venezuelans have pushed the country’s less-than stellar internet capacities to the limit.

“All this in a network that was already operating at maximum capacity,” Movistar Venezuela’s president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zarco, explained on March 20, via a note to customers, as reported by Bloomberg. The president noted the provider’s vital role in the food and health sectors.   

Internet strain could mean crypto difficulties
Javier Valero, a Caracas-based attorney, has faced significant difficulties during his recent home-based work. “My Internet cuts off all the time — I’m either late or I hear half of what’s being talked about” in conference calls,” Valero told Bloomberg. “It’s so slow it’s tragic.”

As the crypto space is largely an internet-based industry, digital asset trading and usage might logically become difficult for Venezuelans.

After 10,000,000% inflation, citizens flocked toward crypto. July 2019 showed record Bitcoin volume numbers coming from the country. The current internet strain could possibly now make such usage more difficult.

Venezuela also hit the news earlier this week as a number of the nation’s brass faced a slew of criminal charges, including narco-terrorism.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/venezuelas-struggling-internet-could-make-crypto-trading-tough

Trillions of dollars have been injected into the global markets in an attempt to revitalize the world economy. The U.S. alone recently hit its highest unemployment rate in history.

The whole world seems to be falling apart except for blockchain
Kraken, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States, is looking to increase its job force by 10%, despite the recent dips in crypto price, according to Forbes on March 26.

Kraken’s team, currently 800 members strong, is adding an additional 67 hires to the company over the coming weeks. Many of the company’s openings are for people who are hospitality professionals with skill sets focused around the liberal arts.

Indeed.com displayed approximately 114.5 per million blockchain-centric jobs last December, right before the first new coronavirus case was reported. By February 2020 that number had increased 3% to 118.4 per million.

Optimism In Blockchain Industry Booms Despite Global Recession
Blockchain industry experts are bullish towards the crypto market. Jihan Wu, Founder of Bitcoin mining giant Bitman, gave his first interview of 2020 at a Chinese blockchain media event, revealing his continued optimism for a crypto market bull run over the coming year. He explained that:

“There are two reasons: first, from China and its neighboring countries experiences, coronavirus can be obtained and taken under control in about 2 months. Secondly, countries around the world are adopting great quantitative easing monetary policies.”

Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder of the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, also stated on Twitter yesterday that Bitcoin is the “only vaccine in the world that can give you immunity to the money printing disease.”

Cointelegraph reported previously that blockchain will be the most in-demand hard skill in 2020, along with cloud computing, analytical reasoning, and artificial intelligence.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-jobs-continue-to-rise-despite-global-recession

How far can a preliminary injunction from an American court reach? The answer to that question is everything for Telegram’s embattled TON blockchain project.

TON has been under legal fire since shortly after the SEC became aware of its token sale. The drama is ongoing as recently as this week, when a federal district court judge issued a preliminary injunction against Telegram for its ten-figure initial coin offering. The allegation is that Telegram’s GRAM token, operating on the TON blockchain, was illegally being sold as a security, and the judge effectively took the SEC’s side on the case.

Filing an opinion with the New York Southern District Court, Judge P. Kevin Castel wrote this week that “the SEC has shown a substantial likelihood of success in proving that Telegram’s present plan to distribute Grams is an offering of securities under the Howey test."

The Howey test is a legal yardstick used to determine if a financial instrument meets the definition of a security — to pass the Howey test is to be named a security (and therefore be subject to regulation).

Now Telegram’s lawyers are firing back with their own paperwork in order to learn more. They wrote a letter to the judge to ask about the injunction in detail.

(The) Defendants respectfully seek to clarify whether the scope of the preliminary injunction set forth in the Order applies only to Purchase Agreements with U.S.-based investors. We appreciate the Court’s attention to this matter and are available should the Court require more information regarding this request.

In other words, their question is: does this injunction apply only to ICO investors based in the US, or to everyone?

Telegram raised $1.7 billion during its ICO, and a distinct majority of that money came from outside US borders. If the injunction only applies to US-based investors, it’s theoretically feasible for Telegram to launch TON anyway without American money.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/telegram-seeks-clarity-on-the-preliminary-injunction-against-ton

The President of the Brazilian Banking Federation, Murilo Portugal, has argued that  cryptocurrencies are not really currencies at all.

Portugal was speaking in a debate about the 'Impact of the Digital Revolution on the Financial System' at the non-profit think tank, the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation. The debate examined the impact of new technologies on financial services, including blockchain, cryptocurrency, big data, artificial intelligence and fintech.

Portugal argued that “cryptocurrencies do not fulfill any of the classic functions of the currency" and said they are not a unit of account, or a means of exchange, or a store of value.

"They are actually called coins but they are not coins, which is why it is cryptocurrency. They do not fulfill any of the classic functions of the currency, which is to serve as an account unit, where people can express prices. They do not serve as a means of payment or as a store of value because the volatility is very high."

Portugal is a respected figure in the financial world, he has a degree in Economic Development from Cambridge and has served as an executive director of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

He went on to theorize that money and information are becoming one and the same — predicting that data and information will end up being regulated in the same way as money. "It is an experience that I think we already see happening," he said.

Bitcoin is a ‘vehicle currency’ in Venezuela
A report published on March 24 by the Open Money Initiative suggests that even in neighbouring Venezuela where hyperinflation is rampant, Bitcoin is not being used as a traditional store of value.

The report, by data scientist Matt Ahlborg, looked at the effects of a multi day power blackout in Venezuela and its relationship to trading volume on Localbitcoins, as well as trades between Bitcoin and other South American currencies.

It determined Bitcoin is being used as a 'vehicle currency' to transfer value out of Venezuela and that informal money transmitters are holding onto Bitcoin only as long as necessary and converting it as soon as possible to dollars or stablecoins. The report stated:

"Bitcoin is being used not as a store of value endpoint, but as a channel on the road to obtain more stable currencies such as the US dollar, Colombian peso, Chinese yuan and various stablecoins."

However Ahlborg concluded this is an incredibly valuable use case for Bitcoin:

"It’s not unreasonable to suggest that Bitcoin could have already facilitated billions of dollars worth of censorship-resistant value transfer to and from Venezuela over the last few years. If we take this as a real possibility, then Bitcoin has already played a part in changing the destiny of an entire country."

Is Bitcoin a store of value or a form of money?
Bitcoin's ability to serve as a currency is hotly debated. Some argue that Bitcoin is 'digital gold', including the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust — who launched an advertising campaign around the concept. In a blog post published in February, U.S exchange Coinbase argued that "Bitcoin is a store of value to rival gold in the digital age”.

Cointelegraph's Antonio Madeira explored the question in an article in late February. He spoke to Antoni Trenchev, managing partner of crypto banking app Nexo, who argued Bitcoin is a store of value:

“The very early narrative was that Bitcoin was going to be a revolutionary currency and p2p payment system. I think that this has failed to materialize in any way. Bitcoin has the functionalities of a currency but it’s used more as a store of value and transition of value especially in larger quantities.”

Madeira wrote that Bitcoin exhibits five of the six features of money — durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply. However he concluded it is currently failing on the sixth, which is general acceptability as a payment method.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptocurrency-is-a-failure-as-a-currency-says-brazils-banking-chief

Following a series of platform outages during historic price action earlier this month, Robinhood, a popular stock and cryptocurrency trading app, now faces another class action complaint.

The lawsuit, filed March 25, was brought by customer Bruce Queen, on behalf of “all Robinhood customers within the United States who were not able to execute trades on securities or change limit orders during the Outages and incurred financial losses.”

Missing the biggest gain in Dow history
As Cointelegraph reported, on March 2, the Robinhood suffered technical problems for the entire day, meaning customers were unable to trade the securities in their accounts for a period of over sixteen hours.

This coincided with the then-biggest one-day point gain in the Dow Jones stock market index history.

Queen alleges that he had bought put contracts through the platform on Feb. 28, and submitted a sell order for these on March 2. However, he was unable to access the sell order throughout the day and the order was canceled by Robinhood on the morning of March 3. Queen was then forced to sell his contracts at a lower price on March 3.

Technical trouble not over for Robinhood
While Queen managed to sell his contracts on March 3, Robinhood’s technical problems were far from over. The platform went offline again for around three hours that day, reportedly due to an unprecedented load caused by a record volume of trades.

A week later on March 9 the platform suffered another outage, with customers unable to buy or sell securities on the public market. This third outage coincided with a major crash across stock markets, with the Dow losing 2,000 points and the Nasdaq Composite index falling 7.3%.

Yet more issues with the platform were reported on March 12.

Queen is not claiming losses on behalf of himself during these subsequent outages, but they are included on behalf of class-action participants who have.

Trying to win back community trust
Following the repeated outages there was a heated reaction from service users who had lost out. The platform has attempted to win back the trust of affected users in the form of credits, with the exact dollar amount being decided on a case-to-case basis.

However, it seems that this has failed to pacify all of the disgruntled customers, who are now demanding a jury trial in the class-action suit.

Indeed, Robinhood is facing another class-action lawsuit related to the platform outages in a United States federal court in Florida.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/another-class-action-suit-brought-against-robinhood-over-platform-outages

As major central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects develop apace, it is becoming clear that not all digital coins will look, or even function the same way.

A recent analysis by Chinese financial media group InterChain Pulse reveals that two of the most visible such projects — those of the Bank of England (BoE) and the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) — may be more different than they are alike.

InterChain Pulse cited BoE’s discussion paper released earlier this month, where the financial institution seriously weighed the pros and cons of issuing a CBDC denominated in pounds sterling.

InterChain compared the provisions set forth in the bank’s report with those of the PBoC and concluded that the two have significant differences in their design.

Unlike China, where the central bank will be the issuing authority of the CBDC, Great Britain has assigned the issuance of its CBDC to the parliament. Moreover, China is working on the digitization of its national currency, the yuan, while Great Britain is planning to create a competitive payment system.

Compared with the digital currency of the PBoC, another significant difference is the application of smart contracts to ensure transactions. The Chinese central bank’s digital currency currently does not support this type of operation.

The BoE’s CBDC will comply with anti-money laundering (AML) provisions, the financing of terrorism and sanctions procedures, and be compatible with the General Data Protection Legislation.

The PBoC’s CBDC must comply with the AML provisions and the bank’s own privacy rules.

InterChain Pulse noted some similarities between the two projects, the most notable being that neither will be based on distributed ledger technology. As both will be used for transactions, BoE and PBoC are developing networks that concentrate on supporting a very high transaction frequency.

Additionally, InterChain Pulse states that neither network will recognize a private digital currency.

Recent patents shed light on China’s digital yuan
As Cointelegraph recently reported, patents from Chinese payments platform Alipay — which is working on the CBDC project — have revealed some details about the digital yuan’s features.

Among them, Alipay itself will be a secondary issuer of the currency, while wallet functionality can be determined by behavior and personal data.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/china-and-uks-planned-digital-currencies-appear-to-have-little-in-common

The Neo Foundation announced on March 25 that they have released the necessary funds to continue operating for the 2020 Fiscal Year (FY). A total of 1,660,865 NEO worth approximately $11 million was released, with 27,800,303 NEO ($190 million) still remaining.

According to its blog post, the Neo whitepaper allows the Foundation to sell its stake of NEO to “support Neo's technological development, ecosystem growth, community expansion.”

The transaction ID published by the foundation reveals that the tokens were sent to an address that contains over 14.6 million NEO, worth $100 million. The announcement reads that the tokens were transferred from the “locked account to the current account,” which would imply that the foundation has an even deeper funding pool than the one contained in the first wallet.

While the sparse transaction history seems to exclude the possibility that it is an exchange address, it could also be the exchange’s cold wallet. Neo Foundation representatives did not immediately answer Cointelegraph’s inquiries on the matter.

The foundation also revealed that it completed the financial review for 2019, with an annual report to be “released soon” to the community.

Background on Neo
Neo, originally known as AntShares, is a blockchain platform based on BFT, a distributed Proof of Stake (dPoS) consensus algorithm.

While it also supports tokens, the platform appears to be shifting its focus toward mainstream applications. This is also seen in its programming environment, which supports traditional languages such as C++ and JavaScript, as opposed to custom languages like Solidity.

The project hasn’t often been in the spotlight recently, as it focuses on relaunching its blockchain for Neo 3.0. In early 2019, roadmap predictions placed its launch in Q2 2020.

NEO co-founder, Da Hongfei, focused on the importance of blockchain at Blockshow Asia in improving the Internet’s data privacy, suggesting that this a potential development direction for Neo.

In September, Neo joined Microsoft’s .NET Foundation as the first blockchain member.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/neo-releases-11-million-from-cold-wallet-to-fund-itself-through-2020

Janet Jackson’s billionaire ex husband, Wissam Al Mana, has demanded that Facebook reveal who was behind ads on the platform that used his image to promote a crypto scam.

The case stems from late February when Al Mana filed a lawsuit against the social media giant about a cryptocurrency scam using his name to promote itself in the Middle East. Al Mana claimed defamation, malicious falsehood and false advertising from the purported cryptocurrency firm ‘Bitcoin Trader’.

One man to sue them all
Facebook has since deleted the offending ads, but Al Mana is concerned fraudsters can publish similar ads containing his image in the future. His lawyers have applied for a court order that would oblige Facebook to reveal details about the ad’s publishers, the Irish Times reported on March 25.

Al Mana is seeking information about the fraudsters’ names, addresses, contact details, payment methods and billing address. Al Mana is suing Facebook Ireland Ltd along with the parties behind the ads.

High Court Justice Leonie Reynolds has urged the parties to resolve their differences before she hears the order application. The 12 month deadline for the dispute hearing is in May, however Facebook’s counsel asserted that it could be extended to 24 months amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

Crypto scams involving big names
Claiming false legitimacy by appropriating the identity of well known figures —- including Kate Winslet, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Bill Gates — is popular among cryptocurrency swindlers. In November last year a Dutch judge ordered Facebook to pay 10,000 Euros ($10,890) each time a new, fake Bitcoin ad featuring Big Brother creator John de Mol appeared.

The crypto community recently spotted a bogus YouTube account impersonating Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of major blockchain startup Ripple, in order to promote a fake airdrop scam. The YouTube scammer has been asking users to send between 2,000 XRP to 500,000 XRP in order to “participate” in an airdrop of 20,000 to 5 million XRP.

Some online perpetrators are even impersonating the World Health Organization in an attempt to steal cryptocurrency donations to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/billionaire-demands-facebook-reveal-who-placed-scam-bitcoin-ads-about-him