A report published by the Better Business Bureau (BBB) says that cryptocurrency-related scams are continually growing, becoming the second most risky of 2019 among North Americans.

According to research from trust-gauging organization published on March 2nd, scams averaged about $3,000 in losses for businesses and charities within Canada and the United States.

The usual tactic, the study claims, is that of false promises of a "significant" return on investment in cryptocurrencies.

With such figures on the table, it represents a notable uptick since their 2018 report’s numbers, which put average losses at $900.

Trading in crypto exchanges with security breaches listed in the study

Following the same line, the BBB also lists as crypto scams losses from trading on exchanges vulnerable to hacker attacks.

The organization considers cryptocurrencies risky assets due to transactions that cannot be reversed in the event of theft or hacking.

The same report cites only one testimony from an Arizona resident about someone allegedly scammed by investing in cryptos. The BBB also specifies that most frauds in the field begin with email contact.

According to the BBB, a third of crypto scams involved the purchase of tokens, listing the cryptocurrency exchange company C2CX as responsible for one-third of the quoted losses (31%).

Employment-related scams as the riskiest in the ranking

Crypto-related scams are not the sole focus of the report. The BBB cited 9,050 instances of fraudulent online shopping sites. For comparison, the firm tallied only 273 cases of cryptos scams within the same year.

Another scam method is the fake employment offer, which is listed first in the BBB’s ranking, with the risk index showing a figure of 153.6, followed by crypto scams that have a 93.8 and online purchases with a slight margin of difference of 93.6.

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IOTA network is finally back online after suffering from a sever hack that caused a loss of around two million dollars. While the foundation has resumed value transactions on the network, is the ordeal over?

While resuming the network is an essential part of the platform’s recovery, the network needs to ensure user security. While the community celebrates the seeming return to normalcy, if another such event occurs due to improper security measures, the network might lose users’ trust for good.

IOTA Network back on track

The company’s Twitter handle posted the announcement on March 10, unveiling that the network’s Coordinator has been resumed. The company also revealed the steps taken to protect Trinity users as well as the future development of the network in a blog post.

As the network seems to have dealt with the aftermath of the hack, the foundation can now focus its resources on removing the centralized Coordinator. The Coordinator grants the foundation the authority to halt transactions on the network, exactly what happened last month.

Currently, the company is currently focused on implementing the Coodicide protocol upgrade to remove the network’s Coordinator. The upgrade would allow the foundation to decentralize the network without compromising its security.

IOTA Trinity Wallet hack

As previously reported by Cryptopolitan, the IOTA network suffered a breach when malicious actors exploited a vulnerability in its Trinity Wallet. The hackers made off with nearly two million dollars. The network was then switched off, halting all transactions to avoid further damage.

Over the month the network was down, the price of its IOTA token has crashed by nearly 40 percent.

Featured image by pixabay.

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Traditional exchanges have been using “circuit breakers” to curb panic selling, and it might be time for crypto exchanges to follow suit.

Yesterday, March 9, trading on the New York Stock Exchange was suspended for 15 minutes. This was due to the S&P 500 Index shedding more than 7% in the morning trading hours. A circuit breaker is a mechanism that suspends trading for a period of time based on market triggers, like Monday’s 7% decline, to prevent traders from behaving in a way that could cause further market slides.

Black Monday panic led to the implementation of “circuit breakers”

Circuit breakers were first approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission following the market crash of October 19, 1987. That day, known as “Black Monday,” saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average drop 508 points (22.6%).

According to its website, the New York Stock Exchange has “three circuit breaker thresholds that measure a decrease against the prior day’s closing price of the S&P 500 Index -- 7% (Level 1), 13% (Level 2), and 20% (Level 3).” The first two levels require a 15-minute suspension of trading. At the level 3 threshold, the exchange suspends trading for the rest of the day.

Should crypto exchanges implement circuit breakers?

As BTC price has dropped by more than $1,200 in the last couple of days, some believe that it’s time for crypto exchanges to institute a similar mechanism. Catherine Coley, CEO of Binance.US, tweeted yesterday:


There have only been 84 double-digit single-day bitcoin price drops in history, 23 of them taking place since 2016. If exchanges used a 10% price drop as a trigger, it wouldn’t be a burdensome change for the industry since there have been relatively few occurrences in the history of Bitcoin.


Others may argue that this would go against the decentralized spirit that cryptocurrency is supposed to represent. The reality is that most trading happens on centralized exchanges, which in themselves represent an aberration on the idea of decentralization. Thus, implementing circuit breakers would not be the slaughter of sacred cows that detractors claim.

Exchanges have already become the biggest sources of centralization in the space. This would also ultimately be a choice. Not all exchanges must decide one way or another — it would be up to the users to decide which exchanges they prefer, as well as when they prefer them.

With the crypto industry maturing, it’s no longer insulated from other markets. It might be time for crypto exchanges to consider implementing circuit breakers to avoid panic selling.

In addition to making crypto markets less volatile, circuit breakers might present crypto traders with more choices.

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Circle, the main stablecoin provider for Coinbase, has added programming functionality to its USDC stablecoin.

Developers Can Use APIs

Circle’s API tools allow developers to automate USDC transactions in multiple ways. An API is a set of tools that allow software developers to interact with an application.

First, Circle’s Payments API allows businesses to receive credit card and debit card payments, then settle those payments in USDC. Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, has suggested that this will speed up payments by allowing businesses to receive funds in “days instead of weeks.”

Circle is also offering a Wallets API, which allows users to receive cryptocurrency payments without running nodes, interacting manually with a public chain, or dealing with on-chain transaction fees.

Finally, Circle’s Marketplace API allows customers to use USDC in other ways. For example, businesses can use the API to “top up” customer funds, enable peer-to-peer payments, or pay suppliers.

Circle is currently offering early access APIs, but production APIs are on the way.

Businesses Can Connect to Banks

Circle’s Business Accounts, meanwhile, serve as fiat on-ramps and off-ramps.

That means that businesses can convert USDC to and from U.S. dollars more easily. With business accounts, users can redeem and tokenize USDC via bank transfers for free. Of course, business account users can also perform on-chain transactions with USDC as well.

Additionally, funds stored in Circle Business Accounts are covered by insurance.

Circle notes that Business Accounts are useful in a wide variety of activities, including “savings, lending, payments, investments, trade finance and cross border payments and settlement.”

Business accounts are available to users in over 150 countries.

Facing the Competition

Though no other stablecoin has introduced a comparable service, Circle’s strategy is not entirely unique.

Facebook’s upcoming Libra platform has plans to fill a similar niche by introducing a dollar-pegged stablecoin, by targeting business users, and by offering extensive developer tools.

Furthermore, most stablecoins can be considered programmable simply because they exist on blockchains that support smart contracts. Tether, for example, exists on Ethereum and TRON, both of which are programmable. Dai has similar programming potential thanks to Ethereum and xDai Chain.

With so much competition, Circle may not be the first project to offer some of its features.

However, it is one of the most significant companies to do so. Circle has served 10 million consumers, handled 500 million transactions, and stored $5 billion in digital assets. USDC specifically is the second largest stablecoin on the market, and it is supported by the popular crypto exchange Coinbase.

The company’s new features will surely build upon its previous success.

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Judge Bruce Reinhart has slammed Craig Wright for producing forged documents and giving perjured testimony during the ongoing litigations between Wright and Ira Kleiman during a hearing concerning the Tulip Trust.

Reinhart questioned Wright’s credibility, noting that — in the past — the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto had openly lied to the court:

    “Particularly given my prior finding that Dr. Wright has produced forged documents in this litigation, I decline to rely on this kind of document, which could easily have been generated by anyone with word processing software and a pen [...] I give no weight to sworn statements of Dr. Wright that advance his interests but that have not been challenged by cross-examination and for which I cannot make a credibility determination. I have previously found that Dr. Wright gave perjured testimony in my presence.”

On March 9, 2019, Judge Reinhart ordered Wright to produce a list of his Bitcoin holdings — which Wright again claimed he could not do as it was held by a blind trust that he could not access. Wright estimated that it would take until January 2020 for the list to be delivered by bonded courier.

Judge Bloom allowed Wright until Feb. 3, 2020 to file a notice with the court “indicating whether or not this mysterious figure has appeared from the shadows and whether the Defendant now has access to the last key slice needed to unlock the encrypted file.”

On January 6, 2020, Wright produced documents evidencing a previously unidentified trust — ‘Tulip Trust III’. Both Judge Bloom and the plaintiffs requested several depositions seeking to establish how Wright obtained the Tulip Trust III documentation, to which Wright objected to numerous interrogatories based attorney-client privilege and spousal privilege.

Wright rejects discovery asserting attorney-client and spousal privileges

Wright claimed that his wife is the trustee of the Tulip Trust, and received the trust agreement as an encrypted file during December 2019 from the trust’s counsel.

As such, Wright asserted that the communications between his wife, Ramona Watts, and the trust’s counsel, Denis Mayaka, are protected by attorney-client privilege, adding that communications between he and his wife are protected by spousal privilege.

The judge determined that “the record does not establish that an attorney-client relationship exists between Mr. Mayaka and Ms. Watts,” also disregarding Wright’s “Mayaka Declaration” as it had not been adequately authenticated. Further, the judge found that the Trust document failed to identify Mayaka as counsel, noting that that “he is assigned a different role.”

As such, the judge concluded that “the record does not establish that Mr. Mayaka is counsel to the Trustee of the Tulip Trust,” adding that Wright and Mayaka do not have an independent attorney-client relationship.

Judge requests judicial assistance from U.K. court

On the same day, the judge requested judicial assistance from the Senior Master of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court in the United Kingdom in the litigation between Kleiman and Wright.

The ongoing case concerns the effort of Ira Kleiman, the deceased brother of David Kleiman, to claim his brother’s share of the Tulip Trust — a stash of more than one million Bitcoins (BTC) that was purportedly set up by Wright and Kleiman following their supposed creation of Bitcoin.

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Jeff Dorman, a CoinDesk columnist, is chief investment officer at Arca where he leads the investment committee and is responsible for portfolio sizing and risk management. He has more than 17 years of trading and asset management experience at firms including Merrill Lynch and Citadel Securities.

    Investing in digital assets is a sham! Participants in this industry are simply trying to anticipate price movements, rather than use fundamental analysis to determine why a token or coin might go higher or lower. There is no intrinsic value. It’s pure speculation based on technical analysis. It’s outright gambling.

It’s also exactly how stock and bond markets traded for the first 300 years.

In 1602, the Dutch East India Company issued the first paper shares. This exchangeable medium allowed shareholders to conveniently buy, sell and trade their stock with other shareholders and investors. For hundreds of years thereafter, investors and traders did their best to anticipate price moves, without any of the tools available today for valuing these securities. Back then, a stock trading at $100 was viewed more expensive than a stock trading at $10, independent of number of shares outstanding, underlying revenues, or business prospects.

It wasn’t until the 1920s, following the stock market crash and the Great Depression, that two Columbia Professors (Benjamin Graham and David Dodd) came up with a methodology for identifying and buying securities priced well below their true value. Their book, “Security Analysis,” was published in 1934, and Graham and Dodd’s principles provided a rational basis for investment decisions that are still applied today by the world’s top value investors.

Warren Buffett chose to attend Columbia specifically to learn from Professor Graham (and received an A+ in his class). Almost 50 years later, Professor Frank Fabozzi introduced similar valuation techniques and concepts for investing in fixed income securities. And shortly thereafter, even newer valuation techniques (like Metcalfe’s Law) were introduced to help value computing networks, and these methods were utilized decades later to value pre-revenue internet giants like Facebook, Tencent and Netflix.

According to Gisli Eyland, who has written about the value investing philosophy, Graham and Dodd “described a fundamentally different approach to stock picking and investing in corporate securities by proposing that the investor should refrain from trying to anticipate price movements entirely. Instead, the investor should try to estimate the true Intrinsic Value of the underlying asset. Given time, the Intrinsic Value and market value would converge.” Today, investors and financial media throw around financial ratios like P/E, P/B, EV/EBITDA, P/S, Dividend Yield and many others as if they’ve been around forever, while smugly chastising digital assets for having no intrinsic value. This may be a good time to remind readers that digital assets are less than 10 years old.

Fundamental models emerging in crypto

When will the Graham and Dodd of crypto emerge? They’re likely already here, working tirelessly behind the scenes on valuation techniques that will be utilized by the Warren Buffets of crypto 50 years from now. Digital assets are still in their infancy, but new fundamental valuation techniques are being built, tested, and discovered every day, from the original MV = PQ analysis, to discounted sum of utility models, to everything else in between. Many of the models in existence are unproven, with only a few years’ worth of data to support their methodologies, while other models have likely yet to be conceived.

Each of these methods has advantages as well as shortcomings. Digital assets are unique, similar to corporate bonds, making different valuation techniques appropriate for specific token types. Just like a bond has different coupons, different maturities, different covenants and different features (callable, putable, convertible, warrants, etc.), most digital assets have unique features as well, making each analysis different than the last (there is a reason Fabozzi’s fixed income bible is over 1,800 pages long).

In our view, the DCF analysis is best used for tokens issued by cash-producing companies such as exchange tokens like Binance Coin (BNB) or Unus Sed Leo (LEO). The NVT Ratio may be better when comparing across smart contract platforms such as Ethereum (ETH), EOS (EOS) and NEO (NEO). A variation of Metcalfe’s law or total addressable market analysis can be used for tokens that are in the early pre-launch stage or are servicing a sector that is difficult to currently measure.

The smartest crypto analysts (including our own internal team at Arca) are developing new methodologies to value digital assets. Once these metrics become widely accepted, price floors and ceilings in crypto will be set based on agreed upon, well-tested fundamental valuation – just like in the debt and equity markets.

I started my career on Wall Street in 2001. I was told to read Frank Fabozzi and Graham and Dodd before showing up for work on day one. I never questioned the legitimacy of these valuation techniques; I simply adopted them because everyone else did too. Had I started in 1901, prior to "Security Analysis," I likely would have been asked to learn how to read ticker tapes instead.

Equity markets turned out just fine, despite a rocky start in determining valuation that, in retrospect, seems silly. So did the fixed income markets. And so too will digital assets. Investors might want to adopt a more open-minded, long-view approach to investing in this new asset class.

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BOSAGORA, a next generation smart-contracting blockchain which showed impressive results in 2019, has now listed on the major South Korean exchange Bithumb.

8th March 2020, Seoul, South Korea – BOSAGORA’s native token BOA, which is governed by a democratic “Congress Network” of its users, saw a staggering 279% growth in Q4 of 2019. In 2020, the project has continued in the same vein, with BOA reaching an all time high in March.

BOSAGORA’s ascendancy is especially well-timed as wider positivity in the Korean cryptocurrency market develops. On March 5th, legislators in the South Korean parliament passed legislation that provides a clear framework for cryptocurrency trading. The move is expected to bring greater certainty, security and growth to blockchain-related projects in the country, with BOSAGORA perfectly poised to take advantage.

First created in 2017, the BOSAGORA project produced an updated whitepaper in 2019 to clarify its core concepts and to set the foundation for its future success. This provided the catalyst to its rapid development and growth towards the end of 2019.

The BOSAGORA vision is of a project-enabling blockchain, supported by the robust functionality of its Trust Contracts, and galvanized by the adaptive and equitable nature of its democratic governance. These elements combine to create a forward-thinking, fair and dependable blockchain focused on securing ongoing success. Through these systems, as well as a series of other mechanisms, BOSAGORA creates the first smart contract blockchain powered by the collective intelligence of its users.

The project is further bolstered by its scalability, as it plays host to an in-built second layer solution called the Flash Layer. In some ways similar in concept to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, BOA’s Flash Layer allows for the near instantaneous confirmation of transactions without adding additional strain to the blockchain, or settlement layer.

In bringing together a fair and inclusive approach, a combination of innovative technological dimensions and a team consisting of some of the most respected experts in the field of blockchain, BOSAGORA looks set to become one of the most talked-about and used blockchains of 2020 with the potential to drastically change the face of the cryptosphere as we know it today. 

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Ethereum 2.0 has fueled a lot of curiosity in the crypto-community. Promising enhanced scalability and privacy, this upgrade is expected to revolutionize the way Ethereum’s ecosystem works.

On a recent podcast, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin asserted that Ethereum 2.0 is going to address all the problems that the ETH ecosystem has been dealing with since its inception.

That said, back in 2017, there was an incident where the application CryptoKitties had clogged the Ethereum network, putting transactions in a long-time limbo. Buterin was asked as to how the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade would help in situations such as this. In response to the question, Buterin replied,

    “Current Ethereum chain can do 36 transactions a second. If you do a roll-up – optimistic roll-up or a ZK roll up, it goes up to 2,500. If you do just Sharding, it goes up to maybe 2000 and 10,000 and a roll-up on top of sharding, it goes up to a hundred thousand to a million per second.”

In another recent interview, Buterin had noted that Ethereum 2.0 would provide added capacity for users through sharding and scaling, privacy features, and more, alongside the new proof-of-stake system. He went on to add that the upgrade would allow users private transactions and contracts to be executed, without needing to demonstrate the content of those activities.

Further commenting on ETH 2.0 facilitating enhanced privacy, Buterin addressed functions like Zk-Rollup and Optimistic Rollup, whereby a person runs the computations, generates the proof, and would keep the chain fraud-proof scheme. Buterin asserted that both these techniques would make “a huge difference over the next year or so.”

He went on to say,

    “Loopring recently launched a ZK-Rollup exchange, which can theoretically accomplish 2,500 transactions per second (TPS) if all Ethereum users were to become their users[…..] These are not just scaling payments but are scaling something that is equivalent to the Ethereum virtual machine.”

On the whole, Ethereum’s Buterin is of the opinion that “ETH 2 is radical and ETH 2 is great, and ETH 2 is potentially a 100 to 1000 factor scaling increase, and Eth 2 is the future. But at the same time, ETH 2 is not literally tomorrow.”

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