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South Korea legalizes cryptocurrencies, and the US may issue a digital currency after China

 Opinion: the US will issue digital currency after China

The US authorities are closely monitoring the development of Chinese digital yuan and, if necessary, will launch their own digital currency, according to ING economist Carlo Cocuzzo.

During a presentation at Blockchain Week in London, Cocuzzo said that 90% of forex turnover is in dollars, and the United States will not want to lose leadership. If the Federal Reserve considers that it is necessary to issue digital USD as opposed to the Chinese currency, it will immediately do so.

In August last year, representatives of the People's Bank of China announced that the digital yuan will be launched soon, with the prototype and blockchain architecture of the token having been already been fully developed.

 South Korea legalized cryptocurrencies

The South Korean authorities have adopted amendments to the legislation of the country, which legalize trading and storing of cryptocurrency.

For their launch they only need to be signed by the president. The government will be given a year to implement the changes, and representatives of the blockchain industry will be given 6 months to bring their activities in line with the new requirements.

Cryptocurrency exchanges, ICO projects and other blockchain companies will fall under regulation. They will be required to comply with financial reporting requirements, use real bank accounts, follow KYC procedures and certify information security management systems (ISMS).

 Coinbase CEO: the number of cryptocurrency users will grow 100-fold

Today, the number of cryptocurrency users is 50 million people, but this number can grow to 5 billion, says Brian Armstrong, Coinbase exchange CEO.

The adoption of the blockchain will be similar to the spread of the Internet, Armstrong wrote in his Twitter account. In his opinion, a cryptocurrency that wants to become a world leader must meet four requirements: scalability, privacy, decentralized identity, and developer tools.

The primary goal is scalability, the businessman believes — the network must process thousands of transactions per second.

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IOTA network resumes operations after hacking, and trading volume of BTC options hits a record

 IOTA network is back online after hack

IOTA Foundation relaunches network after being suspended because of a hacker attack.

On February 12, 2020, attackers stole 8.55 million tokens (about $2million) from the official Trinity wallet, affecting 50 users. IOTA founder David Sønstebø promised to pay victims back from his own wallet.

The company intends to continue cooperation with the FBI, the police of Great Britain, Germany and Malta to find the criminals.

 Mark Cuban compared buying bitcoin and gold to collecting

American billionaire and owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks club, Mark Cuban, once again spoke about cryptocurrencies, comparing them to gold and collectables.

“With Bitcoin, some people value it as a store of value, which makes it like baseball cards, art [and] gold,” he said.

Cuban, however, noted the value of the blockchain technology:

“When people say cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value, they usually lose sight of the value of blockchain technology,” he added.

 Bitcoin options saw record volume

On March 9, BTC options set a new trading record of $198 million.

According to the analytical service Skew, interest in options has grown amid an increase in bitcoin exchange rate volatility up to 65%.

The Deribit derivatives platform registered 86% of transactions worth about $170 million. The second most popular was the OKEx exchange with a trading volume of $23 million, followed by LedgerX and Bakkt. CME, which launched cryptocurrency instruments in January this year, registered only about 1% of the trade turnover.

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Overnight, BTC crashed to a 12-month low, and crypto traders lost $5.8 billion

 Bitcoin collapsed to a 12-month low

This night, the BTC price experienced the largest drop in a day since 2013. The cost of cryptocurrency collapsed by more than 50%, at the moment touching the mark of $ 3,780. Cryptocurrency is currently trading near $5,500.

Most of the crypto assets also lost in value: Ethereum fell 56% to $86, the price of XRP fell to a four-year low at $0.101.

On March 12, buyers closed long positions at $ 811 million on the Bitmex exchange, which was a new record.

 Cryptotraders lost $ 5.8 billion overnight

Due to the sharp collapse of the cryptocurrency market, 235 thousand users suffered losses. The total amount of liquidated transactions amounted to $5.8 billion, according to the portal bybt.com.

The largest number of orders worth about $2.9 billion was forcibly closed by OKEx. BitMEX derivatives platform was the second with a value of $1.7 billion, to follow by Huobi and Binance with losses of $827 million and $360 million.

BitMEX client suffered the largest of $71 million in one transaction.

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Starbucks to accept crypto payments, and Opera integrates a feature to buy BTC and ETH

 Bakkt raises $ 300M in funding

Including from Microsoft. Digital asset startup Bakkt's closed the Series B round, during which the company managed to raise $ 300 million.

The funds were invested by the New York Stock Exchange ICE, Microsoft, PayU, Boston Consulting Group, Goldfinch Partners, CMT Digital and Pantera Capital. Bakkt CEO Mike Blandina said the company plans to launch a payment application this summer.

“With the completion of our Series B financing and recent acquisition of Bridge2 Solutions, Bakkt is now a team of 350 employees and powers the loyalty redemption programs for 7 of the top 10 financial institutions and over 4,500 loyalty and incentive programs including two of the largest US airlines,” he said.

 You can use crypto to pay at Starbucks

By using the Bakkt payment system. The popular coffee shop chain has announced a collaboration with the cryptocurrency platform in test mode - some Starbucks application users got a Bakkt Cash payment function.

“We anticipate that a range of cryptocurrencies will gain traction with customers and, through our work with Bakkt, we will be uniquely positioned to constantly consider and offer customers new and unique ways to pay seamlessly,” Starbucks had said.

Bakkt President Adam White said that the partnership will help the chain reduce payment costs for merchants.

 Opera integrates a feature to buy cryptocurrencies

The U.S. Opera browser users will be able to purchase BTC and ETH directly from the browser. Users can buy cryptocurrency using a bank card or Apple Pay, and coins will be stored on a wallet built into the browser.

The Wyre payment system integrated the function, its commission will be $0.30 + 2.9% for the operation.

“Users can purchase as little as $1 worth of crypto, and there is a maximum daily limit of $250,”

“Users can purchase cryptocurrency even for $ 1, and the maximum daily limit is $ 250. As our browser-based wallet is focused around the usage of cryptocurrencies on the web and using dApps [decentralized applications], we expect the vast majority of transactions will not hit that limit,” a spokesperson at Wyre said.

The service is available in versions of Opera for PC, iOS and Android.

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Bitcoin went up by 23% in 24 hrs, and the Ethereum hashrate may drop by 30%

 Bitcoin went up by 23% in 24 hours

The crypto market has started recovering: total market cap has grown by 19% over the past 24 hours.

BTC price strengthened by 23%: from $5,500 to $6,800. Ethereum rose by 22% and now costs about $148, XRP went up by 15% to $0.1720, Bitcoin Cash - by 29% to $239.

The largest price surge among the TOP 100 crypto assets was demonstrated by Bitcoin SV: the token has risen in price by more than 40% and is now trading near the $172 mark.

 Trading volume on LocalBitcoins jumped by 21%

Over the past week, the trading activity at the LocalBitcoins p2p platform has increased by 21% — this is the largest jump since the summer of 2019.

The main contribution was made by Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Egypt, Japan. Moreover, the latter three countries hit all-time-high weekly fiat trade volumes The situation occurs against the background of coronavirus quarantine. For example, banks closed in Venezuela yesterday, which caused an influx of users to cryptocurrency platforms.

 Opinion: Ethereum hashrate to drop by 30%

Most of the mining devices for mining ETH will soon become useless due to the increasing DAG size, developer Kristy-Leigh Minehan says.

This can lead to a sharp drop by 20-30% in the computing power of Ethereum which will make the network vulnerable to reorganization attacks, and also complicate the work of decentralized applications, she said.

Before work, each mining device must download a DAG file, which increases every 30,000 blocks. Currently, its size is 3.52 GB, which no longer allows mining ETH on Nvidia GTX 1060 3 GB graphics cards. According to a blog post by 2miners, the popular ASIC Antminer E3 will become should stop mining as early as April 8th due to the file size growth.

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The U.S. Federal Reserve says they have “infinite amount of cash” — what’s the impact on bitcoin?

 Why BTC will drop to $5,000

A “death cross" formed on the BTC price, a top-down intersection of 50-day and 200-day Moving Average. This will lead to a price drop down to $5,000, Coindesk analyst Omkar Godbole thinks.

However, the drop will not happen immediately: for example, in the spring of 2018 the “cross”, bitcoin price first went up by 50% in a month, and then declined by 70% within six months.

The scenario will be cancelled if BTC can consolidate above $6,460, the analyst writes. Godbole also notes that similar crosses are forming on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 industrial charts.

 Peter Brandt: Bitcoin price will drop by 50%

Well-known trader Peter Brandt believes that BTC will drop below $3,000. Responding to a comment on Twitter, Brandt posted a chart with a “descending flag” figure - if implemented, the price will go to the level of $2,700.

The trader also indicated that having declined below $7,500, bitcoin price broke the long-term support line and moved into a downtrend. Earlier, the analyst said that bitcoin will drop to zero after breaking this level.

 Opinion: cryptocurrency will benefit from the crisis

Unlimited amount of U.S. dollars will positively affect bitcoin, trader Joseph Young believes.

“Fed printing unlimited money to pump markets = good for bitcoin

Devaluation of dollar over the long term = good for bitcoin

Short-term may be gloomy for bitcoin, but long-term prospect of it remains very bright,” Young tweeted.

A similar opinion is shared by Stack analyst Lennard Neo. He expects an influx of capital into cryptocurrencies due to the uncertainty central banks and governments actions amid the crisis.

CEO of Titus Investment Advisors Justin Gillespie notes that quarantine will strengthen the position of cryptocurrency. According to him, “The longer the people can’t go outside to conduct their business, the more useful the cryptocurrency should become as it can be sent and received from the safety of one’s home."

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Cash and сoronavirus: how to stay safe when dealing with banknotes and bank cards

During the pandemic, when it is of the utmost importance to be very careful about your health and follow good hygiene practice, BestChange team wishes to remind you the necessary precautionary measures when dealing with cash and bank cards.

We already wrote that cash is one of the dirtiest things in the world and a carrier of many diseases. Various microbes live on the banknotes for quite a long time – from one up to two months. Paper money has a lot of cellulose which is the perfect media for the development of bacteria. Plastic and metal money have much fewer microorganisms, and their life is much shorter.

Speaking about COVID-19 specifically, the virus stays up to 5 days on metal materials, 4 days on wood and glass. Paper exposed to coronavirus remained safe after 4-5 days, and the virus stays on plastic for no more than 5 days.

Besides coronavirus, many other bacteria can be found on banknotes: causing skin inflammation, microorganisms associated with the vaginal tract, Escherichia coli and staphylococcal bacteria can be found – they cause intestinal diseases. Besides bacteria, fungi spores and helminthiasis (simply put, worm infections) pathogens can be found on money.

Many infectious disease specialists around the world approve of decreasing the usage of cash in favor of contactless. However, please keep in mind that the direct contact between the bank card and the terminal or touching the terminal when pressing the PIN can be also dangerous in terms of contracting the infection.

We would like to remind you recommendations of WHO: wash your hands, do not touch your face when using cash. WHO does not say that cash must be totally avoided, but theoretically, it can be a channel to contract the virus.

Please remember, that the notion “dirty money” has a real basis behind it and before biting into a snack you have just purchased with some cash, remember what is at stake. Always thoroughly wash your hands or sanitize them after being in contact with cash or touching any surfaces in public spaces, including ATMs.

Modern problems require modern solutions, electronic money and cryptocurrency get another advantage as a safer payment means of the future.

BestChange team asks everyone to follow the advice of doctors and professionals, take care of yourself and your close ones and keep your spirits up!

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Cash turnover hits record high in the U.S. and altcoins mentions on Twitter drop to a minimum

 USD banknote turnover hits a 20-year high

From March 11 to March 18, the turnover of cash dollars in the United States increased by $34 billion, shooting up from $1.809 trillion to $1.843 trillion.

This is the largest growth in the last 20 years, economist John Paul Coning points out: the U.S. citizens are withdrawing money from banks amid the coronavirus epidemic. Last time a similar situation was observed in 1999 when people were afraid of digital devices failure due to the "Y2K bug"

It is noteworthy that the current increase in cash circulation is happening despite the WHO recommendations to avoid contact with banknotes, as COVID-19 can be distributed through them.

 Twitter's altcoin mentions drop to a minimum

Twitter users now write about main altcoins less often - the number of mentions per day has dropped to a three-year low.

The number of posts about XRP has decreased by 60% in two months to 2,542. Ethereum was talked about slightly less — the number of tweets with the hashtag #ETH fell to 2,500, which has become the lowest engagement level since February 2017. For comparison: in December 2017, when the altcoin set a maximum price, the number of tweets about it exceeded 51,000.

Bitcoin’s “little brother” LTC has been completely forgotten —Twitter users mentioned the coin only 350 times a day. The popularity of BTC, on the contrary, has grown, its mentions have doubled since the end of January.

 Small miners shutting off will help the price of bitcoin

Blockware CEO Matt D’Souza said. He analyzed the periods of decline of the network’s hash rate and noted that they were followed by a prolonged increase of cryptocurrency price. In his opinion, now the situation may be repeated.

At the moment, the computing power of the BTC blockchain has dropped to 93 EH/s. In mid-March, when the bitcoin exchange rate sank below $4,000, small miners were forced to turn off the equipment, which led to a sharp drop in the hash rate and the difficulty of mining cryptocurrency.

Matt D’Souza notes that this will benefit the price of bitcoin, as private miners quickly sold their coins to not work at a loss.

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Miners will start to switch off after the halving, and Bitstamp plans to expand its listing

Some miners will stop working after the halving

States a report by an analytic company Coin Metrics. Despite the fact that Bitcoin price has recovered to the level of $6,300, for many miners the breakeven point is higher than that.

“We expect miners to follow a cycle of decreased profit margins, increased selling, capitulation, and a culling of the least efficient miners from the network. Once this cycle is complete, the miner industry should return to a healthier state that is supportive of future price increases,” the analysts say,

Last week, Bitcoin mining complexity fell by a record 16%, according to BTC.com forecasts, after the next eight-day cycle, it will decrease by another 12%. This will also reduce the profitability of mining for inefficient equipment, according to Coin Metrics.

 Bitstamp may launch trading Ethereum Classic, Zcash and Stellar

Bitstamp, one of the first European cryptocurrency exchanges, is considering listing Ethereum Classic (ETC), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Zcash (ZEC), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Paxos Standard (PAX), USD Coin (USDC) and 0x (ZRX).

The platform’s specialists will thoroughly study the technical characteristics of these cryptocurrencies, as well as their compliance with the security requirements of the exchange and the legislation of some countries. It is worth noting that Bitstamp is extremely cautious about listing coins. Currently, only five crypto assets are traded on the platform: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

 Cryptocurrency trading volume on exchanges increased by 60%

Trade turnover at 22 popular crypto platforms grew by 61% in Q1 of 2020, according to the report of The Block media.

In the last quarter of 2019, the figure was $96 billion, and currently, it has increased to $154 billion — almost the same level as in Q3 of last year.

The volume of transactions in the Bitcoin network increased by 11% to $ 178 billion, while the amount of commissions remained virtually unchanged at $20.12 million. The average BTC block size has slightly increased: from 1.14 MB to 1.17 MB. In January, the share of SegWit transfers exceeded 70%, and the number of public Lightning channels increased by 3%.

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Bitcoin is again trading above $7,000, and the ETH exchange balance reaches its maximum since 2016

 Bitcoin has gone up to $7,000

BTC price today has gone over the mark of $7,100 —over the past 24 hours, cryptocurrency has strengthened by 5%.

Since March 13, bitcoin has grown in price by more than 80%. Most of the crypto assets from TOP-20 also added in value: Stellar (11.69%), TRON (9.51%) and Ethereum (6.42%) have demonstrated the highest growth.

Earlier we noted that the capitalization of the USDT stablecoin exceeded $6 billion for the first time. A number of analysts attribute the increase of the number of Tether tokens to the rise in bitcoin price.

 ETH exchange balance reaches its maximum since 2016

Since the end of last year, the volume of ethereum stored on trading platforms has increased by 21% to 18.187 million ETH.

According to Glassnode, this is the highest level since December 2016 and it accounts for 16% of all circulating coins. Interestingly, the indicator is inversely correlated with the price of ETH. Thus, for 12 months from December 2016, Ethereum has risen in price from $6 to $ 1,350 — at the same time, the cryptocurrency exchange balance has decreased from 18 to 8 million coins.

On March 13, the ETH price fell to $95, which was the lowest since December 2018. Now the coin is trading near the $154 mark.

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 Bitcoin Cash undergoes halving

On April 8, in the Bitcoin Cash network block reward was halved. It was reduced from 12.5 BCH to 6.25 BCH at block height 630’000. The night before halving, the coin went up from $251 to $275, but today it has again dropped in price to $257. In about 12 hours, halving of Bitcoin SV, another fork of the first cryptocurrency, will happen. According to BSV developer Bat Jasper, this will negatively affect cryptocurrency as it will make its mining less profitable than mining bitcoin. We would like to remind that halving in the network of BTC itself is expected on May 13, the reward will drop from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC.

 U.S. national debt hits a record $24 trillion

According to Trading Economics, the U.S. public debt is currently $24.018 trillion. It grew by an additional $4 trillion over 4 years under Donald Trump. The sharp increase of this figure was caused by the U.S. Federal Reserve program to support the economy during the financial crisis brought about by coronavirus. The regulator intends to print $6 trillion worth of banknotes. Earlier, TV presenter Max Kaiser called the dollar “debt coupons,” and popular writer Robert Kiyosaki called for investing in bitcoin and gold: “IF US Debt to GDP ratio 60% world sound. Today US Debt to GDP 110% and climbing. US bankrupt”, he tweeted.

 The number of ETH addresses has exceeded 70 million

The number of addresses in the Ethereum network has reached 70 million, the Glassnode service draws attention.The figure began to sharply grow in November 2017 before the coin set a price record of $1,300. Since that time, the cost of ETH was mostly falling and today it is $171. Despite this, the number of addresses has increased 8.2 times since November 2017. The number of active addresses in March was about 230 thousand - the figure correlates with the price of ethereum. The maximum at the level of 715 thousand was set in January 2018, when the cryptocurrency price reached a historical record.

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 China has published a new cryptocurrency rating

Bitcoin is only ranked 14th in the rating. BTC has lost three more positions, giving way to Cosmos (ATOM), Stellar (XLM) and Dash. TOP 3 remains the same since the February ranking: EOS is in the first place, followed by TRON and Ethereum. Lisk, IOST, NULS, Qtum, NEO, XLM and Dash are in top ten. This is already the seventeenth evaluation made by the China-based Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (CCID). Projects are evaluated on three parameters: basic technology, applicability and creativity.

 Binance exchange launches mobile bitcoin options

Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange services, announced launching bitcoin options. The function is only available in the latest version of the exchange’s mobile app. At the moment, users can trade bitcoin options paired with USDT - in the future, the platform plans to expand the list of instruments. Binance chose the American version of options in which the deal can be closed before the contract expiry date. The exchange’s statement states that their options provide “a shorter time frame compared to traditional options”, ranging from 10 minutes to 1 day.

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 BTC and S&P 500 correlation hit a nine-year high

Bitcoin price and the S&P 500 index have been changing most correlated for 9 years, said eToro analyst Mati Greenspan. The correlation of the prices of the two assets reached 0.6, whereas before it did not exceed 0.3 - with a value of 1, the charts move completely identically. The analyst explained this by the coronavirus pandemic. “Bitcoin is still considered a “risk asset” and hasn’t achieved the safe haven status that gold has taken thousands of years to build up,” Greenspan summed up. However, he added that the profitability of BTC is still higher than the stock market: since the beginning of the year, BTC added 7% in price, while at the same time, the price of oil collapsed to the levels of the 2000s.

 Opinion: only large miners will survive halving

Representatives of the mining industry believe that only large and effective miners will remain after the halving. F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun said that due to a decrease in rewards from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC, unprofitable operators could be absorbed by larger players. A similar position was expressed by Alejandro de la Torre, Poolin Vice President. In his opinion, miners using old equipment will have to disconnect after halving. The head of New Mine, Ibrahim Alkurd, noted that one should not hope for a rise in the price of bitcoin after halving. “Miners hoping that the BTC price will jump up after halving the block reward, making their operations profitable, are in trouble,” he said. Wang Chun added that after halving, those farms will stay that are capable of mining bitcoin at a cost of $3,500.

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 The balance of bitcoins on exchanges fell to a minimum

The number of BTC that users store on exchanges has dropped to a 6-month minimum. According to Glassnode, the current balance is 2.36 million coins. The indicator has been declining since March 13, when the price of bitcoin fell below $4,000. At the same time, the network activity has grown to record levels since 2017. According to TokenAnalyst analysts, investors are withdrawing cryptocurrency from exchanges, since they are considering long-term storage of coins.

 65% of Twitter users believe in the strengthening of BTC after halving

The topic of halving is growing in popularity on the social network Twitter along with increased Google searches. Over the past two weeks, the number of posts mentioning the word "halving" has grown tweets-fold, reports The TIE. On May 6, users posted 2,500 tweets: 65% of them are positive, that is, their authors expect that the event will positively affect the value of bitcoin. The TIE notes that the topic of halving at the end of April surpassed the popularity of coronavirus among crypto enthusiasts.

 Ex-President of Bank of China: digital yuan will replace cash

The digital version of yuan, which is already being tested by the Chinese authorities, may completely replace cash in the future, said Li Lihui, the former President of the Bank of China. He noted that unlike traditional currencies, CDBC will not depend on a third-party bank or payment system. In this case, the virtual currency must meet four key conditions: “Whether the digital yuan can become the dominant form of currency and mainstream payment means, depends on whether it has greater efficiency, lower transaction costs, enough economic scale with commercial value, and people’ acceptance,” said the former President of Bank of China. He added that CDBC will have anonymity, like Bitcoin, but the regulator will set limits on the number and frequency of operations without confirming the identity.

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 The profit of miners fell by 44%. Halving is to blame

Daily earnings of miners fell from $16 to $9 million after halving on May 12. Obsolete equipment, for example, Antminer S9, has now become unprofitable. At the same time, the bitcoin hash rate fell by 16%, and the block mining time increased to 10 minutes 32 seconds. The problem should be fixed by a correction of complexity, which is expected in 5 days. The estimated difficulty will decrease by 2%.

 Stablecoin capitalization exceeded $10 billion

The volume of all existing stablecoins reached $10.4 billion, having updated the historical maximum. Tether holds 85% of the market, second place is occupied by USDC, which accounts for 7.2% of capitalization. Since February, the total supply of stable coins has grown by 79%, and the share of USDT has increased by 3%. Most USDT tokens were issued on the Ethereum blockchain - $5.73 billion, $1.8 billion are working on the Tron network, $1.3 billion use the Omni blockchain.

 Pavel Durov announces the closure of the TON crypto project

Pavel Durov, co-founder of VK social network and Telegram messenger, announced the closure of the Telegram Open Network blockchain project. The reason, he said, is the decision of the American court. "Unfortunately, a US court stopped TON from happening. How? Imagine that several people put their money together to build a gold mine – and to later split the gold that comes out of it. Then a judge comes and says: 'These people invested in the gold mine because they were looking for profits. And they didn't want that gold for themselves, they wanted to sell it to other people. Because of this, they are not allowed to get the gold," Durov wrote. He noted that the court banned the use of GRAM cryptocurrency in the whole world since a US citizen can get access to it. According to the businessman, this is a paradox decision, because it implies control of the American authorities over the sovereignty of other countries. “Unfortunately, we – the 96% of the world's population living elsewhere – are dependent on decision makers elected by the 4% living in the US,” concluded Durov. The businessman said that his team is stopping work on the platform and urged not to be fooled by fraudsters using the name of the project.