Qtum Enters “Historic Partnership”

In the nascent cryptocurrency market, partnerships are near-essential, as a budding relationship with parties inside and outside of this industry bolsters the adoption, efficiency, and security of crypto assets and blockchain solutions.

The community surrounding this industry was recently floored, as Justin Sun of the Tron (TRX) project expressed his excitement that his brainchild was partnering with an “industry giant” that was valued at tens of billions of U.S. dollars. Speculation regarding the apparent strategic deal rapidly circulated through social media channels, with many crypto investors hoping for the best.

However, as reported by Ethereum World News, this announcement was rather overhyped, as a report from  ODaily, translated and relayed by CNLedger, divulged that the partnership was nothing more than Tron purchasing cloud computing power from Baidu.

Now, however, Qtum, a popular PoS-based smart contract blockchain, has revealed that it has legitimately partnered with a multinational corporation. According to a press release from the blockchain-focused startup, it has officially partnered with Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) China division in a “ground-breaking” occurrence.  Per the announcement, the startup and AWS will be joining hands to expand the hosting service’s blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) offerings, with a focus obviously being taken on QTUM’s in-house protocols and services. This working relationship will reportedly see the two firms “create bases” for enterprise-grade blockchain solutions, a service that corporations have been clamoring for.

One such service will be a smart contract development platform that is situated on AWS, which will allow developers and users to “quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively” code, launch, and manage smart contract systems. This ground-breaking solution will utilize an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), coupled with the startup’s core software, Solidity, and Gmix web IDE, which are all integral in the process of operating blockchain-based contracts. Qtum, now a bona fide Amazon Technology Partner, will now gain access to Amazon’s business, technical, marketing, and sales resources, which is a positive sign for the blockchain project, to say the least.

Issuing a comment to CoinDesk confirming the business relationship, Simon Wang, an executive at AWS China, wrote:

Qtum are now an AWS technology partner and one of the partner network members.

Surprisingly, as noted by John Scianna, Qtum’s marketing director, this partnership was a long time coming, as Qtum’s AMI has been reportedly listed on AWS’ global marketplace since July, which sparked a discussion between the hosting service subsidiary of Amazon, one of the largest internet giants on Earth, and the startup. As put by Qtum, this is the first time that a “free and open-source blockchain” has inked a deal with AWS, which is an “exciting and valuable contribution for enterprise and individual blockchain end users alike.”

QTUM Defies Mixed Bag Market, Surges 5%

As a result of this self-proclaimed “historic partnership,” the popular altcoin has posted a strong 5.25% gain amid an otherwise unsure, wary market. According to CoinMarketCap, the asset is up to $3.88 a pop, with this gain likely being aided by a staggering $222 million in volume in the past 24 hours.

Seeing that the crypto asset has seen a 97% sell-off since its peak in January 2018, this move to potentially spark a recovery was evidently welcomed by QTUM investors. However, the total market capitalization of the crypto is still a staggering $344 million, with this figure only alluding to the fact that QTUM is still a force to be reckoned with, even amid questionable, tumultuous market conditions.

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Indian regulators' clampdown on cryptocurrency businesses is forcing the exchange startup Unocoin to experiment with stablecoins and ATMs to continue receiving fiat deposits from customers.

Unocoin co-founder Sunny Ray told CoinDesk his company hasn't been able to transact through regular banking channels with its 1.3 million customers for several months, after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) banned banks from working with crypto or crypto companies in April.

Most recently, Unocoin set up an ATM in a Bangalore mall where customers can deposit rupees to their exchange accounts without a bank or credit card. In the coming weeks, Unocoin will open a few more ATMs in Mumbai and Delhi.

"We're essentially employing bank-grade ATM machines," Ray said.

Also, some users are quickly transferring their rupees to the ethereum-based TrueUSD token, which Unocoin began supporting in August, then using it to purchase bitcoin or other assets down the line when the price feels right. As a so-called stablecoin, TrueUSD is designed to maintain parity with the U.S. dollar.

For customers outside Bangalore, support for stablecoins may provide an indirect way to add or hold value in their Unocoin accounts without quite as much volatility, albeit it falls short of a fiat on-ramp. However, that transaction volume is still less than a few thousand TUSD per day.

"We never even considered that [stablecoins] before," Ray said. "That's more just like a stop-gap solution. It's not like an actual, final solution to everything."

As Unocoin investigates how to scale compliant ATMs, Ray said the team is also looking to expand to Malta and Canada, in case operating in India becomes impossible altogether, all while exploring the options for listing several new stablecoins.

Stepping back, an ongoing legal battle to overturn or alter this ban hasn't yielded any results to date. Meanwhile, the ban is having a disastrous impact on India's crypto community, with the popular exchange startup Zebpay abruptly shutting down late last month.

As Kashif Raza, a co-founder of Crypto Kanoon, an Indian regulatory news startup, told CoinDesk:

"The crypto community is suffering from this ban as there have been instances where the bank accounts of individuals have been closed who were found to be dealing in cryptocurrencies."

The crackdown has been so severe that Raza said it has created a misconception in India that bitcoin itself is outlawed, even though the ban only applies to entities governed by RBI.

"From a regulatory perspective there hasn't been any real clarity," Ray said. "We as a company are working on a couple of solutions."

Silver lining

None of this should imply that Indian crypto startups are now operating in a black market. To the contrary, Raza said exchange accounts can sometimes require more know-your-customer (KYC) paperwork than opening a new Indian bank account. Many see the ban as an inconvenient pause, not a death knell.

"Given the fact that the Indian government seems to be in favor of the technology behind virtual currencies, the crypto community is quite hopeful that [banking crypto companies] will be regulated in future," Raza said.

Plus, Unocoin's ATMs allow for regulation-conscious investors like Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures, who praised the new ATMs in a press statement, to keep detailed records of their crypto portfolios while still depositing fiat currency as needed.

On the other hand, the ban has certainly invigorated peer-to-peer trading. Indeed, the P2P exchange WazirX reached a new daily trading volume peak of 50 BTC in September 2018. At the same time, the global P2P exchange LocalBitcoins reached nearly $1.5 million in weekly Indian trading volume at least three times since August.

And there's even silver lining for Unocoin, which has seen up to 500 new account registrations every day ever since Zebpay closed its doors.

"It's almost kind of freeing in a way because there are a lot of people in India that don't have online banking," Ray said. "Almost everybody in India uses cash, so it might in an odd way open us up to an even bigger market."

Still, speaking to how restricting crypto companies that seek to serve a country of 1.3 billion could affect global adoption, Ray concluded:

"Innovation is being squashed in a country where one in seven people live."

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The U.S. Marshals have announced a plan to auction off nearly $4.3 million worth of bitcoin next month.

The government agency said in an announcement on Wednesday that the sealed bid auction is for about 660 bitcoin that were forfeited in federal criminal, civil and administrative cases.

Scheduled to start on Nov. 5, the auction requires would-be bidders to deposit $200,000 after registering their identification with the agency no later than Oct .31.

Based on the announcement, the auction consists of two parts with six blocks of 100 bitcoin each and one remaining block with 60 bitcoin. Bidders will not be able to view other bids or change their bid once submitted, the U.S. Marshals added.

The agency indicated some of the assets in the auction include bitcoin forfeited in several recent cases such as the U.S government's lawsuits against bitcoin traders Theresa Tetley and Thomas Mario Costanzo – both sentenced to jail on charges of bitcoin money laundering.

While the U.S. Marshals did not reveal how much of the forfeited assets from the two convicts above it plans to sell, previous reports noted that the U.S. government seized at least 120 bitcoin from the two, with 40 from Tetley, and 80 from Costanzo.

The planned auction comes just months after the U.S. Marshals sold over 2,100 bitcoin and 3,600 bitcoin in March and January, respectively, an amount totaling to more than $50 million at the time.

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Blockchain has the capability to offer settlement services for daily trading volumes in the United States equity market, according to a report that the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) published Tuesday. The company, which is one of the leading global providers of post-trade market infrastructure, ordered the analysis to the multinational consultancy Accenture, and also worked with blockchain companies Digital Asset (DA) and R3 Corda.

The DTCC study covered nineteen weeks and used private commercial blockchains. The results showed that distributed ledger technology (DLT) could support entire trading day’s volume including at peak rates when the activity equates to 115,000,000 daily transactions or 6,300 trades per second for five continuous hours. Currently, public blockchains operate at single or double-digit per second performance, DTCC claimed, but the Accenture analysis gave additional data about scalability.

“Accenture built a network of more than 170 nodes to model the financial ecosystem of exchanges, market participants and broker/dealers supported by DTCC. The prototypes were designed to test the capture of matched equities trades from exchange DLT nodes, novation of those trades with DTCC acting as the central counterparty (CCP) to maintain trading anonymity on the ledger, creation of netted obligations and settlement of the trades. The test environment for this study was set up in the cloud,” DTCC said in its statement.

The study’s aim was only to provide information about blockchain scalability, and it did not analyze other concerns in implementing DLT including security and resilience, as well as meeting operational, legal, and regulatory requirements.

“This project answered key questions and built serious confidence in blockchain’s ability to drive large-scale transformation,” David Treat, Managing Director, Global Blockchain Lead, Accenture explained.

Scalability is one of the significant blockchain implementation problems for the financial sector and for mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. In June, Bank of International Settlement (BIS) said that blockchain limited cryptos widespread usage as DLT could not scale with the demand.

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Crypto compliance provider and research firm Chainalysis announced it had partnered with exchange Binance in a press release Wednesday, Oct. 17, in order to improve its detection of suspicious transactions.

Binance, currently the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, continues to expand into various international markets, being required to comply with each jurisdiction’s anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) rules.

Chainalysis eases this process, the firm claims, through the use of real-time monitoring to track the provenance of each transaction made on Binance’s platform.

The solution, known as know-your-transaction (KYT), saw its initial release in April, the press release notes.

“Cryptocurrency businesses of all sizes face the same core challenge: earning the trust of regulators, financial institutions and users,” Jonathan Levin, co-founder and COO of Chainalysis commented in the press release, adding:

“We expect many to follow Binance’s lead to build world-class AML compliance programs to satisfy regulators globally and build trust with major financial institutions.”

2018 has seen various well-known exchange platforms — including P2P ecosystem Localbitcoins — introduce additional compliance measures, some of which have jarred with cryptocurrency users that value anonymity. As well, in September, crypto exchange ShapeShift introduced a membership program that will gradually become mandatory and require the provision of “basic” personal information.

Explaining its own implementation of AML and KYC rules, Binance implied such measures were necessary to permit further expansion.

“Our vision is to provide the infrastructure for a blockchain ecosystem and increase the freedom of money globally, while adhering to regulatory mandates in the countries we serve,” Binance CFO Wei Zhou said.

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