Changes made to the public Application Programming Interface (API) of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance seemingly reveal that the company is working on implementing margin trading.

A Reddit user brought the API changes to public attention on March 20 after they were updated last week, noting that the Binance public API response differs from what it should be according to the official documentation released by the company on GitHub. More precisely, the API now includes two additional boolean — which means that their value can be only true or false — variables.

The name of the first added variable is “isSpotTradingAllowed,” while the second is “isMarginTradingAllowed.” The self-explanatory variable names seemingly suggest that Binance is in the midst of implementing margin trading capability.

At press time, data returned by the API also shows that isSpotTradingAllowed is set to true (enabled) and isMarginTradingAllowed is set to false (disabled) on all of the 482 trading pairs.

Binance first promised in the feature rollout section of its white paper that margin trading would be implemented after spot trading and before futures on its exchange. As one Reddit user points out in a comment to the post, what’s new now is the actual change in the API.

Other crypto exchanges already offer margin trading.

In February, major Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange OKEx added four newmargin trading pairs to its platform with up to 100x leverage. And in December of last year, Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex launched margin trading for stablecoin Tether (USDT) against USD.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/binance-api-seemingly-reveals-ongoing-margin-trading-implementation

Bitcoin Cash has now been made available on the largest crypto ATM network in the Alpine nation of Switzerland. Värdex Suisse, which operates the largest and most advanced Crypto ATM Network in Switzerland to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, announced the news via a tweet on 19th March.

“Bitcoin cash (BCH) is online and available now on all our ATMs!” read the tweet by the official twitter handle of the company @vaerdex.

Värdex Suisse is a Swiss Blockchain POS and service provider which offers easy, fast and secure access to the world of crypto and the increasing demand for digital assets. Their mission is to make the buying and selling digital currencies as seamless and smooth as a regular visit to a bank ATM. The company which started in 2017 originally by Bitcoin Suisse AG has been spin-off into an independent company in late 2017 to meet the high demand of local market requests as per their website. Värdex Suisse AG is a member of the Financial Services Standards Association (VQF) and part of the Crypto Valley Zug Community.

The company has 26 ATM locations in major Swiss cities such as Bern, Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Lucern, and Lausanne according to their website. According to ‘Coin ATM Radar,’ the ATM tracker website, there are about 52 bitcoin ATMs and crypto tellers across Switzerland. A majority of them currently support purchases and sales of bitcoin cash. Reportedly, BCH has been gaining in popularity because of the fast and low fee transactions and hence, there has been an increase in adoption of Bitcoin Cash worldwide.

Switzerland has been one of the many countries leading cryptocurrency revolution in Europe. The Alpine nation has actively tried to create favorable conditions for crypto companies and blockchain businesses. The authorities are making a serious effort to capitalize on the trend of blockchain proliferation and build a robust domestic crypto-centered industry, as per crypto insiders. Zug, a small, charming city has become the hottest destination in the world for blockchain businesses. Zug is called the Crypto Valley of Switzerland and offers a powerful platform for global growth due to its business infrastructure, privacy-friendly legislation, world-class talent (ranked number 1 in the world for ease of attracting and retaining world-class talent), and the openness and accessibility of its local crypto-friendly government. The Crypto Valley Association based in the region aims to build “the world’s leading ecosystem for blockchain and cryptographic technologies.”

Source: https://www.cryptonewsz.com/the-largest-crypto-atm-network-in-switzerland-now-accepts-bch/12084/

An Indian crypto exchange has launched a program that allows its users to earn interest on their cryptocurrencies held at the exchange. Initially, users can lend BTC, USDT, BNB, XRP, and ETH. The CEO of the exchange has shared details about this new offering with news.Bitcoin.com.

Lending Cryptocurrencies
Coindcx announced Thursday that its crypto lending program called Dcxlend has come out of the beta testing phase and is now fully launched. Five cryptocurrencies are supported: BTC, USDT, ETH, XRP, and BNB.

The exchange’s website currently displays monthly interest rates of 2 percent for BTC, 1 percent for USDT, 1 percent for BNB, 0.75 percent for XRP, and 0.75 percent for ETH. CEO Sumit Gupta told news.Bitcoin.com that BTC has the highest interest rate “because our traders mostly do margin trading in BTC markets (hence high demand for BTC lenders).”


The exchange detailed that there are “three lending term lengths: 7 days, 15 days, and 30 days. The interest rate varies dynamically and goes up to a maximum of 2%, according to market dynamics — demand and supply.” Furthermore, its website states that “the cryptocurrencies lent through Dcxlend will be used to provide leverage to users on Dcxmargin,” another service the exchange offers.

Gupta shared with news.Bitcoin.com that during the beta testing period with just BTC and USDT, “we had roughly 120 lenders which led to a circulation of 170 BTC on a daily basis.” Claiming that the program has recently garnered more attention from lenders, he remarked, “Hence we’re scaling it up and will keep on adding more coins.”

The CEO explained that his exchange has an internal settlement and liquidation mechanism for margin trading which does not have “a dedicated funding wallet,” elaborating:

Funds are then lent to the users only when the margin trade is open, with no withdrawal access and hard liquidation with 7.5% maintenance margin.


Similar Programs Worldwide
In the U.S., Blockfi recently introduced a savings account that enables customers to earn 6.2 percent annually on their BTC and ETH. Meanwhile, regulated bitcoin derivatives exchange and clearinghouse Ledgerx has a program called Ledgersavings which allows clients to earn an implied rate of around 16 percent annually.

In Japan, regulated exchange GMO Coin launched a lending program for BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC, and XRP last year. However, at the time of this writing, the exchange is only borrowing BTC but customers can lend between 10 and 500 BTC over 181 days and earn up to an annual rate of 5 percent.


Recently-licensed Japanese exchange Coincheck, which was hacked in January last year, also has a lending program for BTC with a maximum annual rate of 5 percent. Prior to the hack, this service supported 12 cryptocurrencies.

Bitbank, another regulated Japanese exchange, also offers up to 5 percent interest annually for users lending between 1 and 25 BTC. Besides BTC, the exchange plans to extend the offer to BCH, ETH, LTC, XRP, and MONA.

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/indian-exchange-lending-program-cryptocurrencies/

The multimillion-dollar blockchain Tezos has officially concluded its first round of voting for two competing system-wide upgrade proposals.

Having raised a record fundraising amount of $232 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017, the Tezos blockchain officially launched last September. It was valued at over $1 billion at the time and presently sits at roughly $360 million in market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap.

Not without its fair share of internal governance conflicts, today marks the official close of the first round of voting on the Tezos blockchain. The two proposals dubbed ‘Athens A’ and ‘Athens B’ are the first of its kind to undergo Tezos’ protocol amendment procedures, designed to roll out system-wide upgrades otherwise known as hard forks in an entirely automated and self-governing fashion.

Having gathered a total of 25,855 community votes, Athens A won the majority of bids from bakers, the equivalent to miners on a traditional proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, with a total of 18,181 votes.

But not all bakers on the Tezos blockchain voted. Over half of the baking community actually chose to abstain from the vote.

The Tezos Foundation – a non-profit entity in charge of funding development on the blockchain and controlling roughly one-third of total baking power – explained in a blog post:

“The Tezos Foundation decided to remain neutral by not upvoting any proposals …. As noted, this contributes to the required quorum and further elevates the voices of other members of the Tezos community in this historic first vote.”

Proposed Changes
Athens A is set to introduce two different backwards-incompatible changes to the network.

First, computation limits per block – also called gas limits – will be increased on the Tezos blockchain to allow for larger transaction throughput. As founder of Cryptium Labs – the second most popular baker on Tezos – Awa Sun Yin explains in a blog post:

“If the gas limit is increased, it would enable more computation in blocks and operations, meaning that not only the maximum of transactions per block could increase, but also the complexity of the transactions.”

Second, roll sizes – which are aggregated Tezos tokens that bakers hold in order to be randomly selected in the block creation process – will be decreased from 10,000 XTZ to 8,000 XTZ.

As Jacob Arluck from the Tocqueville Group – a for-profit business development entity funded by the Tezos Foundation – explains in a blog post, the amendment would “incrementally” lower the barrier to entry for baking and subsequently, block creation.

Neither of these changes according to Yin are all that radical, but are rather geared toward “testing the actual on-chain governance process and setting a precedent for future protocol upgrades and proposals,” as stated in another blog post.

Agreeing with Yin that “the main focus of this first vote is to demonstrate the amendment procedure itself and what it can achieve,” CTO of Nomadic Labs – the developer group who put forth both Athens proposals – Benjamin Canou told CoinDesk:

“It is worth mentioning that even though not radical and super technical, the changes are far from trivial. Take the proposed increase to the gas limit, for instance. It is mostly the change of a constant but just being able to have the community decide on this change is already a breakthrough.”

Now that the proposal voting period has ended, bakers on Tezos will enter into a roughly three-week period of “exploration.”

Next steps
The Exploration Vote Period is the second of four different stages the Athens proposal will move through before eventual activation on the live Tezos blockchain. In the exploration phase, bakers vote on whether to advance Athens A to a testing period.

After gaining a supermajority of votes to do so – that is 80 percent out of 80 percent quorum – the Athens proposal will advance to another three week period where the Tezos blockchain actually spawns a new but temporary blockchain network.

Lasting for 48 hours, this secondary blockchain will act as a test network activating the proposed code in advance and ensuring its proper function.

Given a smooth test activation, the last phase – also called the “promotion period” – reviews the proposal in its entirety for a final time and allows for one more community vote. Altogether, the whole process takes roughly three months to come to a conclusion.

As the first in a series of proposed upgrades to the Tezos’ blockchain still to come, Athens A will likely see activation sometime in late May.

“We are mainly interested in seeing the actual protocol upgrade and the entire Tezos’ community using the Athens protocol from the winning proposal,” said Andrew Paulicek – founder of Tezos baking service HappyTezos – to CoinDesk.

And pointing towards still more radical changes on the blockchain yet to come after Athens, Paulicek noted that he was particularly keen on seeing the integration of zero-knowledge cryptography such as zk-SNARKs also voted on in coming months.

Affirming these plans, Canou told CoinDesk:

“We are indeed working on adding zero-knowledge cryptography via a future protocol upgrade proposal later this year. The exact shape that this integration will take is not yet decided.”

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/welcome-to-athens-tezos-completes-historic-first-blockchain-vote

North Korean political dissident group Cheollima Civil Defence (CCD) is selling Ethereum-based (ETH) visas for entering the country once it is supposedly liberated.

The CCD’s website advertises a “Limited issuance of 200,000 anonymous blockchain visas to visit Free Joseon (previously North Korea) upon liberation” Free Joseon is seemingly a reference to the Joseon Kingdom, a five century long dynasty that was succeeded by the Korean Empire. The visas are emitted in the form of non-fungible ERC-721 tokens dubbed G-VISA on the Ethereum blockchain. The price, for the first one thousand visas, will be 1 ETH.

Per the announcement, the issuance will begin on Sunday, March 24 and all the visas will expire on March 1, 2029, and can only be used once for a stay of 45 days at most. One person can purchase unlimited visas and enter the country multiple times, while being subject to relevant customs and port of entry restrictions.

The website also explains that “each G-VISA is assigned an incrementing ID Number in the order it was purchased,” so no specific number can be requested or changed. CCD states that while ideally the visas could be used to visit a free North Korea:

“Ownership of one or more G-VISAs should be considered a contribution to the movement and should not be used for speculative or fiduciary purposes.”

While discouraging speculation, CCD also points out that G-VISAs may be available on ERC-721 marketplaces such as OpenSea, and recommends to look there for preferred issuance IDs. Notably, while the issuance of the visas will supposedly start on March 24, there are already 5 G-VISAs listed on OpenSea and the page dedicated to the token on Ethereum block explorer Etherscan reveals that already 7 of them exist.

The Bitcoin (BTC) address dedicated to donations has received over 14 BTC so far, ($56,000 at press time) while the Ethereum donation address only received one-hundredth of an ETH at press time.

Cable news network CNN attributed a recent attack on the North Korean embassy in Madrid, to CCD. Armed assailants reportedly restrained staff members before stealing a variety of items and fleeing the premises.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, North Korea has allegedly amassed $670 million in fiat and cryptocurrencies by conducting hacking attacks.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/north-korean-dissidents-sell-ethereum-based-post-liberation-visas

Today, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) welcomed distributed ledger technology solutions firm Filament to its growing consortium of companies from across the globe.

Filament provides both hardware and software support for connected devices in the developing Internet of Things (IoT), a technological initiative to extend internet connectivity to everyday devices.

By joining the initiative, Filament says it seeks to develop the crypto industry’s best practices and gain access to the EEA’s network of hundreds of businesses in multiple industries.

Filament will contribute turn-key support for the EEA’s Hyperledger Fabric solution hosted by software giant Linux. Regarding the partnership, Filament CEO Allison Clift-Jennings said:

“Our solutions feature turn-key support for Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, enabling devices to transact natively with multiple enterprise blockchain platforms. We look forward to contributing to new developments and forging partnerships through collaboration with the EEA community.””

The firm’s goal is to advance automation and develop new revenue streams by bringing “non-internet” devices online. With the support of the EEA, Filament will likely make use of Ethereum’s decentralized smart contracts platform to scale up its operations, and build more products through which all connected devices on the Internet of Things can communicate and transact.

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance continues to add new and innovative business models to its roster of companies from virtually every major industry, from finance to healthcare. With the addition of the Filament, the EEA has expanded its network and is moving closer to its ultimate goal of using Ethereum tech to decentralize the world.

Source: https://cryptobriefing.com/enterprise-ethereum-alliance-welcomes-filament-to-the-fold/

XRP adoption has been slowly gaining traction as developers are looking to integrate XRP and develop new applications which have actual use-cases.

A developer, SchalaubiDev [@SchalaubiD], posted on Twitter that he developed an add-on, which when installed would allow users to send XRP via email.

The developer posted a screengrab of the add-on installed on Microsoft Outlook, which also showed the XRP received. Wietse Wind, the developer of TipBot and the lead for XRPL Labs, which is funded directly by Ripple, helped him with the API on the project.


Source: Twitter | SchlaubiD

However, the project is not open source yet, but the developer said he had plans to make it open source in the future. With the add-on, users can send and receive XRP directly to other users via email and the receiver doesn’t need to have an XRP address.

The sender needs to enter the desired amount of XRP, which will be sent to the receiver via the XRP TipBot after the email is sent. The recipient will immediately receive an email from MoneyMessage with the access data. The XRP received can be withdrawn by the user at any time to the desired XRP wallet.

The only necessity is that the users should have XRP TipBot to use the aforementioned facilities. Moreover, the maximum amount of XRP that can be sent is limited to 20 XRP.

This add-on is currently up and running on Outlook 2016 with support for Office 365 in the works. The developer also added that the same functionality would be arriving in Gmail as well.

@John_S_cothill, a Twitter user, commented:

“Congrats, this looks ace! Possible Gmail extension in future for the businesses that have moved away from Outlook (its a growing proportion), and personal users?”

@bigbuckor, another Twitter user, commented:

“This would be yet another revolution in the way we send money…with this, who would need Western Union?!”

Source: https://ambcrypto.com/xrp-adoption-goes-mainstream-users-can-send-xrp-via-emails-with-a-simple-add-on/

BitMax.io [BTMX.com], the industry leading next-generation digital asset exchange, has announced a strategic partnership with Fantom, the decentralized nervous system of the smart cities of the future, and the platform for nearly instantaneous payments. Fantom solves the problems of existing distributed ledgers such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, by utilizing its revolutionary technology on a global scale. The Fantom token was listed for trading on the BitMax.io exchange on March 12th, 2019.

What is Fantom?

Fantom’s mission is to provide compatibility between all transaction bodies around the world, creating an ecosystem that allows real-time transactions and data sharing with low cost. The distributed ledger proposed by Fantom is combined with a high-performance virtual machine and secure smart contract execution.

The new network proposes a groundbreaking consensus mechanism which utilizes gossip to reach aBFT consensus. The developers behind Fantom consider themselves to be specialists in holistic consensus. They’re building the network and the next generation infrastructure or backbone to power smart cities and blazingly fast payments. Fantom is a highly scalable, decentralized, and secure network. It has the ability to collect a large quantity of high-speed data transmission with scalable solutions across multiple smart city service providers.

By 2020 it is estimated that smart cities will have 90 billion IoT devices sending data that needs to be stored securely and be accessible to stakeholders for smart city data-driven Smart contracts and DApp. As an IT infrastructure backbone, the Fantom platform will change the operation of public utilities, smart homes, healthcare, education, traffic management, resource management, and environmental sustainability.

Fantom uses a new protocol called the “Lachesis Protocol” for maintaining consensus. This protocol will be integrated into the Fantom OPERA Chain. Applications built on top of the Fantom OPERA Chain will enjoy instant transactions and near-zero transaction costs.

The platform is open-source and will be used and changed by the community to provide various application support tools that can be used to create decentralized applications [DApps].

Fantom’s solution to current blockchain problems

Fantom’s technology is intended to create potentially infinite scalability, processing transactions very quickly even with a large number of nodes participating in the network. It will use a method where a single event block verifies the transaction prior to it, and transactions are verified and processed in a non-synchronized way without being approved by miners as in prior blockchains. The increased transactional load won’t lead to bottlenecks or delayed approval. It also intends to manage historical information without assistance from external databases, such as the Oracle Database.

Event blocks that store information from transactions contains multiple data packages. A data package may include historical information, transactions, Smart Contracts, reputation management, and rewards.

Third generation blockchain technology shows improved performance, but the speed of creating blocks is still slow. The OPERA Chain intends to ensure high creation and processing performance of up to 300,000 transactions per second.

With a high level of scalability and reliability, Fantom’s strong third-generation blockchain technology will be able to be utilized on a large scale across many industries and domains. It intends not only to process large numbers of transactions at scale but to process Story and historical data to ensure the reliability of transactions.

Team Members

Dr. Ahn is the CEO of Fantom Foundation. Ahn is a contributing writer at Fortune Magazine and has been awarded the President Award for his successful IT business. In 2010, Dr. Ahn established a successful food-tech platform SikSin, which has since acquired over 3.5 million downloads and 22 million monthly page views.

Jake Choi has been involved in the cryptocurrency space for over three years as an investor, trader, advisor, and entrepreneur. Previously, he worked as Vice President of Sales at digi.cash, a digital currency platform, where he established their cryptocurrency brokerage and vaulting business, facilitating trades up to US$5million worth of cryptocurrencies.

Michael Kong is a smart contract developer who has been involved in the blockchain space for several years. He previously worked as the Chief Technology Officer at Block8, a venture capital-backed Blockchain incubator where he managed all of the business’s projects.

What is BitMax.io?

BitMax.io is the industry leading next-generation digital asset exchange that provides a broad range of financial products and services to both retail and institutional clients across the globe. This innovative trading platform was founded by a group of Wall Street quant trading veterans and built upon the core values of blockchain, transparency, and reliability, to deliver high-quality client services and efficient trading experience.

Last November, BitMax.io team introduced a revolutionary trading model that combined “transaction-mining” and “reverse-mining”. Different from traditional transaction-mining-only exchanges, BitMax.io platform users receive not only BTMX tokens as a reward for trading on the platform but also rebates for executing maker trades. “Reverse mining” helps to support the liquidity on the platform.

BitMax.io always strives to provide its global users with a comprehensive set of trading products. Its recently launched margin trading function is another step forward from a product offering perspective to better serve their dynamic trading needs. For those users who understand and acknowledge the risks involved in margin trading, the function allows users to borrow funds from the platform and to trade more digital assets than they normally could afford.

The list of digital assets that can be traded on margin has increased from the initial four to 18 different tokens, even including BTMX platform native token. Again, this is the pioneering move among all the exchange players, that not only builds upon its progressive BTMX token economics but also expands the utility functions of BTMX, especially with those BTMX under lock-up that can be used as collateral.

Overall margin trading can bring more trading volume and enhance liquidity on the platform. And with increased buying power, users can leverage their tradable asset as collateral for a potentially higher return on investment when the price goes up. However, they need to bear the risk of potential losses from margin trading when the price moves down. [The margin trading function of BitMax.io is not available for North American markets].

A Collaborative Partnership

BitMax.io has already expanded its global client base to 40,000 active community members and over 110,000 registered users. Last several weeks the team has successfully launched the listing of seven innovative new projects and the Fantom listing will be part of this impressive track record. BitMax.io and Fantom are both committed to encouraging the broad-based adoption of cryptocurrencies with focus on real-world usability and scalability.

Source: https://ambcrypto.com/bitmax-io-btmx-com-and-fantom-ftm-form-a-strategic-partnership/