Cryptocurrency exchanges and hacks are two terms that appear to be synonymous with one another. The reality is that in 2019 alone, the blockchain community has already been accustomed to six major hacks, subsequently resulting in the cryptocurrency-equivalent of tens of millions of dollars in stolen funds.

It is also possible that others have occurred, much unbeknownst to the public eye.

Nevertheless, the latest of such attacks occurred just this month via Japanese third-party platform BitPoint. The hack is believed to have resulted in the hackers illegally extracting at least $30 million in customer funds.

The unfortunate fact that must be realized is that irrespective of the underlying safeguards employed by cryptocurrency exchanges, the means and methods of would-be criminals are getting smarter and smarter. As such, the focus must not only be on how exchanges are protecting customer funds, but how they react when the worst does happen.

complete at : https://beincrypto.com/another-day-another-hack-when-will-it-stop/

Supposedly by mistake, the controversial digital currency company Tether Limited printed five billion USDT stablecoins yesterday. The Bitcoin price immediately responded positively to the print, providing evidence for some that the company is manipulating bots to push up the price using large USDT mints.

full article on: https://beincrypto.com/bitcoin-price-rises-after-usdt-misprint-do-bots-trade-on-tether-mints/

What do you think about the Tether ‘misprint?’ Do you think it was a genuine mistake?

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is in talks to set up its own regulated insurance company with the help of insurance broker giant Aon, industry sources told CoinDesk.

Establishing “captive” insurance subsidiaries, wholly owned by the firm being insured, is a time-honored way for corporations to reduce costs and improve access to reinsurance markets (a form of insurance purchased by insurance companies in order to mitigate risk). Nearly all Fortune 500 companies and thousands of midsize firms maintain captives, according to a December 2018 article in trade publication CPA Journal.

Coinbase and Aon see this structure as potentially part of the answer to the shortage of insurance available to crypto exchanges, the sources said. While Coinbase has obtained more coverage than most, often exchanges just self-insure by setting aside a bunch of coins to cover losses in the event of a hack or disappearance of customer funds. The problem with that approach is its lack of a formal structure, creating the temptation to access the funds for other purposes and ambiguity about how much coverage a firm actually has.

With a captive, on the other hand, the funds are segregated and held in a regulated, audited vehicle, which can help the firm go out and attain more cover from the reinsurance market. To be clear: the captive would insure only its parent company, not competitors.

Neither Aon nor Coinbase would comment on the latter’s interest in captive insurance. However, Aon did say that it established the industry’s first crypto captive earlier this year for an unnamed client. This Caymans Islands-based captive will write “crime” policies covering hacks of hot (online) wallets and “specie” coverage for cryptocurrency kept offline in cold storage, the broker said.

The two companies have worked together before: in April, Aon helped arrange about $255 million in coverage for Coinbase’s hot wallets. The exchange, which keeps only 2% of client funds in hot wallets, held $25 billion of crypto at the height of the 2017 bullrun.

Aon said a handful of its crypto clients are considering the captive option, adding that Bermuda and some leading U.S. on-shore domiciles are expected to follow the Caymans soon.

“There is a lack of capacity and some are uncomfortable with what is available in the marketplace and are looking to alternative solutions,” said Jacqueline Quintal, a managing director and the financial institutions practice leader at Aon. “I think the path for most will be to buy some amount of traditional insurance first and then to explore alternative structures, potentially including a captive — and we are having more and more of these conversations.”

The case for captives
Stepping back, a captive is an insurance company created and completely owned by another company to provide coverage for itself. It’s a regulated alternative to self-insurance which can offer direct access to reinsurance markets and act as an investment vehicle.

If pricing is too high in the commercial insurance markets or no underwriters are willing to cover a firm’s risk, captives are used to formalize self-insurance with reporting on capital and reserve requirements.

Speaking to the advantages of using a captive rather than simple self-insurance, Quintal said: “If a firm is self-insuring, they’ve accepted responsibility for funding 100% of any loss. Captives, in comparison, provide a means through which firms can access insurance or reinsurance, while also pre-funding self-insured loss amounts in a more formal way than simply setting aside capital.”

Taking this more formal and regulated approach, Quintal added, can help create more capacity in the market, and “by having more control over a firm’s insurance program, captives can bring the price of risk financing down over time.”

Even for a crypto firm, a captive would have to keep most of its claims reserve in fiat, but crypto could potentially be used for the surplus (additional funds reserved in case of an unexpected amount of claims), according to Ward Ching, managing director, Aon Captive Insurance Managers.

There have also been discussions about including crypto in the Caymans captive’s investment activities, said Ching.

“It’s all about doing the math and showing the domicile regulatory leadership how the inclusion of cryptocurrency as an asset class both satisfies the regulatory mandate and provides financial flexibility in a constructive and safe manner,” he said.

Self-insurance
It’s no secret that many of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges simply self-insure against hacks and losses.

The problem historically has been that crypto insurance is prohibitively expensive, way too limited and fiendishly tricky when it comes to actually making a claim. In response, crypto firms have resigned themselves to holding their own coins in cold storage (where the private keys are disconnected from the internet, in a hardware device or piece of paper locked in a safe) to deal with losses. 

complete at: https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-is-in-talks-to-launch-its-own-insurance-company

In September of last year, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) released its blockchain trade finance platform. Chinese media is now reporting that the ‘experiment’ has been a massive success, reaching billions of dollars worth in transactions on foreign exchanges.

China has been experimenting with blockchain for some time, but authorities are just now releasing concrete results. According to Sina Finance, the People’s Bank of China has processed around $4.4B in foreign exchange transactions on its blockchain platform. Currently, the platform incorporates 483 branches from 28 banks.


PBoC Has Room to Expand
Although this may seem impressive, there is still a long way to grow. Because of uneven development in fintech technology, business volume is still a fraction of what it could be on the platform.

Cross-border financing is a major responsibility of Chinese banks, and blockchain technology promises to cut costs to make the process more efficient. That said, with the country’s financial infrastructure being so lopsided, it will likely take a few years to balance out.

The blockchain platform launched in Shenzhen and is called the ‘Bay Area Trade Finance Blockchain Platform’ (BATFB). Expansions are also coming to the Guangdong, Hong Kong, and the Macau regions.

This effort was spearheaded by the Central Bank Digital Currency Research Institute along with the PBoC. Its main purpose is to eliminate fraud and provide real-time transparency.



Here for the Long Haul
However, the platform is for much more than just foreign currency transfers. Regulators are actively looking to expand it to include supply-chain logistics and international trade. The BATFB also signed an external tax filing with the Shenzhen Taxation Bureau last week, indicating that it is here to stay.

China may be hostile to cryptocurrencies, but it is leading the way in implementing blockchain technology. Although this may seem like good news for the industry as a whole, China has yet to loosen its existing laws regarding these digital assets. Until then, the rest of the market is unlikely to gain much exposure from these successes.

source: https://beincrypto.com/peoples-bank-of-china-blockchain-platform-has-processed-nearly-4-4b-this-past-year/

Although it should come as no surprise, the United States leads the world in tweets about Bitcoin and Facebook’s new cryptocurrency ‘Libra.’ The other five countries in the running are the United Kingdom, Canada, Turkey, India, and Australia.

There should be no doubt as to where the most buzz surrounding Bitcoin is. According to a new study by research firm The Tie, around 38.9% of all Bitcoin-related tweets were from the United States. The United Kingdom came in at a distant second, making up around 10.5%.

However, what’s just as interesting is that the proportion of Americans tweeting about the Libra is even higher than Bitcoin, with the United States making up 43.8% of all Libra-related tweets.

https://twitter.com/TheTIEIO/status/1146576002086309888/photo/1

Some other fun facts the study found include:

- American tweets are overwhelmingly positive towards Bitcoin, with over 61% of tweets being favorable.
- However, this is only slightly higher than average, with 59.8% of all tweets about Bitcoin being positive.
- Altogether, Americans and Brits make up over 50% of all Bitcoin-related tweets.
- Other nations in the ‘top 5’ include India, Canada, and Turkey.
- Although other nations tweet about Bitcoin far less, they are far more positive. Peru, for example, stands out for being the ‘most positive’ on Bitcoin.

The fact that Bitcoin-related tweets are mostly from the United States tells us how much the industry still has to grow. Most of Europe was notably absent from this study, indicating there is still much room for growth.

One interesting factoid in the study was that Venezuela leads the world in the most negative tweets about Bitcoin, making up around 62% of all of them. This is likely due to frustrations over Bitcoin’s high fees, which many Venezuelans cannot afford due to hyperinflation.

Overall, the trends on Twitter seem strong for Bitcoin. However, we can expect the Twitter crypto-verse to continue to expand beyond the United States as the industry grows.


source: https://beincrypto.com/the-united-kingdom-and-united-states-make-up-over-half-of-tweets-about-bitcoin/

Talking to the French press, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon asserted his opinion that Libra is not necessarily going to take the cryptocurrency world by storm. He also allayed fears that the global economy is in dire straits.

Libra One of Many Institutionalized Cryptocurrencies, Won’t Necessarily Be in the Lead
Solomon shared his thoughts on the new wave of institutionalized cryptocurrencies in an interview with French outlet Les Echos. He specified that Goldman Sachs undertakes extensive research into tokenization, adding that his bank recognizes its potential.

The success of Facebook’s Libra, he feels, will rest on its selling points. Namely, the ability to use blockchain technology to create a stable digital currency backed by a basket of fiat currencies in order to move money across borders.

He declared, however, that there’s no way of telling whether Libra will make any more progress than “one of the other fifty that people are watching”. The CFO of Blockchain Capital has a similar viewpoint. This, he holds, is especially significant if seen in the light of many other big players entering the game. JP Morgan is launching its own virtual currency, and Solomon believes it’s safe to assume that many other major financial institutions could follow suit.

He underscored, however, that we’re still in the early days. Citing COO Sheryl Sandberg, he notes that even Facebook is a long way off from launching.



The Role of Regulation
He specified that regulators are already very aware of the rapid changes and are attentive particularly to payment flows. Certainly, he maintained, there awaits a change in regulation if cryptocurrencies are to become mainstream. Regulation, he underscored, is important for the security and stability of the financial system.

Solomon does not feel that the existence of banks is in jeopardy thanks to these new actors like Libra. He concedes that they must evolve. This is partly due to profit loss as cryptocurrencies continue to siphon transactions away from traditional banking channels.

Tech giants, however, are not about to become banks. He opinionated that they have other, more pressing concerns. That and they would likely be unwilling to subject themselves to the same regulatory constraints as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. To capitalize on their large user numbers, he envisions they’ll want to partner with banks rather than work to replace them. While they might end up competing in some channels, Solomon questioned the viability of tech institutions to gain customer trust as far as aspects like risk management are concerned.

source:  https://beincrypto.com/libra-is-interesting-says-goldman-sachs-ceo-but-isnt-convinced-it-will-dominate-the-market/


What do you think about Goldman Sachs’ stance on Libra and future institutionalized cryptocurrencies?

Move over, Bitcoin FUD: The real greenhouse guzzler is stationed at a military base near you, both foreign and domestic. New research has shown that the U.S. Military surpasses a myriad of countries in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and even that of Bitcoin mining.

Big, Bigger, Baddest – There Are Much Bigger Climate-Affecting Culprits Out There Than Bitcoin Mining

So far it concerns the environment, a familiar new trend is doing the rounds. It equates the energy consumption of a particular practice (think Bitcoin) to a particular geographical set (think, most recently, Las Vegas). But laying blame at the feet of small fry without arming ourselves with cold hard facts about what’s really going on isn’t doing us any favors.

Research undertaken by UK’s Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers indicates that the US military produces as big a carbon footprint as 140 countries. Leave Bitcoin mining alone. There’s a bigger climate villain out there.

One Military Fuel Budget Equals Whole Countries’ Greenhouse Gas Emissions

To put this military data into context, let’s consider the countries that flank it on the expenditure scale. The US Military’s fuel usage alone matches the total greenhouse emissions produced by Peru and Portugal. Peru is the fourth largest country on the South American continent, home to 32.5 million people. Portugal houses 10.3 million citizens. Together, nearly 43 million people produce carbon dioxide on the same level as less than 1.4 million people (those in active service). Their primary responsibility is to wage the so-called “everywhere war”. Supposedly to protect its own against perceived threats directed at citizens of the United States of America. And, even more important, to safeguard the continued domination of the almighty dollar.

In ecological circles, unsustainable human consumption is measured using Earth Overshoot Day. This marks the day, annually, when we hypothetically deplete our given allocation for that year in terms of the earth’s biocapacity to carry us en masse. In 2018, this date was August 01. While the index provides a global mark, individual countries have their own entries on the scale. Some countries reach overshoot day faster or slower than the norm.

In terms of Country Overshoot Day, Portugal’s 2019 event fell on May 26. Peru will likely mark its national representation of unsustainability on September 23. The U.S. was on March 15 this year. The world would need 5 of planet Earth to sustain human life for a single year of everyone lived the way people in the United States do. Data from 2015 shows that US electricity usage during the Christmas holidays alone is as much as countries like El Salvador and Ethiopia use in an entire year. Even then, lighting up everyone’s favorite holiday contributes only 0.2 percent of the US’ annual energy consumption.



Bottomless Money Spending
According to The Balance, the United States estimates spending $989 billion on its military from October 1, 2019, to September 30, 2020. It’s also the largest military budget on the planet. The United States is the world’s top economy by nominal GDP, hitting $20494.10 billion in 2018, reports TradingEconomics. Portugal’s annual nominal GDP is $237.962 billion. That of Peru, $222.24 billion. The US’ armed forces spend over three times that just on oil and fuel.

The US government was exempted from reporting military emissions in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This was corrected with the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Now Trump has withdrawn the country from further participation starting in 2020. So soon it’ll be back to guesstimating how much fossil fuels the world’s largest war machine burns through. Only, most people won’t be counting. Because of incomplete data, researchers often leave the military out of such studies. Meanwhile, Trump wants more weapons spending. Having it all is not enough.

Cryptocurrency is an Alternative Solution to a Pervasive Societal Problem – Not The Reason The Ice Bergs Are Melting
Everyone should be more planet-friendly. A lot more planet-friendly. Bitcoin mining does contribute to our overall carbon footprint, despite what some may think. But Bitcoin is finite and it will only be so long before we have mined all 21 million coins. Yet, how long will the Christmas Lights Society keep pointing fingers at the cryptocurrency industry while the military-industrial complex keeps going unfettered? The mainstream media is focusing the majority of its attention on numbers that contribute a comparative minority to global warming.

All’s fair in FUD and war. But the war on decentralized currency is fighting this battle in a way that would make Lao Tzu proud. “In war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.” Here, it’s going right for the jugular, knowing the world currently has a soft spot for climate change.

The cost difference between a finite, immutable resource and a debt-ridden financial system bound to erupt, is obvious. One requires, for argument’s sake, electricity consumption the size of Las Vegas. The US dollar, on the other hand, involves 1.4 billion people to keep it stable and secure.

source: https://beincrypto.com/compared-to-bitcoin-mining-the-us-military-is-the-real-climate-threat/

Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Cardano, is often brazen. After forcing changes in the Cardano Foundation, he now says Facebook enslaves and gives nothing in return. Presently, ADA is down 18.7 percent week-to-date.

Cardano Price Analysis

Fundamentals
Online commentators believe that Facebook is a primer, readying crypto assets to new highs. With a broad user base of over 1.7 billion spread across the globe, Facebook’s stablecoin in Libra will indeed shed light on what crypto and digital assets are.

Even so, Charles Hoskinson is adamant. Arguing that despite expectations, Facebook as a tech company gives nothing in return. Instead, what the scandal-ridden social media giant does is enslave. While Talking to Finance Magnates, he said:

“I am not entering a market and looking to extract value from people. Facebook has to come into countries it doesn’t know a lot about and convinces them to enslave themselves to an economic monopoly and give nothing in return. And their only pitch is that you’ll pay less on fees.”

However, he didn’t stop there. Responding to critics busy tearing down IOHK and frustrated by shifty deadlines, Charles said:

“I also think the community has been exceedingly unfair with their criticism of our deadlines…People are saying we’re incompetent, that we don’t know what we’re doing. Moreover, there’s many people on Reddit and Twitter and other things who have said things that are just crazy. “


source: https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/07/02/cardano-founder-responds-to-critics-ada-on-the-chopping-board/