US Financial Authority Asks Brokerage Firms to Disclose Crypto Activities

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/us-financial-authority-brokerage-firms-crypto-activities/
Posted: July 10, 2018
By: Kevin Helms


The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) issued a Regulatory Notice last week on digital assets.

A not-for-profit organization authorized by Congress, FINRA is not part of the U.S. government but is tasked with protecting America’s investors by making sure the broker-dealer industry operates fairly and honestly, its website describes.

With few exceptions, the Authority explains that in addition to registering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):

Every firm and broker that sells securities to the public in the United States must be licensed and registered by FINRA.

Individual registered representatives must also register with FINRA. According to its website, FINRA had 629,112 registered representatives and 3,712 member firms in April.

In the 4-page notice, the Authority emphasized that it “is monitoring developments in the digital asset marketplace and is undertaking efforts to ascertain the extent of FINRA member involvement related to digital assets,” adding:

FINRA is issuing this notice to encourage each firm to promptly notify FINRA if it, or its associated persons or affiliates, currently engages, or intends to engage, in any activities related to digital assets, such as cryptocurrencies and other virtual coins and tokens.

Furthermore, until July 31 next year, the Authority “encourages each firm to keep its Regulatory Coordinator abreast of changes in the event the firm, or its associated persons or affiliates, determines to engage in activities relating to digital assets not previously disclosed.”

Kumamoto Electric Company and OZ Mining Corporation to Start Mining in Southern Japan

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/kumamoto-electric-company-and-oz-mining-corporation-to-start-mining-in-southern-japan/
Posted: July 10, 2018
By: Nathalie Stucky


Kumamoto Electric Power Company to Offer Cheap Rates
Kumamoto City in the Kumamoto Prefecture are located on the Kyushu island in southern Japan. Kumamoto Electric Power Company is also set on spreading crypto mining factories throughout Japan, according to a statement, making use of the cheapest electricity price in the country, limited to KEPCO (Kansai Electric Power Company) and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company). “Since the liberalization of the electric power market took place in early 2016, there are more and more electric power companies offering lower electric fees. In the Kyushu [Southern] region, I believe Kumamoto Electric Company offers one of the cheapest rates,” a salesperson at Kumamoto Electric Company told news.Bitcoin.com.

Japanese Ex-Financiers Started Mining Business in Northern Rural Industrial Zone
A cryptocurrency related startup company run by a group of Japanese men formerly working in the banking industry installed a crypto mining factory with 500 miners in the country side of Fukui, a Japanese coastal city located on the Chinese side of the sea, in the North. Alt Design, founded in September 2017 in Tokyo, offers various kinds of services such as crypto and ICO consultancy, but its founder and CEO Yuta Funayama decided around November of 2017 to start mining crypto in Japan. “We wanted to offer our clients and investors who are mainly Japanese a possibility to see the miners with their own eyes.”

Kumamoto Electric Company and OZ Mining Corporation to Start Mining in Southern Japan

Yuya Yamamoto, a spokesman of Alt Design, told news.Bitcoin.com in an interview: “Japanese people invest in miners abroad, but they expressed some worries saying that it’s harder to check what’s going on at the miner farms, especially if they are located outside of Japan. What we offer also, is the ‘Japanese quality’ service in which we believe the management of our miners is solid.” Alt Design has been mining litecoin and ethereum since mid-March 2018. “Our employees all have a background in IT. The miners operate 24/7 and our staff rotate daily to check if everything is running smoothly,” Yamamoto said, “we believe that our expertise is to tackle any incident quickly.” And the facility can resist natural disasters, he added. The equipment generates about 200 ETH and LTC altogether a month, he said.

Also, while searching for a place to install the plant, Alt Design found an area of Japan where the local government offers subsidies for IT companies such as paying them half of the rent if they install their business in unused local factories. The municipality of Fukui offers low business settling fees in support of new businesses, including IT companies. “We offer companies which want to settle in our city to pay up to half of their rent for three years,” Hiroyasu Yoshida, who represents the Fukui Municipality said. The electricity isn’t cheap everywhere in Japan, but the tariffs are lower in the Hokuriku region, including Fukui, which is to the north of Japan’s main island, facing China.

Facebook’s Blockchain Division Has a New Director of Engineering

Source: https://www.ccn.com/facebooks-blockchain-division-has-a-new-director-of-engineering/
Posted: July 07, 2018



Social media giant Facebook has recently promoted senior engineer Evan Cheng to director of engineering for its recently-launched blockchain division.

Earlier in May, Facebook put together a team led by David Marcus, Coinbase board member and former president at PayPal, to explore blockchain technology and its potential use cases for the platform. The team consisted of less than a few dozen people and included senior executives from Instagram. The team was said to directly report to Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook.

In an executive reshuffle, Facebook appointed Evan Cheng as the director of engineering and Kevin Weil, formerly VP of product at Instagram, as the VP of product at their blockchain division. According to his LinkedIn page, Cheng has been employed at Facebook since November 2015 and has been working at their programming languages and runtimes division. He also worked at Apple for over 10 years and is credited as one of the inventors of LLVM, a compiler that generates the low-level machine code for Apple devices. Cheng is also listed as an advisor to blockchain projects Zilliqa and ChainLink.


In a Facebook post earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg stated that he would take up a personal challenge to study cryptocurrencies this year. He remarked that centralization and centralized systems are a key problem today and that he would examine this technology to accelerate decentralization and “put more power in people’s hands.”

He said:

“There are important counter-trends to this –like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”

As CCN reported, Facebook recently reversed its ban on cryptocurrency ads on their platform. The ban was initially placed to protect its users from fraud and theft. Facebook admitted that the ban was intentionally broad and they would revisit the policy while they “work to better detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices.” Once the ban was lifted, Facebook announced that they would allow pre-approved applicants to advertise on their platform.

Although Facebook hasn’t announced any plans about how they would use blockchain technology on their platform, It is clear that they are pursuing this technology with interest. In the light of the data crises faced by Facebook, it is going to be interesting to see how they utilize this technology to improve their services.

South Korea officially recognizes cryptocurrency exchanges

Source: https://bcfocus.com/news/south-korea-cryptocurrency-exchanges/17812/
Posted: July 06, 2018
By: Chandna

In a major breakthrough, South Korea has legitimized the cryptocurrency sector as an industry. Soon, the country will have "a set of classification standards for the South Korean Blockchain and cryptocurrency industry."

According to local website BChain, the Korean government is set to release new blockchain industry classification norms by the end of this month. Three ministries - the Ministry of Information and Communication, the National Statistical Office and the Ministry of Science and Technology - are said to have been working been working on a draft for a couple of months.

The industry will be divided in three categories, which will deal separately with decentralized apps (like the ones made on top of Ethereum technology), mining activities of different tokens and the third will include crypto exchanges and brokerages.

Meanwhile, Malta and Japan have also come up with legislations which are being touted as quite cryptocurrency and blockchain-friendly. The Financial Services Agency of Japan is working to improve a law that requires digital assets to be stored separately from other securities. Recently, Malta also announced a new legislation that is aimed at attracting blockchain-based businesses to the country.

https://www.ccn.com/chinese-angel-investor-gathers-10000-bitcoins-during-bear-q1-2018/

There was one Chinese investor who is now trending after he bought 10k bitcoin during the Q1 bear or during the bearish movement at the first quarter of the year. According to the article he was Cai Wensheng the founder of a selfie-app called Meitu which is very popular in China. This man is a good sign that bitcoin really is becoming more attractive to big enterpreneurs across the globe.

Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to Study Blockchain Implementation

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/reserve-bank-of-zimbabwe-to-study-blockchain-implementation
Posted: July 05, 2018
By: Ana Alexandre


The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) has initiated studies of blockchain technology with a view to subsequently embrace the technology and integrate it into the bank’s business processes, local news outlet NewsDay reported July 5.

Speaking at the Alpha Media Holdings’ Banks and Banking breakfast meeting in Harare yesterday, RBZ governor John Mangudya reportedly said that the bank is looking to embrace the technology. He stated that central banks in a number of countries, including China, the U.S., U.K., and South Africa have been considering blockchain deployment for their own activities. Mangudya continued:

    “I did not say cryptocurrencies because it is lower than blockchain. Blockchain encompasses all the cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin... and we are saying we are putting in motion studies, ways and means of investigating that blockchain technology.”

Mangudya noted that the bank’s work on blockchain is driven by the desire not to be left out on an important technological development, while stressing the need for a cautious approach. He added:

    “What we are against as I have always said is to do things which are not regulated because we need to know where these bitcoins are being mined and do want to hunt them. So while we want to embrace things, we need to know where they are coming from. If you embrace mobile banking platforms we know that there is a trust account.”

In May, Zimbabwe’s central bank issued a circular ordering all financial institutions to stop providing service to cryptocurrency exchanges and liquidate existing crypto-related accounts. The director and registrar of financial institutions Norman Mataruka explained his decision, stating that the RBZ has an “obligation to safeguard the integrity of payment systems”, which the central bank is not prepared to provide for crypto.

In November of last year, RBZ announced that the use of Bitcoin (BTC) was considered illegal in the country. Mataruka then said that the use of “Bitcoin … is not actually legal” within the country’s jurisdiction.

Switzerland’s Main Stock Exchange Dives Deep Into Crypto

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/switzerlands-stock-exchange-crypto/?utm_source=OneSignal%20Push&utm_medium=notification&utm_campaign=Push%20Notifications
By:  Kevin Helms
Posted: July 07, 2018
Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space


Switzerland’s principal stock exchange has announced that it is building a platform for the trading, settlement, and custody of digital assets. This announcement follows reports of government officials working on giving crypto businesses access to banking services.

SIX Launching Digital Exchange

SIX, the operator of Switzerland’s principal stock exchange, SIX Swiss Exchange, announced Friday that it “is building a fully integrated trading, settlement and custody infrastructure for digital assets.”

The SIX exchange is fully regulated by Swiss Authorities, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma) and the Swiss National Bank, as a Financial Market Infrastructure operator. The company plans for its new platform, called Swiss Digital Exchange (SDX), to “enjoy the same standard of oversight and regulation.”

Citing that SDX will bridge “the gap between traditional financial services and digital communities,” the company claims:

        SIX Digital Exchange will be the first market infrastructure in the world to offer a fully integrated end to end trading, settlement and custody service for digital assets. The service will provide a safe environment for issuing and trading digital assets, and enable the tokenization of existing securities and non-bankable assets to make previously untradeable assets tradeable.

SIX CEO Jos Dijsselhof commented, “this is the beginning of a new era for capital markets infrastructures. For us it is abundantly clear that much of what is going on in the digital space is here to stay and will define the future of our industry.”

Will the Platform Trade Bitcoin Directly?

While the official announcement by SIX does not mention whether the platform will support the direct trading of cryptocurrencies, a few publications indicated that it will trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Business Insider wrote, “SIX’s new platform, set to launch in the first half of next year, will offer end-to-end trading, settlement, and custody service for digital assets such as bitcoin and ICO [Initial Coin Offering] tokens.” The Financial Times wrote, “The platform being built by the Six exchange is designed to be used for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and will be based mainly on Blockchain distributed ledger technology.”

However, SIX clarified in a tweet:

        First we will enable the tokenization of bankable assets like stocks or bonds and, potentially, at a later stage non-bankable assets. Whether we will also make cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or existing ‘ICO tokens’ available, is still open.

Meanwhile, SIX has been maintaining Crypto Market Index 10. Its objective “is to reliably measure the performance of the largest and most liquid crypto assets and tokens and provide an investable benchmark for this asset class,” its website describes. “The prices for the crypto assets and tokens are obtained from multiple exchanges.”

Switzerland Wants to Become Crypto Nation

Switzerland’s Main Stock Exchange Dives Deep Into CryptoRecently, news.Bitcoin.com reported on government officials and bankers working on giving crypto businesses access to banking services since Swiss banks have reportedly been refusing accounts to crypto firms.

The country’s economic minister, Johann Schneider-Ammann, said earlier this year that his country wants to become the “crypto nation.” So far, the canton of Zug, promoting itself as the heart of “crypto valley”, has been attracting crypto startups with favorable tax and regulatory environment.

In February, Finma published guidelines for ICOs after seeing a sharp increase in the number tokens planned or executed in the country and a corresponding increase in the number of inquiries about the applicability of regulation.

What do you think of SIX launching a digital exchange? Do you think they will start trading bitcoin soon? Let us know in the comments section below.

Global Telecom Blockchain Consortium Unveils Working Group for Remittances


Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/global-telecom-blockchain-consortium-unveils-working-group-for-remittances
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By: Marie Huillet
Posted: July 07, 2018

A global blockchain consortium of telecom carriers has announced that six further major international telecoms firms are joining its ranks, CT Japan reports today, July 6.

The consortium, dubbed ‘The Carrier Blockchain Study Group’ (CBSG) has also today unveiled the creation of a new blockchain working group that will focus on global remittance services.

Launched in September 2017, CBSG counts as its founding members Japanese telecoms conglomerate Softbank, Taiwan-based telecoms carrier Far EasTone, and two U.S.-based firms - telecoms-focused blockchain firm TBCASoft and telecoms firm Sprint.

Three further members have since joined, these being South Korean LG Uplus, UAE-based Etisalat Telecommunication Corporation and the state-owned South Korean KT Corporation..

In Asia, the latest leading telecom carriers to join are Malaysia-headquartered conglomerate Axiata, the Philippines’ leading telecoms provider PLDT, Indonesia-based Telin, and Vietnam’s largest cell network operator Viettel.

Zain, which provides cell and data services to almost 47 million consumers across the Middle East and Africa, and Turkey’s leading cell phone operator Turkcell have also joined.

The Director of Viettel International Business, Doan Dai Phong, gave some insight today into the ambitions of CBSG’s global cross-carrier blockchain ecosystem, saying the new services would cover “[cell phone] top-up, roaming wallet, secured clearing and settlement, personal authentication [and] IoT applications.”

Blockchain’s potential, which a Axiata representative argued is “by design [...] extremely well suited” to streamlining global telecoms “across trusted, connected and distributed parties,” is being recognized by increasing numbers of major industry players.

In May, Cointelegraph reported on the successful live testing of a blockchain proof of concept (PoC) that would automate inter-carrier settlement of services across the telecoms industry, completed by two major telecoms firms from Hong Kong and the U.K.

Earlier this spring, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei revealed its latest Hyperledger-fuelled blockchain cloud service, and South Korean telecoms operator SK Telecom also announced two new blockchain tech platforms, one for digital asset management, and one to support the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) investment ecosystem.