Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX is big-time bullish on Ethereum, saying he wishes he had bought some ETH in the pre-sale when it was sold for about 30 cents in 2014. This week, Ether hit a new all-time high at $2,500. This is a big shift from calling Ether “a double-digit shitcoin,” which, in his favor, he admits to. “One of the best writers in the space. Also the most successful market maker/manipulator,” commented trader and investor Tetranode, who is extremely bullish on Ethereum. “The double-digit shitcoin was just a phase. Soon all will understand the method in the madness,” he added. Ethereum, Hayes goes on to say, though imitating Bitcoin like the majority of the projects does in the crypto space, it “offered a substantial improvement by creating a virtual decentralised computer that greatly expands the potential use cases for the technology underlying Bitcoin.” Hayes’ views on Ether aren’t much different from the likes of Kyle Davies, co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, who revealed on the podcast “TechnicalRoundup” that their fund is “overweight Ethereum.” With their focus on layer one, Davie believes Ethereum is “overlooked” as everyone is focusing on the success of some other layer ones. And while some DeFi projects are moving to other platforms like BSC, “layer two is real.” Though 3AC is invested in some layer two solutions as well, Ethereum is where “a lot of innovation is still happening,” he said. The second-largest cryptocurrency network is the base of the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, with $60 billion in total value locked (TVL). The goal of the DeFi movement is to have “a peer-to-peer system that moves information from point to point without a centralized, trusted gate keeper,” Hayes said.

Broken Traditional Model
Haye’s focus in his latest write-up is to determine how much upside there is left in the market right now if some decentralized crypto can replace a portion of the need for blind trust in a centralized trust cartel. He found this out by putting the failing traditional banking business model in the limelight. The banking index all over the world has been doing poorly despite all the help that they get from governments. “Banks who privatize profits and socialize losses haven’t managed to enrich their shareholders,” he noted. But if these banks adopted the technological improvements, they would have seen the exponential growth the technology bellwethers are recording. A decentralized service powered by a public blockchain can actually replicate and improve upon every product and service offered by a bank that too at a lower cost on a macro scale, Hayes wrote. Traditional banks, he says, “are destined to be service companies for a subset of relatively wealthy global Boomers,” which still got billions of dollars of fee income in that business, but it’s not a growing slice of the market. The public paid $2.68 trillion, 2% to 3% of world GDP, to these banking institutions. On top of this, we paid audit and accountancy services $87.09 billion, which Hayes said will go to zero because of blockchain.

Ethereum & DeFi is the Way
Ethereum, today, is the most developed, used, and decentralized smart contract network. No doubt others like BSC, Polkadot, and Solana are emerging but simply put, unlike Ethereum, no has proven themselves yet.

“No other public smart contract-enabled blockchain operates at the scale of Ethereum.”
Some might argue that the gas fees are astronomical, but as Hayes says, “it is a good problem to have,” after all, “nothing in life is free, and this is doubly true in the crypto capital markets.” This fee that incurs on every action, along with the fees charged by dapps, can actually be seen as income to those keeping the network running, just like the tax we are paying banks to use their services. Assuming Ethereum can capture some percentage of the 5-year average earnings of banks and the big four audit firms, Hayes comes up with extraordinary numbers. image1 At 0.50%, the price of ETH implies a 10x price appreciation from current levels putting it above $20,000. Trader Teranode is of a similar opinion and sees Ether hitting $100k in the future. “Eth went 80% down (400 to 80) after he called it a double-digit shitcoin. 20k, the conservative prediction in his blog post based on DeFi penetration of overall financial markets, would be an 8x from 2.5k. Both spooky and auspicious,” commented Zhu Su, CEO at Three Arrows Capital on this. “I am very certain that DeFi can take away at least 0.50% of activity from CeFi,” wrote Hayes.

“When you take a high-level approximation that shows you will make money even when you are assuming the worst-case scenario, get long whatever the I respectfully disagree are valuing.”

BitMEX Co-Founder Arthur Hayes Puts Ether Moon Target Above $20,000
https://cryptonews.net/552040/?utm_source=CryptoNews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=shared

The co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky has said that he is really proud of Brian Armstrong, one of his company’s first software engineers for starting Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. Recently, Coinbase went public in a direct listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange marking a significant milestone for the nascent crypto market industry.

Airbnb CEO Proud of Brain Armstrong for Starting Coinbase
In an interview on CNBC’s Tech Check on April 16th, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky had all praises for one of his former employees, none other than Brain Armstrong, the Co-founder, and CEO of Coinbase, saying:

“Brian actually is one of the original architects of our payment platform and our fraud detection system. So I’m really, really proud of what he’s doing.”

Brain Armstrong had worked for the online rental marketplace for a little over a year. Departing in 2012, Armstrong started Coinbase. At the time the U.S-based cryptocurrency exchange was found, Bitcoin was only three years old, priced around $6.

Despite him leaving the company, Chesky said he kept in touch with Armstrong.

The Airbnb Crypto Connection
The CEO of the online rental marketplaces even highlighted cryptocurrencies role towards economic empowerment and accessibility, as well as Coinbase’s focus on security:

“I think one of the lessons here is when you give power to people, it provides more economic empowerment and more access. But in order to get more power to people, people have to be able to trust each other.”

Chesky then went on to link cryptocurrencies and Airbnb, sharing both are based on the system of trust:

“Obviously, cryptocurrencies have their own system of trust. Airbnb, our system of trust based on our reputation system, I think has been able to unlock a lot of economics. So I think these general trends of unlocking systems of trust that allow more people to participate in the economy is a huge boon to the global economy.”

When host Deirdre Bosa asks Chesky whether Airbnb has any plans towards crypto adoption, Chesky replies he did not “have anything to announce right now. But I can tell you that we’ve been certainly looking at this.”

Airbnb CEO Proud of Former Employee Who'd Quit to Start Coinbase
https://cryptonews.net/550402/?utm_source=CryptoNews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=shared

The Robinhood crypto and stock trading platform was briefly non-functional early this morning. Usage was fully restored a few hours later.

On April 16. the beleaguered Robinhood trading platform a major trading outage for crypto, stemming from an “unprecedented demand.”

The company resolved the issue a few hours later, but the market was quick to pick up on it.

The outage occurred at 7:00 AM and was completely fixed roughly two hours later at 9:16 AM. During this time, several assets were spiking, most notably Dogecoin (DOGE).

Activity in the market has picked up significantly in the past week, with bitcoin crossing $64,000. Some of this trading has been sparked by Coinbase’s stock listing, which has garnered much attention.

Dogecoin jumped in value following of a cryptic tweet from Elon Musk, who has tweeted about it on several other occasions. Investors have flocked to it, giving it an 80+% increase in the past 24 hours.

The platform had previously intentionally restricted DOGE trading when it was ralling, citing “overwhelming market conditions.”

Robinhood, meanwhile, had to deal with criticism from the crypto community. Most in the Twitter universe commented that the platform just didn’t want users to trade a spiking asset. Some users noted that the DOGE page wouldn’t even load up.

The incident is simply yet another troubling one for Robinhood, which is facing extreme criticism from the public. Still, the number of crypto users has grown by over 600% this quarter.

These incidents are happening as it plans to go public, which could happen in the latter half of 2021.

Robinhood facing troubles
A day earlier, Robinhood released a post remarking on the Massachusetts Securities Division’s decision to revoke its license in the state. The revocation prevents the company from serving millions of customers in the area.

Robinhood has filed a complaint and motion for a preliminary injunction to stop the change.

The company called the decision an “attempt to prevent Massachusetts residents from choosing how they invest is elitist and against everything we stand for.” It refers to the complaint as a reflection of outmoded ways of thinking.

It also continues to face severe backlash over its handling of the GameStop short squeeze incident. The platform appears to have taken some permanent damage to its reputation.

Robinhood Restores Crypto Trading After Dogecoin Volumes Cause ‘Major Outage’
https://cryptonews.net/547092/?utm_source=CryptoNews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=shared

Cryptocurrency investors want exchanges that offer top cryptocurrencies and that are easy to use on any device securely. On all of these fronts, CoinSmart has got you covered. For Canadian traders, in particular, it is great to have access to substantial crypto exchanges that keep up with Canadian KYC compliances.

CoinSmart is an excellent Canadian exchange. This article reviews several of the specific features that they offer. To begin, here is a shortlist of several of the features which make CoinSmart a top-notch exchange.

Feature Summary
Traders have access to 9 coins, which includes top coins such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple.
SmartPay is the easiest way to accept crypto payments using your CoinSmart wallet.
User-friendly trading interface for new traders.
Premium accounts for high-volume traders.
A trading app for smartphones.
24/7 customer support and easy-to-use FAQ.
95% of coins are kept in cold storage with 2 Factor Authentication.
Low fees for deposits, withdrawals and trading.
KYC compliant and registered with the Canadian credit institution FINTRAC.
Credit and debit card funding from Canadian bank accounts.
SmartPay
Using SmartPay, account holders can now instantly accept Bitcoin payments as well as access cash. This feature also allows users to create customer invoices so that they can be paid for services with BTC. Because CoinSmart’s wallets can be attached to your Canadian bank account, with SmartPay, users can convert their Bitcoin into CAD within the same day.

Smart Guarantee
One of the main perks of cryptocurrencies is the speed of transactions. But, transactions can still take up to several days. With the Smart Guarantee feature, users can pay a fee to ensure that transactions are completed within a set timeframe.

Premium Trading Accounts
CoinSmart also accommodates high-trading volumes. Investors that wish to open an account of $25,000 CAD or more are eligible for a premium trading account. Premium traders have access to a personal account manager, high-volume prices and discounts and same-day payment settlements.

Security and Crypto-Storage
CoinSmart is very secure, and to date, has not suffered any security breaches. The exchange uses SSL encryption, which keeps personal information secure from prying eyes while browsing. A padlock icon will appear in your browser to indicate that your browsing is protected from phishing or hacking.Additionally, CoinSmart keeps the majority of its cryptocurrency in cold storage. This means that any digital currency held by the exchange is kept offline, while only a small portion is kept online in hot storage. Cold storage is central to the security of any exchange. Keeping large quantities of cryptocurrency online opens an exchange up to a higher risk of theft.
Fees
Compared to most exchanges, CoinSmart has a fairly low fee structure. Commission fees for a single trade are 0.2%, which means that a $1,000 trade costs $2. And a double trade has a 0.4% commission.

Users with Canadian bank accounts can use e-transfer and Interac to fund their accounts. There are no fees for funding your account with $2,000 or more. And there is a 1.5% fee for e-transfers between $100-$1,999.

KYC and AML
CoinSmart is a Canadian-based exchange that operates in Toronto. As such, they comply with FINTRAC, which is a centralized Canadian credit and identity compliance standards agency. This means that users need verified accounts, meaning that users’ identities and Canadian addresses are run through a credit check. This is a very simple process, as CoinSmart is partnered with Canadian credit company Equifax.

Given the new regulations from Canadian regulatory bodies, it is nice to see that CoinSmart is ahead of the game. As of April 2021, Canadian cryptocurrency exchanges must be registered with the appropriate regulatory bodies.

For users, this means that those exchanges which do not take steps to comply with regulations may become more and more difficult to use in Canada.

Cryptocurrencies on CoinSmart
Bitcoin
Ethereum
Litecoin
Ripple
Bitcoin Cash
EOS
NEO
Stellar (XLM)
Cardano (ADA)
Bottom Line
With CoinSmart’s high-quality cryptocurrencies, useful features, low commission fees and usability, they rank as an excellent exchange. It is also a bonus that they are already onboarding clients with FINTRAC. This will likely mean fewer interruptions for users as the current Canadian regulations start to take effect.

CoinSmart Review: Is It the Best Cryptocurrency Exchange in Canada?
https://cryptonews.net/547440/?utm_source=CryptoNews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=shared

Data on NonFungible.com, a website that tracks NFT transactions and marketplaces, revealed that the sales of digital non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have increased from $93 million recorded in the fourth quarter of 2020 to more than $2 billion in the first quarter of 2021.

This difference between the two figures shows that the number of NFT transactions conducted in Q1 2021 increased more than 20 times compared to the volume of the previous quarter. This total figure of over $2 billion does not comprise the sales of NBA Top Shots.

NBA Top Shots refers to the video highlights that are being turned into NFTs and traded and its trades which are recorded on the Flow platform amounted to $472 million earlier this year.

NFT sold by Beeple at Christie’s in March was also not included as the $69 million trades were traded through a partnership with Nifty Gateway.

Among the NFT projects that have significantly contributed to this remarkable record is the CryptoPunks project. In March, the project recorded $7,680,621 and $7,571,191  sales with an average price that went from $ 2,500 in previous months to $ 95,900 in just a few months and later dropped to around $ 45,000 by the end of that same month.

SuperRare (Art MarketPlace) and HashMasks (Collectibles) projects also contributed, the value of an artwork sold on SuperRare increased from $ 1,232 to $ 12,166.

The increase in the NFT sector is due to the attention it is attracting recently as it seems like the next big thing in the crypto space. Records on Google Trends data show that the volume of searches for ‘NFT’ increased greatly from the range of 0-100 since the beginning of the year showing the level of public interest in recent times.

Despite the huge drops in average prices from February last year, 2021 came with a turnaround as the over $ 2billion sales of NFTs are an indication of interest from the public. Reports on NonFungible.com also mentioned that there was a ratio of 73,000 buyers to 33,000 sellers, showing that more people want to purchase these and those who have are not planning to sell but continue keeping.

NFT Sales Jump From $93M to Over $2B in Three Months
https://cryptonews.net/538314/?utm_source=CryptoNews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=shared

According to the XRPscan platform, since April 4, Jed McCaleb, the person who helped found Ripple Labs and was its first chief technology officer, has released 100.8 million XRP.

On April 6, McCaleb received a whopping 364,768,757 XRP from Ripple, as per the data from XRPscan.

At the present exchange rate of XRP, this constitutes a staggering $139,151,938.

Jed McCaleb keeps selling the rest of his XRP riches
Ripple’s cofounder and its first CTO has made nine transactions, carrying a total of 100.8 million XRP from his “tacostand” digital wallet.

Each of them bore either 12 million or 8.4 million XRP tokens. Today’s transaction was worth 8.4 million XRP.

Prior to the transfer on April 4, Jed had taken a month-long break in releasing XRP – the date of the previous sale was March 4, when 9,713,398.410000 XRP was withdrawn.

7169_0
When Jed McCaleb left Ripple Labs (which started as OpenCoin a year earlier), he got a compensation of 9 billion XRP coins for cofounding the entity and his help as an CTO.

The settlement agreement prevented him from selling all the 9 billion coins at once to prevent the price collapse to zero.

So Jed started large XRP sales only in 2018 – approximately 6 million XRP, while the rare largest amount he sold prior to that was 3 million coins.

On 6 December 2020, McCaleb dumped as much as 29.5 million XRP.

Jed McCaleb Dumps 100 Million XRP In Past Week, Receiving 365 Million from Ripple
https://cryptonews.net/533780/?utm_source=CryptoNews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=shared

Quick Take
Crypto exchange Binance has ventured into the space of tokenized stock trading, starting with Tesla.
That means users can now buy fractions of the Tesla stock token on Binance.
Crypto exchange Binance has ventured into the space of tokenized stock trading, following the likes of FTX and Bittrex Global.

To begin with, Binance has listed Tesla stock tokens, meaning the exchange's users can now buy Tesla tokens representing its shares.

One Tesla stock token represents one share of the company. Users, however, can buy fractions of the token, with the minimum trade size being one-hundredth of the token.

The fractionalization of stock tokens makes them more affordable. One Tesla stock, for instance, is currently priced at around $700, which is quite expensive.

"Stock tokens demonstrate how we can democratize value transfer more seamlessly, reduce friction and costs to accessibility, without compromising on compliance or security," said Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

Zhao first hinted at the launch of tokenized stock trading service earlier this year. He told The Block at the time: "We're definitely looking at it."

"We do try to copy innovation when innovation is good," Zhao said at the time, referring to FTX's similar service.

Like FTX and Bittrex Global, Binance has also partnered with German financial firm CM Equity AG and Switzerland-based tokenization firm Digital Assets AG for the service.

'Commission-free'
Binance is not charging any commission for trading stock tokens. It is not clear what the exchange's business model is around the service. The Block has reached out to Binance and will update this story if we learn more.

Binance's service follows traditional market hours. Tesla's stock token, for instance, will follow Nasdaq market hours, a Binance spokesperson told The Block. FTX and Bittrex Global, on the other hand, offer 24/7 tokenized stock trading.

When asked why to follow traditional market hours, the Binance spokesperson told The Block: "Stock tokens are fully-backed, and the trades are executed in real-time. Hence, trading of stock tokens follows the underlying stocks' traditional trading hours."

"Each token is fully backed by a depository portfolio of underlying securities that represents the outstanding tokens," said the spokesperson. "Our partner CM-Equity AG, a licensed and fully regulated asset management firm in Germany, entrusts the acquired shares to a third-party brokerage firm for custody. In addition, CM-Equity AG will be monitoring all trading activity for compliance."

Binance's stock tokens are priced and settled in BUSD, meaning users can buy and redeem these tokens via the exchange's stablecoin, issued by Paxos. FTX's stock tokens, on the other hand, are quoted in "USD stablecoin," meaning users can buy and redeem in a range of options, including the U.S. dollar, as well as USDC, BUSD, HUSD, and PAX Standard stablecoins.

It is worth noting that stock tokens are not shares, but they only give exposure to underlying shares and potential corporate actions, including dividends and stock splits.

Binance said it would list more stock tokens in the future based on market demand.

To get started with the stock tokens service, Binance users will have to go through know-your-customer (KYC) measures, including submitting identity documents and completing facial recognition verification.

Binance launches tokenized stock trading, starts with Tesla
https://cryptonews.net/533828/?utm_source=CryptoNews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=shared