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BackCrypto market news covering the halvening and volatile price movements, blockchain adoption and altcoin news. Live questions about marketing and upcoming releases — all in This Week in Crypto!
Crypto Market News Highlights
1. [9:34] Gold’s Upside Now Pales in Comparison to Bitcoin (BTC): Weiss Ratings
Wow, did they need a magnifying glass and a Sherlock Holms to figure that one out? Kevin loves when people take small ranges of time, and then make comparisons that sound macro. For instance, “Bitcoin in the last two weeks has outperformed gold”. So what? Who cares?
When you buy into any asset, you need to look at the long term. The upside or downside of Bitcoin since January is not interesting. To be honest, Kevin thinks the upside of Bitcoin from 2009 to 2020 is literally meaningless if he’s buying today. Still a speculative asset.
Kevin doesn’t care about comparisons, and no one should, really. Yet, for some reason people always drop back on comparisons when talking about Bitcoin price news. This year, gold is up about 12%, and Bitcoin is up 25%. So, while it’s double, it’s not amazingly different for an asset that has such extreme volatility.
2. [12:33] Users blast Coinbase after yet another outage during pre-halving Bitcoin drop
Every trading venue Kevin has ever been a part of, or seen, in times of mass-usage, generally tends to have some issues. Why? Because they all use the same technology. So, no matter how great your matching engine is — you’re sitting on some type of server infrastructure, ISP lines, some type of non-cosmic technology, that can break.
Coinbase probably got back up quite quickly and Kevin can’t say much bad about Coinbase. They handled it much better than BitMEX has handled it in the past.
It just shows that no matter how great the frontend looks, lots of backend still is antiquated because no one is out there building better infrastructure.
3. [21:58] Silicon Valley Start-Up Carta Plans Private Stock Exchange To Rival Nasdaq
This one is kind of interesting. Carta is a company that basically does cap table management, as well as securitization or the electronic version of stocks for private companies. So, if you have a big private entity and you don’t want to go public, but you want to be able to have a cap table and an electronic stock that people can trade — you can do it there.
Most of these are big companies that just haven’t gone public yet. 14 000 companies and they’ve issued billions and billions worth of private stock. Nasdaq has a private company, called Private Market. It allows private companies to issue stock and run cap table management. And this startup wants to compete with them.
It’s similar to what the CSD and CoinMetro wants to do, with a major caveat. We are going crossborder and global, these guys are basically staying in the US. They only deal with private companies. However, let’s see if the patent actually gets approved first.
Check out our Medium post to read more crypto market news!
Live Questions – CoinMetro updates and Crypto Market News
Tokenization
[39:12] Any updates on the Japanese ski resort token project?
Firstly, legal documentation has started to be drafted this week. We have a few calls. Also, designers are working on that website. Timeline looks like the first weeks of July. There is some implementation that needs to happen on the Ignium side, and that’s in the next sprint.
[51:28] What are the goals of the CSD from the Montenegro authorities side?
The benefit to the country is the sandbox. The metrics are for getting companies to establish in the country, to go through the sandbox and to potentially license themselves in the country and provide services.
In general, they want business to come to Montenegro. They want to ease some pain points that the government has. They want to entice people to come and test them, because they can do it without acquiring licensing first. So that’s generally what the sandbox is.
For Montenegro, if the CSD functions right and we’re able to prove the point that liquidity exists around the world — and the ICO bubble kinda proved that. The reason why that retail liquidity hasn’t been tapped, is because there hasn’t been infrastructure to connect capital from retail users to companies that need it.
In conclusion, the point that we’re trying to prove is that with the right infrastructure, the money goes where it’s needed, and the income goes back to where the money came from.
Product Updates
[39:52] Will it be possible to buy tech stocks at CoinMetro in the future, or leverage trade them?
We would need different licensing to do that, that’s for sure. It’s a possibility, and was kinda the idea in the beginning with multi-asset trading. However, in the short term, it is not something we are looking at.
[55:26] GBP and Virtual IBAN still on track?
Yes. Development wise, we should be ready this weekend. From the administrative side, we have set a date for June 1st. But that also depends on the provider.
[57:00] Are you guys implementing Parsiq?
We will at some point, but we haven’t done it yet. They’re still building out the product.
[1:03:01] What are the products you are marketing?
Initially, the three main products we already have, which are Exchange, Margin and TraM. TraM is a big one, and Kevin thinks people are underestimating that one.
Want to learn more about CoinMetro’s Trade Mirror for passive income?
[1:05:37] How is the progress on the debit cards?
Moving along. We haven’t submitted designs yet. Kevin expects we have a design submitted by end of May. Afterwards, we would be able to roll out roughly by the beginning of July.
[1:08:44] TraM is a huge selling point, but you need more managers!
Yep. But the way to get more managers, is to advertise it.
CoinMetro Updates
[40:42] What are the next 3 important steps for CoinMetro?
First, we are about to go into our first major marketing push. Leading up to that, it’s about the rebranding, fine tuning products, getting market pages and small products out to help with the onboarding process and initial look and feel of CoinMetro. Also, the new Dashboard. The ability to cross-sell, getting our marketing channels done so we can cross-sell via email. Monitoring and trigger points for different clients and different situations, such if traders are trading high volume and making money, losing money, TraM managers making or losing money, people looking for passive income earning, and more triggers like these.
In conclusion – lots of different things, but they all revolve around onboarding, look and feel, and cross-selling.
[47:00] What’s next on the release schedule?
If you look at the roadmap, it’s still valid. We have a KYC push, Dashboard, Markets page, deposits/withdrawal retooling, GBP availability, funding, pairs, Faster Payments.
Check out CoinMetro’s Q2 Roadmap to see what’s planned for Q2!
[50:05] Anything new in the BizDev this week?
Biz Dev going around the USD. Trying to put together an agreement with a company that provides some really cool data that we’re going to be able to use indicators based on sentiment on social media. Also ties in to some clientbase they have, as well as potential on the investing side. Talking with a few others on the marketing realm.
[1:00:50] How much are you looking to raise for the CoinMetro bond?
€2,5 million Euro, because that is the threshold by which we can offer it legally across all Europe, without having to register a prospectus in each European country.
Rebranding & Marketing
[54:05] Does the rebranding mean an entirely new website and exchange look?
Rebranding is mostly frontend. Logo will probably stay for now, but there will be a rebranding of the design and the copy — the words on the homepage. Also, the colors will change a bit. As far as the platforms, SimplEX will be going away, and will be integrated as Buy/Sell/Swap in the
[1:01:56] What is marketing going to look like?
This question gets asked almost on a weekly basis. Marketing is going to look like marketing. We have people behind the scenes that will be like affiliates and ambassadors. We have been sharing agreements for traffic. Also, we will do press releases. Different types of retargeting and social media. Not so much in banners, but they’re useful for specific types of advertising. We may do some A/B tests. We may even do some more physical media in different regions. So, it’s a mix. Which is what you need to do.
Become a CoinMetro Ambassador and Earn!
Reddit Questions
[31:12] Could you elaborate on how the Rebates System doesn’t make XCM a security, when it’s essentially revenue sharing? – da9el84
Kevin doesn’t see how it’s revenue sharing. And even if it was revenue sharing, if you’re making revenue based on what you’re doing, directly tied to your interaction with the platform, then it is not a security.
If you make a revenue share based on the collective work of others, that becomes a collective investment scheme, which would require some licensing, and could potentially make that asset a security.
CoinMetro Rebates & Tiers offer great benefits to CoinMetro traders!
[32:03] Could you imagine a scenario where users used the rebate system, but through settings toggled a switch that auto converted their XCM from rebates into one of the pair offerings? – da9el84
Perhaps, but it’s already easy to convert those XCM into another asset on the exchange. It also makes an additional fee, drives the XCM price, and lets CoinMetro vault some XCM.
[32:58] How are the new marketing guys doing? Haven’t heard or seen anything from them till now. ~ rockpaperbird
We have test ads right now running in the US. Also, we have been testing copy and we already have some good metrics and have changed landing pages based on those metrics.
Lots of work going on. Copy being written, rebranding happening, new homepage being derived to drive conversion. All kinds of things happening in the background.
[27:55] “Kevin Explains Crypto” Term: Zero-knowledge proof
Now that you are up to date with crypto market news, let’s focus on crypto education.
This was actually developed in MIT, 1980s, originally. Like most of the crypto technology, it’s not new. Zero-knowledge proof gives a party the ability to prove to another party that they know the value of something, without giving the other party any information apart from the fact that they know the value.
So it enables complex transactions to happen, and to prove to another person that the other person should be involved in that transaction, without that person needing to provide any non-necessary information to the end party.
So it’s proof, without gaining any additional knowledge. Zero-knowledge proof. Interested in learning more? Have a look at the video where Kevin explains “Zero-knowledge proof”:
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That’s a wrap for this week’s crypto market news with CoinMetro Founder Kevin Murcko! Please join us next week for more CoinMetro reports, Bitcoin news feed, Altcoin prices and Ethereum news! We’ll be live on CoinMetro’s Facebook and YouTube Channel at 12 PM (UTC). Make sure you submit your questions to the CoinMetro subReddit!
As always, we’re available to answer any questions you may have on our Telegram Group 24/7. You can also find CoinMetro on other channels: Twitter, Instagram, Medium, Reddit and LinkedIn.