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BackCrypto market news and updates about CoinMetro new product releases.
Check out our weekly “This Week in Crypto” summary or watch the full video here.
Crypto Market News Highlights
1) Bakkt CEO Kelly Loeffler Appointed to US Senate Seat
This is funny, because she’s appointed — normally, senators are voted in. In certain circumstances where a senator can no longer fulfill their duties, someone can be appointed. It’s good that we have a pro-crypto person in the senate. Might even be three.
A little bit of conflict of interest floating around this woman. Her husband is either the CEO or owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and she’s going to be the one to provide price discovery on Bitcoin to the same institution. Anyway, having somebody in government who’s pro-crypto, pro-blockchain, pro-DLT is not a bad thing.
2) US Arrests Ethereum Developer for Training North Koreans to Evade Sanctions
Kevin was actually invited to the same event, but didn’t go as he didn’t feel like going to prison. This guy went however. The title of his presentation was essentially “How to evade sanctions using Ethereum”. Maybe he assumed no one had a cellphone and it wouldn’t get out. Well, it did.
It doesn’t even have to be a sanctioned country. Going to any country and telling people how to evade US and OFAC sanctions using a piece of technology is obviously illegal. So, going to a country and explaining how to evade sanctions so the government can bring in more money to basically kill people and build weapons of mass destruction is not that smart.
3) 70 cryptocurrency hedge funds have closed so far this year, investors are weary of Bitcoin
It’s not that investors are wary of Bitcoin — the problem is that “cryptocurrency hedge funds” could mean some guy who bought some cryptocurrency and sold it to his friends. In an unregulated environment (most of these hedge funds being unregulated) they simply just bought Bitcoin and held it, and then Bitcoin crashed and people got out on the lows. Retail investors sell on lows and buy on highs — they’re really good at it.
These 70 “hedge funds” had no strategy whatsoever, and they aren’t even hedge funds in any way, shape or form that anybody in finance would ever agree with. These are just 70 small little firms that got on the bandwagon.
Well, if you do business with a very highly regulated US firm, expect that you’ll have to follow all pertinent regulations. But if you have dormant accounts that you haven’t paid attention to — so what. Same thing happens to your bank account.
Who are they warning? If someone hasn’t used their account long enough for the “abandoned property act” to take place, they probably don’t care.
5) Microsoft Announces Token Collectibles on Ethereum Blockchain (partnership with Enjin)
Putting all these NFTs (non-fungible tokens) on the blockchain makes sense. It’s going to happen, in the medium to long term. Even if physical collectibles still exist, authenticity of physical collectibles has always been a problem. If these “authenticity certificates” go on the blockchain when the collectibles are actually produced, then we have a true certificate of authentication that comes from the actual producer.
Microsoft – way to go on that, it makes sense.
Would you like to read about more market news? Check out our Medium post!
Live Questions
Will the CSD be ready in January?
Yes, coding of the MVP will be ready by the end of January.
When IOTA?
We have a list for the next submission for LHV and we’ll add IOTA to that list.
Is TraM ready?
For all intents and purposes, yes. Testing is still underway. We’re on track. Mostly some UI/UX changes going on right now.
How many TraM managers will be available at launch?
We had two signed up, not sure if they’re both going to be ready at launch.
Did you resume communication with the Chainlink team?
They just got back in touch with us and we’re probably going to have a call with them next week.
Any news on market makers?
We should have market makers on the platform before Christmas. PARSIQ themselves are working with a separate market maker for their own token. We may also do some business with them, in negotiations right now.
Will we get the new currencies this month?
Probably not. The main provider behind these currencies is actually expanding their banking reach, and they’re in the process with two or three different banks. This will allow them to support more of these currencies — and more importantly, so that they can automate everything, as their current banks are struggling with automating it.
One of those banks is actually LHV and we’re in the process of helping them getting a meeting.
What will your focus be now that funding is secured?
Client acquisition is the main focus, leading to self-sustainability. Within that, there are focuses about fine tuning and getting the rest of our products launched. Licensing is a focus, but with the current funds in our possession, it’s not a possibility. The Montenegro sandbox license is something we’re still going after, and also looking at licensing in Mexico because we can do it relatively inexpensively.
We’re also going to be building out as we grow in compliance, support and marketing. Marketing will be the first thing we’ll build out.
What’s the general plan to attract traders with so many exchanges around?
There aren’t that many exchanges. Kevin would say that there are 150-200 active exchanges in the world. 200 exchanges in the world to control the amount of assets that can actually be tokenized, which we’re talking about every market known to man — plus some additional, SMEs, property and other things that aren’t already packed in to any type of tradable asset — so 200 is nothing.
Consider the fact that the vast majority, 99%, aren’t going to get licensed to do anything of above. So, how will we get clients?
If we look at the product suite we already have, even if we internally are quite nitpicky on things that we still need to achieve and things that need to be redesigned — when we compare our product suite with that of any of our competitors, Kevin would say that in most cases we are either better or the same. In a very small amount of cases, they may have something we don’t.
The only thing we haven’t done which they have done, is marketing. We haven’t focused on client acquisition.
We’re really only competing with a small section out of the other exchanges when it comes to actual client acquisition. We are also able to acquire clients in different segments, because we have different things like TraM, where we can cross-sell clients that don’t know how to trade, we have margin and more. We will offer more passive income products in the future.
It’s not hard to get clients, you need a budget and you need marketing. We’ve still grown, but now that we have a budget and going to pool more resources to marketing, it’s simply about fine tuning the budget, finding the customer acquisition cost that make sense, getting the right ROI, and then churning it.
Reddit Questions
Can you implement a warning that ETH is transferred by contract?
Some exchanges don’t take contract address transfers and claim that the money is lost. This is nonsense – let’s make that clear right away. Simply, their automated system doesn’t see the transfer. Contract transfers show as zero, and you have to dig into the contract to find out the value of what was transferred. If they claim that they didn’t receive it, they are lying.
However, we have looked at this internally and looking at adding some warnings. We are also migrating to our own Ether wallets instead of using BitGo, so we can mitigate this problem a hundred percent.
Either way, we’re not the problem here. These other exchanges are just too lazy to implement a solution where they can track contract address deposits. We’re going to “fix” this. It’s a perfect description of what this market is.
“Kevin Explains Crypto” Term: Vanity address
When you open a crypto wallet, you get an address, which is a long string of letters and numbers. A vanity address is when an address has some recognizable characters. Maybe the the first characters would have your initials, or a brand name.
Interested in learning more? Have a look at the video where Kevin explains “Vanity address”:
Listen to Last Week’s TWiC on the Go
Get the complete scoop by tuning in to our audio version of last week’s TWiC on SoundCloud. Happy listening!
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That’s a wrap for this week’s AMA with CoinMetro Founder Kevin Murcko! Please join us next week on CoinMetro’s Facebook and YouTube Channel at 1 PM (UTC) for another round and 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.