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BackNews highlights from the past two weeks, biz dev progress and CoinMetro updates.
Curious about what’s next for CoinMetro? Find out on CoinMetro’s Q1 Roadmap!
Check out our weekly “This Week in Crypto” summary or watch the full video.
Crypto Market News Highlights
1) How the Long Tail of the Coronavirus Might Slow Bitcoin’s Hash Power Growth
They’re saying that most Bitcoin miner-makers have been affected by the outbreak since their factories are based in cities. Almost all production will be halted for some time.
Kevin thinks this whole Coronavirus is quite overblown. At the end of the day, there will most likely not be a lasting effect. A bubble of a month or two, or three — most of that hash power would be eaten up by older machines coming back online, cloud mining — whatever. Especially if the hash power spikes down, people will assume they have a better chance to get their old miners back online.
2) Data Shows $25 Billion Worth of Bitcoin and Ether Held by Seven Crypto Exchanges
Centralized exchanges hold a good amount of the available Bitcoin and Ether. One of the only things you can do with crypto — let’s be honest —is trade it. The vast majority of use is for trading.
And trading with CoinMetro is as easy as it gets! Buy Bitcoin or Buy Ether in three simple steps.
3) Austria crypto regulators slap unlicensed operators with €200,000 maximum fine
There we go. We will start seeing more and more of this. Austria has not yet fined anyone, but they will. Which is what regulators are supposed to do.
Would you like to read about more market news? Check out our Medium post!
Live Questions
When will GBP be available?
We are expecting news from LHV within the next week regarding the GBP ramp.
Does CoinMetro server side use microservice architecture or containerization? Do you have a DevOps person who manages kubernetes or perhaps docker swarm?
We do use Docker and containerization. Some microservices are running. We use a few different types of techniques, and those are two of them.
We have a DevOps guy, who isn’t full time yet. However, we are still in preliminary talks with the CSD team, to take over some of the development inside of CoinMetro. They use a form of agile development that seems to work quite nicely for their team.
How is the CSD coming along?
CSD is coming along very well. MVP was ready on the 20th of January. Now we are working on building auxiliary services. March 23rd is the date for the launch inside of the sandbox.
Learn more about the Ignium CSD!
When is the first issuance?
Would be right around the same time, at the end of March.
What is the hold-up with getting new TraM managers online?
The algo-trading manager(s) were waiting for liquidity. Our market maker has been scaling up since last week. They were onboarded and were going through a demo on the platform.
On a larger scale, it’s another aspect of marketing. We had a meeting today with someone who might be joining the marketing team.
We need awareness. People need to know that the platform exists — both from the investor side, and from the manager side.
Follow a few easy steps on how to join a TraM, or start your own private TraM!
Did you have the audit with LHV?
The audit is scheduled for the 25th of this month. It was delayed because our Head of Legal was sick.
The volume seems to have stabilized at about €100k daily. To what do you attribute this?
Mostly attributed to us restructuring liquidity, and market makers coming onboard. We were doing a VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price) and 5 tiers of liquidity, on most of the major pairs. That gave us larger spreads, but more liquidity top of book.
Initially we thought that since most exchanges have low liquidity top of book, this could separate us. But we came to realize over time that most clients just want cheap crypto top of book.
Bitcoin, Ether, and the other top cryptos are available to trade with a very narrow spread. Check out the order book on the CoinMetro EXpress platform!
What’s new regarding biz dev?
One cool thing on the biz dev side is that one of our currently listed assets has agreed to do some co-marketing with us, which will start happening sometime within the next two weeks.
That asset will also be getting an additional boost of liquidity, because the issuer of that asset is actually going to provide funds so that the market maker can more accurately price their asset.
We are hoping to be officially in Montenegro by the end of February/early March. It will lead to a lot of biz dev opportunities.
What is the status of the potential liquidity providers for QNT?
They are up and running on all assets. QNT right now has minimum liquidity, but more liquidity is coming.
You can Buy QNT with EUR on the CoinMetro EXpress platform.
What did you get up to in Mexico?
Kevin attended a conference in Tulum. There will be some videos posted from the conference. Kevin was interviewed by a team that was filming for Netflix, so sometime in the summer there will be a crypto movie which Kevin will be in. They also filmed at the Montenegro conference last year.
Some work got done in terms of the CSD with the co-founder. Some meetings set up in Brazil, Los Angeles and New York, about the CSD. We will also mention CoinMetro.
When do you expect the CSD devs to be fully onboarded at CoinMetro?
We are still in talks with them. Oliver will be running them through a full demo of the systems next week. We will then negotiate with them. They are available by the 17th of February, so probably the week after that, depending on how the negotiations go.
They may start with some project-based assignments, and once we see how the project base goes, we would integrate them more into the team. Potentially, they could start before the end of the month.
Since you are still looking for the CMO, what is the plan for marketing in the meantime? Does everything depend on getting that position filled?
No, it does not depend on that position only. We will bring in some advisors, probably within the next week or two. Those advisors will be giving advice, to set up funnels, pieces of our strategy, social media, and getting everything ready for starting.
We may not even hire a CMO. What we need is a team and a strategy. We will be hiring more SEO, content, and other positions, to make sure that we have enough people to support enough the strategy and to-do list that is going to be amassed over the next couple of weeks.
How involved are the investors that came in recently? Are they hands off and let you crack on? Do you think they will be there long term?
They are hands off. They give feedback when they can, but they are angel investors. They trust us to do what we feel is right. That is why they gave us the money.
Kevin does believe they will be here long term. They have committed to put up more funds in additional funding rounds.
T-shirts?
Still working on the last couple of designs. 10 more coming in. We’re probably looking at the beginning of summer for T-shirts to be available to the community.
Reddit Questions
Could you make a printable flyer or cards that ambassador would use to hand out with our link on it? – KSavage79
A QR code on printables would be a good idea. Kevin will pass this along to our design guys, to see what they think.
There is lots of digital material in the toolkit available on the Ambassador Dashboard!
How well are you guys protected against hacks? What happens if it occurs anyway? – NeoHodler
Any company can always be better at protecting themselves, from a technical standpoint. There are always new ways for hacks to happen. Having said that, most hacks are social engineering, and for those we are very well equipped.
With FXPig, there were people trying to social engineer us on many occasions. They never had any success. Mainly because Kevin has been doing business online pretty much since the Internet became a thing and social engineering has always been a part of that.
We have already had people try to social engineer us on many occasions on Telegram, via email, and other channels, without success. The team is pretty small and tight-knit. From the technical side, we constantly look to increase our ability to stop outside penetration into our system. We limit the amount of data that is available through any ports that may be open.
Our cold wallets hold the vast majority of all assets on the exchange. Hot wallets are only accessible by very few individuals inside the company. All cold wallets are multisig and time restricted vaults.
We don’t have as many eyes on us like Binance and other exchanges, so we don’t have as many people trying to hack us – that’s for sure. But we put a lot of effort into making sure that we do everything we can to keep ourselves secure.
From the social engineering aspect, we are probably one of the most ‘aware’ companies on those types of hack attempts.
When the bull run starts and other exchanges will overload with new users, is CoinMetro capable of handling a big influx of users in a short time? It would be a killer if the site can’t handle it. – NeoHodler
Yes, and we are currently rehashing our entire codebase to make sure that it is more scalable than it is now. It is scalable now, but it was built in a piecemeal fashion as we had developers that came and went, and different code techniques from different developers. It was made in pieces, so now we are going back and refactoring that code, so that it will be much more scalable.
About bull runs — everybody talks about bull runs. Don’t confuse bull runs (prices going up) with an influx of new users. They are mutually exclusive. In 2017 — yes, you had prices going up and lots of new users coming in. The market has changed since then, and we will never see a crypto like Bitcoin run from €8k to €200k in one year. It’s not going to happen. Ever.
A bull run can and probably will happen, and we will have more people coming into crypto as it becomes easier to use, as it is integrated into banking apps, payment service gateway apps, etc — it will have nothing to do with price points.
However, our goal is to be on the forefront of the next influx of users into the crypto space. Considering that we will not only do unregulated assets, but also regulated assets, and moving into many different spaces, including payments, over the next year.
Staking tokens will earn rewards for holding coins. What coins will you list? – KSavage79
We may at some point do something with staking. There is a bit of a legality question there, and it is a bit of a gray area.
We still use BitGo for the majority of our cold and hot wallets. BitGo does offer staking on two assets right now, but we don’t have either one of them listed. If BitGo starts offering staking on assets we already list, we will consider offering staking, or at least give those rewards back to our client base, in a way that would be compliant with law.
We are still waiting for LHV to come back with the guidelines which will help us list more assets quicker. Hoping that will happen this month.
“Kevin Explains Crypto” Term: State channel
A lot of people have heard about on-chain transactions on the blockchain and off-chain transactions— something that happens outside of the blockchain, and is then reported to the blockchain.
A state channel is some type of payment/transaction channel, that is off-chain, where transactions can take place in a secure environment. Transactions are still signed, but not involving consensus or blockchain. Eventually the transactions get pushed on the blockchain for immutability. For example, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
Interested in learning more? Have a look at the video where Kevin explains “State channel”:
Listen to Last Week’s TWiC on the Go
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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.