Cryptocurrency Daily News Bulletin: January 15, 2019

General News

Bakkt may still be awaiting regulatory approval from the CFTC ahead of its planned launch this month, but they continue to invest heavily in developing its projects. They announced the acquisition of “certain assets” belonging to Rosenthal Collins Group (RCG), an independent futures commission merchant. CEO Kelly Loeffler claims the move will help improve risk management and treasury operations, along with Bakkt’s AML/KYC operations.

BitMex, the Hong Kong-based bitcoin futures exchange, is closing trading accounts in the US and Quebec amidst growing regulatory restrictions in North America.

Cryptopia, the New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange, has gone offline announcing they have “suffered a security breach which resulted in significant losses.” No information has yet been provided on the value of the losses or the tokens affected.

HSBC announced it has settled more than $250 billion in transactions using DLT. More than 3 million FX transactions have been settled and a further 150,000 payments have been made with its HSBC FX Everywhere platform, which has been in use for the last year “to orchestrate payments across HSBC’s internal balance sheets.” HSBC added the platform has resulted in “significant efficiencies and opportunities” and following successful in-house implementation, they are now exploring how this tech can help multinational clients.

Denmark’s Tax Agency has got the green light to access crypto traders’ data – including trades, names, addresses and central person registration (CPR) number. Three unnamed crypto exchanges will now have to hand over the data for the period spanning 2016–2018.

Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin $3,685.73 USD (2.78 percent) now has a “fear index” similar to the Cboe Volatility Index (VIX) for the stock market. LedgerX announced the launch of the LedgerX Volatility Index (LXVX), drawing data for the index from its regulated bitcoin options. The LXVX is down 20 percent at about 68 since December. While this is still three times the volatility of the stock market it may show fear is decreasing in the space.  

Ethereum Classic $4.33 USD (1.74 percent) has now seen a sudden surge in transaction fees on their blockchain, leaving developers speculating whether cryptocurrency exchanges could be at risk of further attacks. Over the last 24 hours, average transaction fees on the blockchain rose to $6.10, up nearly 800 percent from $0.71 the day prior, the largest spike in transaction costs in the history of the blockchain. It is uncertain whether the sender of these transactions is looking to take advantage a loophole that enables gas token creation through exchanges free of cost or if it is an intentional measure to subsidize ETC mining pool and prevent further 51% attacks.

Ripple $0.330822 USD (2.42 percent): Following the addition of XRP as a base pair on Binance, the exchange has so far launched trading of pairs for Tron and ZCoin.

TrueUSD $1.01 USD (-0.30 percent): Crypto startup TrustToken has launched a new address management feature for companies managing client Ethereum addresses. AutoSweep allows an exchange to provide each of its clients a unique deposit address matched to the exchange’s central wallet. This makes it much cheaper for exchanges to as they don’t need to run a lot of transactions to aggregate all these users’ tokens into their hot wallet and requires less management of private keys.

– WN.com, Jamie Saarloos