Daily Cryptocurrency Bulletin For Thursday, July 25, 2019

General News

Kraken has hired the ex-CEO of OTC trading platform B2C2, Kevin Beardsley, to head its new Bitcoin futures expansion as volumes hit $2.5 billion in June.

Norwegian Air Shuttle owner Bjørn Kjos and his family have set up a cryptocurrency exchange and plan to introduce Bitcoin payments at their airline. The new exchange is dubbed Norwegian Block Exchange (NBX) and is set to launch in August. Norwegian Air Shuttle (Norwegian) is Scandinavia’s largest airline and Europe’s third-largest budget airline.

TD Ameritrade’s CEO Tim Hockey claims consumer demand is pushing the firm to increase their cryptocurrency offerings and claims their investment in ErisX may help them with this.

Cryptocurrencies 

Bitcoin $10,084.02 USD (3.61 percent) is now available as a payment option in 73 additional of Newegg’s country-specific stores. The online electronics and software retail giant now accepts BTC for purchases in nearly all its 80 served nations. This comes as the amount of BTC that has been untouched for five years has reached an all-time high. 3,847,859 BTChas not moved, according to data from Coin Metrics. BTC has now regained once again the $10,000 handle, but alts have spearheaded today’s market recovery. 

Bitcoin SV $167.21 USD (1.81 percent) has successfully increased its block size limit today following its scheduled fork.

Bitfinex’s $0.032169 USD (7.40 percent) LEO tokens are being purchased by U.S. indirectly, with Arrington XRP Capital and Arca both saying they invested in through third parties. Bitfinex maintains it banned U.S. individuals in August 2017 and U.S. corporates a year later, as their court battle with the New York Attorney General (NYAG) continues. The NYAG claims they did business with New York entities as recently as 2019.

Ripple’s $0.318552 USD (3.17 percent) Q2 results show the firm’s total sales of XRP increased 48 percent to $251 million, driven by direct institutional sales, increasing 73 percent. However, “Ripple plans to take a more conservative approach to XRP sales in Q3” as they plan to pull back from certain OTC markets to focus on where liquidity is most needed, which may negatively impact institutional direct sales. Likewise, Ripple will target programmatic sales at 10 basis points of their lowered trading volumes. Ripple’s trading volumes dropped 28 percent quarter over quarter, from $595 million to $429.5 million, though this is due to better accounting measures to weed out previously inflated statistics.Ripple’s $0.318552 USD (3.17 percent) Q2 results show the firm’s total sales of XRP increased 48 percent to $251 million, driven by direct institutional sales, increasing 73 percent. However, “Ripple plans to take a more conservative approach to XRP sales in Q3” as they plan to pull back from certain OTC markets to focus on where liquidity is most needed, which may negatively impact institutional direct sales. Likewise, Ripple will target programmatic sales at 10 basis points of their lowered trading volumes. Ripple’s trading volumes dropped 28 percent quarter over quarter, from $595 million to $429.5 million, though this is due to better accounting measures to weed out previously inflated statistics.

Refereum $0.002210 USD (35.63 percent), the crypto game marketing startup, has secured a partnership with major Fortnite competitor, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). PUBG players will able to earn RFR token rewards on by logging directly into the game and accomplishing achievements, such as winning matches. RFR can be used for purchases of games or in-game items, as well as to tip their favorite streamers. RFR is up over 35 percent today on the news.

Tron $0.023507 USD (1.13 percent) CEO Justin Sun has issued a public apology for his recent conduct hyping the now postponed lunch with Warren Buffet, in which he mentioned the term “regulator” 13 times. Sun claims he will now limit his public marketing. Notably, the social media post has now been deleted. This all comes as Chinese authorities allegedly raised suspicions over the Tron’s legal status according to news agency Caixin, as well as reporting Sun has been banned from foreign travel. Caixin is named in the apology.

– WN.com, Jamie Saarloos