Daily Cryptocurrency Bulletin For Monday, August 5, 2019

General News

Apple is banning users of its highly anticipated Apple Card from purchasing cryptocurrency.

fTLD Registry Services are set to ban the DNS extensions from generic banking “service providers,” following an uptick in applications for .bank domain names by crypto firms.

Mastercard appears to be looking to enter the crypto wallet space with new job ads for blockchain and cryptocurrency-related product development.

Nexo has unveiled a crypto card that collateralizes users’ crypto and supplies them with a fiat loan. Nexo has extended more than $700 million in crypto-collateralized loans to 200,000 plus clients. Now, loans can be used to make purchases at merchants accepting MasterCard.

Shinhan Financial Investment, the brokerage arm of Korea’s second largest bank – Shinhan Bank – will soon be offering peer-to-peer (P2P) stock lending via the blockchain.

Iran’s government is close to passing a bill that finalizes regulation for cryptocurrencies. Mining will be allowed inside Iran if conditions listed in the bill are met, including obtaining industry ministry approval. The bill also lifts the illegal status of cryptocurrencies in Iran.

Cryptocurrencies 

Bitcoin $11,723.02 USD (9.40 percent) total computing power has set yet another record. The average Bitcoin mining hash rate over the last two weeks has reached 71.43 quintillion hashes per second (EH/s), up from 64.49EH/s on July 23. This comes as BTC has seen huge weekend and overnight gains, with BTC dominance now rising to 67.5%. 

Bitcoin Cash $349.00 USD (5.33 percent) promoter Bitcoin.com has announced it will launch a crypto exchange called Exchange.Bitcoin.com. Expected to launch in early September, the exchange plans to offer around 50 trading pairs, as well as Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) tokens tied to the BCH blockchain. Meanwhile, Stefan Rust has replaced BCH leader Roger Ver as CEO of Bitcoin.com, who is now Executive Chairman.

Ethereum $234.06 USD (6.64 percent): Microsoft has revealed a new AI project leveraging the Ethereum blockchain. The company plans to decentralize AI by allowing people to easily access, share and run machine learning models using Ethereum.

Litecoin $104.18 USD (13.09 percent) is seeing big gains again today – passing the $100 mark – with its halving now less than 24 hours away, meaning miner rewards will soon reduce from approximately 25 to 12.5 LTC per block. This comes as UK-based crypto exchange CEX.io is supporting new fiat onramps for Litecoin, which is paired with both the British Pound and the Euro.

Ripple’s $0.329659 USD (4.47 percent) XRP-powered cross-border payment platform xRapid is now live in its integration with international remittance giant MoneyGram. In a new earning’s call, MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes revealed the company launched xRapid this week, confirming the technology can settle payments in a matter of seconds.

Tron $0.023050 USD (2.90 percent) founder, Justin Sun, announced the first version of the Tron scalability solution called “Sun Network” will be released on Aug. 10. Sun claims the network will enable 100x scalability and the building of decentralized applications on sidechains. The new sidechain system will also feature free transactions, 100 times lower fees and faster transaction confirmation and unlimited capacity for the main network.

– WN.com, Jamie Saarloos