Daily Cryptocurrency Bulletin For Wednesday, August 14, 2019

General News

ABS Bank – an institution owned by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia – has invested a “significant” amount in TradeWindow’s platform after taking part in a pilot utilizing its tech to carry out a trade between a Korean importer and a New Zealand meat exporter last year.

Barclays is no longer working with Coinbase. While Coinbase has found a replacement in U.K. upstart ClearBank, they have lost ties with a household-name bank. Also, Barclays connected Coinbase to the U.K. Faster Payments Scheme (FPS), enabling users to instantly withdraw and deposit British pounds – with U.K. customers now experiencing slower service.

Seed CX, the bitcoin derivatives provider, has begun testing its margin swaps products with users through its subsidiary Seed SEF, a regulated swap execution facility (SEF). Whilst several firms are looking to offer physically-settled bitcoin derivatives in the U.S., Seed CX wants to become the first to offer physically-settled products on margin.

Shinhan, one of South Korea’s largest banks, has partnered with GroundX, the blockchain subsidiary of messaging app provider Kakao, and blockchain developer Hexlant. The deal will see the three companies jointly develop a private key management system for use within Shinhan’s systems, with Ground X providing the blockchain platform and Hexlant creating infrastructure that will include an “anti-cracking program” – set for testing by October.

Cryptocurrencies 

Bitcoin $10,536.10 USD (-6.56 percent) functionality has finally been integrated onto Samsung’s blockchain-enabled smartphones. The move after the Galaxy S10 range was launched in March with a “Blockchain Keystore” offering cryptocurrency storage and transactions for ETH and related ERC-20 tokens. Samsung has now included bitcoin features to the developer kit (SDK) for several S10 models (S10e, S10, S10+ and S10 5G), as well as the Note10 and Note10+ devices. The SDK additions also include support for KLAY of the Klaytn blockchain recently launched by Korean messaging app Kakao. Meanwhile, the spread between the price of bitcoin on South Korean and U.S.-based crypto exchanges, which returned in June and hit 16-month highs, has vanished. The “kimchi premium” peaked at 54.48% but has now reversed with BTC 2.15% higher in dollar markets than in won. Researchers have sighted the fall of the Korean won and the regulatory environment becoming more challenging for crypto exchanges in Korea as reasoning.

Ripple $0.292436 USD (-1.81 percent): Investors in the cryptocurrency XRP have filed a new complaint against Ripple that marshals the SEC’s own words to argue the startup illegally sold unregistered securities – the first federal case to do so. The filing also cites California advertising law, in addition to federal securities law, to argue that investors were misled by Ripple’s promotion of XRP. While the case is a year old and has not yet received class-action status, the new complaint is the first that Ripple must respond to with a substantive answer. Ripple has until mid-September to file its response.

Veritaseum $5.07 USD (-2.80 percent): The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is seeking to freezethe assets of Reggie Middleton, organizer of the $14.8 million Veritaseum ICO. The emergency action accuses Middleton of propagating false information about his businesses, as well as conducting trades in the open market jacking up the price of VERI. The SEC also alleges he misappropriated at least $520,000 of investors’ money for personal use, as well as $600,000 to purchase precious metals to prop up another scam. The price of VERI tokens plummeted over 70 percent yesterday on the news. 

– WN.com, Jamie Saarloos