Hong Kong Startup to Battle Revolving Credit with Asia’s First Crypto Visa Debit Cards

Industry startup Crypto.com, formerly ‘Monaco’ before a rebrand, has revealed its plan to issue 100,000 Visa-powered cryptocurrency debit cards in Hong Kong and Singapore.

The Hong Kong startup confirmed that it would pit its debit cards against the insecure revolving credit practiced by mainstream credit card issuers, as reported by the South China Morning Post. Kris Marszalek, Crypto.com’s founder and chief executive officer, referred the line of credit practice as “unethical,”  which unjustifiably allows banks to make profits from undeserving people.

“These people should not be given a credit card in the first place,” said Marszalek.

Revolving Credit v/s Crypto-Backed Lending

The availability of credit when needed is known to be one of the main advantages of Revolving Credit. However, it also influences credit card users to spend more than they afford. Non-payments – or even late payments – can trap borrowers into the maze of compound interests. Also, Revolving Credit allows banks to keep loan rates unhinged, and rights to change credit limits and interest rates at will.

Projecting Crypto.com’s crypto-enabled debit cards as a viable solution, Marszalek revealed that they would offer money lending services to their crypto-card holders. The business model will reject revolving credit practice by choosing to lend fiat money by collateralizing cryptocurrencies. People will only be able to borrow 40-60 percent of their pledged cryptocurrency in fiat money. The method also means that Marszalek would not rely on borrower’s credit scores like its traditional counterparts.

“Crypto.com would only face the risk from volatility in the value of the bitcoin and MCO pledged as collateral,” he said.

Crypto.com has applied for money lending license in the countries it is expanding to, starting with Hong Kong and Singapore. Once approved, Marszalek expects Crypto.com to disrupt the credit card history – once for all.

Mass Adoption, Liquidity, and Whatnot

Crypto.com claims that their Visa-powered debit cards would allow an easy switch between cryptocurrencies and fiat, thereby making cryptocurrency accessible to more users and improving the overall liquidity. The company currently supports five cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Binance Coin and their very own institutionalized currency, MCO – convertible to a total of seven fiat currencies, including Hong Kong Dollar, Singapore Dollar, and the US Dollar.

The real challenge, however, is to make crypto debit cards more attractive than traditional cards. In its current format, users accuse crypto debit cards of charging an absurd amount of middlemen-induced fees for their services. Furthermore, the underlying volatility of the crypto-market makes it impractical for end-users to use it as a regular payment medium.

Crypto.com currently offers cash backs, lower exchange rates, feasible ATM withdrawal limits, and many other attractive services with its range of debit cards. The company plans to include cryptocurrency trading services and an automated cryptocurrency buying and selling service into its portfolio in the near future.

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Ripple General Counsel Departs Cryptocurrency Firm Amid Class-Action Dispute over XRP

A top lawyer at cryptocurrency startup Ripple has left the company, a spokesperson confirmed to CCN on Friday.

Brynly Llyr, who joined the San Francisco-based blockchain company in Nov. 2016 as the firm’s general counsel and has served in that role in the nearly two years since, is no longer with the organization. Llyr’s departure from Ripple was first reported by Quartz.

In a statement, a Ripple spokesperson confirmed the move and said that the blockchain firm was “grateful” for her work at the company.

“We can confirm that Brynly Llyr has moved on from Ripple. We’re grateful to all that she did to help build an incredible team that will continue the work they’ve been focused on for the past year and beyond. We wish Brynly all the best in her next endeavor and the team here at Ripple looks forward to the next chapter where we will continue to pave the way in this ever-evolving and unchartered industry.”

Previously, she had managed “class action litigation and complex litigation” for eBay and also spent time at PayPal after it was spun off from the e-commerce giant, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Llyr’s departure comes as Ripple prepares to defend itself against a variety of class-action lawsuitsalleging that the XRP cryptocurrency — whose majority owner is Ripple — should be regulated as a security and that the firm’s distribution of XRP (which is often colloquially referred to as “ripple”) constitutes an illegal securities offering.

The spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about whether Llyr’s departure would have any impact on that legal battle. However as Hacked reported in July, the company has hired a heavyweight to oversee its case that XRP is not a security: Mary Jo White, the former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency that determines whether an asset should be regulated as a security by the federal government.

Ripple, for its part, has long denied that XRP is a security. The SEC, meanwhile, has not commented on the matter publicly, though officials have stated that bitcoin and ethereum — the only two cryptocurrencies with circulating valuations higher than those of XRP — should not be classified as securities under current U.S. law.

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Bitcoin Cash Gains 14% as Stress Test Hits Transaction Record

Over the weekend, Bitcoin Cash conducted a stress test designed to prove to merchants and businesses worldwide that its mainnet is capable of scaling on chain and handling huge transaction volumes currently.

The principal takeaway from the results of the test was that increased transaction volumes did not lead to a fee surge, and in fact transaction fees declined slightly.

‘Hopefully an annual event’

According to the stress test website, the stress test was an opportunity for businesses and developers on the BCH network to gather useful data and stress test their own services in what is hoped to become an annual event.

Starting on September 1, 2018, the Bitcoin Cash encouraged thousands of users to deliberately carry out multiple activities including sending BCH and using BCH Decentralized Applications (DApps), so as to raise the number of ongoing transactions into seven figures.

View image on Twitter

Bitcoin Cash@BITCOlNCASH

The Biggest Community Driven Stress Test Of Any Blockchain

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Bitcoin Cash experienced over 2.1 million transactions on September 1 as shown in the data below from BitInfoCharts.

Source: BitInfoCharts

As a result of the increased network activity, microtransactions on the BCH blockchain went up as high as 14,300 per block going by data from Coin Dance.

Source: Coin Dance

To put that in perspective, Bitcoin microtransactions usually average below 1,500 per block.

Declining Fees

In what the Bitcoin Cash community will no doubt see as a vindication of the stance which led to their initial split with Bitcoin, the stress test results showed that as transaction figures topped 2.1 million on the Bitcoin Cash network, transaction fees did not show any increase and in fact, according to data from BitInfoCharts, transaction fees actually declined slightly from $0.002 to $0.0017.

Source: BitInfoCharts

In the course of the stress test, Bitcoin Cash achieved the highest amount of crypto market activity, making up 34.6 percent of all crypto activity over the past 24 hours, based on data from BitInfoCharts.

Source: BitInfoCharts

At the peak of the stress test, Bitcoin Cash took up a massive 63 percent of all crypto market activity according to BitInfoCharts.

Data source: BitInfoCharts

Following the successful completion of the stress test, the BCH price has experienced a mild boost, going up from Saturday’s opening price of $543.96 to as high as $653.69 on September 2 according to data from CoinMarketCap.

The 24 hour trading volume of BCH also went up from $490,619,000 at the start of trading on September 1 to $570,200,000 on September 2. Its market capitalization also gained $1.2 billion, rising from $9,423,372,872 to $10,673,018,727.

Source: CoinMarketCap

The stress test comes a few weeks ahead of a contentious hard fork upgrade championed by Bitcoin ABC, which has met stiff opposition from nChain and CoinGeek amongst others.

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Bitcoin Price Intraday Analysis: BTC/USD Could Attempt Pullback

On Monday, bitcoin price corrected weakly to the downside, summing up the pullback close to 3 percent.

The BTC/USD looked lazy the whole day. The pair earlier corrected from its intraday high near 7340-fiat and continued its fall until hitting today’s low at 7203-fiat during the Asian morning session. The pair recovered later in an attempt to restest 7340-fiat, with its uptrend migrating smoothly from the Asian to the European trading hours. However, it was stopped by the Rising Wedge resistance, as depicted in the chart below. And now, as we begin the US session, BTC/USD is once again attempting a breakout, which looks weak already in near-term.

BTC/USD Technical Analysis

Bitcoin is nearing its Rising Wedge resistance once again, looking for a breakout. But the selling pressure seems to be strong around that area, as can be seen through the price movements of the past few days. We have broken only once, only to find bears around the upside target around 7400-fiat.

We are already in a pullback scenario. The Stochastic indicator has rejected its overbought area and is now heading south, awaiting a bounce back. The RSI indicator, at the same time, is also looking to reverse its trend after reversing from its overbought sentiment area. We are just supported by the 50 percent Fibonacci retracement level of the last wave from 8311-high to 5872-low, which could be a potential bounce back level for the BTC/USD pair.

At the same time, let’s not forget to mention the moving average crossover between 100H and 200H MA on 4H BitFinex chart; it is a buy signal in medium-term. What could be a possibility is BTC/USD testing 7091-fiat only to bounce back towards the Rising Wedge resistance.

Overall, Bitcoin market is inside a medium-term bullish bias.

BTC/USD Intraday Analysis

The range we are watching for today has 7379-fiat as our interim resistance and 7153-fiat as our interim support. It is a pretty wide range to apply our intrarange strategy; thus, a pullback from the Rising wedge resistance or interim resistance could open a decent short opportunity towards support, and a bounce back from support could open a decent long opportunity towards the Rising Wedge resistance while eyeing the resistance level.

The chances of a breakout are meager according to the current scenario. We will still be prepared for it. That being said, a break above 7379-fiat could have us put a long position towards 7459-fiat. Placing a stop loss four-pips below the entry position will protect our trade from intensified losses.

Looking the other way, a break below 7153-fiat will have us enter a short towards 7091-fiat while eyeing the Rising Wedge channel for a potential bounce back. A stop-loss four-pips above the entry point will define our risk management perspective.

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Google Dives into the Ethereum Blockchain with its Big Data Analytics Platform

Google BigQuery, Google Cloud’s Petabyte-scale data warehousing solution, has made the Ethereum dataset available to enable the exploration of smart contract analytics, the company announced on a blog.

BigQuery has made it possible to explore all of Ethereum’s historical data. Ethereum’s ETL project on GitHub includes all source code that can be extracted from the blockchain and entered into BigQuery. Google is seeking new contributors and blockchains.

Making Blockchain Data Accessible

The purpose of making the Ethereum blockchain data accessible on Google Cloud is to make all data stored on the blockchain easily accessible. While Ethereum’s software contains APIs for functions that can be accessed randomly, such as checking wallet balances, the API endpoints are not easily accessible for all data stored on the blockchain.

While API endpoints do not enable viewing blockchain data in aggregate, BigQuery’s OLAP features enable such analysis. The blog displayed a chart showing Ether transfers and transaction costs year to date, aggregated by day. Such visualization supports tasks like prioritizing changes in the Ethereum architecture, should an upgrade be needed.

Google Cloud can synchronize the Ethereum blockchain to computers equipped with Parity, an Ethereum client for building applications, the blog noted.

It also extracts data daily from the Ethereum blockchain ledger, such as token transfers, and stores partitioned data for efficient exploration on BigQuery.

In addition, the BigQuery Python library allows clients to query data tables in Kernels, a free in-browser coding platform on the public data science platform Kaggle.

Smart Contract Analytics

Google BigQuery has already enabled analysis of smart contract function calls, transaction times and smart contract function analytics.

BigQuery has demonstrated querying the contract tables and dataset transactions to identify the most used smart contracts based on transactions. The accompanying chart shows the 10 most popular Ethereum ERC-721 contracts by transactions.

The smart contract for the CryptoKitties game is the most popular ERC-21 smart contract. Where the contract source code logs a birth event to the Ethereum blockchain, the table allows users to query instances of this event.

If someone wanted to discover games similar to CryptoKitties, they can measure this by deploying the Jaccard similarity coefficient, a statistic that is used for comparing the diversity and similarity of sample sets using a JavaScript UDF.

Another query measures the 10 most popular tokens by transaction volume.

It is possible to measure a token by time window such as the daily number of token transfers for a particular token and to create a visualization of the data for a specific time period, as shown in the accompanying chart.

Also read: Banking services giant to use Google Cloud platform for real-world blockchain testing

More Visualizations Possible

It is also possible to use directed graph data structure to glean insights about the data since it includes a set of transfers among wallet addresses.

In one example, the first 40,000 transactions contained at least two trading partners. The blog gives an example of a graphic made with Gephi, a visualization software, showing nodes color labeled by groups of addresses that transfer often with each other. The Modularity algorithm was used to calculate this graphic.

Much of the smart contract source code is available for free, allowing Google users to discover what functions contracts perform based on the name, even functions that don’t have the source since the common function names carry a common signature.

Google Cloud has given momentum to smart contract analytics through BigQuery.

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Taiwanese Hospital Launches Blockchain Platform for Record Keeping

As part of efforts to consolidate the government’s Hierarchical Medical system policy, Taipei Medical University Hospital has introduced a blockchain-driven platform for the advancement of medical record-keeping.

The Healthcare Blockchain Platform will be used to improve patient referral services and integrates individual healthcare networks for people to access their medical records with relative ease, according to a report on Taipei Times.

In a statement released by the hospital, the platform will be a one-stop referral and long-term care service in support of the government Hierarchical Medical System policy.

The Project incorporated the collaboration of over 100 community-based clinics and employed the use of blockchain technology in addressing “common pain points” in healthcare. These include the transfer of data between medical institutions, personal patient portals and physician referral process, the hospital wrote.

“Using smart contracts, hospitals and clinics can request and authorize patient record sharing easily and securely,” the report noted.

Hospital superintendent Chen Ray-jade, who spoke to the news outlet, said the technology would provide an avenue to synchronize electronic medical records with electronic health records from various clinics and hospitals. It would also come with a security feature of notification and consent before any transfer occurs.

Taipei has only followed the path of other healthcare establishments in the world using ledger technology in the management of medical data.

Earlier in August, a medical big data ecosystem meant for the storage and secured transfer of sensitive genomic and personal information was jointly developed by South Korean biotech enterprise Macronand local tech firm, Bigster. The move is expected to reshape the global medical landscape by allowing for secure storage and transfer of large amounts of sensitive genomic and personal information through the blockchain.

German Camelot Consulting Group also introduced a similar blockchain technology developed for the management of sensitive medical data in April.

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Doge coin Drops 35% as Dogethereum Sentiment Wears Off

Dogecoin today fell as much as 35 percent from its highest peak since March.

The DOGE/USD yesterday established the intraday high near 0.00692-fiat after rising by more than 70 percent in just two days. Just before the yesterday’s close, the pair had undergone a bearish correction towards 0.00540-fiat. The Sunday’s trading session began on a bounce back from the said low, jumping as high as 0.0066-fiat. However, sellers began to take control during the mid-Asian, early-European session near the top. As a result, just before the beginning of the US session, DOGE/USD broke below the 0.00540-fiat low and established a new intraday bottom at 0.00443-fiat.

On Friday, Dogecoin has recorded massive gains across all the major exchanges owing to its announcement of integrating into Ethereuem network. The speculators drove the price up – probably on the promise of widespread bullish sentiment – but failed to sustain the upside momentum. The price action looks pretty common. Just recently, IOTA had also jumped 40 percent following its integration into Fujistu as their new protocol standard. The token value however erased a majority of gains after the sentiment dried off.

DOGE/USD Technical Analysis

The drop in DOGE/USD hasn’t really rattled the overall bullish sentiment in the market. The pair is still trading above its 200H and 100H moving average indicators, while the RSI and Stochastic are only beginning the correction from their respective overbought areas. DOGE/USD is currently supported by 0.00512-fiat, a level which has already been broken once and had established 0.00456-fiat as the next downside target. That being said, the probability of the pair breaking below the said support level is high.

At the same time, a bounce from 0.00512-fiat could bring 0.00620-fiat in view as the next potential resistance, and long position target. Should it happen, DOGE/USD will attempt to retest the intraday high while eyeing February high at 0.00838-fiat as its primary upside target for medium-term.

One should also keep a close eye on Bitcoin’s performance. The leading digital currency today has recorded impressive gains following an unannounced buying influx. The rest of the leading coins, on the other hand, have experienced losses. Any correction in the Bitcoin value could also allow Dogecoin to reverse its prevailing downside momentum.

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