Summing up the past week for the cryptocurrency market – a new bitcoin price record in 2019, details of the Libra Facebook project, the publication of recommendations on cryptocurrency regulation for the member states of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) and other key events of the week.
Bitcoin rate hit a new high in the last year
The events of last week may be the last argument in favor of the statement that cryptozyme is finally completed. So, Bitcoin (BTC) made an impressive leap up, the culmination of which was the Saturday capture of the bar at first $ 10,000 and then at $ 11,000. At the same time, at the beginning of the week, the first cryptocurrency was trading at levels just below $ 9,000.
The small correction that followed to levels of $ 10,500 – $ 10,700 was hardly discouraged by investors. Convinced of the further growth of Bitcoin and numerous experts. So, the co-founder of the Gemini exchange, Tyler Winklevoss, said that after Bitcoin overcomes the $ 10,000 barrier, there is no doubt that he will soon take the $ 15,000 mark.
If bitcoin breaks 10k, you can bet it’s going to break 15k … ???
– Tyler Winklevoss (@tylerwinklevoss) June 19, 2019
Well-known technical analyst Peter Brandt, meanwhile, expressed the opinion that the long-term goal of the price of the first cryptocurrency is $ 100,000. According to him, since 2010 the BTC / USD pair is in the fourth parabolic phase.
“No other market in my 45 years of trading looked on logarithmic graphs in this way. Bitcoin is a market unlike any other, ” Brandt said.
As of Sunday evening (17:50 UTC), the weighted average BTC rate was around $ 10,750 with a capitalization of $ 191.1 billion. Over the past seven days, the price of the first cryptocurrency, taking into account the Sunday correction, has increased by more than 18%.
Bitcoin has set growth and the rest of the market, the cumulative capitalization of which now exceeds $ 326 billion.
Among the most popular Altcoins, we turn our attention to Monero , which during the reporting period has risen in price by more than 20% and is now trading at around $ 116.5 and Ethereum , which managed to overcome the psychological barrier of $ 300. Also this week, Binance Coin rose to record levels against the dollar, retarding growth in the near approaches to $ 40, while XRP approached close to $ 0.50.
Facebook published white paper with information about the cryptocurrency Libra
The focus of attention this week was also the Libra cryptocurrency project from the world's largest social network Facebook.
On Tuesday, June 18, the official white paper of this global stable cryptocurrency was submitted , according to which each Libra unit will be provided with a basket of currencies and other assets that will together form Libra Reserve. This refers to bank deposits and government securities from the most trusted central banks, which would presumably ensure low coin volatility. However, the value of the token will not be tied to any fiat currency.
At the initial stage, the founding members of the Libra Association will act as validator node operators, after which, as expected, the transition to decentralization will take place. The founding members of the association include Mastercard, PayPal, Visa, Booking Holdings, eBay, Facebook, Uber, Spotify, Vodafone, Coinbase, Xapo and other well-known companies. At the same time, no member of the organization can own more than 1% of the vote (this also applies to Facebook).
The Libra Association will also deploy security-tokens called Libra Investment Token, which will attract funds from accredited investors who can earn dividends from reserves.
The news about Facebook’s plans almost instantly provoked a reaction from traditional finance representatives and politicians around the world. Thus, French Finance Minister Bruno Le May said that the Libra token should not and cannot become a sovereign currency, and in the US Congress urged Facebook to suspend work on the project .
Meanwhile, the head of Australia’s central bank, Phillip Law, stressed that there are a lot of questions on the part of regulators regarding Libra, so it’s too early to draw any conclusions. In Switzerland, where the organization is registered, FINMA and other departments communicate with representatives of the Libra Association to determine whether its activities and the digital currency itself should be regulated in accordance with their norms.
In Russia, as stated by the chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market, Anatoly Aksakov, Facebook does not legalize cryptocurrency from the company and will limit foreign sites through which it will be possible to buy it.
It also became known that on July 16, the US Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on Libra's cryptocurrency from Facebook, and France, which chairs the G7, will set up a working group on stablecoins , which will also be done by Libra.
The response of the financial establishment to the initiative of the social network is best illustrated by the statement by a member of the US House of Representatives Maxine Waters:
“They must stop immediately so that we can sort it out.” We must protect our customers. We cannot allow them to go and go to Switzerland with their partners and start competing with the dollar, ”she said.
FATF has presented recommendations for regulating the cryptocurrency industry
The Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) has officially finalized the development of recommendations for the regulation of cryptocurrency for all 37 member states of the organization, including Russia.
So, despite the criticism of the proposals and warnings about the adverse consequences for the industry, the group decided that bitcoin exchanges should exchange user data when they make transactions between sites.
Such data include :
- the name of the sender and the data on his digital wallet ;
- the name of the recipient and the data on his digital wallet;
- physical address of the sender, his passport data or user ID, which binds him to the company, date or place of birth.
In addition, any cryptocurrency service provider (VASP), individual or legal entity, will have to undergo a licensing or registration procedure in its jurisdiction. Thus, according to the FATF, the competent authorities will have to make sure that the criminals are not the beneficiaries of VASPs.
It is noteworthy that the recommendations of FATF touched and mixing services. So, VASPs should mitigate the risks associated with such transactions, which obfuscate senders and recipients, and if this is not possible, then providers should not be allowed to do so.
In theory, the member countries of FATF are not obliged to follow the recommendations, but in this case they will be blacklisted and face an outflow of foreign investment.
In Russia may allow the purchase and sale of cryptocurrency
The Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation does not exclude that permission to buy and sell cryptocurrency on the territory of the country will be included in the law on digital financial assets. However, according to Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseyev, the final decision on this issue has not yet been made.
“In terms of cryptocurrency, the last question that remains is the question of determining how much cryptocurrency can be used. There range from prohibition to the possibility of purchase. As a foreign currency: you can buy and sell, but you can not pay. After the political decision on this issue is taken, we will have the responsibility , ”the deputy minister explained.
The draft law on digital financial assets, in which the ban on the use of cryptocurrency as a means of payment in the Russian Federation was registered, was adopted by the State Duma in the first reading in May 2018. In preparation for the second reading, the definition of cryptocurrency was replaced with “digital operational signs”.
The head of the Duma Financial Market Committee, Anatoly Aksakov, called the introduction of this concept a compromise solution and noted that according to FATF recommendations, Russia should adopt a bill on the circulation of cryptocurrency before the end of 2019, as this tool is also used to launder criminal proceeds. by.
Binance cryptographic service launched a BTCB token with a secured bitcoin
This week the BEP2 BTCB token, secured by the first cryptocurrency and tied to its exchange rate, started trading on the Binance exchange. At the moment, the new token is traded only in conjunction with the first cryptocurrency.
BTCB also appeared in the listing of the non-custodial trading platform Binance DEX, where it is traded in tandem with Binance Coin (BNB).
According to representatives of the Binance exchange , BTCB is 100% secured with “digital gold”, while the addresses of its reserves are open and accessible for auditing .
Mobile wallet for Lightning Network on Android and iOS
Lightning Labs, a leading developer of solutions for the Lightning Network , introduced its first mobile application for Android and iOS (Testflight). The Lightning App is a non-custodial wallet with which users can make instant payments in an amount not exceeding one-sixth of a bitcoin (over $ 1,500).
The service has a feature called Autopilot, which is based on Lightning Labs' own cluster with three full nodes. Using the nodes of a startup, users cannot receive more funds than they sent.
The plans of the project team to reduce the dependence of products from Lightning Labs. This is likely to happen when the support for the Neutrino protocol appears in the Bitcoin Core client, which will allow the application to connect to external nodes so as not to overload the mobile device.
It is noteworthy that in the first days since the launch of the applications they were downloaded more than two thousand times.
Zcash will switch to a new version of the protocol with sharding support
Cryptocurrency developer Zcash , the Electric Coin Company (ECC), intends to make radical changes to the architecture of this cryptocurrency user-oriented privacy.
The ambitious plans of the creators of the project provide that the network Zcash will be able to handle "thousands or even millions of transactions per second." To implement them, you may need to switch to a completely new blockchain with the support of sharding technology .
Scharding, better known as one of the solutions for the Ethereum network, is a mechanism for dividing data in the blockchain into more manageable parts, in which the nodes store only part of the data, relying on information from other nodes.
But, despite the fact that the Zcash roadmap has a number of similarities with Ethereum, in order to use sharding, this cryptocurrency may need to switch to a completely new blockchain, which will also need to be created from scratch.
Publication date 24.06.2019
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