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EOS maker  Block.One  must pay $24 million in penalties for conducting an unregistered securities sale, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Monday evening. Notably, the press release highlighted that block. One’s  token sale began shortly before the SEC released its Dao report  but “continued for nearly a year after the report’s publication.” The company did not secure an exemption from securities registration requirements and did not otherwise register the sale, the SEC said. More significantly,  Block.One’s  statement said that its ERC-20 token is no longer in circulation “and will not require the token to be registered as a security with the SEC.”    Read more

Cryptocurrency derivatives firm LedgerX alleges that former United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman Christopher Giancarlo obstructed the approval of its amended Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) registration because of personal bias against the firm’s CEO Paul Chou. As Industry news outlet Coindesk repoted  on Sept. 28, LedgerX made the allegations in two letters  obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. Per the report, while Giancarlo did not answer the outlet’s request for comment, Chou confirmed that the letters are real, accurate and are only some of the messages sent by the firm to the CFTC. Read more

As data from monitoring resource coin dance  confirms, after the hash rate metric dipped from 104 quintillion hashes per second (h/s) to 57 on Sept. 23, it immediately reversed. On Sept. 24, it doubled, reaching 114 quintillion h/s, just a touch away from the all-time highs of 121 quintillion h/s seen ten days previously.  commentators initially appeared scared when hash rate dropped. Long considered a measure of commitment to the Bitcoin Mining  process, what appeared to be a sudden exodus of computing power sparked alarm.  If the latest statistics are reliable, however, Bitcoin’s hash rate remains on its upward trajectory, around all-time highs. This contrasts with its drop in price: at press time Friday, BTC/USD was down 21%  versus seven days ago.  Read more

Bitcoin’s price briefly slipped below $8,000 on Thursday for the first time in three months, though the cryptocurrency is still more than double its level at the start of 2019.David Nage , principal at the Los Angeles-based money manager Arca Funds, discusses his views on this week’s price drop and whether price volatility in cryptocurrencies might turn off big investors. Nage believes that as an asset, bitcoin is akin to future-pointing equities like Netflix and Amazon. With the caveat that “we’re not in the business of price predictions,” Nage said. And while the next halving – a periodic reduction in bitcoin mining rewards, expected to occur around May 15, 2020 – is potentially bullish, both the technical and fundamental views point toward uncertain times ahead for BTC’s direction after its recent Sell-Off  threw into question the long-term trend.  Read more

Emsisoft announced  that they are releasing a new free fix for the WannaCryFake ransomware bug. The WannaCryFake is the next version of the WannaCry worm, a type of malicious software program that first began spreading across computer networks in May 2017. When a computer system is infected with the WannaCryFake worm, data is held hostage and a payment in Bitcoin will be requested to decrypt the files and release access to data.   The software company adamantly states that “under no circumstances should you attempt to make contact,” and to not ever pay the ransom. The free decryption tool will puportedly help ransomware victims recover their files without causing permanent data loss. Read more

It’s a lively time for bitcoin derivatives – or at least for those writing about them. For those trading them, it may be business as usual. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) announced Friday it is preparing to offer options trades on its bitcoin futures contract. It’s a surprising move, because options volume to date rounds to zero, as a percentage of reported volume in futures and swaps. The announcement gives CME a way to offer options without having to build much anew. Why should it? CME’s bitcoin futures market represents a tiny percentage of its overall volume. Read more

Intercontinental Exchange’s (ICE) Bakkt platform has traded 71 Bitcoin (BTC ) futures contracts in the first 24 hours following its launch on Sept. 22. According to ICE historical data on Bakkt’s Bitcoin/USD futures contract trading, the platform has traded 71 BTC at press time, with the last recorded trading price settling  at $9,875 per Bitcoin. In an analysis  for Cointelegraph earlier today, Rakesh Upadhyay wrote that the lukewarm reception to the Bakkt launch is likely due to the fact that the currency’s price has been range-bound recently, so institutional traders are in no hurry to initiate positions. A few days prior to the platform’s launch, ICE determined  tentative margin requirements for the contracts. The initial hedge requirement for daily and monthly futures contracts is $3,900, while the speculative initial requirement for both contracts is $4,290. Read more

After two delays  and 13 months of questions, the Intercontinental Exchange-backed ware houses  and futures contract facilitator is launching Monday, opening the door for institutional investors to take positions on the cryptocurrency in a federally regulated venue. Trading is set to open at midnight UTC and close at 22:00. For the first time, interested observers will be able to see just how much pent-up demand there is among big-money traders for this hotly anticipated service. Bakkt’s data feed  will be freely available through June of next year, after which it will require a subscription. As often noted, Bakkt’s futures will be physically settled, meaning buyers receive bitcoin at expiration, whereas the futures available since 2017 at the Chicago exchange CME Group are cash-settled – essentially side bets on the cryptocurrency’s price. Read more 

Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock who resigned abruptly in August, has dumped his 13 percent stake in the e-commerce company he founded 20 years ago to buy cryptocurrency and precious metals, he announced late yesterday. Byrne said that, by the end of the week, he will have reinvested all of the proceeds into “investments that are counter-cyclical to the economy.” A longtime proponent of cryptocurrency — Overstock was one of the first companies to accept crypto payments, launched the tZERO security token trading platform. Byrne was ahead of the curve, but perhaps too much so, as the external pressures against him compelled his resignation from the company last month. Read more 

Crypto exchange Binance is planning to add over-the-counter (OTC) trading to its platform in a month to provide users with fiat currency gateways. Binance’s co-founder and chief marketing officer He Yi said at a media session on Tuesday during the Shanghai Blockchain Week that the exchange will specifically support fiat on-ramp via OTC for Chinese yuan. He added that the new service will be part of Binance’s plan in the coming months to dedicate more time and resources to compete in the Chinese market.  Further, the exchange is also rolling out a payment service to allow users from 170 countries to buy crypto assets using fiat currencies at  Binance.com . Read more

Cryptocurrency could replace sovereign currencies from the U.S. dollar to the Euro and threaten central banks. David Marcus, the executive leading the project, posted a series of tweets the same day members of the Libra Association met with regulators convened by a G-7 working group in Switzerland. He argued that creating Libra isn’t the digital equivalent of printing U.S. dollars or minting new euros. The simple existence of Libra, he says, doesn’t create new value.  Read more