Powers On... is a monthly opinion column from Marc Powers, who spent much of his 40-year legal career working with complex securities-related cases in the United States after a stint with the SEC. He is now an adjunct professor at Florida International University College of Law, where he teaches the course “Blockchain, Crypto and Regulatory Considerations.” More and more, governments are fearing that they will lose control over aspects of their respective legitimate financial systems, including capital raising and trading, to the hundreds of unlicensed, unregulated centralized and decentralized crypto exchanges worldwide. There is a clear rising chorus of alarm …
OkEx chief strategy officer, Alysa Xu, called out crypto data site CoinMarketCap, or CMC, for its recent exchange ranking rationale, proclaiming the platform dead. "Fairness and justice are the basis of all rankings," Xu said in a May 15 post on Chinese microblogging site Weibo. "CMC is dead, and we mourn together tonight." CoinMarketCap recently changed its ranking metrics Binance recently rose to the top of CMC's crypto exchange rankings after the data site changed the rationale by which it composed its list. CMC now shows exchanges ranked in order of web traffic, instead of liquidity or volume. Binance acquired …
Research firm Hurun published a list of global unicorns, or companies worth more than a billion dollars, in 2020. This ranking features all billion-dollar tech startups founded in the 21st century that are not listed yet listed on public exchanges. The report, named “Hurun Global Unicorn Index 2020,” shows that there are a total of 586 unicorns globally — up from 494 companies listed in the 2019 ranking. The blockchain industry represents 2% of the list. Ripple takes the top spot as the company with the highest valuation in the sector. It ranks at #23, which is up from last …
Binance Smart Chain — a dual-chain architecture from major crypto exchange Binance — is now integrating Chainlink (LINK) data oracles. Binance Smart Chain adds smart contracts to the exchange's original chain, Binance Chain, and is currently in testnet. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov told Cointelegraph that in his opinion, this integration will save time and effort for developers who are building decentralized apps on the blockchain: “With the Chainlink integration, Binance Smart Chain developers no longer need to dedicate months of engineering time to set up their own oracle infrastructure. Now, they can simply use Chainlink as an abstraction layer to …
As Cointelegraph reported on Feb. 19, Binance temporarily suspended most of its crypto trading platform activities due to unscheduled system maintenance. For several hours the exchange’s users were unable to perform most basic functions including deposits, withdrawals, spot trading, margin trading, P2P trading, lending, redemption, as well as asset transfers from sub-accounts, margin accounts, futures accounts, and fiat wallets on the platform. During the outage, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao explained that the root cause of the trading halt was a technical issue with one of the market data pushers. In the end the exchange solved the issue the same day, …