If the crypto sector is to attract more institutional investors, it will need to provide more insurance solutions. This point was driven home anew with the recent news that the Gemini crypto exchange has launched a captive insurance company, Nakamoto Ltd., to insure its Gemini Custody business for up to $200 million — reportedly the largest amount for any crypto custody service in the world. This new insurer will help Gemini’s institutional clients to meet their regulatory requirements, Gemini’s head of risk, Yusuf Hussain, explained to Cointelegraph in a Jan. 16 story, and this “is consistent with Gemini’s approach of …

Recently Hiromi Yamaoka, the former head of payments and settlements at the Bank of Japan, said that Facebook’s Libra has forced central banks to research and consider issuing central bank digital currencies (CBDC). Currently China is leading the race in developing a CBDC but it appears that other nations are now attempting to play catch up. In a press release, the Bank of England said that the central banks of Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, the European Union, Sweden and Switzerland have joined hands with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to form a working group tasked with researching CBDCs. …

The total market capitalization of the crypto space rallied from about $184 billion on Jan. 3 to a high of $250 billion on Jan. 19. That is a 35% gain within a short span of time. Usually, fast-paced rallies do not last long, hence, for the long-term health of the markets, it is better to have rallies with intermittent corrections. Bitcoin has been following the Stock-to-Flow model fairly accurately. The model’s creator, an analyst known as PlanB, believes that the price of Bitcoin is likely to average around $8,200 until the halving event in May of this year. Thereafter, the …

The transaction volume going through the EIDOS decentralized application (dApp) has massively skewed the results of the 2019 dApp Market Report, published Jan. 20. The token airdrop dApp on the EOS blockchain, saw almost three times as many transactions in 2019 as all of the other dApps on nine leading platforms combined. Perhaps the most notable aspect about this statistic is that EIDOS did not launch until 1st November 2019. In the two months of 2019 that it was active, EIDOS racked up almost 2.4 billion transactions. For the whole of 2019, the total number of transactions registered on all …

The total crypto market capitalization has risen from about $190.5 billion at the start of the year to over $243 billion. That is a rise of about 27.55% within 17 days. This shows that the bulls are back in action. Another interesting thing to note is that the rally is led by altcoins, which are outperforming Bitcoin (BTC) by a huge margin. This shows that the current rally is more broad-based, announcing the arrival of altseason. Digital asset management firm Grayscale Investments reported that $225.5 million in investments flowed into its products in Q4 2019. That took the total investment …

The crypto space is making a comeback and the rally is being led by altcoins. While several altcoins might participate in the initial rally, we believe that the market will start differentiating between each cryptocurrency based on its fundamentals. Hence, traders should avoid buying the non-performers expecting a repeat of the previous bull market when every altcoin staged a parabolic rally. When compared against altcoins, Bitcoin (BTC) has been an underperformer over the past few days. Its dominance rate, which had risen above 69% on Jan. 8, dipped below 66% on Jan 15. On Jan. 14 Bitwise Asset Management withdrew …

Bitcoin has seen an uptick in volumes in the new year. A report by cryptocurrency market research firm Arcane Research shows that 7-day average daily trading volume has surged 126% in a week. Along with Bitcoin trading volume, the CME Bitcoin futures contract has also seen increased activity. The Bitcoin futures open interest has skyrocketed to a seven month high, which is only behind the peak seen at the end of June. A pick up in volume and open interest with rising prices or even if prices remain range-bound is usually a sign of accumulation by the stronger hands. This …

Blockchain software development firm Block.One released EOS.io 2.0, the software underlying the EOS blockchain. In the release announcement published on Twitter on Jan. 10, Block.One claimed that the update makes the blockchain “faster, simpler, and even more secure.” Major changes to the smart contract virtual machine The official blog post on new software explains that it includes a purpose-built WebAssembly (WASM) engine on which the EOS smart contracts run. According to its official website, WASM is an instruction format designed for deployment on the web and servers. This change is expected to improve the performance of smart contract execution, given …

Safe haven assets were dumped on Jan. 8, on reports that the US-Iran conflict might not escalate to an all out war. Cryptocurrencies, which had surged alongside gold and oil with also retreated from two-month high. However, the positive sign is that most major cryptocurrencies have held their immediate support levels, which indicates buying on dips. This shows that the sentiment has changed from sell on rallies to buy on dips. With the news-based rally out of the way, the focus will again shift to the fundamentals. A new law governing cryptographic password management came into force in China on …

DappReview published its 2019 insights on the decentralized app (DApp) space in a Jan. 8 report. Just three blockchains accounted for 98.65 percent of total transaction volume, though EOS began to struggle in Q4 2019. Decentralized app aggregator DappReview summarized the main events within the DApp ecosystem in 2019. The value of on-chain transactions amounted to $23 billion, with 1,955 DApps added during the year — bringing the total number to over 4,000. However, the firm notes that in terms of the number of users, the entire space continues to lag significantly behind any single widely used centralized app. The …

The crypto markets continue to respond to the events happening in the United States-Iran conflict. Any sign of escalating tensions is boosting the crypto markets higher. Google Trends shows that the searches for terms “Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin Iran” have surged in the past few days. This shows that investors are considering Bitcoin as a safe haven asset, similar to gold. A report released by analytics firm SFOX showed that Bitcoin had a very low correlation with traditional assets such as gold and stocks in the second half of 2019. This made it an attractive hedge in a portfolio. The report …

The price of an asset class is determined by its fundamentals and the sentiment towards it. At times of panic or exuberance, fundamentals take a back seat and sentiment dictates the price action. Currently, the US-Iran tension has sent investors scurrying towards safety. This has seen a move away from stocks and into assets that are considered safe havens. However, it is unlikely to be a one-way move. There will be periods of calm that would be followed by statements from both parties that would reignite the conflict. Accordingly, the volatility will remain high as the market participants interpret and …