Ripple Expand Into Iceland With New Acqui-Hire

Just announced earlier today, the San-Francisco fintech firm Ripple has just expanded into Iceland.

As Ripple stated in its blog post, the firm revealed that it has acqui-hired (acquired and hired) a cryptocurrency trading firm based in the nation, Algrim. This move is Ripple’s latest expansion into Europe and the next move in spreading the firm across the globe.

The announcement says that the new team will be focused on leveraging their expertise to assist in the development of Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity product, which utilises the need for XRP.

According to Christopher Kanaan, senior vice president of Engineering at Ripple, he said:
“With built-in expertise in trading and exchanges, the addition of Algrim’s engineering talent to our team will be instrumental in continuing the momentum we’re already experiencing with On-Demand Liquidity. We’ve been committed to sourcing expert crypto and trading talent in key global markets since day one, and the acquisition of the Algrim engineering team is a successful example of doing just that.”

It’s said that the Algrim’s engineers “spent over a decade building traditional trading platforms and foreign exchange trading algorithms.”

Dadi Armannsson, the CEO of Algrim said:
“The decision to join the Ripple team was a natural fit — both companies share a vision to enable widespread adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology, which aligns directly with what we’ve been working towards for the past several years. We are big believers in XRP and the XRP Ledger, and eager to help build the future of payments at Ripple.”

As Ripple expands throughout the world, more and more institutions will start to hear about the firm. Not to mention the number of investors who will become aware of the firm and thus, XRP.

It will be interesting to see how Ripple expands from here.

African Interest In Bitcoin Peaks!

According to recent data, Africa is growing in the interest of Bitcoin. In the nations of South Africa and Nigeria currently, lead in terms of Google searches in relation to the leading cryptocurrency.

Despite experiencing a significant loss in value these few weeks, this news comes from data through Binance Research, the crypto market analysis branch of the crypto platform. The department published a video of statistics showing the interest of bitcoin country by country.

“Visualized changes in heat ranking of “Bitcoin” #BTC in Google search by each Country/Region from Jan 2011 to today.
Noticeably, relative search trends of "Bitcoin" within each country have shifted from West to East, and most recently, Africa.”

Even though this is data from only fifty countries, it is understandable for some nations like China - given the censorship on google in the country.

By around 2015, interest in Bitcoin surged in East Asian countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines. As reported by Be in Crypto, it’s around this time that “interest in Bitcoin starts to grow in hyper-inflation-stricken Venezuela too. As BeInCrypto previously reported, Bitcoin could provide relief to citizens in the region. Also worthy of note is the fact that Australia has such a consistent presence in the top ten over the entire period.”

For South African countries, it is well-known that many citizens don’t have a bank account. A spokesperson for one of the largest financial institutions in the country, Nedbank said the following on the matter.

“Seasonal workers will abandon their bank account in months where there is no income. Other clients live in a largely unseen economy that is still cash driven.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Crypto Traders Are Looking For Alternative Liquidity Sources

After alarming reports from South Korea that crypto trading volumes are going down and causing massive shutdowns in the dozens of cryptocurrency exchanges that the country has fielded, it was quite interesting to take a look at the conditions of other crypto locations all over the world.

As it stands right now, it’s quite common to see crypto traders scramble for a better withdrawing option rather than cryptocurrency exchanges due to a seriously changing crypto regulation landscape. Almost every single large crypto exchange is now required by their respective governments to disclose information about trader withdrawals and overall trading history.

Because of this, the traders are slowly getting the idea that the industry is becoming more and more centralized. Because of this, we see thousands of traders flee to various companies for liquidity.

One such example is the online gaming industry, which used to feature a variety of deposit methods from the beginning, but seems to be focusing very heavily on accepting crypto payments.

Another example is a typical investment firm which promises their users the opportunity to deposit in cryptos but withdraw in fiat currencies.

Why Not Withdraw Straight From Crypto Exchanges?
As already mentioned, the regulations are tightening as we speak and crypto exchanges have to disclose the information to the respective governments if they want to continue their operations.

We’ve already seen the UK revenue service request three large exchanges to give them customer trading data so they could calculate the due tax.

By transferring the coins to a different platform which is not registered directly as a financial firm, allows traders to generally avoid the watchful eyes of the government. The most popular method so far has been noted in the gaming sector, for the following reasons.

Fleeing To IGaming
Due to the popularization of cryptocurrencies, dozens of iGaming websites started to accept cryptocurrencies as a form of deposit or would require their customers to exchange it to a local token.

This practice became very popular in the United Kingdom and Australia, where some of the largest websites would accept Bitcoin payments, and transfer them either directly into fiat currencies, or to their localized tokens first and then into fiat.

But regardless of what the process looked like, the customers would get the opportunity to turn their crypto investments into fiat currencies, which they’d then withdraw little by little on their bank accounts or digital wallets.

This helped them legitimize their withdrawals from cryptocurrency exchanges, thus not having to be listed on the questionable transactions list that the company would provide the government.

It would cost a little bit more in terms of fees, but in the end, traders managed to avoid any kind of added tax and personal information disclosure.

Closing The Options Slowly
The government is definitely not blind to these types of practices, obviously. If a writer like myself knows about it happening, then there are definitely dozens of people in respective agencies who know about it.

However, they can’t simply ban the currency as it would not be enough incentive to do so, and they can’t restrict private companies from accepting crypto payments as that would come across as authoritarian.

What they can do, and have done, is amend their regulations, which force companies to disclose revenue they received via cryptocurrencies. This amendment would then introduce additional taxation, thus discouraging companies from offering it.

This was relatively the case with a popular video game marketplace, Steam. But instead of the regulations and a bit of government pressure, the company was forced to refuse crypto deposits due to a volatile market.

Is It Worth Going Through Such A Process?
As cryptocurrencies become more and more common in the digital space, companies start to capitalize on it by introducing higher fees. They are slowly starting to understand that users have little choice but to go for their services if they want alternative means of liquidity, and there’s the time gap before the government does something about it.

Furthermore, they’re worried about being subject to even more taxes, which is why they’re trying to mitigate such an event by taking more via fees. Essentially, it’s becoming less and less enticing to use these entities as a source of liquidity.

The only industry which more or less has the opportunity to utilize the demand even after taxation proposals is the financial industry. Traders who transfer their funds from crypto exchange to let’s say a stock exchange, could classify it as diversification, and thus avoid any crypto-specific taxation.

But that too will be targeted sooner or later.

The Utilisation Of BTC In Turkey

There’s always been a lighthearted debate on what continent that Turkey is apart of, whether it’s Europe or Asia. Either way, the nation now owns more cryptocurrency than any other country in Europe.

This information is known thanks to a recent tweet from the Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares, Meltem Demirors who posted this to her sum 78.5k Twitter followers:

.@ING_news'e göre, Avrupa ulkeleri içinde Türkler kripto para sahipliginde % olarak birinçi sirada yer aliyor. Türk yatirimcilari ve start-up’larinin bu buyuk basarisindan dolayi bir Türk olarak gurur duyuyorum.

h/t @fundstrat pic.twitter.com/20eTGbdyL0

— Meltem Demirors (@Melt_Dem) February 27, 2019

In a rough translation on Google, we can see that she firstly, proud to be Turkish and based on the ING research, 18 percent of Turks own cryptocurrency. This is much higher than the overall 9 percent average.

In addition to this, she also pays tribute to the great are startups and investors in the country. Even so, there might still a few more reasons why Turkish people are holding onto digital assets.

Even though Bitcoin is a volatile asset it doesn’t change the fact, that Turkey’s currency, the lira, isn’t any different. In fact, even with Bitcoin seeing massive losses last year, the trading volume on Turkish exchanges seems to experience gains of nearly 40 percent.

The lira is currently undergoing a crisis and has been for a while now, and involved the dollar-denominated debt that took place in summer last year which greatly devalued numerous Turkish families life savings. In addition, they also saw their pensions and investments affected in a big way.

Even though this isn’t on a similar level of the likes of Venezuela, the lira did lose 20 percent of its value from one day to the next in August last year. With this in mind, Turkey could be creating the perfect storm for cryptocurrencies.

“With a dwindling economy and devalued national currency, it’s hardly surprising that Turkey takes the lead in cryptocurrency ownership.” In fact, the unknown co-owner of Bitcoin.org tweeted about the huge surge in traffic from investors in Turkey saying that this will be how the leading cryptocurrency will impact the world.

Craig Wright & Kleiman Start Settlement Discussions

Both parties of the Wright/Kleiman case have just entered settlement discussions and have requested a 30-day extension of all case parties to understand all the negotiations.

According to a joint motion filed on 12th September Craig Wright and Ira Kleiman have reached a “non-binding agreement in principle” in order to settle the case with both parties agreeing that by reaching a binding settlement is in their "best interests."

As reported by Sam Bourgi for CCN:
“Both parties are seeking an extension of all deadlines pertaining to the case in order to exclusively devote their efforts to settlement discussions. Currently, Kleiman’s motion for attorneys’ fees is due on Sept. 20, Wright’s opposition to sanctions ordered by Judge Reinhart is due on Sept. 23, and expert disclosures are due on Nov. 5.”

Several analysts have attributed the 40 percent federal estate tax incurred by Kleiman through the court’s ruling as the motivation for the plaintiff’s desire to settle.

This has been ongoing since last year when Ira Kleiman sued the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto, Craig Wright, for $10 billion alleging that Wright had sought to fraudulently gain custody over his late-brother Dave Kleiman bitcoin holdings.

Judge Bruce Reinhart was the man overseeing the case and ruled in favour of Kleiman in the end.

Reinhart concluded that Wright had made several “inconsistent statements” relating to material matters concerning his reported inability to demonstrate the value of his bitcoin holdings as of 31st December 2013. The Judge said:

“I completely reject Dr. Wright’s testimony about the alleged Tulip Trust, the alleged encrypted file, and his alleged inability to identify his bitcoin holdings.”

The magistrate says Wright’s testimony, “was not supported by other evidence in the record” and “defies common sense and real-life experience.” Reinhart went onto highlight that “when it was favorable to him,” Wright “appeared to have an excellent memory and a scrupulous attention to detail.”

But otherwise, Wright was found to be “belligerent and evasive.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!Craig Wright & Kleiman Start Settlement Discussions#anchor(title)

The Phenomenal Growth Of Ripple Won’t Be Easy To Stop

When Ripple started, the project has continued to put together a string of serious partnerships with financial institutions over the past few years. When they started, Ripple was overlooked because of its relation with the traditional financial system which drove a lot of enthusiasts away from it because of the centralisation factor.

This year though, Ripple is one of those cryptocurrencies that you can’t really ignore. Now that it is making more and more partnerships such as the World Bank and EU Commission, Ripple is one of the biggest names in the industry.

Starting so many partnerships with some of the world’s biggest financial names is a big sign of significant growth which can’t be ignored. The work that Ripple is undergoing at the moment will be very important in setting the groundwork which will allow the other cryptocurrency projects to boom over the next few years. So whether you love or hate Ripple, it is important to keep up to date with their latest collaborations, as they are knocking down walls between both blockchain technology and the traditional financial world.

So with this, let’s take a look at what some of these high-profile institutions that have partnered up with Ripple and what they are about.

EU Commission
Earlier this year, the EU Commission announced the launch of the Internation Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA).

INATBA was founded with the main aim to encourage with regulators, create a global model of governance for blockchain and develop interoperability standards for the whole industry.

The organisation brings together startups, policymakers, SMEs, global entities, regulators and more to boost the support for blockchain technologies at it tries to break into the mainstream.

Ripple has recently announced that they are actually one of the founding members of INATBA too.

World Bank
In March, Ripple’s remittance product, xRapid was included on the World Bank’s official webpage.

They have stated that remittances are a lot more expensive in the areas that they are needed the most. So with this, it is no surprise that they view DLT as having the potential to push forward changes to a whole industry when the world remittance costs are 7 percent as of the fourth quarter of 2018.

Ripple is growing at an incredible pace and these are just two of the hundreds of partnerships that Ripple have garnered over the years. Who knows what 2019 will hold but we can only assume its destined for bigger things.

The Genesis Capital CEO On Why No One Is Shorting Bitcoin

Following on from an interview we reported on yesterday called How Genesis Capital ‘Won’ The 2018 Bear Market, the firm’s CEO spoke on strategy and why no one is shorting Bitcoin at the minute too.

For a quick recap on another part of the interview with CryptoSlate, click here.

Strategy
So whereas there are hedge funds shorting Bitcoin, which may have built a platform for Michael Moro's lending firm, the game is changing…

Market-neutral funds are now a thing which is borrowing to balance the exposure between long and short positions. But apparently, shorting the spot price of bitcoin isn’t part of this tactic anymore.

Moro explained:
“The guys that were shorting Bitcoin in 2018—no one’s shorting Bitcoin today. Bitcoin’s almost become the base pair, and it does what it does. People aren’t shorting the spot. However, what people will do, is short the alts.”

As CryptoSlate write, this is most likely down to the Interbank Foreign Exchange market because the US Dollar is used by the public as a fiat base currency. So any significant action on the short end will go on in the fiat ‘alts,’ the Euro, Sterling, and so on. It looks as if the leading cryptocurrency is going the same way.

The CEO has indicated that altcoins are being put in their “pecking order” by institutional traders like his clients, who will short them back to their original fair value. They won’t be selling the leading cryptocurrency to take their short positions though.

“Relative to how Bitcoin performs, they’ll short Litecoin, or XRP, or Ethereum. If Bitcoin went up 5 percent in a day, and say Litecoin goes up 10 percent, they’ll short Litecoin back down. They’re almost putting things back into the relative valuation that these investors have made up in their mind, as in ‘here’s how the pecking order goes.’”

Will Bakkt’s Launch Imminently Impact Bitcoin?

Here we are, the one-week countdown before the Bakkt platform launches and hopefully, something interesting will start happening to the market.

All eyes on are the launch of the platform, especially Bakkt’s physically settled Bitcoin futures product, as it is widely believed that it could provide a much-needed boost for the aggregated crypto markets.

This all being said, it’s important to highlight that some investors could be slightly disappointed in the immediate results of the platform’s launch as well others which have released over the past year or so which have been met with nothing as what was expected.

But Bakkt is different.

If you've been around in the crypto space for the past year or so, you will most likely have heard about the Bakkt platform. Nothing has quite been hyped up like Bakkt before in the industry.

A popular cryptocurrency analyst on Twitter, PlanB has spoken about the upcoming platform in a recent tweet and has explained that he belies it will create a price discovery model aside from the cash market's influence.

“7 business days until … Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) is offering physically settled Bitcoin futures through its Bakkt unit. It will act as exchange, clearinghouse and settlement authority. ICE BTC futures will create price discovery apart from any cash market influence. ”

As to what this will have on bitcoins price action, we don't know but it will surely be an interesting thing to watch.

The economist Alex Krüger, who focuses mainly on cryptocurrency, recently explained that VanEck’s Bitcoin Trust for institutional investors only has four bitcoins under management.

“Three days after launch, the VanEck bitcoin trust for institutional investors has reportedly managed to issue a whopping 1 (one) basket. It has 4 bitcoins or $41,400 in assets under management. Massive.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

SEC Chairman Says Their Close To Approving The Bitcoin ETF Proposals

Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Jay Clayton has said that the organisation is getting ever closer to finally approving a bitcoin ETF. However, Clayton went onto warn that further work needs to be done to avoid the manipulation of price and make sure the market is transparent.

Speaking to CNBC’s Bob Pisani during an interview, Clayton was asked how close we actually were to seeing an approved bitcoin ETF.

His response?
"Yes. But there's work left to be done."

A bit ominous yes, but it’s good to know that the SEC isn’t just brushing it off and inevitably going to reject the proposed ETF’s.

Watch the video here.

Manipulating price

Clayton has said that the SEC wants more info about custody as well as assurances against price manipulation.

"How do we know that we can custody and have a hold of these crypto assets? That's a key question. An even harder question — given that they trade on largely unregulated exchanges is — 'How can we be sure that those prices aren't subject to significant manipulation?"

Clayton continued, saying that progress has been made in these regards but he does clarify that "people needed to answer those hard questions for us to be comfortable that this was the appropriate type of product."

After the SEC once again delayed their final decision on the bitcoin ETF, one commissioner from the regular, Hester Peirce has said that the agency should already have approved the bitcoin ETF’s.

Peirce highlighted that the commission hasn’t been very open-minded when approaching the bitcoin ETF.

It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out and when the ETF proposals actually get approved but if Clayton’s words are anything to go by, we won’t be waiting too long. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!

3 Fiat Currencies That Were More Volatile Than Bitcoin In 2019

Economy and financial experts always like to bring up the volatility argument against the adoption of cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin.

Nearly every time a person previously involved in traditional financial markets gets asked about their opinion of Bitcoin, their immediate answer is that it’s not stable enough to be a viable investment.

In some sense, they are indeed saying the truth, Bitcoin is extremely volatile, which is why it’s so attractive to beginners and veteran traders. Most don’t have to wait for months or years for them to see significant returns from the investment, as the markets tend to move quite often and quite radically.

But in terms of 2008 and 2019, the Bitcoin volatility has been slightly on the low end, meaning that there were no serious spikes to speak of, besides that one point where the crypto reached around $14,000 but corrected shortly thereafter.

In this article, I’d like to showcase several fiat currency pairs that were either as volatile as Bitcoin, slightly less volatile, or even more volatile in 2019.

There are quite a lot of them, but let’s focus on the more “popular” currencies if we can.

The British Pound
The GBP has been quite volatile ever since their decision about Brexit was announced. And by volatility, I mean that the currency has been going downhill, only resurging a little bit once the government was having trouble making decisions whether or not the decision should actually go through.

Even today, the UK parliament is struggling to make a definitive decision on how the UK will exit the European Union, and whether they will exit or not. What we know is that the EU is tired of postponing this decision, but they get better and better leverage the longer the UK fails to come up with a plan.

This failure to come up with a plan has led to the GBP declining to a point where it’s nearly as valuable as the Euro, and we all know that GBP was once considered one of the most stable, reliable and strong currencies in the global economy.

Now though, dozens of banks are trying to relocate outside of the country, while taking quite a hefty sum in the capital with them. The volatility index shows around 3% volatility for a 30-day framework in 2019 alone.

With BTC, the estimate for the last 30 days was around 3.49% and the next 30 days is around 4.21%.

The Turkish Lira
The Turkish Lira has been having a tough time as well, ever since the “coup” that nearly took over the country several years ago. Many believe that the country’s current government is authoritative and does not follow Turkey’s almost century-old Ataturk model.

With that model, Turkey was focusing on developing the economy and increasing the overall democracy in the country. Since President Erdogan solidified his position after the coup attempt, the Turkish Lira has been going downhill relative to the USD.

In fact, there were thousands of Turkish citizens fleeing to cryptocurrencies in order to somehow protect themselves from inflation, or at least purchasing property and investing via USD while there was still time.

In 2019 though, the status quo stabilized just a little bit, but compared to other fiat currencies the Turkish Lira was still has a much higher volatility index of 6%. As already mentioned in the paragraph talking about the GBP, Bitcoin’s volatility index was around 3% in the last 30 days.

This puts the Turkish Lira way above Bitcoin in terms of volatility. Furthermore, considering that Turkey is a massive trading hub between the East and the West, the volatility was extra confusing considering the amount of foreign currency that is funneled inside of the country.

New Zealand Dollar
The New Zealand Dollar will most likely be classified as the most volatile currency in the world after its inflation report.

According to a Forex news outlet Forexbonuslab, The currency has been bankrupting and enriching all at the same time, as traders enter the market with highly leveraged trades in the hopes of catching a slope or a spike.

The volatility index in the last thirty days was recognized to be around 7-8% which is way above what Bitcoin has been going through lately.

Considering the fact that the government of New Zealand is now considering crypto salaries as the common, lawful practice is a great indication of how much more stable cryptocurrencies are becoming for this market.

Overall, in this part of Oceania, Bitcoin is definitely a winner in terms of stability.

Will These Figures Stop The Criticism?
The criticism will most definitely not seize because of these figures simply because multiple experts still see Bitcoin as a bubble, an asset without anything supporting it when in reality, it’s the biggest supported asset there is.

There are millions of people that agree on the value of Bitcoin every single day and help move the market. This is exactly the same with fiat currencies. The only difference is that the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies makes it more volatile, as the market is usually divided 50/50 between the bulls and the bears. Whenever one side loses the other wins without a doubt.

This is the nature of any financial market and will continue to be so in the future.