One Stop Cryptocurrency NewsCast For Today ?

📮 08-12-2019

📉 MarketCap:                  $203 B

📊 24h Mcap %:                 -1.08%

⚠️ Bitcoin Dom:                 66.4%

📌 Active Coins:                2,407

📍 24h Vol %:                 -12.43%

💲 24h Vol:                     $41 B

1.  Ethereum has passed block #9068000, putting it within 1000 blocks of the scheduled Istanbul hard fork, which should take place at around 23:30 UTC. Specifically, Istanbul will expand interoperability with privacy token Zcash. The upgrade will also make zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge) cheaper. zk-SNARKs allow users to demonstrate knowledge without exposing that knowledge — a technology critical to Ethereum’s recent privacy enhancements.

2.  The Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE) has teamed up with Algorand to develop a new ecosystem for copyright management. Algorand uses a pure Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol that guarantees decentralization, scalability and security, making it particularly suitable for handling the swarm of metadata and transactions necessary in copyright management. Both Algorand and SIAE are confident that in the near future, blockchain technology will become the cornerstone of the industry.

3.  The Ukranian government has approved the final version of a money laundering law that will handle virtual assets and virtual asset service providers (VASPs) per FATF guidelines. One of the guidelines focuses on individual crypto transactions worth less than 30,000 hriven ($1,300), from which the government will only collect the public key of the sender for the purpose of financial monitoring. However, once the transaction exceeds that amount, the government will apply verification to both sender and receiver.

4.  According to Master of On-Chain Analysis, Willy Woo, bitcoin's on-chain momentum is crossing bullish. Woo made the claim in a tweet posted earlier today. He didn't tell what the indicator is, notating that it is proprietary to Adaptive Capital. All Woo did say was that it tracks investor momentum, presumably by considering a combination of bitcoin on-chain transaction volume. Woo further asserted that the bitcoin bottom is most likely in, saying that, “anything lower will be just a wick in the macro view.”

5.  Ethereum has successfully completed the Istanbul hard fork. Hitting at block number 9,069,000. Istanbul includes six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), specific code changes to the ethereum protocol, including EIPs 152, 1108, 1344, 1844, 2028 and 2200. The main issues addressed by the six EIPs are: Denial-of-service (DDoS) attack resilience (EIP 1344), Interoperability with equihash-based proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as zcash (EIP 152). Gas costs (EIPs 1108, 2028, 2200).

6.  Bitcoin has been used as an “escape valve” in countries with oppressive regimes like Venezuela and Zimbabwe, which indicates that it does have a potential applications far beyond finance. Alex Gladstein, CSO of The Human Rights Foundation believes that Bitcoin has an important role to play in a world that is currently undergoing “massive social transformation”. He believes that the digital currency which is decentralized is still better than a society where the money is centralized, held by arbitrary power and is traceable by government entities.

7.  Microsoft’s blockchain-enabled cloud service Microsoft Azure announced new tokenization and blockchain data management services. The Azure Blockchain Tokens service aims to simplify the definition, creation and management of compliant tokens built to industry standards.. The other service announced, blockchain data manager, is a new Azure Blockchain Service feature designed to allow its users to capture blockchain ledger data, transform and decrypt it if it is encrypted and deliver it to multiple sources.

8.  The Korean government is preparing legal tools to tax capital gains from the sale of crypto assets. Until recently, Korea was one of the most active markets for crypto speculation. But there was no direct framework to tax capital gains from the sale of digital assets. Specialized legislation to target digital asset deals is expected to arrive from the tax season for 2020. The Ministry of Economy and Finance is working on building the measure that will become a tax bill from next year an official from the Economic Ministry told.