Welcome to the daily crypto news :
‘Request for Exhumation’: QuadrigaCX Creditors Ask for Proof That Cotten Is Dead;
Stellar Tried to Give Away 2B XLM Tokens on Keybase. Then the Spammers Came;
Why the ECB Is Getting in on the Stablecoin Game;
Can ‘Dogfooding’ Altcoins Find Real Users in 2020?;
US Fed to Print $425B for New Year’s — 3 Times Bitcoin’s Market Cap;
‘Request for Exhumation’: QuadrigaCX Creditors Ask for Proof That Cotten Is Dead
A law firm representing users of the now-defunct crypto exchange QuadrigaCX wants investigators to exhume the body of its former CEO.
A letter sent by law firm Miller Thomson to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) asks for the authorities to dig up and examine the body of Gerald Cotten, who reportedly died of complications due to Crohn’s disease at the end of December 2018. Cotten was 30 at the time.
“The purpose of this letter is to request, on behalf of the Affected Users, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the ‘RCMP’), conduct an exhumation and post-mortem autopsy on the body of Gerald Cotten to confirm both its identity and the cause of death given the questionable circumstances surrounding Mr. Cotten’s death and the significant losses of Affected Users,” the letter reads.
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Stellar Tried to Give Away 2B XLM Tokens on Keybase. Then the Spammers Came
Spammers started showing up on Keybase as soon as Stellar announced a giant airdrop on the encryption app. They went away as soon as word went out that the free money era was over.
Or so Max Krohn, CEO of Keybase, told CoinDesk in an interview on Wednesday.
There's been discussion lately of a serious uptick in spam on the chat side of Keybase. The explanation for that apparently lies almost entirely in Keybase's partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation to airdrop 2 billion XLM to users of the app over a 20-month period.
"It was really an interesting experiment," Krohn said. “In the end, it definitely achieved the goal of getting more numbers onto Keybase and more people onto Stellar."
The trouble is, at a certain point the costs started to outweigh the benefits, as Keybase admitted when it announced the program was coming to an abrupt end. The third and final XLM airdrop began today, Dec. 13.
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Why the ECB Is Getting in on the Stablecoin Game
Welcome to The Breakdown with Nathaniel Whittemore. Starting off this episode we discuss European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde’s comments on stablecoins that inflamed Crypto Twitter yesterday. She said projects in the space indicated clear demand even as she gave bitcoin a bit of a backhanded compliment.
Meanwhile, two hugely hyped projects – Orchid and Filecoin – have both resurfaced. What might this mean for the token narrative going into 2020? We'll explore what the growth of these tokens means for the market in general.
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Can ‘Dogfooding’ Altcoins Find Real Users in 2020?
This post is part of CoinDesk's 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Leigh Cuen is a reporter with CoinDesk. These are her personal views.
If 2017 was the token boom and late-2018 was a crypto winter, then 2019 was the year of “dogfooding,” or "using your own product."
Throughout 2019, leaders from more than a dozen leading crypto projects told me they were distributing tokens to stimulate usage, development, and growth. Which raises the question: If companies are giving tokens away, do they have a legitimate business with organic demand? So far, it appears there’s more supply than take-up for many altcoins.
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US Fed to Print $425B for New Year’s — 3 Times Bitcoin’s Market Cap
The United States central bank will inject at least $425 billion of nonexistent money into the economy by the middle of next month.
In a statement released Dec. 11, the Federal Reserve confirmed it would ramp up so-called repurchase, or “repo,” operations on key dates over the new year period.
Fed to “print” 3x Bitcoin market cap in weeks
The time of year required extra assurances for banks, the Fed claims, with repo operations designed to support their day-to-day operations.
“The Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has released the schedule of repurchase agreement (repo) operations for the monthly period from December 13, 2019 through January 14, 2020,” the statement reads.
The Fed then confirms:
“In accordance with the most recent FOMC directive, the Desk will conduct repo operations to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample and to mitigate the risk of money market pressures around year end that could adversely affect policy implementation.”
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