Have we reached the bottom yet?
Some more positive news coming for the crypto holders this week, starting off with Square the cash app has been approved for trading cryptocurrency in New York. Since New York has some strict trading rules and requires companies to get the bitlicense it is good to hear that the growing cash app Square has been credited the license and will start trading crypto in the near future. "They've had approval in most states but New York was by far the biggest on where you couldn't trade bitcoin" says Nomura Instinet analys Dan Dolev.
Read more about this in the CNBC article
More approvals and positive news follow for Stellar Lumens who have also been approved for trading by the New York Financial Regulators. ItBit, the second largest cryptocurrency exchange have announced that they are adding Stellar lumens to their platform. Any crypto that would get added to this exchange will automatically be approved by the New York financial regulators as ItBit is a regulated US financial services company based in New York City. ItBit currently offers trading of BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC and now Stellar Lumens, they also offer over-the-counter trading services.
To read more about this, check out the bitguru article
Two major Russian banks, Sberbank and Alfa-bank, have recently been testing cryptocurrency portfolios for private clients. They will offer its customers shares in a fund in which BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC, XRP and EOS will be traded on cryptocurrency trading platforms like Kraken and BitStamp.
This is some great news for adoption, regardless of how the markets look today it is good to hear of new ways for people to buy, manage and hold crypto and it will be a very important factor during the next bull run.
Read more about this here in the blockchain journal article
Coinbase to discontine GDAX and open Coinbase Pro. Also in a recent interview it seems like adding more cryptocurrencies to Coinbase is one of their priorities, especially ERC-20 tokens which they announced some time ago. They recently announced that they will be adding Ethereum Classic which jumped up a few percentages on the news and is looking like a good buy for long term hold.
I personally won't be buying ETC as I am not so sure of what they are doing or what their current development is, the same way that I haven't held Litecoin in many years and am unsure why Coinbase listed it to begin with.
Although I don't use Coinbase and don't like their high trading fees or the bad customer support I've heard of, I think its heading in the right direction to become another big platform for user adoption and making it easier for investors to purchase currencies or their index fund.
We've heard about hackers using computers to mine Monero before, but recently police in Rui'an city in Zhejiang, China have arrested 16 suspects who have been using over 100,000 computers of Internet Cafes to mine the cryptocurrency Sia coin with. Apparently they had developed a malware and marketed it to maintenance firms who allegedly helped to inject it on the computers. The issue first emerged in July 2017 when internet cafes started to notice their computers being awfully slow and using up to 70 % CPU even after a fresh restart. Slow computers combined with higher utility bills caused suspicion and since most of the computers in the internet cafes are under the same maintenance firm which has so far remained unnamed, the police arrested the firm's chief executive officer in August who then revealed more information on the hackers. The investigation is still ongoing and the malware is said to have spread across more than 30 chinese cities with over 100 computer maintenance firms being involved.
As the price of Sia coin jumped up by 400% in July to $0.01 a big reason could've been the increase in hashpower mining it, part being from the hacked computers.
Here I thought Sia coin focused on storage and that was one of the few ways to mine it combined with the asicminers that were released and sold out in early 2017.
