19 New Crypto Licenses In The Philippines

It has been reported that the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA), a Philippine-government owned and controlled corporation, has issued nineteen new companies provisional licenses to operate digital asset exchanges in the Philippines.

It has been revealed that there are currently 17 crypto and blockchain-related firms that have been issued provisional principal licenses while 2 firms have regular licenses.

Provisional principal licenses allow companies to conduct offshore financial technology solutions, business activities and offshore virtual currency exchange activities.

Provisional regular licenses allow firms to conduct offshore virtual currency exchange activities only.

According to Catherin Joy Alameda, the corporate board secretary at CEZA, states that Provisional principal license is priced at around $360,000 and a regular license is priced at $85,000 with a validity period of 6-months.

Firms will be able to acquire its permanent license when it is able to fully comply with the requirements of CEZA.

CEZA expects to generate about 20,000 new jobs in fintech sector when it awards 25 principal licenses to qualified fintech companies.

New Paper for Bitcoin Privacy Released

It has been reported that a new privacy paper has been released last Wednesday.

The paper bears an author with a familiar name, Tom Elvis Jedusor or better known in the Harry Potter world as Lord Voldermort.

The author of the said papers bears the same name of the author of “MimbleWimble,” a protocol improving two of blockchain’s biggest problems, privacy and scalability.

The new paper called “Fragmented Transaction Protocol” is seeking a second privacy boost through the obfuscation of transaction amounts until the moment the coin is spent.

The community is hoping that the author will be the same author that has sparked a flurry of innovation and activity in the bitcoin project.

However, Mathematician and developer Andrew Poelstra, one of the first to go public with a positive assessment of MimbleWimble, doubts the author of the new privacy paper is the same authror.

He states that the new proposal breaks some of the privacy aspects of MimbleWimble and writing style is much different.

Whether his assessment is correct or not it seems that the author wanted to draw more attention to proposal.

CME Trading Up 41% In Q3

The CME Group Inc. has recently announced on twitter that Bitcoin futures trading is experiencing a rising volume.

The firm revealed that the daily average for Bitcoin futures in the Q3 has risen 40% and open interest was up 19% over Q2.

This is seen as a massive improvement just over two months ago which has seen less than 2,500 BTC transactions down from over 8,000 at the months’ midpoint representing a fall of nearly 70%.

Trading activity is said to be heating up again with 5,000 contracts in the third quarter, a significant increase from the 3,577 contracts traded in Q2 and up 170% from the first quarter’s 1,854 contracts.

Q3 open interest, which accounts for the total number of unsettled contracts held by current market traders, is also up with nearly 2,900 separate contracts from Q1 and Q2 which had 1,500 and 2,400 individual contracts respectively.

Speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus in Singapore, Tim McCourt, CME’s managing director and global head of equity products and alternative investments reveals that 40% of bitcoin futures trading on CME comes from outside the United States in which 21% of it from Asia.

Goldman Sachs and Galaxy Digital Ventures Invest In BitGo

Financial giants from Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and Galaxy Digital Ventures LLC have increased their stake in the cryptcurrency industry by investing in BitGo Holdings Inc, a cryptocurrency custodian service provider.

The two financial titans have contributed $15 million to Series B of BitGo’s funding round, bringing the amount raised in that round to $57.5 million.

The said fund will go toward the development of a $1 trillion crypto wallet.

Mike Belshe CEO of BitGo states that there is no other company better positioned than BitGo to serve institutional investors who want to trade cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

They are committed on bringing in custodial solution that will enable them to provide custodial services to $1 trillion worth of digital assets or even more.

The involvement of Goldman Sachs comes as a surprise to many as it has been rumored that the Wall Street bank was planning to offer its own cryptocurrency custody services and it would have been unlikely that the company would be willing to provide funding to a competitor if it was.

Nevertheless the investment of these two Wall Street Firms is a positive sign that institutional investors are interested in this nascent industry.

Growing Demand For Crypto And Blockchain Industries

Glassdoor, a recruiting site, has recently released a study indicating a growing demand for crypto and blockchain-related job opportunities in the U.S. despite the slump in cryptocurrency prices.

The company made this analysis by studying a large number of online U.S. job posting on their site containing certain keywords that is related to the subject matter such as Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency.

The study revealed that the job openings are concentrated in 15 cities constituting 79% pf blockchain-related job ads in the U.S.

These include New York City and San Francisco have 24% and 21% of total job opening respectively.

They are followed by San Jose, Chicago and Seattle which accounts for the 6%, 5% and 4% job opening respectively.

The most in-demand blockchain roles are primarily technical and engineering.

It also shows that in terms of predominating employers in the field, Glass door showed that blockchain software technology firm Consensys and IBM is leading the pack with over 200 job opening.

Glassdoor also noted the absence of job openings from Facebook, Google and Apple.

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