US to study feasibility of digital currency
Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard has announced that the US central bank is studying the feasibility of a digital currency. The Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund have called for central banks to at least study the possibility of digital currencies as private sector firms propose and experiment with a competing units of exchange. Such initiatives include Facebook Inc.’s proposed global digital currency Libra.
The Fed governor listed several topics that needed further study, including whether a CBDC reduce costs and operational vulnerabilities; what kinds of banks or financial firms would offer digital currency accounts and who would oversee them; and what kinds of financial stability risks would be raised by digital currencies.
Now, put up crypto holdings as collateral with Binance Futures
Users can now put up their crypto holdings as collateral to fund futures trading with Malta-based Binance, one of the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume. The new feature allows users to trade futures contracts using assets stored in their Binance exchange wallet as collateral, without the need to use their coins to directly fund orders.
The Binance Futures platform gives users the opportunity to trade 13 pairs with high leverage, and also to hedge existing positions to manage their risk. Aaron Gong, director of Binance Futures, said the feature allows more flexibility and choices of deposits to open futures positions.
Traders using the service can currently borrow tether (USDT) at zero percent interest against holdings of Binance USD (BUSD)—the exchange’s own stablecoin issued in partnership with New York-regulated firm Paxos—eliminating the need to transfer BUSD to a futures wallet.
Binance is also adjusting its fee structure to encourage market makers to add liquidity to its futures platform, which means market makers will receive a negative fee for placing trades on selected pairs.
The Bitcoin Halvening is just 100 days away
Every 210,000 Bitcoin blocks or approximately every 4 years, the number of new Bitcoins created every day gets cut in half. Called the Halvening—in Bitcoin jargon—the event is going to take place in less than 100 days. This event is what allows Bitcoin to maintain its supply cap at 21 million while also supplying the necessary rewards for miners for securing the network.
Currently, 1,800 Bitcoins are mined every day. This will be cut to 900 daily after this next halving event.
Though people argue that designing this event into the code is what has pushed Bitcoin prices to new highs, this event was built into the Bitcoin protocol by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Creation of an attention economy for ethnic press
Since the beginning of last year, we’ve been dabbling with the idea of introducing tokens as rewards for our readers and enabling the creation of an internal attention-economy. On 25 February, we launched Sun Tokens on the Waves Blockchain with the aim to incentivise our ecosystem of readers, contributors and advertisers. Although such tokens are only being trialled and tested by publishers, we wanted to take a step in familiarising our readers with the idea from an early stage of this tech.
Most of us spend hours each day contributing to social media. We pour our creative energy into networks that give us no direct economic value in return. Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagrams, and Snaps all take time to create and provide unique value to people in the community. Yet nearly all the value we generate is directed to corporations who maintain these services.
For a growing community like ours, it’s important to sustain ethnic press and a token into the ecosystem will revitalise this niche. A viable platform for ethnic press can mediate these transactions and spread the value across its users. This will enable better content being published on our platforms and ensure an incentive for everyone taking part in the process, including contributors and readers.
For the next several months, we intend to airdrop and give away tokens to readers who set up wallets on their mobile devices. We will simultaneously talk with our clients and offer them incentives to accept these tokens. Since these tokens are always issued with a value, the end user can either save them or convert them on exchanges for fiat currencies. Having said that, we highly recommend the community to start using it as a medium of exchange for non-commercial transactions.
We believe there are many transactions that happen outside a normal transaction. Or in other words, not all transactions need to be settled in national currencies. If you want to tip your child for their help in folding laundry, you can use Sun Tokens to tip them. The process is simple—you just have to scan their QR code and send Sun Tokens into their wallet. They can then accumulate these tokens and redeem them from our partners. More significantly, you can encourage your child to contribute content to The Indian Sun for tokens. We are hoping that podcasters, writers, film makers will see new meaning in working with us once the use of tokens become more widespread in the community. It’s not always commercially viable for micro-publishers to pay contributors and this will definitely help us bring in some level of incentives.
Downloading wallets, earning rewards, converting them into cash or using them at partner outlets can all sound tough in the beginning. I’ve been experimenting with cryptocurrencies for a year now and I realise that it’s not the smoothest process and it can all be too geekish in the beginning. Millions of users that have already adapted the new tech have had similar experiences when they started off. But once you get a hang of it, things can be simpler than posting on Facebook or Tweeting from your phone.
Over time, with better tech solutions being introduced, this will become far easier. We strongly recommend our readers to start getting engaged with it and help us build a strong community asset that can be used by businesses and members of the community. If there are developers in the community who have spare time, it would be great to hear from them on how to simplify the tech for readers.
Why did we choose Waves Platform?
We chose Waves Platform because of its enhanced security, smooth interface. There’s nothing stopping us from trying out easier and cheaper platforms later. For the time being, it’s Waves because we believe it’s the easiest for the end user who is not fully clued in with this tech. Readers can simply go to the App Store or Google Play and download the app. Remember to save your key words. Waves Platform has a built-in exchange as well and we think it will be easier for readers to convert their tokens into another currency too.
In brief, Sun Tokens are purely created to build an attention-economy and to sustain ethnic press in Australia. These tokens should not be used for speculation. It’s to motivate, encourage and to make publishing fun. Store your key phrases securely after your download the wallet and enjoy using them.
Bitcoin 101 from Zebpay CEO
Heard about Bitcoin? Curious about what it is and why the world is going crazy about it? Is it a bubble? or is it the next big thing?
Zebpay which introduced 3 million Indians to crypto investing is now in Australia. Ajeet Khurana CEO of Zebpay is going to be in Melbourne on Tuesday, 6 August, to answer questions on bitcoin investing.
Zebpay is one of the few successful Indian product companies to go International. Zebpay’s Australia journey started in May with a local presence at the Fintech Hub Stone and Chalk in Melbourne.
With a deep focus on ease of use, prompt support and 360-degree platform coverage with iOS, Android and Web, Zebpay is one of the best platforms to start investing in crypto.
Khurana is a serial entrepreneur and investor from India. His interest in Bitcoin follows the natural trajectory for any savvy investor exploring new asset classes. Ajeet has a knack of finding investment opportunities where others find none.
“I was head of blockchain and cryptocurrency committee of IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India), the highest industry body for companies in this space,” says Khurana, who was also the CEO of IIT Bombay’s Business Incubator SINE and did his MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Will TRON’s CoinPlay be the appstore of the blockchain industry?
The latest version of CoinPlay released by Tron aims to become the number one platform to download applications from the blockchain industry. Tron Foundation sees it as the ‘AppStore of the blockchain industry’.
In March 2019 TRON acquired the blockchain application marketplace CoinPlay, which the company says has seen significant growth in its number of users and listed applications. Coinplay is available worldwide and was created for the purpose of providing up-to-date blockchain applications in one place and ensuring the security and trust of users regarding the source of the downloads. According to the Tron Foundation, CoinPlay is an important addition to boost the development of the crypto industry and the construction of a decentralised Internet.
In the future, CoinPlay is supposed be able to support real-time quotes in multiple currencies and different platforms. CoinPlay is also working on developing high quality content on the crypto industry, so that it becomes a link between the user and other crypto projects of interest.
Tron CEO Justin Sun tweeted: The world’s first blockchain application store with a large number of applications for trading, wallets, market information, media and news, industries, blockchain games as well as DApps.
Send and receive bitcoins on WhatsApp
Now you can send and receive Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) via messaging platform WhatsApp thanks to the Lite.Im bot. The move aims to simplify the cryptocurrency transaction process, bringing virtual currencies closer to people.
In a tweet published by Zulu Republic on Sunday, 19 May, the digital platform announced that its cryptocurrency messaging platform Lite.Im had introduced bitcoin via WhatsApp.
More than 1.5 billion people in over 180 countries use WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends and family, anytime and anywhere.
All users have to do is add the Lite.Im WhatsApp bot and follow the on-screen prompts. There are numerous options for users apart from sending and receiving BTC and LTC. Presently, the two default languages are English and Spanish.
The service also allows people to earn cryptocurrency via a referral program. The service also supports sending and receiving Ether (ETH) and ZTX—the native token on the Zulu Republic platform.
Lite.Im already has similar services for Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and SMS.
According to the company, “social messaging” is an important component of wider cryptocurrency adoption.
Meanwhile, Facebook has its own cryptocurrency plans, although there is no official word from the company yet.
Cardano OBFT activation date set for 20 Feb, but it’s tentative says Charles Hoskinson
The new update from Jormungandr has been postponed to the second week of February 2020.
Charles Hoskinson, creator of Cardano, has stated that February will be a crucial month in the development of Cardano, and set the tentative date for activation of Cardano’s Ouroboros Byzantine Fault Tolerance (OBFT) hard fork as 20 February. Hoskinson has reiterated though that it is still a tentative date. Hoskinson said the update looks good in every way, but they are willing to postpone the date if they find a problem or if one of Cardano’s partners requests an extension.
In addition, after the fork, Cardano will launch the Byron reboot with Haskell wallet backend, which Hoskinson termed the most important event since the introduction of Cardano in 2017.
The Shelley mainnet will be released in March or April, but Hoskinson reemphasised that this date depends on the progress of the mentioned updates.
In February, Cardano released two new versions of the Jormungandr node software 0.8.8. and 0.8.9. The first version mainly fixed bootstrapping problems and the second one fixed booting problems on the Cardano network. Hoskinson said that these updates have solved most of the problems reported by users, but that a new update will be needed to solve all issues.
