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Cryptocurrency Exchange Coinbase is Permitting Traders and Investors to Purchase Stocks

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According to the latest announcement, Coinbase, an American cryptocurrency exchange platform, is all set to go live within two weeks, allowing investors and traders to purchase stocks in the trading platform. 

An official announcement states that Coinbase’s stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol COIN on April 14, 2021.

Founded in 2012, Coinbase is a leading U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange that operates remote-first without an official physical headquarters. It has a strong presence in the cryptocurrency market. The company aims to build the crypto economy to establish a transparent financial system enabled by cryptocurrency assets.

Initially, last year in December 2020, a leading crypto exchange platform announced that it is going public. Brian Armstrong expressed concerns about Bitcoin trading at that time, and despite that, Armstrong appears confident that whatever bitcoin is incurring, it is likely the start of something big.

After deciding to go live, the crypto exchange filed Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As things are now going in the right direction, one can only conclude that the exchange passed the financial agency’s approval procedure, which is applied to all firms requesting public trade options.

As a part of this announcement, Armstrong commented that we are committed to bringing the potential of crypto to everyone. He further stated that we would continue to strive to provide customers with the highest levels of security, trust, and transparency during times of intense demand. 

The Period of Extreme Demand Has Truly Arrived, Says Armstrong

In December 2020, when Armstrong announced that Coinbase plans to go public, he noted that all have to believe that we are still in the initial stages and that there’s a lot more to come. Now, as Bitcoin is trading for more than $59,000 per unit, it seems like Armstrong’s statement has truly arrived. 

Many major companies, including Tesla, Mastercard, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Visa, and others, are showing interest in crypto space and allowing crypto payments for goods and services. Tesla announced that people can now buy a Tesla with bitcoin in the U.S. Similarly, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., according to the announcements, is also investing in a cryptocurrency startup named Fireblocks to embrace digital assets. Visa, a major credit card provider, also announced that it is collaborating with cryptocurrency exchange platform and card issuer Crypto.com to facilitate a crypto settlement system for fiat transactions. 

To get instant updates about Blockchain Technology and to learn more about online Blockchain Certifications, check out Blockchain Council. 

Cryptocurrency Exchange Coinbase is Permitting Traders and Investors to Purchase Stocks

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Bitcoin is outshining gold in the battle of the safe havens

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As the Bitcoin (BTC) price edges closer to $59,000, its value relative to gold is approaching new all-time highs, possibly hinting at the emergence of a new preferred store of value.

Measured against gold, Bitcoin’s price reached 34.94 ounces on Tuesday. The BTC-gold comparative peaked at 35.35 ounces on March 13 as Bitcoin surged past $61,000.

Bitcoin continues to outperform gold by a significant margin. | Chart via BuyBitcoinWorldwide

Bitcoin’s value relative to gold has more than doubled over the past three months and has grown nearly sevenfold since October 2020.

Gold futures, meanwhile, plunged below $1,700 a troy ounce Tuesday on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price bottomed at $1,676.50, marking a new three-week low. Since peaking above $2,050 a troy ounce in August 2020, bullion has corrected nearly 18%.

2020 was a big year for gold, as the yellow metal set new all-time highs in every major currency before toppling $2,000 per U.S. dollar for the first time. Bullion ended the year with a gain of around 22%. Still, that paled in comparison with Bitcoin’s 265% yearly return.

With the recent $1.9 stimulus package fueling inflation fears, assets like gold and Bitcoin should, in theory, perform well as investors hedge their bets against the declining dollar. However, the recent rise in bond yields may have taken some of the shine away from gold.

Others, even some prominent analysts like Bloomberg’s Mke McGlone, believe gold is losing ground to Bitcoin in the battle of the safe-havens. Earlier this month, McGlone tweeted:

“Gold will always have a place in jewelry and coin collections, but most indicators point to an accelerating pace of Bitcoin replacing the metal as a store of value in investor portfolios.”

Even JPMorgan, an organization long critical of Bitcoin, has claimed that the digital currency will consume a portion of gold’s market share. “The adoption of bitcoin by institutional investors has only begun, while for gold, its adoption by institutional investors is very advanced,” JPMorgan strategists led by Nikolas Panigirtzoglou said in a December 2020 report. “If this medium to longer-term thesis proves right, the price of gold would suffer from a structural headwind over the coming years.”

Bitcoin’s digital gold narrative continues to strengthen post-halving. The quadrennial deflationary event, which last occurred in May 2020, reduces the amount of new Bitcoin that enters circulation after each block is mined.

Bitcoin is outshining gold in the battle of the safe havens

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Growth hacker uses crypto to help the unhoused

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Before the 2017 bull run, growth hacker Giacomo Arcaro often slept in his car. Now an entrepreneur who speaks at crypto conferences and forums, he is looking for ways to promote adoption and help those financially struggling as a result of the ongoing pandemic.

Last weekend, Arcaro prepared to issue up to $50,000 in Ether (ETH) crypto loans to homeless and unhoused people in New York City. After speaking with some of the roughly 80,000 individuals in the city’s homeless population on a different occasion — and giving away some Bitcoin (BTC) in the process — he said many were, unsurprisingly, asking for money for necessities like blankets or food. However, some reportedly wanted funds to buy equipment to work remotely — e.g. microphones.

On Mar. 20, the growth hacker set up posters on Wall Street with crypto expert Eloisa Marchesoni and listened to business pitches from unhoused individuals, many of whom don’t have the ability to apply for a loan through traditional banks. Arcaro approved 12.5 ETH — roughly $22,000 at the time of publication — in loans, with an average of 0.5 ETH going to each person.

“Some interesting ideas that Eloisa and I vetted and funded were related to recycling, investing in the purchase of equipment to collect cans and bottles,” said Arcaro. “One woman was going to use the ETH to then buy a professional trash picker and stroller cart to carry the cans and bottles to the nearest store where she will drop them off each time to get some money in return.”

Photo courtesy of Giacomo Arcaro

In approving the crypto loans, the growth hacker sent the ETH directly to Coinbase wallets on the recipients’ smartphones with the stipulation that should they pay him back in the future, he would double the loan and continue the relationship. If they immediately cash out, he would not assist them again.

“They did not easily accept the idea of having to download Coinbase Wallet on their phones and having to handle intangible money. It was harder than I thought to speak to them about Ether.”

Though Arcaro acknowledged this is not the typical way many try to help the homeless in the United States — often by donating to non-profit organizations, giving cash directly to them on the street or through an online fundraiser — his approach is reportedly based on the work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. The Bangladeshi social entrepreneur pioneered much of the work around microcredits in the 70s and 80s, giving small loans to many unbanked people in poor communities.

“If these guys are smart, they can do all sorts of microinvestments,” said Arcaro. “If they keep this money in their wallets and stake it, they may earn $2 or $3 per day — which is a lot for a homeless person.”

Though it is difficult to get a true count, some estimate that there are more than 150 million individuals without homes or proper shelter around the world. In early 2020, there were more than 580,000 people homeless in the United States, with many in New York City and Los Angeles. However, with the economic impact of the pandemic, that number has likely increased significantly.

“I can guess there’s a lot of really smart people that have some issues with COVID and they are in the streets,” said Arcaro. “They cannot access [credit], they cannot open any bank account, they cannot ask for mortgages.”

Arcaro’s methods require that any unhoused or homeless person requesting a crypto loan have a smartphone capable of supporting Coinbase Wallet. Though he said “all the homeless” he encountered had access to the internet, that may not always be the case outside of a major hub like New York City. A 2018 study showed that the majority of homeless people in the U.S. do have access to mobile phones, while a separate report from the City Bar Justice Center cited smartphones and internet access as a major factor in shortening periods of homelessness.

“If you’re not comfortable with crypto, it’s not for you, but [this is for] a ‘new kind’ of homeless. The ‘startup’ homeless, or the people who want to step out of poverty […] It’s for people who want to do something with their life but they have bad luck.”

Following the rollout on Wall Street, Arcaro said he would circle back in about a month to check in on the loan recipients to address any technical or logistical issues. He said he may eventually try the experiment in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as internationally in Germany, Dubai, and Thailand.

Growth hacker uses crypto to help the unhoused

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Payment Network Visa Now Uses USDC as Settlement Currency

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US credit card-issuing company Visa announced on Monday its intention of facilitating crypto payments through its network.

Visa Completes First Crypto Pilot Test

Visa strategic partner Crypto.com did a pilot transaction with the crypto firm settling a portion of its debts in US Dollar Coin (USDC), a “stablecoin” pegged to the US Dollar 1 to 1. 

The transaction was completed over the Ethereum network- a decentralized blockchain offering that has nurtured decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

Visa is fast-tracking its plans to enable more of its strategic partners to enjoy this feature later on in the year.

The move, which is described as an industry-first merge of digital and fiat-focused institutions, is riding on the back of an upsurge in cryptocurrencies worldwide. 

Wider adoption has seen legacy banks like the Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, investment company BlackRock Inc. and the fellow US credit card company MasterCard embracing digital currencies in the past month.

This rise in institutional demand for crypto-assets has been fostered mainly by the foremost cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which has made significant rallies in the past year. In a show of faith and growing acceptance, Tesla placed $1.5 billion worth of investments into Bitcoin in early February.

In a subsequent announcement, Tesla boss Elon Musk said BTC will now be accepted in exchange for Tesla’s all-electric autonomous sedans. This move has seen BTC make new ATHs climaxing at $61,000 last week.

Visa’s latest move sees it address a significant problem plaguing crypto’s adoption. Usually, if a crypto owner pays for purchases from his crypto wallet, the digital asset needs to be converted to fiat at the end of the day.

This would lead to additional costs at the point of conversion. With this latest offering, Visa would enable its partners to settle their financial obligations using USDC, making it far easier for funds to be moved between entities.

The US payments giant has been making digital headway into the crypto-economy for some months now. In a new partnership with the first federally chartered digital bank Anchorage, Visa received its USDC funds in the company’s Ethereum address with the crypto company serving as the custodian.

Visa Eyes CBDCs Use On Its Platform

This pilot test is significant for the US payments firm as it leads to the adoption of digital assets for daily transactions. The company is also looking to benefit from the frenzy surrounding central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The digital assets sanctioned by the host country’s apex bank draw much interest from financial bodies globally.

In a recently published report, the Bank of International Settlements noted that over 80% of global central banks actively explored a digital version of their national currency. With this growing interest, Visa published a whitepaper in which it proposed a CBDC facility where transactions can be executed without the need for an internet connection.

According to the San Francisco firm, the growing adoption of cryptocurrencies is forcing them to ask many questions, and CBDCs could be a way they can provide the needed answers.

Payment Network Visa Now Uses USDC as Settlement Currency

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Blockchain Technology in Garbage Collection

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Blockchain Technology in Garbage Collection

Wondering if Blockchain can help in improving waste management? You have landed on the right page. This article talks about how Blockchain can tackle waste management and enlists some initiatives taken worldwide to deal with garbage collection.

Table of Contents 

  • A Glimpse of Blockchain Technology 
  • How Crypto and Blockchain Improve Waste Collection
  • Blockchain Has Already Entered Garbage Collection: Here is How
  • Concluding Lines

A Glimpse of Blockchain Technology 

In most simple words, Blockchain is a decentralized peer-to-peer ledger that maintains a complete copy of transactional records in a transparent and immutable manner. Instead of relying on a third-party intermediary or any centralized authority, it ensures complete decentralization. 

There are various exciting features of this technology, but among them, immutability is unquestionably one of its key characteristics.

Although many people still relate Blockchain with cryptocurrency, today, the technology has its footprints in almost all industries, including supply chain, healthcare, logistics, finance, and with the continuous advancements in technology, garbage collection is no more an exception.  

Implementing Blockchain in waste management can enable governments to track and monitor waste right from its generation(source) to its disposal(destination), bringing a greener environment. 

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How Crypto and Blockchain Improve Waste Collection

Every day, the planet drowns under an ever-increasing amount of garbage, wreaking havoc on human health, the economy, and the atmosphere. Systematic and effective waste disposal has emerged as a major concern in several countries, including developing nations. The reason for this vast waste management is due to the increased pace of urbanization and accelerated rate of population.

Since the waste management process involves various steps such as segregation, transportation, recycling, disposal, tracking, and monitoring, such complicated processes are nearly hard even for government institutions. But such a process can be streamlined by having a single platform to track all waste management activities right from their origin to their disposal. 

Let’s delve deeper and explore how Blockchain can help in tackling waste management.

Prevents Fraud and Manipulation 

The present disposal of waste management is unfair, lacks transparency and proper documentation. What happens is when contractors dispose of the waste material, they submit a waste plan report to the municipality office for receiving the payment, which is based on the quantity of waste they are collecting and presenting. There is no proper channel that can check the submitted, and hence these reports are easily manipulated, leading to payment frauds at a large scale. 

Blockchain can eradicate this fraud by offering a single decentralized P2P platform where the whole process can be traced and cross-checked. 

Streamlining Documents

In traditional documentations, there are always the possibilities of loss of information. But having information on distributed ledger eradicates such problems as information is stored in an immutable and transparent manner, like forever. Moreover, technology permits a massive ledger of data to be accessed securely by various stakeholders.

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Blockchain Has Already Entered Garbage Collection: Here is How

Seeing the potential benefits of Blockchain, various players have entered this space to tackle waste management. Ivan Zubilewicz, an entrepreneur from Campo Viera in northeastern Argentina, has developed a cryptocurrency that he hopes would improve and enhance local waste management.

Although the regulatory framework for cryptocurrency hasn’t developed in Argentina yet, Viera will soon be utilizing JellyCoin (in a limited capacity) in order to deal efficiently with waste collection. 

Another similar community-driven approach is carried out by a nonprofit group called CITAG which stands for Citizen Involved & Technology-Assisted Governance) in Bengaluru city, India. According to Shobha Ananda Reddy, who is CITAG’s secretary and an environmental scientist, her municipal government, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, has a Blockchain-based app to manage waste management. For now, CITAG’s Blockchain is in a development phase, but Reddy believes that if successfully implemented, data tampering would become a non-factor, and the record of citizen complaint filings and collector-marked pickups would be more precise. In addition, it will also include feedback to higher-ups on who is doing well and who is not.

RecycleGO, based in New York City, is another Blockchain-driven waste management project that aims to integrate software and technology into recycling. CEO Stan Chen believes that the world needs extensive scalable solutions for tracking in terms of attaching data to human activity to provide social impact behavior to be monitored, measured, and credited. 

Concluding Lines 

This has brought us to the end of our discussion. There is no doubt regarding whether Blockchain can revamp the entire waste management industry or not. By maintaining accountability in waste management by placing producers, customers, and waste management workers into a network together, Technology can give a new definition to the environment.

Not only Blockchain, but, Blockchain coupled with IoT sensors can help in tracking how much waste has been collected, how much can be recycled, how much is hazardous and non-biodegradable, and everything, bringing a cleaner and greener environment for one and all. 

To get instant updates about Blockchain Technology and to learn more about online Blockchain Certifications, check out Blockchain Council.

Blockchain Technology in Garbage Collection

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Control-Finance Scam Mastermind Hit With $570M Fine By CFTC

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Benjamin Reynolds stands as the mastermind behind one of the biggest Bitcoin Ponzi schemes out there. While the man hasn’t been located yet, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has enacted a default judgment against him. He will be mandated to pay a fine of $572 million in restitution and penalty after a federal New York judge made the default judgment against him.

Around 22,800 Bitcoin Stolen

The CFTC had accused Reynolds of operating a pyramid scheme that went by the name of Control-Finance. The scheme itself had fraudulently promoted a cryptocurrency investment company based within the UK, and the complaint itself was filed all the way back in 2019.

The complaint itself saw the agency go into detail about how this fictional CEO had, through fraudulent means, obtained 22,800 Bitcoin, which is worth an excess of $1.24 billion. He stole this Bitcoin from more than 1,000 investors, and promptly misappropriated it.

Usual Tactics Involved

Control-Finance made use of the typical promises of daily returned in order to lure in their unsuspecting investors. Promises were made of a 45% monthly returns, 1.5% a day. As is the norm in these types of scams, Control-Finance fabricated weekly trade reports to feed the investors further false information.

bitcoin etf

New participants within the program were given the typical promises of annual returns, but the entire operation was, in fact, just a big Ponzi scheme.

The CFTC explained that the big promise made by Reynolds was that he would return all Bitcoin deposits to the various Control-Finance customers by October of 2017’s end. As we all know now, he didn’t do that, retaining the deposits for his own personal use instead. As a result of this scheme, almost all of the customers managed to lose their entire Bitcoin deposits, with only a few managing to get an inkling of their initial investment

Stealing The Money Of Others

As one would imagine, the watchdog claimed that Control-Finance did no trading for its customers’ behalf, and didn’t earn any profits, to begin with. Instead, the scheme managed to launder the stolen funds by way of thousands of circuitous blockchain transactions. Reynolds even managed to transfer segments of these stolen assets to various bank accounts spread across tax havens, the Seychelles islands being a prime example.

The court paper went as far as accusing Reynolds of forging documents from the UK Companies House in order to convince the victims of this scam that the entire operation was legitimate.

As it stands now, the CFTC has failed to locate Reynolds, but the agency has managed to make a ruling through the New York court to settle his accusations in his absence.

Control-Finance Scam Mastermind Hit With $570M Fine By CFTC

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