“Weekly what changed in crypto” by Alte.Capital — 30–7th May 2018

Most important stuff we’ve seen previous week in crypto world with personal thoughts

Major developments

The last week major driver appears to be the news about what will happen in the upcoming week. There are rumors about CFTC and SEC officials meeting on 7th May to review the legal status of Ethereum, Ripple and other cryptos. Developers and some of the lawyers representing the industry are frustrated that the SEC continues to apply an arcane legal test to determine whether crypto assets fall into the basket of assets that SEC regulates.

We see regulators efforts also in other countries and SEC case can show what are US government intentions regarding control of crypto space.

Despite if this internal meeting will be actually held, there won’t be any final decision made.

On the other hand, more projects announced that in upcoming weeks they plan to finish their milestones. Looks like this was a price driver for some projects like Stratis, Loom Network, Ziliqua, IOTA and 0x.

Lastly, we see that from week to week more and more people starting to use decentralized exchanges. Big user growth and increased volumes caused issues for idex.markets which stopped working a few days ago due to performance problems. It shows that there is a need for better and more scalable decentralized applications.

Price action

It was a mixed week for major coins. Some gained and some lost value within 10% range. Projects like Cardano and EOS apparently dropped in value due to huge gains in previous weeks.

Market cap hit 470 billion dollars on 6th May and it looks like this can be our middle term resistance. We think we will see market floating in the area between 350–470 billion dollars for a few upcoming weeks.

Weekly crypto market capitalization — 30–7 May 2018 (by coinmarketcap.com)

Major crypto events in week 30–7 May 2018

Reddit plans to restore Bitcoin payments and add Ethereum and LitecoinReddit plans to restore cryptocurrencies as a payment option for its golden members — this time Bitcoin will not be the only option. In an interview with Cheddar on Thursday, chief technology specialist, Chris Slowe, said the crypto payment option would return after the platform was rebranded. What’s more, the CTO stated that payments to Reddit will be possible at Ethereum and Litecoin. End of Telegram pre-ICOOne of the largest pre-ICO shares carried out by Telegram has been detained. Until now, about 200 investors have invested in the pre-sale, and funds have been accumulated amounting to approximately USD 1.7 billion.The reason why the Telegram would do this is unclear, although it is supposed that it may be more and more new regulations. Some, however, argue that the reason is simply to collect adequate funds for the development of the platform on the blockchain.

Ripple Labs suedAn investor has filed a lawsuit against financial Ripple Labs alleging that the company violated state and federal laws by offering unregistered securities to retail investors. The complaint asserts that Ripple, pre-mined XRP coins and sold them to the public in “what is essentially a never-ending initial coin offering”.

This is very interesting because Ripple Labs (the company) did not create Ripple (XRP) coin in 2014 year.

80% of XRP supply was gifted to them by the creators (founders of the company) to build use cases around. The remaining 20% was split by the initial creators of the coin. Of the 80% that Ripple Labs holds, the majority of that is locked away in a third party escrow and slowly released to Ripple to increase liquidity.

PWC bought shares in VeChainPricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has acquired a minority stake in the Chinese startup VeChain Global Technology Holding Limited, which is the founder of VEN. PwC intends to integrate the VeChain blockchain platform into its solutions that they offer to their clients.

Japan’s Financial Regulator is pushing exchanges to remove Monero, Dash and ZcashThere are currently no reports of an outright ban, and it is still legal, at present, to deal with Monero, DASH and Zcash in Japan. Instead, the government appears to be taking the indirect route to bring the usage of these cryptocurrencies to an end.Japan’s financial regulator is applying quiet pressure on cryptocurrency exchanges in the country, to convince them to stop handling digital currencies favored by criminals and hackers, including Monero, Dash, and Zcash, because they are hard to track.

Next “What changed in crypto” letter is due on April 30th, 2018

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