On his weekly television address on Sunday, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced plans for the country to develop a state-backed cryptocurrency. Apart from revealing the proposed digital currency’s name — the Petro — and claims that it will be backed by the country’s oil, gas, gold and diamond wealth, Maduro provided few details about the…
In recent months, trading values for the major cryptocurrencies have experienced explosive upward growth. At the time of this writing, BTC is trading at an all-time-high of $9,700, with major players like Ether (also the major fuel behind many ICOs), Litecoin, and Ripple seeing similar price growth. To a casual observer, this can easily be…
In a new ruling published on Monday, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) declared ICOs and similar cryptocurrency-based fundraising tools to be illegal within the country. The PBOC’s statement also demanded that all current ICOs on China-based exchanges be halted immediately, and that funds from previous ICO rounds be returned. The ruling follows an extended…
Yesterday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an “Investor Alert” about “potential scams involving stock of companies claiming to be related to, or asserting they are engaging in, Initial Coin Offerings (or ICOs).” Given the turbulent and uneasy relationship between the U.S. government and crypto-based startups, this investor warning sent a brief chill…
A bill prepared by Russia’s Ministry of Finance targeting the creation and circulation of so-called money surrogates, a classification that would include digital currencies like Bitcoin, has been at least temporarily withdrawn from consideration following comments from the country’s Justice Ministry. As reported by regional news source RNS, the bill – popularly known as the…
Last month, San Francisco-based bitcoin startup Shift Payments announced plans to release a new debit-card system that would enable users to pay with traditional bank accounts, as well as bitcoin and Ripple wallets. Backed by tech-industry kingmakers Y Combinator, the card promised to serve as a next-generation bridge between digital currencies and traditional banking by…
Only a week after exiting beta testing for its new bitcoin-to-dollar exchange platform, China’s OKCoin has skyrocketed past Western exchanges in terms of volume. As CoinDesk reports, the USD/BTC trading pair on the site had a volume of 16,342 BTC yesterday, handily beating Bitfinex’s 15,552 BTC volume, as well as Bitstamp’s 14,463 and BTC-e’s 6,556….
Ripple Labs announced today that their bitcoin-friendly alt-coin system will soon be offered to the customers of two small U.S. banks. The Ripple system is part of a new low-cost, real-time international payments service offered by CBW Bank of Topeka, Kansas, and Cross River Bank of Teaneck, New Jersey. The integration is the first time…
One of the biggest concerns about PayPal’s rapidly approaching integration with bitcoin-based payments has been liquidity. The eBay-owned payment processing giant handled around $180 billion in transactions last year, roughly 30 times bitcoin’s total market cap. If PayPal aims to bring bitcoin payments to the masses, even a relative giant in the space, like Coinbase,…
In an interview with CBC News, Square CEO Jack Dorsey dropped an interesting hint about his company’s future relationship with bitcoin. Speaking about concerns that Square might face stiff competition from the forthcoming Apple Pay mobile point-of-sale system, Dorsey said: “We’re building a register so that sellers can accept a credit card, so they can…