🌐 Chinese tea company Urban Tea will go into mining
Urban Tea, a Chinese tea trading company, will mine cryptocurrencies to diversify and expand the business.
To implement the new development strategy in the cryptocurrency industry, the Urban Tea leadership brought in two industry experts. Fengdan Zhou has been appointed as the new COO of Urban Tea, who has experience in setting up and operating mining farms in Hong Kong and Singapore. Zhou will be making the Urban Tea business plan a reality so that the company can become a successful member of the mining industry. Yunfei Song, who specializes in blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, mining and digital asset management, will take over as the company's independent director.
Urban Tea CEO Yi Long decided to pursue cryptocurrency mining after thoroughly analyzing the economic situation and researching the viability of the mining industry. Lun concluded that the popularity of digital currencies is growing rapidly, so it will be profitable for the company to mine.
In 2018, another tea company, Long Island Ice Tea, became interested in mining cryptocurrencies, opening the Long Blockchain mining division. Later, however, the firm began trouble with the Nasdaq, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The firm was accused of artificially inflating stock prices and insider trading.
As a reminder, last month the cryptocurrency investment bank Galaxy Digital also started mining and announced the launch of financial services for miners.
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🌐 The Motley Fool: "Bitcoin will grow tenfold in 15 years"
Analysts at The Motley Fool, a financial and investment consulting firm, expect bitcoin to grow tenfold over 15 years.
The company is preparing a new product - the 10x index, which will include assets with tenfold growth potential within 15 years. Bitcoin was included in this index, with the company planning to buy BTC for $ 5 million. The purchase of the coins will be carried out by the firm directly, and not indirectly through "overvalued ETFs".
“We are investing $ 5 million in bitcoin for three reasons. We believe that it is a more effective means of long-term storage of wealth than gold. We believe that it will become a recognized medium of exchange and that its value will stabilize over the next decade. We believe that it will act as an effective hedging asset against inflation, "- wrote representatives of The Motley Fool on the social network Twitter.
Analysts note that the volatility of the first cryptocurrency may persist in the coming years, however, in the long term, the bitcoin rate can easily grow tenfold.
“We plan to keep these bitcoins for years to come,” the company said in a statement.
Note that on February 16, the rate of the first cryptocurrency for the first time in history exceeded $ 50,000. Thus, a tenfold increase in bitcoin means reaching the $ 500,000 mark.
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🌐 Paxful will add Lightning Network support
P2P platform Paxful will add Lightning Network support for faster, more cost-effective Bitcoin transactions.
The Lightning Network solution allows you to move bitcoins in a few seconds at a minimal cost. This network of payment channels is designed to reduce the burden on the Bitcoin blockchain. Paxful co-founder Artur Schaback said that in two weeks the exchange will integrate the Lightning Network and conduct beta testing. Thereafter, the solution will be rolled out gradually.
The integration will speed up deposits, as the exchange does not have to wait long for their confirmation, as it usually happens on the Bitcoin network. Shabak said the maximum deposit amount could be limited to $ 500, but Paxful has yet to determine the exact amount of the limit. As the site's management explained, Lightning is an experimental network that is still growing and currently has limited capacity.
As a reminder, Bitfinex became the first exchange to integrate the Lightning solution. In September, Bitfinex added enhanced Wumbo payment channels to allow users to deposit and withdraw up to 5 BTC via Lightning. Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has said it plans to add support for Lightning in the near future as well. The more platforms implement the solution, the faster bitcoins will move between exchanges.
Last year, Paxful said it would use the Reactor and KYT tools created by market research firm Chainalysis to track illegal transactions.
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🌐 Cosmos Developers Launch Stargate Update
The Cosmos cryptocurrency project has received an update from Stargate that adds a highly anticipated feature - the internal blockchain communication (IBC) protocol.
The Cosmos ecosystem is made up of many blockchains and now, with the Stargate update, these networks can interact with each other as well as with other blockchains. IBC allows you to move tokens between blockchains and exchange data, and certain compatibility conditions must be met to connect third-party blockchains.
Previously, each project created in the Cosmos ecosystem developed its own bridges to interact with other networks. Kava CEO and co-founder Brian Kerr said the developers have spent years and millions of dollars building “bridges of their own,” such as connecting to Binance.
In addition to the IBC integration, the update also focused on performance issues. The developers added support for the Protobuf format, made a more efficient data streaming mechanism and launched the State Sync protocol, which allows nodes to synchronize with the Cosmos blockchain in less than 30 minutes. The ability to automatically update blockchains built on the Cosmos SDK has also been added, and the security of light clients has been improved.
Currently, the Stargate update is activated on the main ecosystem network - Cosmos Hub. Decentralized finance projects are expected to greatly benefit from this update, which will make it much easier to connect to third-party blockchains.
In September, it was reported that the Nym project plans to increase the anonymity of the Cosmos ecosystem and provide users with the ability to exchange data in a confidential manner.
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🌐 Arthur Hayes: "Get away from traditional brokers and trade cryptocurrencies!"
Former CEO of BitMEX exchange Arthur Hayes urged traders to abandon securities trading on traditional financial platforms and switch to cryptocurrency trading.
In his article, Hayes emphasized that the recent incident with GameStop stock, when users of the Reddit forum significantly raised their rate, which led to losses for institutional investors, showed Wall Street's attitude towards ordinary people. Various platforms, including Robinhood, have begun to restrict trading in GameStop shares as well as tightening margin requirements for trades.
“The owners of this game did not like the course of events and they began to restrict us so that the stock price would correct. Withdraw funds from broker accounts. Stop trading there. Stop paying a system that thinks you are second class. This protest can be really powerful! ”- wrote the former CEO of BitMEX.
Recall that at the end of January, a group of traders from the popular Internet forum Reddit launched a trend to buy shares in the GameStop computer games store chain. They wrote that large investors and hedge funds went short on these stocks and the public decided to “punish” the institutional. They really did it - for example, the hedge fund Melvin Capital lost 70% of its assets.
Interestingly, Arthur Hayes himself has been in "silence mode" since September 2020. He left his position as CEO of BitMEX last October and it is unknown what he has been doing since then.
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🌐 OFAC Fines BitPay $ 500,000 For Violating US Sanctions
Cryptocurrency payment company BitPay has settled claims with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and will pay a $ 500,000 fine for violating US sanctions.
According to the notice , BitPay will pay a $ 507,375 fine for facilitating transactions between US citizens and individuals in regions under US sanctions (Crimea, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Iran, and Syria). According to the US Treasury Department, in the period from 2013 to 2018, similar transactions were carried out in cryptocurrencies for $ 129,000.
According to OFAC, the company knew it was facilitating transactions between persons in the sanctioned regions because it had location and IP address information.
BitPay could face a maximum fine of over $ 600 million under the allegations, but OFAC took into account some mitigating factors: BitPay's enforcement of law enforcement, employee training, launching an identity service, blocking IP addresses in sanctioned regions, and a number of other steps. to prevent such transactions in the future. BitPay partnered with OFAC while the agency investigated violations.
“BitPay did not exercise due caution or care about its sanctions obligations when it allowed individuals in authorized jurisdictions to transact with BitPay sellers using digital currency for approximately five years, despite the fact that BitPay had sufficient information to verify these customers ", Says OFAC.
The notice states that cryptocurrency companies must comply with OFAC rules and monitor possible sanctions risks. The regulator has issued guidelines that companies can use to do this. In a statement, a BitPay spokesman said:
“We have partnered with OFAC and are happy to resolve this issue. The charges included a small number of transactions (2,102) that took place between our sellers and their customers from 2013 to 2018. The transactions appear to have originated from jurisdictions under US sanctions. These transactions had an average value of less than $ 100, totaling $ 128,582.61, and were in industries such as online hosting and gaming. OFAC found the violations not flagrant. ”
These transactions accounted for 0.04% of the total transactions conducted during that period, the spokesperson said and the company has since improved its compliance program. As a reminder, OFAC said last fall that paying ransoms to cybercriminals during ransomware attacks could violate US sanctions.
