The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in conjunction with a group of seven central banks, today released its first joint report on central bank digital currencies (CBDC), focusing on their fundamental principles and characteristics.

Along with the report, the Bank of Japan, a member of the group of seven central banks, released a document outlining its specific approach to CBDCs from a distinctly country-focused perspective.

According to the Bank of Japan document, it will begin the first of several phases of testing for its own CBDC, the digital yen, sometime in 2021. This will include the development of a test environment for the currency and experiments on its functions. basic as a payment instrument.

The Bank of Japan intends to carry out a three-part process. Two consensus tests and a pilot program. In the first two consensus tests, the bank will develop these test environments and add additional functions to them to test their feasibility. In any case, the pilot program would arrive only if the bank deems it necessary to collect more data.

On the other hand, the document highlights five relevant aspects for the arrival of the CBDC: universal access, security, resilience, instant payment capacity, and interoperability. With this, the bank ensures that there are no excluded individuals, that it is available 24/7, and that it can provide liquidity when making a payment.

The Bank of Japan report indicates that a fundamental characteristic of the digital currency must be the resilience to an infrastructure disturbed by forces Majeure. Declares: “Off-line use in times of grid and system failures, as well as power outages, is also important for Japan, given the frequent occurrence of natural disasters.”

Due to the nature of its geography, Japan is prone to a wide range of natural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, typhoons, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions.

BIS report

For its part, the BIS digital currency research group was announced in January 2020 and included the central banks of Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, and the European Central Bank. Since then, the United States Federal Reserve has also joined the group.

The report published today by the BIS also highlights that to fulfill the role of a true CBDC that fits in the current regulatory landscape, they must have a total of 14 fundamental characteristics, some of which include:

 Convertibility: CBDC must be exchangeable for cash at parity.

 Convenient: CBDC payments should be as easy to use as other payment methods like cash and mobile payments.

 Instant: Transactions must be settled instantly, or in minutes.

 Scalable: The system should be able to expand to cope with larger future volumes.

 High performance: CBDCs should be able to process a large number of transactions simultaneously.

With these features involved, central banks are forced to implement their network from scratch because cryptocurrency chains known as Bitcoin or Ethereum cannot process such a large number of transactions.

By: Jenson Nuñez.

Samuel Reed, CTO of BitMEX, who was one of those indicted by the US Department of Justice on October 1, has been released from his arrest after posting a $ 5 million bond.

Reed’s bail was approved on October 3, on the condition that he appear for court proceedings and, if convicted, surrender to serve a sentence. In the process, the authorities seized his and his wife’s passports.

The court hearing took place on October 1 by videoconference. Attorney William J. Trach of Latham & Watkins LLP Reed is in charge of Reed´s representation.

Reed, 31, was arrested in Massachusetts for alleged violation of the Bank Secrecy Act and for “willfully failing to establish, implement and maintain an adequate anti-money laundering (‘AML’) program on the Mercantile Exchange of Bitcoin or ‘BitMEX’ “.

New faces on board

Reed was indicted along with co-founders and colleagues Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Gregory Dwyer, who remain at large at the same time BitMEX announced that the four executives have stepped down from their positions in light of the US government’s allegations.

BitMEX was the subject of two lawsuits on October 1, by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the US Department of Justice. The CFTC accused the derivatives exchange and its operators of running an unregistered trading platform as well as violating anti-money laundering and “know your customer” rules.

HDR Global Trading, BitMEX’s parent company named in the CFTC lawsuit, promised to fight the charges at the time.

BitMEX maintained that for the exchange the current situation is “business as usual” (the usual), but the withdrawals of Bitcoin, the open interest in its futures, and the volumes show a very different picture. More than 40,000 bitcoins, currently worth about $ 440 million, have been withdrawn from BitMEX, according to various data trackers.

Open interest in the BitMEX futures market crashed and fell from more than $ 1 billion to less than $ 600 million. Trading volumes also dropped sharply and it is unknown what future the exchange could expect if it is found guilty.

What happened?

The CFTC stated that BitMEX is responsible for the execution of unauthorized commercial operations, illegally offering commercial assets, not appearing as an authorized merchant, and not executing the regulations established for this kind of operations and movements.

“BitMEX was touted as the world’s largest crypto derivatives trading platform, with billions of dollars in daily transactions. A lot of that volume comes from markets and customers resident in the US, the platform never got registered with the CFTC and did not adjust itself to the law, which is essential to guarantee the integrity and vitality of local markets ”.

The CFTC had an open investigation into BitMEX since June 2019, in which they were investigating several of the charges raised in the recently filed lawsuit. When reports about the investigation conducted last year circulated, the platform recorded the withdrawal of $73 million in BTC funds in just 24 hours.

By: Jenson Nuñez.

 The Canadian company Dapper Labs creates Flow that seeks to transform what until today was a complex and inaccessible process into a possible tool for both game developers and applications such as for creators of digital assets.

The blockchain or chain of blocks, until today is known as digital guarantors for the use of cryptocurrencies, they were famous for their effectiveness as well for their complexity. The difficulties and costs of incorporating other types of content on these platforms were intimidating for the most daring of developers.

They posed severe limitations such as implementation barriers, the possibility of scalability, and the lack of attractiveness for a mass audience.

With the decision to break with that paradigm and forever transform the experience of developers and users, Dapper Labs starts from scratch and seeks to revolutionize the world of layer one blockchain through Flow, a chain of blocks for open worlds.

It is a modular tool with a low comparative cost that allows the scalability of projects generating a “sustainable ecosystem” that solves the inconveniences caused by the decentralization that layer two systems offer.

The choice of great brands to reach their consumers

Dapper Labs executives do not hesitate to say that this is a technology that will forever revolutionize the industry and that Flow will decisively strengthen the link between entertainment and the digital economy as never before.

And these are some of their arguments to support their claims: The company made a recent alliance with global giants of entertainment, sports, and entertainment such as the NBA, UFC, Warner Music Group, and Dr. Seuss, among others, ratifying the importance that blockchain is gaining.

It is in this environment that Flow, based on its experience, moves like a fish in water and is positioned as the alternative par excellence for the development of content and digital assets.

As Dapper Labs maintains that there is no better experience than one that is enriched by the experiences of other users, that is why Flox incorporates a new competitive advantage to the previous ones: The availability of a token in the active Coinlist community, currently and a permanent link without any previous investment requirement.

About Dapper Labs

Dapper Labs. is the team behind some of the most successful cryptographic applications developed on the Ethereum network. It has developed and implemented Flow, which it claims as the only layer 1 (layer one) Blockchain created to solve current network problems and allow its use on a large scale.

Its development team has consistently delivered well-known Blockchain experiences to the consumer: CryptoKitties, Dapper Wallet, NBA TopShot are among them. It reports that more than 11,500 people pledged to participate in the Flow Community Sale (by Dapper Labs) in less than two weeks.

It ensures that it is the largest number of token sale participants in the history of CoinList. Bids were open for the live auction that took place on October 6 at 8:00 a.m. ET.

By: Jenson Nuñez.

An anonymous user lost more than $ 140,000 in UNI tokens in a scam perpetrated within the DeFi ecosystem under the command of the UniCats project.

According to information published by various media networks, an anonymous user deposited the above figure in UNI tokens to derive MEOW assets, under the expectation that said assets would revalue over time, as occurred with initiatives such as Yearn. Finance or Sushiswap.

However, what the scammed user did not know is that the UniCats smart contract contained a “back door” that allowed the operator of the same to extract the funds stored by investors.

In this way, the creator of UniCats took advantage of the gaps in the governance mechanism to take control of the affected tokens, subtracting in two operations a total of 36,000 UNI tokens, whose estimated value at that time was about $140,000, and later changed them in Uniswap for about 416 Wrapped Ether (WETH).

Although the victim, in this, case lost around $140,000, associated reports assure that other victims together lost more than $50,000. Manuskin said the scammer moves the funds to a mixer to prevent victims from tracking him down.

According to the researcher, this would be the first case of large-scale scam in a DeFi token of this type, since unlike vulnerabilities exploited by hackers; here it happened that the programmer left this door open to take advantage of investors deliberately.

Scams and smart contracts

At the height of DeFi, many people lose sight of the fact that they could take big risks by putting their funds as collateral, in the expectation of rapidly multiplying their capital in what appears to be very safe offerings.

Cases like this and many others show that criminals are everywhere and that it is increasingly important to know in detail the operation of digital currencies, associated markets, and projects that seem like good investment offers.

Such knowledge is quite useful to stay away from false promises, which seek to take advantage of misinformation and the expectations of those who aspire to multiply their capital without much effort.

No more than 1% of a trader’s portfolio should be at risk in a single trade – this is the key to sustaining multiple consecutive losses. They must test and adjust their plan over a long period – hundreds of trades. A good system gives the trader an advantage over a long time because randomness becomes less relevant with a larger sample.

A good trade should be one in which a trader planned his trading, negotiated his plan, and managed the sum of all risks; those are all the elements under the trader’s control. It is NOT defined by the result.

A bad trade, on the other hand, is when a trader does not follow his rules and executes trades against his better judgment. This will always be a bad deal, even if it turns out profitable, the move will lead to a bad end.

By developing a well-tested plan, traders can overcome the hurdles of random reinforcement, eliminate emotion and momentum, and learn to be profitable. This is how you become a part of that 5% who are successful as traders.

By: Jenson Nuñez.

Bitcoin has risen by 20% in the last three months. Last October 8^th, the power devoted to Bitcoin mining exceeded its all-time high.

Once again, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) broke the USD 11,000 barrier. The rebound of more than 4% in 24 hours occurred on October 8^th, after the company Square, belonging to Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, invested USD 50 million worth of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has remained below the USD 11,000 level since last September 19^th. According to CoinMarketCap, the value of the first cryptocurrency on the market even reached USD 10,248 at its lowest moment on September 23^rd.

In recent days, the price of Bitcoin has fluctuated between USD 10,400 and USD 10,700. However, the final momentum to break the 11,000 barrier again occurred between October 8^th and 9^th, coinciding with Square’s investment. The inclusion of the company seems to have mobilized bullish sentiment and investment enthusiasm, moving the price accordingly.

This recent momentum led Bitcoin’s total market capitalization to exceed USD 200 billion once again.

The price of the first cryptocurrency has recovered by close to 20% in the last three months. Its current value is almost 150% more than the price that it had during the fall that the declaration of a pandemic has caused since its start in March of this year.

Besides, the price increase coincides with a new milestone for Bitcoin mining. For the first time in history, on October 8^th, the total processing power on the network was above 170 EH/s, according to data from Glassnode.

The cryptocurrency market has usually followed in Bitcoin’s footsteps by increasing the price of altcoins accordingly. The numbers of the main cryptocurrencies have remained green in recent days. The Chainlink project, whose LINK token has risen by more than 14%, is the most prominent. Others, like Ether (ETH) and Binance Coin (BNB), have increased by more than 4%.

Institutional Investment in Bitcoin

Square’s purchase of USD 50 million worth of Bitcoin is just an example of how the institutional curve of investment in the main cryptocurrency has been accelerating.

This year, business intelligence firm MicroStrategy has invested more than USD 400 million to maintain part of its reserves in Bitcoin. First, they bought around 21,000 BTC in August and, a month later, added another 16,796 BTC to their assets.

In September, investment firm Grayscale reportedly reached USD 4.8 billion worth of BTC in reserve. Not all the bitcoins in those reserves are in the hands of Grayscale, which does not buy them directly either. One of the services that Grayscale provides is that of making purchases on behalf of its customers, in addition to issuing shares denominated in Bitcoin.

Despite that situation, this fund is close to USD 5,000 million, which is a sign of the institutional interest in investing in Bitcoin. Data from CoinMarketCap indicate that the trading volume of the cryptocurrency reached more than USD 60,000 million in just 24 hours.

By Alexander Salazar

According to data from Santiment, the daily trading volume on DeFi has also decreased by 30.2%. In recent days, the Curve token has lost 92.7% on its value, followed by SushiSwap and bZx.

The decentralized finance (DeFi) market is in the red and the industry’s top tokens have reported losses of up to double digits in just a week. The fall has affected assets such as COMP, YFI, and SUSHI, whose prices recorded a reduction of more than 50%.

Blockchain analysis firm Santiment reported that the capitalization of the DeFi industry market dropped by 25.1% in less than 24 hours. However, cryptocurrency market analyst Ceteris Paribus estimates that the total devaluation of the market in recent days is around 61.8%.

The Santiment report highlights that the daily trading volume has decreased by 30.2%. The fall has affected the favorite tokens on the market the most, as is the case of COMP of the Compound platform, which recently lost over 55% on its price. Concerning Andre Cronje’s Yearn Finance, the YFI token recorded a 31.3% decline in just 23 hours.

However, this collapse has had the worst consequences for the Curve, SushiSwap, and bZx. According to data from Ceteris Paribus, the value of the Curve token decreased by 92.7%. SushiSwap and bZx followed with depreciation of 91.5% and 90.4%, respectively. The drop also hit Uniswap, one of the most popular platforms in the DeFi ecosystem, whose token lost 38.2% on its price.

There has been a stir in the community due to the drop since it has reportedly reduced one-fourth of the capitalization of the DeFi market in less than a month. After the popularity of decentralized finance, platforms exploded and yield farming practices took hold some weeks ago, DeFi tokens were amid a bullish rally. However, this significant drop in prices has led to speculation on social media about whether DeFi has burst like any financial bubble.

End of DeFi or Bump in the Way

Economist Kruger Macro compared the current decline in the DeFi market to that of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) occurring two years ago. At the time, the market capitalization of ICOs decreased by 95%, over the course of a year. Today, the collective market for DeFi tokens has lost the same percentage of capitalization, in just a single month.

This behavior may not paint a good picture for DeFi, but it does not mean that the industry will die completely. The Santiment report noted that many DeFi tokens are currently undervalued, so their price could increase in just a few hours or weeks. It also denounced that there are whales in the market, that is, holders with large sums of tokens mobilizing huge amounts of money.

Users believe that the increase in gas fees on Ethereum has led to the collapse. At the time of writing this article, the gas fee is at 154 gwei, an average of USD 0.80 per transaction. However, users report that they are paying up to USD 30 per fee to conduct complex operations or those with large amounts.

The increase in gas on Ethereum affects the good use of DeFi platforms, but the popularity of this industry has exploded in recent months. When this happens in a new market, it is impossible to avoid the artificial inflation of the prices of its products. Therefore, an abrupt correction of the values in the DeFi market may have caused this drop.

By Alexander Salazar