Category Archives: Cryptocurrency

The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies reached an all-time high today, passing $60bn as the innovative assets continued to draw robust inflows.

This figure reached $63.6bn atone point during the day's trading, according to online data serviceCoinMarketCap, which represented a weekly, monthly and quarterly increase of roughly 18%, 115% and 220%, respectively.

While analysts cited different variables as fueling these gains, one factor they noted was growing awareness of cryptocurrencies, one that is finding them emerge as a more diverse set of investments than observed previously.

Tim Enneking, chairman of cryptocurrency hedge fund Crypto Asset Management, spoke to this development, stating:

"Cryptocurrencies are finally hitting the general consciousness whereas before they were marginal, with the possible exception of bitcoin."

As the assets draw "increased media coverage," Ryan Rabaglia, head trader for Octagon Strategy, told CoinDesk new investors are coming to the space.The growing interest in the space is also being felt at his over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk, which has been seeing a rise in business activity.

"Our onboarding rates have experienced a massive spike and our trading volumes, at mid-month, have already increased exponentially compared on a month-to-month basis. We do not see this quieting any time soon," he said.

When asked whether his company has experienced an increase in this activity amid the recent rally in cryptocurrency prices, Harry Yeh, managing partner of Binary Financial, told CoinDesk:

"There's definitely a larger demand, not just for bitcoin, but [for] everything across the board."

As for where cryptocurrency prices (and therefore total market cap) will go next, analysts offered mixed views. While the total value (and number) of assets in this space has surged in recent months, it is difficult to tell how much further they can climb without developing compelling value propositions.

Yeh offered an optimistic point of view, telling CoinDesk that "we are just getting started".

"People still don't really understand that there is a lot more room for this to move because it's a global phenomenon now. Expect more moves up but also some pullbacks like in the last week," he said.

Jacob Eliosoff, a cryptocurrency fund manager, offered a more cautious stance, telling CoinDesk that the market was "reaching the frenzy point". He expressed doubt as to how much longer these values would hold, noting that while nobody knows for sure when a bubble will pop, there are always warning signs.

Eliosoff stated that in this case, a "crackdown" oninitial coin offerings (ICOs), the process by which developers create new cryptocurrencies to fund projects, would likely spur a downturn.

He also asserted that should bitcoin prices see a downturn, the cryptocurrencyspace could see diminished confidence.

Price chart image via Shutterstock

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Cryptocurrency Market Cap Tops $60 Billion to Hit All-Time High - CoinDesk

Cryptocurrency is attracting mainstream attention, resulting in notable growth in trade volumes and token values.

Multiple blockchain-based currencies have seen massive growth since the beginning of 2017, including Bitcoin.

There has also been arecent boom in alternative cryptocurrencies, especially Ripple (XRP) and Ether (ETH).

This has caused Bitcoins share of the total cryptocurrency market cap to fall below 50% for the first time in history, despite thesignificant growth of the token.

One of the largest online cryptocurrency exchanges, Poloniex, recently issueda press release stating that it was working hard to cope with the influx of new users and increased transactions.

The exchange said that since January 2017, it has seen an increase of over 600% active traders online, and a 640% increase in the amount of transactions processed.

Poloniex said it is working to scale up its operations to meet the massive increase in active traders, including hiring more developers and exchange staff.

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Massive cryptocurrency growth in 2017 - MyBroadband - MyBroadband

Note: This is a precursory article, as the company has said they will be shipping units next week, and that there will be reviews and proof after that point. Nonetheless, we have decided to release the details we have now so that aspiring miners can make their own decisions regarding FoxMiners hardware.

The Bitcoin industry is so filled with scam artists, its instant and cash-like nature being attractive to them, that a given firm trying to enter the space is often marked guilty until proven innocent. While that may be what is going on with all the chatter aboutFoxMiners, it seems there are some legitimate reasons to be suspicious:

A company representative has said they will be shipping orders beginning Monday next week. Little of their story makes any sense, but we as journalists are charged with reporting the truth, so we will have to follow the story and see what happens. Our anonymous complainant makes a good point, however, saying:

I never received a receipt for payment, or any kind of notification. As stated, code on their page just rondomises a bunch of preprogrammed wallet codes, so there is no way for them to know who paid what. Generally for a Bitcoin transaction to occur for an online transaction, a wallet address would be generated and unique for each payment, so the supplier would know who is paying. I cannot see anyway that this isnt a scam.

Stay tuned. As far as we can tell, this could either be a great new mining company or another massive mining scam. Unfortunately there are no Bitcoin police, so stories like this will remain common for the forseeable future, and the best we can do is encourage our readers to know your provider, research anything that seems too good to be true, and, when possible, never pre-order anything.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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Cryptocurrency Miner FoxMiners Rife With Scam Allegations - CryptoCoinsNews

Ireland-based online foreign exchange AvaTrade has announced the addition of Ether, Dash, and Ripple to its trading portfolio. As per AvaTrade CEO Dire Ferguson:

"We are proud to be the first to introduce these exciting cryptocurrencies to our impressive instruments' selection."

AvaTrades announcement isnt surprising. The three rising cryptocurrencies have all experienced immense surges in their market caps over the past year. Global settlement network Ripple (XRP) has enjoyed a recent bullish run and managed to surpass Ether for second place on the market. Nevertheless, Ether (ETH) has risen approximately 680 percent over the past year, leaving its market position in a comfortable third place.Meanwhile, Dash (DASH) has also experienced a gradual climb. In March, the cryptocurrency skyrocketed to new highs and it currently occupies a solid sixth place spot on the market with a cap of $653,338,016 at the time of publication.

According to Ferguson, these were all positive indicators that the cryptocurrencies were ready to be traded on the Forex platform.

"The latest political and financial events have changed the trading world, and we work hard to ensure we stay on the top of our game, and always remain an industry leading brokerage."

Founded in 2006, AvaTrade is fully regulated in the European Union, Australia, Japan, South Africa, and the British Virgin Islands. The foreign exchange offers over 250 financial instruments, trading platforms, and mobile apps to its customer base.

Dan is a US Army veteran and Los Angeles-based writer passionate about science and technology, current events, human rights, economic impacts, and strategic calculus. Dan is a full time staff writer for ETHNews and holds value in Ether.

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Foreign Exchange Adds Cryptocurrencies To Its Trading Portfolio ... - ETHNews (press release) (blog)

NEW DELHI: Allaying fears that after "WannaCrypt" ransomware, India will be targeted by a cryptocurrency malware attack that quietly but swiftly generates digital cash from machines it has infected, the country's cyber security unit on Thursday said India is safe from the "Adylkuzz" malware.

"There are no reports of this 'Adylkuzz' malware from the Indian establishments yet. Users are advised to maintain updated anti-virus software and apply patches to operating systems and applications on regular basis," Sanjay Bahl, Director General of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), said.

After facing a massive ransomware attack that exploited a vulnerability in a Microsoft software and hit 150 countries, the same Windows vulnerability (MS17-010) was also exploited to spread "Adylkuzz" by another group of hackers.

According to a report in The Registrar, tens of thousands of computers globally have been affected by the "Adylkuzz attack" that targets machines, lets them operate and only slows them down to generate digital cash or "Monero" cryptocurrency in the background.

"Monero" -- being popularised by North Korea-linked hackers -- is an open-source cryptocurrency created in April 2014 that focuses on privacy, decentralisation and scalability.

It is an alternative to Bitcoin and is being used for trading in drugs, stolen credit cards and counterfeit goods.

"There is no need to panic as "CERT-In publishes regular advisories and vulnerability notes on its website as well as some on Cyber Swachhta Kendra website," Bahl said.

According to Nick Savvides, Manager, Cyber Security Strategy at Symantec who is based out of Melbourne, Australia, the attack is not on the math behind the cryptocurrencies.

"Instead, it is based on compromising computer to be used to mine cryptocurrencies for the benefit of attackers. Essentially stealing people's power and CPU to generate new cryptocurrency coins," Savvides said.

Organisations should never conclude that the absence of a major cyber-attack means that they have effective cyber defences.

"'WannaCry' and 'Adylkuzz' show how important security patches are, in building and maintaining those effective defences, and why regular patching plans to mitigate environment vulnerabilities need to become a higher priority," added Steve Grobman, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, McAfee.

One difference between "Adylkuzz" and "WannaCry" is that it is advantageous for "Adylkuzz" to remain undetected and run as long as possible to maximise the amount of time a machine can be used for mining.

"There are the latest reminders of how the 'to patch or not to patch' risk analysis needs to be rethought within organisations worldwide," Grobman said.

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No reports yet of cryptocurrency malware attacks in India - Economic Times

The global financial sector and economy have been transforming at a considerably fast rate during the past few years. Digitized assets, cryptocurrencies and innovative financial systems are creating new ecosystems for monetary transactions and formulating alternative assets that have become parts of a modern portfolio. Since its establishment in 2015, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, has pioneered the analysis and documentation of the present digital economic transformation.

The Cambridge Centre of Alternative Finance has just published a benchmarking study of the current global cryptocurrency economy. By far, this is the first study ever to closely examine the global cryptocurrency economy and its essential components including wallets, exchanges, payments and mining.

The study presented some interesting results, which we will summarize throughout ths article:

There are currently between 2.9 million and 5.8 million unique users of various cryptocurrency wallets. The study reported that there are currently at least 1,876 individuals, all over the world, who work full time in the cryptocurrency sector, yet there are most likely more than 2,000 workers in this sector when considering large mining companies and other businesses, which did not provide the needed headcount numbers.

Cryptocurrency exchanges have the largest number of operating companies and employ more individuals than any other sector in the cryptocurrency industry. Exchanges are dispersed upon a wide geographical area and are not confined to a certain area or continent. Interestingly enough,52% of small cryptocurrency exchanges had a formal governmental license, as opposed to only 35% of larger exchanges. 13% of employees on exchanges were responsible for the security of the platforms. An average of 17% of an exchanges budget is spent on security maintenance.

The study estimated the number of active cryptocurrency wallets to be somewhere between 5.8 million and 11.5 million. The demarcation between exchanges and wallets is considerably blurred, as 52% of wallets were found to offer integrated cryptocurrency exchange options, of those 80% offered a fiat-to-cryptocurrency exchange service. Oppositely to exchanges, most online wallets do not control the private keys of the coins of the users.

Even though 79% of cryptocurrency businesses have relationships with retail banks and payment networks, the difficulty of establishing and maintaining such relationships is still the industrys biggest challenge. Averagely, fiat-to-cryptocurrency payments comprise 66.6% of the transaction volumes of various cryptocurrency payment companies, while fiat-to-fiat transactions and crypto-to-crypto transactions represent 27% and 6% respectively.

70% of large cryptocurrency miners have high influence on protocol development, as compared to only 51% of small cryptocurrency miners. The map of miners shows that big mining facilities are dispersed all across the globe, yet a large number of these facilities exists in certain Chinese areas.

The Cambridge Centre of Alternative Finance has just published the first study of its kind to highlight some of the basic elements of the current cryptocurrency economy. More similar studies have to be conducted periodically to monitor the transformation of the global economy via the blockchain technology during the upcoming years.

Image source:The Cambridge Centre of Alternative Finance

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Benchmarking the Global Cryptocurrency Economy - A Research Study - Live Bitcoin News

The massive recent cryptocurrency rally is not going unnoticed by the online trading industry. The multi-regulated international forex and CFD brokerAvaTradeannounced today that it is adding threerising altcoins, Ethereum, Dash and Ripples XRP, to its trading portfolio.

The London Summit 2017 is coming, get involved!

The choice of these specific blockchain tokes is not very surprising considering the incredible returns they generated in 2017 which must have brought a lot of interest, and pressure on the broker from its clients to add them.Ripples XRP now has a market cap of $13.5 billion, up from $1.5 billion in early April.Ethereum and Dash already jumped before that in the previous cryptocurrency price explosion.

The latest political and financial events have changed the trading world, and we work hard to ensure we stay on the top of our game, and always remain an industry leading brokerage, says Mr. Dire Ferguson, CEO of AvaTrade. We are proud to be the first to introduce these exciting cryptocurrencies to our impressive instruments selection.

Ireland-basedAvaTradewas founded in 2006 and offers more than 250 financial instruments, multiple trading platforms and mobile apps. It is regulated in the EU, Japan, Australia, South Africa andthe British Virgin Islands.AvaTrade first introduced Bitcoin CFD trading back in 2013, both on the popular MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and on its proprietary platform.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem has been on fire this year. Most of the 700+ blockchain assets traded around the world are up significantly this year. In total, the combined value of the entire market is now at a record $62 billion. Leading the pack is still Bitcoin with a price of over $1840 and a market cap of $30 billion.

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AvaTrade Adds Ethereum, Dash and Ripple Cryptocurrency CFD Trading - Finance Magnates

The Merkle

Cryptocurrency Trading Startup CryptoPing Launches ICO - FinSMEs FinSMEs (blog) CryptoPing, a new venture for cryptocurrency traders, has announced the launch ot its ICO on May 25, 2017, to finance further project improvement. Take Advantage of Altcoin Price Fluctuations With CryptoPing The ...The Merkle all 2 news articles »

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Cryptocurrency Trading Startup CryptoPing Launches ICO - FinSMEs - FinSMEs (blog)

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May 17th, 2017 Zug, Switzerland. After 12 months in stealth development, Monaco Technology GMBH unveiled its revolutionary Monaco VISA Card and App today. Besides traditional funding sources, Monaco can be funded with Bitcoin, Ethereum and other ERC20 tokens.

Monaco allows users to spend and send money globally at perfect interbank exchange rates, saving EUR30-40 on every EUR500 equivalent spent. Monaco Card will work on the VISA network, giving it world-wide acceptance.

Kris Marszalek, Founder of Monaco Technology, commented: The team worked incredibly hard over the last year to bring the Monaco VISA Card & App to the market. Its a beautifully simple product that allows users to avoid all the bank charges and currency exchanges impose on them. We believe that every single person who holds Ether or Bitcoin needs one. It brings amazing value, transparency and peace of mind. Youll never have to worry about exchange rates again, always getting the best deal physically possible. Its an incredible feeling!

Other features of the Monaco App include:

Together with the product reveal, Monaco announces its ICO, starting on May 18th. The Company targets contributions of 150,000ETH to fund customer acquisition goals and further product development.

Commenting on the ICO, Mr. Marszalek said: In an industry that has a reputation for being opaque, we stand out with our mission: to build simple and honest nancial products that improve lives. This starts with how we develop the products, how transparent we are about pricing and is reflected in how we structured our ICO.

Mr. Marszalek continued: Were fundamentally against the current industry practice of hyping-up ICOs for weeks, only to launch them and close in 30 minutes. Pre-sale discounts are not allowed in the Monaco ICO, giving all contributors a level playing eld on May 18th. In case the demand exceeds supply, the Company will continue selling tokens for another 7 days, to ensure fair and broad distribution of tokens and to improve potential secondary market performance of the MCO Token

Blockchain community members who participate in the Monaco ICO will receive MCO tokens in exchange for ETH contributions. As MCO token holders, they will have a stake in the MCO Asset Contract.

The MCO Asset Contract is an absolutely essential part of how value will be created for MCO token holders. Every time Monaco VISA Card users spend their BTC, ETH or other ERC20 tokens, Monaco will charge a 1% software license fee. All these fees will be automatically sent to the MCO Asset Contract. Over time, as Monaco users spend on the platform globally, the value will accrue in the MCO Asset Contract. A small license fee seems reasonable, as users are saving 5 to 8 times more on every transaction with Monaco VISA Card., Mr. Marszalek explained. Monaco forecasts that with transaction volume growth and appreciation of the ERC20 tokens over the next 5 years, the value of the MCO Asset Contract may reach US$500MM.

Limited Edition Monaco VISA Black Cards numbered 001 to 999 will be issued to participants of the MCO Token Sale. Black Cards numbered from 001 to 499 will be assigned to Top ETH Token Contributors. Black Cards numbered from 500 to 999 will be assigned to the fastest contributors, based on the time stamp of their ETH contribution. The Black Card Leaderboard will be available at Mona.co and will update automatically in real-time during the MCO Token Sale.

Besides the exclusive design, Monaco VISA BLACK Card holders will enjoy lifetime unlimited perfect interbank exchange rates and triple free monthly ATM withdrawal limits. More benets will be rolled out over time.

The person who contributes the highest number of tokens in the ICO will be rewarded with the Monaco VISA Black Card Number 001 and will receive a bonus 188,888 MCO Tokens from the Monaco Founders Pool. The 188,888 Bonus MCO Tokens will not be subject to a lockup period.

To find our more about Monaco please visit: http://www.Mona.co White paper download: http://www.Mona.co/whitepaper To pre-register for the Token Sale: http://www.Mona.co/register

LEAD ADVISOR:

TokenMarket: http://www.TokenMarket.net

MEDIA CONTACT:

Freya Stevens [emailprotected]

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Monaco VISA, the World's Best Cryptocurrency Card, Comes out of Stealth Mode; ICO Launches May 18 - CryptoCoinsNews

Aragon, a Spanish blockchain startup developing a decentralized management platform for organizations, has announced a partnership with blockchainassets exchange ShapeShift.

The London Summit 2017 is coming, get involved!

The integration will enable Aragon buyers to participate in the token sale with over fortydifferent cryptocurrencies on the ShapeShift platform, including Bitcoin, Ether, Dash, and Litecoin.

Co-founder and Project Lead at Aragon Luis Cuende said: ShapeShift is known throughout the crypto space as one of the best digital asset exchanges. Featuring many of the leading blockchain tokens, ShapeShift will provide Aragon buyers with a fast and simple way to participate in our sale with a multitude of different cryptocurrencies.

An uncapped number of tokens will be sold during Aragons month-long token sale starting todayand concluding June 14, 2017. All funds raised from this initial sale, in the form of Aragon Network Tokens (ANT), will be used to continue building the Core and to build the Network.

Aragon is pioneering the change in organizational structures, redefining how companies are managed worldwide. At ShapeShift we strive to align ourselves with companies that further advance and broaden the usage of blockchain technology and are delighted to play a role in Aragons upcoming token sale, said Erik Voorhees, founder and CEO of ShapeShift.

Entering into the token pre-sale as institutional partners are ICONOMI and CoinFund. In addition, Aragon listsa number of individual pre-sale contributors including Joe Urgo, Director of Operations for Ethlance and Danielle Levi, co-founder of Stampery.

Early contributors, presale partners and advisors will acquire tokens which vest over time through smart contracts.

As a team we are dedicated and committed to the long term success of the project. Therefore, the Aragon token sale will be one of the first to restrict Founder and early contributor rewards with tokens which vest using smart contracts. We believe vesting should become a de-facto standard for all blockchain projects, added Cuende.

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ShapeShift Instant Cryptocurrency Exchange Now Supports Aragon ... - Finance Magnates