Day: April 2, 2021

EQIBank Picks Unido As Institutional Partner for Blockchain Solutions

by Dailyhodl

Global digital banking service EQIBank has chosen Unido as its institutional partner for secure custody solution. The bank is set to utilize a customized version of Unido Insto, the institutional bank-in-a-box solution built on Unido’s fragmented key signing technology, to deliver crypto custody and crypto trading products to existing EQIBank clients and drive new user acquisitions.

The Unido Insto platform consists of custody services for banks, custody providers and digital exchanges that wish to provide easy-to-use enterprise-grade solutions for individuals, investors, asset managers, and crypto-native companies, delivering their end users secure management of their digital assets from a central dashboard.

In addition to custody and access to a marketplace of DeFi options to deliver yields on idle assets, Unido will deliver an integrated OTC trading interface for EQIBank to buy and sell crypto for its clients. This is all built on Unido’s advanced security based on its patented fragmented key signing engine.

“EQIBank selected the Unido platform due to its market leading security solution, based on patent-pending fragmented key signing engine, and its easy-to-use client experience. This brings EQIBank clients easy access to secure crypto storage, OTC transacting, and DeFi investing.” – Edwin Carlson, chief operating officer, EQIBank.

The announcement comes after a wave of similar partnerships and investments that position Unido as the leading enterprise platform in the blockchain space – a solution that is becoming central to the broader adoption of crypto as institutional investors continue to join the market. EQIBank’s use of Unido Insto is set to introduce a new host of users to better and more secure custody services on the blockchain.

Unido is a crypto asset custody service and enterprise platform that provides features for the management and investment of crypto assets on-chain. It relies on a patent-pending fragmented private key obfuscation algorithm for security and offers services that are interoperable with most blockchain networks. Unido’s enterprise features include a business banking portal as well as DeFi Vault. Learn more on Twitter or Telegram.

EQIBank is one of the world’s leading innovative banks and strives to provide more products to more countries than any other digital bank. EQIBank is the world’s first global digital bank aimed solely at businesses and high-net-worth individuals and provides offshore, tax-exempt, and tailored personal and corporate banking services to clients in 180 countries and territories.

With 24/7 cloud-based access, real-time insights, and high barriers to entry, EQIBank’s strategy is to accelerate simplification, using Open Banking Standards and Open APIs to create a new global standard of banking.

www.eqibank.com

This content is sponsored and should be regarded as promotional material. Opinions and statements expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of The Daily Hodl. The Daily Hodl is not a subsidiary of or owned by any ICOs, blockchain startups or companies that advertise on our platform. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in any ICOs, blockchain startups or cryptocurrencies. Please be advised that your investments are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility.

Follow Us on Twitter Facebook Telegram

 

Source

Tagged : / /

JPMorgan Reveals ‘Big’ Bitcoin Price Prediction As Bitcoin And Crypto Market Surges Toward $2 Trillion

by Forbes

Bitcoin has won its fair share of Wall Street supporters this year amid a bull run that’s seen it soar around 500%.

The bitcoin price hit highs of just over $60,000 per bitcoin last month before falling back slightly, but has since made up lost ground. Meanwhile, the broader cryptocurrency market has surged to almost $2 trillion—boosted by decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens.

Now, analysts at Wall Street banking giant and former bitcoin skeptic JPMorgan have said bitcoin could climb as high as $130,000 in the long-term if it continues to see its volatility converge with that of gold’s.

MORE FROM FORBESAfter 500% Bitcoin Boom, Data Reveals Why April Could Be Even Bigger For The Bitcoin PriceBy Billy Bambrough

“Considering how big the financial investment into gold is, any such crowding out of gold as an ‘alternative’ currency implies big upside for bitcoin over the long term,” JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a note to clients this week.

MORE FOR YOU

The bank found that a six-month measure of bitcoin volatility appeared to be stabilising around the 73% mark—suggesting “tentative signs of bitcoin volatility normalisation” that could help to “reinvigorate” interest from institutional investors.

High volatility “acts as a headwind towards further institutional adoption,” according to JPMorgan.

The bitcoin price has soared as institutional investors including London-based asset manager Ruffer and insurance giant MassMutual have bought into bitcoin—with Elon Musk’s Tesla topping off a series of high-profile bitcoin bets.

The bitcoin price has climbed from around $10,000 per bitcoin to around $60,000 as a result, but JPMorgan thinks it could still have some way to run.

“Mechanically, the bitcoin price would have to rise [to] $130,000, to match the total private sector investment in gold,” JPMorgan analysts wrote.

MORE FROM FORBESLegendary Investor Warns Bitcoin Ban ‘Likely’ As Price Suddenly Soars Toward $60,000By Billy Bambrough

The bitcoin community is, meanwhile, feeling flush after bitcoin’s sensational 2021 run.

“After a stellar performance in the first quarter that saw the king of crypto record an all-time high of $61,700, bitcoin enters April leading a seemingly buoyant cryptocurrency market,” Paolo Ardoino, the chief technology officer at British Virgin Islands-based bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, said in emailed comments, pointing to PayPal’s announcment this week it will soon let users spend bitcoin and a handful of other cryptocurrencies at its 29 million merchants worldwide.

“As PayPal’s recent announcement demonstrates, the inherent volatility of digital tokens is no barrier to their increasing use in payments. This rally could possibly herald bitcoin’s first meaningful encroachments into the legacy financial system and credit card industry.”

Source

Tagged : / / / /

XRP Is Worth More Today Than Before SEC Lawsuit Against Ripple

by Decrypt

In brief

  • The price of XRP is up 170% since the start of the year.

  • Investors may think the SEC’s case against Ripple won’t amount to much.

Usually, legal troubles are bad news for stock prices and crypto assets. XRP, the native asset of the Ripple payments platform, is proving to be an exception.

After rising over 5% in the last day, the price of an XRP token is now $0.60, and the market cap is $27.9 billion, according to data from Nomics. That’s higher than where the price was before the SEC filed a $1.3 billion lawsuit against Ripple Labs. On December 18, 2020, four days before the suit, XRP was worth $0.58 with a market cap under $27 billion.

It’s been a remarkable turnaround for the token, which dipped as low as $0.17 after the SEC brought the lawsuit. The SEC says that Ripple Labs, co-founder and executive chairman Chris Larsen, and co-founder/CEO Brad Garlinghouse, are responsible for $1.3 billion in unregistered securities offerings—XRP being the unregistered security in question. 

Broadly speaking, a security is an investment contract that signifies a stake in a financial venture with the expectation of future profits. The SEC regulates securities sales in the US.

In the wake of the allegations, several exchanges and trading platforms—among them Coinbase, Binance.US, Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, and eToro—suspended XRP trading. Ripple has also suffered setbacks; its partnership with MoneyGram ended in March after the latter cited “uncertainty concerning their ongoing litigation.”

But Ripple and its leadership team have fought back against the charges. It’s asked the court to force the SEC to turn over documents regarding the agency’s examinations into Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have seemingly escaped the SEC’s scrutiny. The agency has been tight-lipped about its approach to evaluating crypto assets.

Those documents could include mention of XRP as a “virtual currency” rather than as a security, which could boost Ripple’s case. Or, armed with the agency’s criteria for determining which crypto assets are securities, Ripple could argue that it shares the characteristics of Bitcoin and Ether. 

XRP’s most recent price surge—the token briefly touched $0.60 in February before dipping to $0.41 two weeks later—may signal that investors believe the cryptocurrency, and the firm behind it, can survive the SEC’s case, especially after stablecoin issuer Tether escaped a years-long New York Attorney General’s Office investigation into financial fraud with an $18.5 million fine but no admission of guilt.

The coin’s price may also demonstrate that the crypto market overall is just really, really hot. However, it has increased in price at a faster clip than several other coins in the top 10. According to Nomics, XRP’s price has gone up 170% since the start of the year, outpacing Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Chainlink among the top 10 coins in market cap.

Source

Tagged : / / /

AU21 Capital Invests in XFai’s DEX Liquidity Oracle

by Dailyhodl

AU21 Capital, one of the most influential investment firms in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, has announced its investment in XFai, a decentralized oracle service provider. XFai has recently caught the attention of other major investors such as LD Capital and Rarestone Capital, and raised $3.8 million USD within 12 hours, an uncommon event in the context of private sales in the DeFi space.

The reason behind XFai’s recent streak of investments is its groundbreaking technology. Firms such as AU21, who are committed to “backing the most brilliant founders in blockchain,” have seen the potential in XFai to open a whole new ecosystem for small to mid-cap tokens. In total, this represents over $250 billion in crypto and DeFi projects that are not reaching their potential. A problem XFai could resolve.

These tokens usually fall prey to hidden mechanics in centralized exchanges and are unable to resort to decentralized alternatives due to low liquidity. This places them in an uncomfortable position where many of the projects fail for reasons that have nothing to do with their value proposition or technical feasibility causing investors to be locked into a downwards spiral

The XFai team has built a DEX Liquidity Oracle (DLO) that promises to level the DeFi playing field and help these projects. The DLO consists of a smart contract infrastructure that goes a step further than providing data feeds. It manages liquidity between centralized and decentralized exchanges to solve latent issues between the two and creates a more fertile ecosystem by permitting cross pollination. This allows “small cap token holders to earn token-denominated returns on autopilot,” according to XFai’s white paper.

AU21’s bet on XFai is a bet on the DLO’s potential to change the current paradigm in DeFi and create better market conditions, as the team’s outlook on the investment confirms.

“We are proud to announce our backing of XFai and their autonomous liquidity management solution for cryptocurrencies. The DEX Liquidity Oracle achieves several technological milestones in decentralized liquidity provision, and will serve to create a more efficient and accessible marketplace for digital assets.”

The firm is known for its foresight, having invested early in current industry leaders such as Binance, Huobi and Synthetix.  It was also one of the first investors in Polkadot and it serves as a member of the Polkadot Venture Network as well as the Polkadot DeFi Alliance.

The strategic investment in XFai comes just before the project’s launch of an innovative funding model that breaks away from the outdated Token Generation Event (TGE) and introduces the more transparent and efficient Liquidity Generation Event (LGE). The LGE is designed to protect investors from the high gas fees, failed transactions, slippage and impermanent loss that currently plagues the DeFi space. XFai’s LGE for the $XFIT token is set to take place on April 8.

This content is sponsored and should be regarded as promotional material. Opinions and statements expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of The Daily Hodl. The Daily Hodl is not a subsidiary of or owned by any ICOs, blockchain startups or companies that advertise on our platform. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in any ICOs, blockchain startups or cryptocurrencies. Please be advised that your investments are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility.

Follow Us on Twitter Facebook Telegram

 

Source

Tagged : / /

‘Wild west’ as developers MacGyver highly popular NFTs on Cardano

by Cointelegraph

Despite not yet having functional smart contracts on the layer-one, intrepid Cardano developers have recently hacked together methods to mint bootleg nonfungible tokens. These experiments in hosting unique data on the blockchain are reminiscent of the pre ERC-721 standard era for Ethereum — and, what’s more, so far they’ve proven to be enormously popular with token drops routinely selling out. 

In a post on Reddit today, ADA Technology Management (ATM), a staking pool operator for Cardano, revealed what they claimed to be two NFT images they’d minted on the chain. In the thread the company said they were planning to offer NFT minting as a service to pool delegators.

The so-called NFTs come with a number of caveats, however. Because Cardano doesn’t yet support smart contracts or have a NFT token standard, in order to create a NFT users mint a native token one-of-one native token.

“Tokens on Cardano are native and are on the same level as ADA. Instead of smart contracts, so called “minting policies” control the flow of a certain token group. NFTs are basically tokens on Cardano with a quantity of 1,” explained Alessandro, the self-described “brains” behind SpaceBudz, a Cardano-native collectibles project and the author of a Cardano Improvement Proposal to establish a Cardano NFT metadata standard.

Developers can then embed in the token metadata a link to an Arweave and/or InterPlanetary File System address where an image is stored. One example NFT shows that the “metadata” section of a mint transaction includes a link to a IPFS address which displays the associated SpaceBud. The end result is a wholly unique token permanently recorded and transferrable on the Cardano blockchain — a NFT by many, if not all, definitions. 

Thriving community

Despite the extra hoops developers have to jump through to create them, the NFTs have proven to be enormously popular with users. 

According to Alessandro, SpaceBudz sold out all 10,000 NFTs in just three days at a price of 50 ADA per, and there’s already an eager secondary market where especially rare SpaceBudz have sold for as high as $40,000.

Even before SpaceBudz, CardanoKidz was working on Cardano-native NFTs as early as August 2020. Multiple pre-sale rounds sold out “within hours of launch,” according to Zac, a member of the CardanoKidz marketing team. One Satoshi-inspired Kid sold for 32,000 ADA even before the tokens were minted, and the NFTs themselves went live in late March.

Zac credits tools like a community-developed token and minting policy tracker for helping to make developers’ lives easier. The official Cardano developers, IOHK, appear to be embracing the new vertical as well, as lead engineer Polina Vinogravoda gave a quick tutorial on minting NFTs on the chain on Tuesday. 

A host of other projects round out the upstart ecosystem, including CryptoPunk-inspired CardanoBits, and minting platform CNFT. While still rudimentary, the NFTs on Cardano are cheaper than those on Ethereum as well: minting a native token costs roughly 2 ADA, or $2.50.

While the developers working in this nascent community have managed so far, ultimately they’re excited for smart contracts to make their lives easier.

“We can’t wait for smart contracts to arrive for more functionality but we had JUST enough tools and experience to make NFTs work on Cardano,” said Zac. “It’s been an incredible journey so far.”