Day: April 9, 2021

Several Cloud Storage Crypto Assets Are Set To Go Parabolic, Says Trader Elliot Wainman

by Dailyhodl

Cryptocurrency trader Elliot Wainman believes the native tokens of decentralized storage network protocols are set to go parabolic.

Wainman cites the recent rise of Filecoin (FIL) as an example. He says the coin’s resurgence appears to be largely driven by Chinese crypto market participants, and is set to continue.

“[Filecoin’s rally] is all being driven by the fact that major Chinese officials have started to actively encourage Filecoin mining…”

The trader points to Siacoin (SC) and BitTorrent (BTT) as additional cloud storage platforms that are picking up steam.

“[Filecoin’s rally is] having ripple effects throughout the entire cryptocurrency world. We’ve also seen huge pumps in storage coin Siacoin which is up almost [200%] over the last month.”

Wainman points out that mining Filecoin requires participants to own the cryptocurrency.

“…the actual tokenomics behind Filecoin require people to buy Filecoin to mine Filecoins. You can’t just mine it like a Bitcoin by buying an ASIC – Application Specific Integrated Circuit…

That is a phenomenal tokenomics structure for Filecoin holders. And essentially this is leading to an explosive and parabolic snowball effect here for Filecoin mining and Filecoin purchasing.”

The YouTuber adds that China’s reasons for supporting Filecoin include a drive to reduce over-reliance on the Western dominated internet infrastructure.

“[Filecoin’s] decentralized cloud storage purpose fits into China’s agenda to build out its own internet infrastructure as a defense mechanism against the tech cold war. This is what’s going on with the American and China rivalry with tech.

Apparently, China sees decentralized storage as a key to essentially guarding against internet infrastructure that has more or less been dominated by western influences like Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google… almost all of these, except for Alibaba and all of their infrastructure. It’s mostly a western game here with the internet infrastructure.”

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Meitu now Holds $100 Million in BTC and Ether after Latest Bitcoin Purchase

by Btcmanager

Hong Kong app-production firm Meitu has revealed that it holds $100 million worth of cryptocurrencies in its portfolio. This was revealed in a disclosure filing on Thursday with the Hong Kong Stock exchange. 

$100 million worth of Crypto-assets

Meitu reached the $100 million crypto-asset mark following its latest purchase of 175 bitcoins worth $10 million this week. This milestone was achieved over a series of three purchases within the space of a month. 

On March 5 the company bought 379 bitcoins and 15,000 Ether. It subsequently expanded its portfolio by purchasing 16,000 Ether and 386 bitcoin on March 17 before its latest purchase on Thursday. In total, Meitu holds 31,000 ETH and 940 BTC in its portfolio. 

 In the filing report, Meitu revealed that investing in cryptocurrencies is part of the Group’s plans to diversify its portfolio. The company further stated that Bitcoin was an effective hedge against the depreciation of fiat currencies and was an excellent store of value. 

 “The Board believes cryptocurrencies have ample room for appreciation in value and by allocating part of its treasury in cryptocurrencies can also serve as a diversification to holding cash in treasury management,” it noted in the filing.

This development from Meitu is remarkable given that the company only announced a concrete policy to acquire crypto assets in March. It is understood that the app-maker intends to use some of the ETH in its holdings to launch decentralized applications in the future. 

More institutions to follow suit?

Meitu is also one of the few Chinese-based public corporations to add cryptocurrency to their balance sheet. China has a strict policy on cryptocurrencies and only Chinese companies listed outside mainland China can invest in cryptocurrencies. 

It will be interesting to see whether this policy changes as bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are becoming popular among institutions. Other publicly traded companies globally have started adding Bitcoin to their portfolio. 

Car manufacturing giant Tesla recently committed $1.5 billion towards purchasing bitcoin and subsequently revealed that it would be accepting payments in BTC. Twitter CEO also hinted that the social media giant could begin accepting bitcoins. The current market sentiment is high with Bitcoin and Ethereum recently surpassing all-time highs leading to expectations that more companies could add the assets to their portfolio. 

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Investors in Paragon’s $12 Million Cannabis Crypto ICO Will Finally Get Some Money Back

by Decrypt

In brief

  • Paragon aimed to use blockchain to help the cannabis industry function better.

  • The SEC called its ICO an unregistered securities sale.

  • Investors have been sidelined.

In April 2020, ParagonCoin went bust. The “decentralized solution for the cannabis industry,” which raised $12 million in a 2017 initial coin offering (ICO), said it would file for bankruptcy after being pursued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an unregistered securities sale.

The legal move—and the founders’ physical move to Eastern Europe—meant investors in the defunct project were left with little to show for their investment. 

Today, the SEC said it is beginning the process of distributing the $175,000 Paragon paid in civil penalties to aggrieved investors.

ParagonCoin was part of the ICO boom of 2017. That was the year Filecoin collected $257 million, Tezos received $232 million, and Polkadot garnered $145 million to build new blockchains. By comparison, Paragon took in a relatively modest $12,066,000 worth of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies in exchange for its native PRG token as part of a presale and crowdsale that ended on October 15, 2017.

Paragon, started by Jessica VerSteeg and her husband Egor Lavrov, promised to use blockchain to bring greater transparency to an under-regulated industry while also creating a workaround for cannabis businesses that can’t access traditional banking services. Most dispensaries can’t accept credit or debit cards directly due to federal regulations, a problem Nevada politicians, for example, are also working to solve.

But things quickly went south for Paragon, which employed an aggressive marketing strategy that seemed to catch the SEC’s attention in all the wrong ways. In late 2018, it became one of the first crypto startups to receive an SEC enforcement action stemming from its ICO.

Paragon settled with the SEC, agreeing to return investors’ funds, pay a $250,000 fine, and register PRG as a security. 

In March 2019, it filed paperwork with the SEC registering PRG as a security. However, after claiming a net loss in 2018 of $11 million—tied not only to administrative expenses from its SEC battle but also to questionable expenditures such as $463,000 to Lavrov for marketing services—the company was unable to return investors’ funds and only managed to send the SEC $175,000 of the $250,000 penalty it had promised.

By late 2019, as investors began suing for their missing money, Lavrov and VerSteeg, who finished in 9th in Season 28 of global competition The Amazing Race with her teammate, were frequenting Europe. They can be seen in a July 2019 post on Instagram, apparently in Ukraine (Lavrov is a Russian citizen). After that, VerSteeg–a former model with an A+ social media game, all but stopped posting.

In April 2020, Paragon made it official, announcing via its website that it was filing for bankruptcy.

“We never considered ourselves experts in the matter of US securities, therefore we sought out the guidance of highly recommended lawyers that were supposed to help, unfortunately they misguided and failed us,” the homepage reads. “We did our best to launch the product, but most of our resources were allocated to legal battles and compliance requirements.”

Today’s action by the SEC moves the $175,000 Paragon paid from the US Treasury to a “fair fund,” which the SEC uses to pay back investors or return profits. A civil suit is ongoing.

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SingularityNET (AGI) rallies 1,000% as industries aim to merge AI with blockchain

by Cointelegraph

The internet has reshaped society over the past 40 years and experts are predicting that digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to transform how humans interact with data for the foreseeable future.

One AI-focused cryptocurrency project that has seen tremendous growth since the beginning of 2021 is SingularityNET (AGI) and its talented humanoid robot named Sophia.

AI developers can utilize the SingularityNET platform to create, share, and monetize their services through its AI marketplace, which allows users to browse, test and purchase those services using the native AGI token.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that the price of AGI rose by nearly 1,000% in 2021, increasing from a low of $0.046 on Jan. 1 to a high at $0.50 on April 6, its highest level since February 2018.

AGI/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

Three reasons for AGI’s impressive rally over the past few months are the growth of its cross-chain collaboration with Cardano (ADA), its entrance into the decentralized finance (DeFi) arena and the release of the SingularityNET Layer 2 (SL2) which enables the creation of tokens on top of the AGI platform.

DeFi and the SingularityDAO

DeFi has emerged as a potent source of growth for the cryptocurrency ecosystem since the sector exploded gained traction in June 2020 when projects like Uniswap and Yearn.finance began to reshape the industry.

SingularityDAO was first revealed in November 2020 with the mission of facilitating the growth and funding for early and mid-stage blockchain projects by “leveraging AI and well-designed tokenomics to create radically more liquidity for the corresponding tokens,” according to the project’s website.

This DeFi-related activity along with offering the ability for AGI holders to participate in platform governance, network security and earn a yield through staking helped the token rally throughout January and February 2020.

Sophia the robot also captured some of the nonfungible token (NFT) hype for AGI in March after becoming the world’s first artificially intelligent being to create nonfungible token-based artworks and the products generating more than $1 million in sales during her debut NFT drop on Nifty Gateway.

AGI ecosystem expands via Cardano

The second source of growth for AGI and the ecosystem has been its partnership with Cardano and IOHK, the company backing the development and expansion of the Cardano network.

Developers at SingularityNET recently revealed plans to create a new AGI token on the Cardano platform which informally has been called AGI-ADA. This will allow tokens to be swapped back and forth with its AGI ERC-20 counterpart while maintaining the same value.

The SingularityNET Marketplace on Cardano will utilize the protocol’s Plutus smart contract language to introduce a host of new features, including the integration of AI-DSL, “a new domain-specific language that lets AI agents on the network efficiently and formally describe their properties to each other.”

To move ahead with the phase 2 expansion and collaboration with Cardano, a majority of AGI token holders needed to vote on and approve the expansion which included a motion for the creation and release of 1 billion new AGI-ADA tokens in monthly increments that will take 91 years.

The voting period lasted from February 3 to February 7 with the community ultimately approving the implementation of phase 2.

Layer 2 functionality could drive AGI price higher

The introduction of SingularityNET Layer 2 is the third factor behind AGI’s growth in 2021. Its integration enables the creation of secondary agent networks on top of the SingularityNET network.

One of the major challenges facing the Ethereum network and tokens operate on it are high transaction costs and network congestion that leads to lengthy confirmation times.

By building on SL2, networks could create their own tokens which will require a small fee in AGI to conduct transactions at a rate which is much cheaper than Ethereum gas fees.

Several popular projects on the network are already slated to become the first SL2 projects, such as SingularityDAO and NuNet, with newer projects including the Awakening.Health nursing assistant robots and the SophiaDAO benevolent robotics AI network which is also in line for integration.

According to the SingularityNET Foundation, these projects are just a way to get the SL2 “off to a running start,” with the organization aiming to “stimulate the creation of a variety of amazing third-party SL2 projects” that grow their communities and build software that helps “drive AGI token utilization in the underlying SingularityNET network.”

SingularityNET’s focus on artificial intelligence and big data has the project well-positioned to see further growth, especially as cross-chain connectivity, DeFi integration and layer 2 functionalities merge with the AGI ecosystem.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.