Tag: Bitcoin Exchanges

Amber To Launch In 44 States Across The U.S.

by Bitcoin Magazine

Australian-based bitcoin exchange Amber is set for its U.S. launch in 44 states via a public beta release.

Amber, the Australian-based Bitcoin accumulation app that has spawned an entire generation of Dollar Cost Average (DCA) products around the world, has announced its launch in the United States, per a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine.

“We decided to get the app rolled out in stages, so the first few releases in the US won’t have all the functionality we have back home in Australia, but it’s a start,” said Amber CEO and Founder Aleks Svetski. “We want to get the product in people’s hands so we can better prioritize what people want to see us build next.”

The app is currently in private beta for both iOS and Android, with plans to move to a public beta this upcoming October. Customers will have access to Amber Basic and also the option of their premium service, Amber Black, which offers users to stack as much bitcoin as they want with no fees. The app will be live across 44 states once the beta goes public.

Following the U.S. launch, the company is aiming to expand in the emerging markets in Latin and South America. The vision Amber has for the app is to become an all in one “super app” where users can have access to purchasing power in the form of fiat, earn bitcoin and shop inside the app, all without ever having to sell their bitcoin.

Svetski explained: “Bitcoin companies are not just the future of finance, but the future of freedom technology. Just like Bitcoin ‘breaks all the models,’ Bitcoin businesses will break all the legacy businesses across verticals as diverse as social networking, investing, saving, communications, gaming, commerce, transport and you name it.”

Amber boasts investors such as Fulgur Ventures, Morgan Creek Digital and a major Australian university. They recently closed more funding from lead investor Fundamental Labs and are launching a short campaign on BnkToTheFuture this week that will let people invest in the company and get exposure to its upside.

You can find Amber on Twitter: @TheAmberApp

You can also find out more about their BnkToTheFuture campaign at:

https://app.bnktothefuture.com/pitches/amber

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Bitcoin Exchange Huobi To Retire Existing Mainland China Users

by Bitcoin Magazine

The company said that its platform would not be serving any user from China by the end of the year.

  • Huobi said in a statement that it is not accepting registration of new accounts for Mainland China users.

  • Existing accounts from users in that region will be gradually phased out by December 31, 2021.

  • Huobi said it would “ensure the safety of users’ assets,” but it hasn’t detailed its plans for acting on that promise.

  • The move comes after China instituted a renewed ban on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies last week.

Bitcoin exchange Huobi will gradually retire existing users in Mainland China and has already ceased account registration for people interested in the firm’s services who live in that region, the company said in a statement on September 26.

Huobi said it no longer opens accounts for users in Mainland China, effective September 24, 2021. The company shared on its website that the move is an effort “to comply with local laws and regulations.”

However, existing user accounts in the region will be gradually retired by December 31, 2021, Huobi said. Per the statement, the bitcoin exchange will “inform users on the specific arrangements and details through official announcements, emails, text messages,” or other mediums.

The announcement comes after news surfaced last week that China was acting on a renewed ban on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, a move the communist-led country has been trying to enforce since 2013, to no avail.

As regulated, centralized bitcoin exchanges are forced out of China, users are set to seek alternatives. Since an actual ban on Bitcoin is impossible to enforce, the move will likely strengthen alternative markets given the currency’s peer-to-peer (P2P) nature.

Earlier this year, the Nigerian government placed similar restrictions in the country where it banned regulated institutions from dealing with bitcoin. The result, however, was a steep increase in P2P trading volume in the country, which has been climbing ever since.

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Swiss Bitcoin Startup Relai Builds Proprietary Broker

by Bitcoin Magazine

The investment app has become a regulated Virtual Asset Service Provider, allowing it to provide BTC brokerage services in Europe.

Bitcoin investing app Relai has become a regulated Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) in Switzerland, allowing it to provide bitcoin brokerage services to customers in the country and Europe, according to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine. The startup, now a partner of the Financial Services Standard Association (VQF), will be able to provide more efficient order processing and cease reliance on third-party exchanges.

“We are excited to be one of the few Swiss bitcoin startups who are members of VQF, allowing us to build Europe’s leading bitcoin brokerage platform,” said Julian Liniger, co-founder and CEO at Relai. “With our own broker, we will be able to set competitive fees, increase order efficiency, and build new products and services for our users.”

Relai acquired the VQF membership to build an in-house brokerage platform, no longer needing to outsource trade execution. Now, the firm will be able to provide customers with the direct exchange of euros and Swiss francs for bitcoin and vice versa, ceasing reliance on third-party businesses.

The Swiss startup provides customers in Europe with instant access to bitcoin purchasing and selling services without creating an account or submitting personal information. Relai doesn’t require registration, and customers don’t have to endure verification processes or extensive document requirements.

Under the previous model, however, Relai customers were limited to purchasing approximately $1,100 per day and $110,000 per year. But since becoming a VASP in Switzerland, the company can now enable more significant purchases, which would require more personal information to be submitted by users.

The news comes to fulfill Relai’s plans first set out in June. That month, the company raised $2.7 million in a Series A round, which it said would fund projects to build a proprietary broker. Other objectives shared by the company include obtaining a financial intermediary license and providing new offerings for investors looking to buy large amounts of bitcoin.

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Paxful Integrates The Bitcoin Lightning Network

by Bitcoin Magazine

The peer-to-peer bitcoin trading platform will now enable its over seven million users to cheaply and quickly transact BTC.

Peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange Paxful announced that its platform has fully integrated the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s second-layer scaling solution. The firm, one of the leading peer-to-peer trading platforms worldwide, will now allow its more than seven million users to transact bitcoin across the globe more quickly and cheaply.

“Bitcoin is hands down the best financial option for the people who really drive economies forward,” said Ray Youssef, Paxful’s co-founder and CEO, in the announcement. “But in order for it to succeed and usher in global adoption, we need to overcome the issue of scale. The industry’s greatest chance of Bitcoin scalability is through Lightning, which makes micropayments exceedingly cheaper and faster.”

Lightning enables cheap and fast bitcoin transactions by leveraging smart contracts to abstract small and frequent payments away from the Bitcoin network base layer. That abstraction occurs in the form of payment channels, in which users connect by jointly creating 2-of-2 multisig addresses, which they can then use indefinitely to transfer funds to one another. But even though only transactions that either open or close a Lightning channel get recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, all Lightning transactions abide by the Bitcoin protocol rules.

Indeed, Lightning has already been empowering people worldwide to enjoy true financial freedom and sovereignty. Since bitcoin became an official legal tender in El Salvador on September 7, people have been able to buy coffee, breakfast, and lunch there with BTC through the Lightning Network. The layer-2 solution empowers Bitcoin to fulfill its potential and become a widely accepted medium for transacting value.

“At its core, Bitcoin was envisioned as a means of exchange,” said Artur Schaback, the peer-to-peer platform’s COO and co-founder, per the announcement. “Paxful’s seven million users now have another option to transact micropayments — one that is cheaper and faster than the traditional Bitcoin network.”

Paxful’s Lightning onboarding was assisted by Lightning Labs, an open-source software company dedicated to the Lightning Network. Their CEO and co-founder, Elizabeth Stark, said the integration “is a huge step forward” in bringing bitcoin to billions of people. Stark later added that her company is “excited to onboard millions of Paxful users who can now send instant, global, low fee transactions with Lightning.”

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Binance Implements Mandatory Identity Verification For All Users

by Bitcoin Magazine

The bitcoin exchange now requires all users to upload an ID, a selfie, and undergo facial verification, dismissing possible downsides.

Bitcoin exchange Binance has announced changes on its account verification policies, implementing mandatory, hardened know-your-customer (KYC) procedures for all users. Effective immediately, all new users will be required to provide additional personably identifiable information (PII) to access Binance services such as deposits, trades, and withdrawals. Existing users will lose access to most services except withdrawal until they provide the necessary PII.

The new requirements entail that, from now on, all Binance users be required to endure a more extensive identity verification process, called “Intermediate Verification,” on the platform. The starter verification status, “Basic Verification,” which required a user’s full name, nationality, date of birth, and home address, has gone defunct. Now, to trade BTC or other cryptocurrencies on Binance, users have to go beyond the basic verification and upload photos of a government-issued identification card and a selfie, as well as undergo live face verification. All data will be sent to the exchange’s servers and staff, who will personally review and either approve or deny it.

“Binance is announcing these measures to help support its efforts in Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML),” the statement said, citing “enhanced user protection” and the need to “combat financial crime” as motives underlying the changes.

Even though some of the alleged reasons behind KYC seem legit – to prevent criminal financial activity and terrorism – the long-term effectiveness and downstream consequences of these tactics are rarely discussed. Instead, proponents of offensive tactics worldwide hold KYC/AML as the holy grail to combat crimes, even though it often doesn’t deliver and end up increasing the attack surface for every single individual.

Moreover, it is reasonable to believe that criminals can adapt to and circumvent KYC procedures entirely in the short term. As processes adapt to encompass more use cases and more illicit activities, so do bad actors, turning it into a cat-and-mouse game of much-reduced effectiveness. But more importantly, in the long run, extensive KYC ends up providing supercharged surveillance powers to future government leaders who may use that power and information as they wish – without user consent. Additionally, centralized data centers often get hacked, compromising user data and further increasing attack vectors.

Mainstream narratives don’t allow the downsides of KYC to be discussed, leaving an open floor to any regulation that could supposedly benefit society at large at the expense of individual rights. However, that often fails to be achieved and can harm the individual and their commonly neglected right to privacy. In a regulatory environment that is hardly ever openly discussed, those who value individual human rights are seen as “the screeching voice of the minority.” And as the individual gets obliged to pay ever more expensive personal costs to the alleged welfare of the whole, both the person and the people lose.

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A Look Back At July’s Bitcoin Market

by Bitcoin Magazine

A look at the supply changes, exchange activity, futures trading and more indicators of July’s bitcoin market.

The below is an excerpt from the monthly recap by the Deep Dive, Bitcoin Magazine‘s premium markets newsletter. To be among the first to receive these insights and other on-chain bitcoin market analysis straight to your inbox, subscribe now.

Supply Reaccumulation

The overarching trend in Bitcoin since the start of 2020, but more broadly, over the course of Bitcoin’s history, has been an increasing amount of the network’s verifiably scarce supply becoming illiquid.

The hoarding of supply, or as bitcoiners call it, “hodling,” creates a virtuous cycle of adoption, as an ever growing number of proponents/adopters are competing to acquire an ever shrinking free float of supply, which in turn attracts more curious individuals to learn about bitcoin and the attributes which make it objectively the best monetary asset humanity has ever seen.

This broad trend of growing illiquid supply causes what some bitcoiners refer to as “number go up” technology, which is a great simplification of what bitcoin has done historically better than any other asset — accruing additional value, in exponential waves of adoption and price appreciation.

With an absolutely scarce supply, and an ever-increasing pool of network participants, betting on bitcoin to stop its trend of exponentially increasing in value over time is extremely unwise, even if growth on a percentage basis is less explosive than it was during the network’s early days.

Illiquid Supply

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Read here for more information on the classification between liquid and illiquid supply.

As July arrived, a sudden and sharp increase in previously illiquid supply becoming liquid helped to send the price spiraling downwards as sentiment quickly changed and over-leveraged speculators sold positions at a loss, or were liquidated entirely.

Our views have stayed unchanged since the middle of May, that a deviation from the broad trend of illiquid supply increasing (thus more dollars changing for the marginal unit of bitcoin) does not mark the conclusion of the trend, but instead a momentary pause while coins are reaccumulated from weak hands.

Liquid Supply Change

One of the hardest things for many market participants to understand about bitcoin is that price does not go up on good news; price goes up when the marginal seller has been exhausted, which may or may not be influenced by the news cycle. It is the first point however that is fundamentally important to understand.

In a global market that has some liquidity in every technologically-able market on the planet, price is entirely set by the marginal buyer and seller; and against an ever-growing passive daily buyer base, the marginal seller is very often the driver of price.

This is why looking at illiquid supply can provide value to investors looking to visualize changes in trend and holder behavior.

On May 18, the previous 30 days saw 248,529 bitcoin re-enter the liquid supply, as 2021 investors capitulated for historic levels of realized losses on-chain in May and June. On July 6, we said the following regarding the on-chain reaccumulation that was taking place:

“When a breakout comes, it seems extremely likely to come on the upside, as strong-handed hodlers have once again begun to aggressively accumulate.” – The Daily Dive #016 – Price Consolidation Continues 

The price has since rallied approximately 20% and we expect further momentum to the upside over the course of the third and fourth quarters of 2021.

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Highly correlated to changes in liquid/illiquid supply is the aggregate bitcoin balances across exchanges. While not every buy/sell goes through an exchange (i.e., settlement between two counterparties directly on-chain for goods/services), the BTC/USD exchange rate is set by spot bitcoin demand for bitcoin across various exchanges.

WIth the sharp increase in liquid supply during the month of May came a corresponding increase to bitcoin balances across exchanges.

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Large Pockets Are Aggressively Accumulating Bitcoin

by Bitcoin Magazine

On-chain data shows that large-pocketed investors have begun to aggressively accumulate bitcoin.

The below is a recent edition of the Deep Dive, Bitcoin Magazine‘s premium markets newsletter. To be among the first to receive these insights and other on-chain bitcoin market analysis straight to your inbox, subscribe now.

Big Money Making Moves

On-chain data has started to show that large-pocketed investors have begun to aggressively accumulate bitcoin.

OTC Desk Outflows

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Looking at the seven-day moving average of OTC Desk Outflows, over the course of 2021 there has been a pretty strong correlation between spikes in outflows and local bitcoin bottoms. This can be attributed to the fact that institutions and big money do not like buying an asset that is being heavily bid, as these players may even be able to move the market themselves if they are impatient.

Thus, when the price falls meaningfully, these players rush in to accumulate at a discount. That is exactly what we have seen over the last week, and the price has responded with eight straight days of higher closes.

Exchange Balances 

Disclaimer: With exchange balance data, it is possible that that is an internal move that is mislabeled and subject to further change.

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Once again, it is possible over the short term that the data is a mislabeled internal transfer, but it is very likely that this is not the case.

If correct, more than 60,000 BTC has been transferred off exchanges over the last 24 hours. A truly staggering amount, this would mean that massive institutional buyers are in the water and actively accumulating.

The daily net outflow from exchanges would be by far the largest seen since the start of 2020, and you would have to go all the way back to May of 2016 to see one of larger size.

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Largest Exchange In Latin America, Mercado Bitcoin, Raises $200 Million From SoftBank

by Bitcoin Magazine

Major Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin has raised $200 million from SoftBank and will seek to increase offerings and penetrate new markets.

The biggest bitcoin exchange in Latin America, Mercado Bitcoin, has raised $200 million from SoftBank as announced by its parent company 2TM Group. The fundraising is the most significant series B round in the history of Latin America and values 2TM at $2.1 billion — now the eighth biggest unicorn startup there.

“Millions of people around the world are realizing that digital assets and cryptocurrencies are both innovative technologies and efficient stores of value — Brazil is no exception to that trend,” said Roberto Dagnoni, executive chairman and CEO of 2TM Group, in the announcement. “This series B round will afford us to continue investing in our infrastructure, enabling us to scale up and meet the soaring demand for the blockchain-based financial market.”

Mercado Bitcoin plans to use the round’s proceeds, representing SoftBank’s most prominent investment in a cryptocurrency company in Latin America, to increase its scale, expand its offerings and invest in infrastructure to meet demand. The company also plans to penetrate other South American markets such as Chile and Argentina.

Brazil has seen greater involvement in bitcoin trading than it has in traditional securities for a few years now. And according to the announcement, Mercado Bitcoin has processed almost $5 billion in transaction volume in the first five months of 2021 with a client base of 2.8 million — compared to a total of 3.7 million individual investors on the country’s stock exchange.

Marcelo Claure, CEO of SoftBank Group International, also commented on the series B round, saying that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have “incredible potential in Latin America,” and later adding that SoftBank is “excited to take part in this incredible journey” with 2TM.

The Brazilian bitcoin exchange, founded in 2013, raised this latest investment just five months after its series A round in January 2021. The company’s first round was co-led by G2D/GP Investments and Parallax Ventures and advised by J.P. Morgan. Other firms that also participated in that round include HS Investimentos and Gear Ventures.

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Judge Rejects Class Certification In Lawsuit Over Mt. Gox Hack

by Bitcoin Magazine

In the latest legal development around victim attempts to recover funds from bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, a judge denied class certification.

In the latest legal development around the 2014 hack of Mt. Gox, perhaps the most notorious bitcoin exchange event in history, a federal judge in the U.S. has rejected a bid for class certification from victims.

“An Illinois federal judge … rejected a bid for class certification from customers of defunct Japanese bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, saying it’s not reasonable to conclude that 30,000 putative class members shared the lead plaintiff’s interpretations of Mt. Gox’s terms of use or even read them,” Law360 reported.

In order to move forward with claims against Mt. Gox through a class action lawsuit, a judge first has to certify the class, determining that all individual members are similar enough to litigate against the defendant as part of a single case.

The lead plaintiff in a $400 million case, Gregory Greene, has argued that Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles misconstrued the exchange’s terms of use through the drafting and dissemination of them. But in this recent ruling, judge Gary Feinerman determined that the many victims of the hack could not have equally read or learned from these terms, and therefore should not be able to sue as a single class.

Feinerman instead handed a win to “Karpeles, who has argued that a compensation plan in Japan would better serve the proposed class members than litigation in the United States,” per Law360.

The Mt. Gox hack remains the largest compromised bitcoin exchange event in history by a wide margin, with some 850,000 bitcoin stolen. Victims have been attempting to recover funds through litigation for years, including via the State of California in 2019 and Tokyo District Court in 2020

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BTC-Only Exchange Bitcoin Reserve Launches Across Europe

by Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin-only exchange Bitcoin Reserve has launched for users throughout Europe, offering retail and institutional stacking options.

According to a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine, Bitcoin Reserve, an Estonia-based, bitcoin-only brokerage, has officially launched all of its services for clients throughout Europe.

With this launch, it appears that Bitcoin Reserve will become the first bitcoin-only exchange that is accessible to all European residents, according to a list on Bitcoin.org. Rather than present users with an abundance of other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Reserve will now allow all new European users to strictly focus on accumulating bitcoin.

The brokerage provides two core services for users. The first, known as Flash, enables users to immediately buy and sell bitcoin with limits of up to about $60,000 (€50,000). This service could be an avenue for users to purchase small amounts of bitcoin at regular intervals, effectively euro-cost averaging their investment and hedging against some of BTC’s volatility.

Paired with this, Bitcoin Reserve’s Concierge service offers the option to buy and sell bitcoin in amounts over that roughly $60,000 cap (€50,000).

“Bitcoin is the future reserve currency of the world, but the onramps into the ecosystem are decidedly cumbersome,” said Bitcoin Reserve Founder Nik Oraevskiy, in the release. “As more people turn away from an increasingly bankrupt economic system, Bitcoin Reserve will be there to help anyone to take charge of their financial future.”

Bitcoin Reserve’s launch across Europe is a significant development in the space as it gives retail investors there and option to be onboarded onto a bitcoin-only exchange with relatively high buying limits. Simultaneously, Bitcoin Reserve allows institutions in Europe to work with a bitcoin-focused company to acquire BTC. 

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Bitcoin (BTC) $ 26,272.04 0.41%
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