Huobi to Delist Monero and Privacy Tokens on Regulatory Account

Huobi Global has unveiled its plans to delist privacy tokens, counting Monero (XMR), Dash (DSH), Decred (DCR), Firo (FIRO), Verge (XVG), Zcash (ZEC) and Horizen (ZEN) as the digital assets that will be affected.

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The delisting process starts today as all deposit support for the cryptocurrencies has been halted. Huobi said its users who still have some funds in any of these digital assets would have up to September 19 to liquidate their positions into their spot wallets.

According to the exchange, any user who did not exit their respective trade position by then will see the trades automatically closed for them by the Huobi and credited into their spot wallet.

The delisting of these privacy coins can be attributed to mounting regulatory pressures and the failure of the coins to comply with their internal compliance policies. Effectively, the delisting of these tokens is supported by the exchange’s Token Management Rules of which Article 17(16) provides for delisting if “The token is a privacy token, does not support offline signatures, or its node source codes are not open-sourced”.

While Huobi, one of the major global digital currency trading platforms, did not ascertain whether the crackdown moves on the privacy coins were based on its compliance efforts from a request from a regulatory body in the regions it currently plies its trade, the firm sure wants to stay on the good books of these market watchdogs.

Huobi has faced some backlash from some regulators in the past year and has been asked to move its business away from Thailand. Despite this, the exchange has been making targeted efforts to enter the US market, with its subsidiary receiving the Money Service Business license from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as reported by Blockchain.News back in July.

With the scrutiny on privacy coins building up, Huobi believes it’s high time it delisted the coins.

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Monero (XMR) Readies For A Breakout As It Touches Important Milestone

Privacy coin Monero (XMR) usually spends its time in the shadows, which is exactly the way its community likes it. Till date, it is still impossible to penetrate the privacy that the digital asset offers, making it the go-to choice for investors who are trying to keep their crypto transactions and holdings a secret. Recently though, the cryptocurrency is breaking out onto the radars of more investors as it shatters an important milestone.

As more crypto users are discovering their transactions are not as hidden as they might have thought, they are moving towards coins like Monero that offers the privacy they desire. This has seen the number of users rise on the blockchain and total transactions carried out has soared, more than doubling in just the first quarter of 2022.

Monero (XMR) Surpasses 20 Million Transactions

Monero is no doubt the leading privacy coin in the crypto space and it has once again proven this with its recent milestone. The coin seems to have exploded in popularity in just the first two months of 2022 as the number of transactions carried out has doubled from 2021. Last year, the number of transactions recorded was sitting at 8.65 million. With less than two months into the new year, the volume of transactions tells a new story.

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Growing almost 150% in just a matter of months, the number of Monero transactions has crossed 20 million. Data from Blockchair shows that there have been a total of 2,554,175 blocks mined over the lifetime of the privacy digital asset, landing on more than 20,023,000 transactions carried out in the same time period.

This number is important for a digital asset like Monero whose sole utility is being untraceable. It spells more usage from crypto users as they move towards keeping their crypto footprints hidden. It also points towards more adoption of the coin, and as the market rises out of the ashes of the last burn, it may mean significant growth for the digital asset in relation to price.

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Growing With The Market

Like most cryptocurrencies, the price of Monero (XMR) had suffered when the market had crashed. This saw the cryptocurrency crashing from its high of almost $525 to the low $140, around which its value has trended for the past week. However, with the recent market recovery going into last weekend, Monero has followed along and has posted a recovery, up 16% in the past 24 hours alone.

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This does not mean that the digital asset is out of the woods though. Sentiments around the cryptocurrency continues to skew greatly in the bearish territory, and sell signals continue to overpower the asset. According to data from Barchat, Monero’s sell indicators have taken hold with 88% pointing towards sell. The 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day MACD Oscillator also point towards sell.

Monero (XMR) price chart from TradingView.com

XMR recovers to $176 | Source: XMRUSD on TradingView.com

On the short term though, the 20-day moving average has turned towards buy. Coupled with the increased adoption and growing volume recorded, this trend is expected to continue and drive the price of the digital asset up in its wake. With a strong close above $180 by end of day, next significant support will be at $200, at which point, bulls will be able to sink their claws firmly into the asset.

Featured image from CoinJournal, chart from TradingView.com

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Zcash Likely Bound for Brief Correction After 80% Gains

Key Takeaways

  • Zcash has risen by more than 80% over the last five days to hit $265, its highest price since May.
  • The bullish impulse was likely fueled by news that the network will transition to proof-of-stake.
  • ZEC could now be bound for a spike in profit-taking before the uptrend resumes.




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Zcash made headlines last week after developers announced the network would move from proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Although the transition may take up to three years to complete, ZEC has gained significant bullish momentum in the wake of the announcement. 

Zcash Is Back in the Green

Zcash is soaring after the development company behind it, Electric Coin Company (ECC), revealed plans to transition to a PoS consensus algorithm. 



In a recent blog post, ECC’s CEO Zooko Wilcox made the case in favor of switching the network to PoS. He highlighted the need to decrease the downward price pressure on ZEC from miners and increase the utility of the token. Wilcox argued that PoS would make Zcash “more decentralized, attack- and capture-resistant and egalitarian,” strengthen security, and improve performance. 

The transition to PoS could be “achievable within three years,” according to ECC. Still, cryptocurrency enthusiasts appear to have welcomed the news. Zcash has seen its market value surge by more than 80% since the announcement on Nov. 19, going from $146 on Nov. 18 to a recent high of $265 today. 


The privacy-coin could be bound for a brief correction before advancing further. The Tom DeMark (TD) Sequential indicator presented a sell signal on ZEC’s 4-hour chart as prices failed to overcome resistance. A spike in selling pressure around the current price levels could help validate the bearish formation, resulting in a retracement to the $227 support before the uptrend resumes. 

Zcash/US dollar price chart (Source: TradingView)

Given the rising optimism around Zcash, it would be prudent to watch out for a decisive 4-hour candlestick close above $262. Breaching such a crucial resistance area can boost investors’ confidence and extend the uptrend towards higher highs. ZEC could then surge towards $304 or even retest mid-May’s high of $373. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned BTC and ETH.

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Privacy Coin Zcash Weighing Proof-of-Stake Move

Key Takeaways

  • Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox wants to move Zcash to Proof-of-Stake.
  • The primary concern isn’t the environment, but greater security at a lower cost.
  • Wilcox believes the value proposition of privacy coins has never been greater than now.


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Zcash is considering moving away from the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm to the lighter, faster, and more eco-friendly Proof-of-Stake, Zooko Wilcox told Forbes. 

Zcash Founder Says Proof-of-Stake is Proven

Zcash may be ditching Proof-of-Work in favor of Proof-of-Stake.

The plan to change the privacy coin’s consensus algorithm comes more than two years after user rebekah93 first proposed the move in a Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) to the community. 


Proof-of-Stake is a mechanism used to secure blockchains. Unlike Proof-of-Work blockchains like Bitcoin, which rely on an energy-intensive mining process, Proof-of-Stake allows users to secure the network by staking crypto tokens rather than providing computational power. In Proof-of-Stake blockchains, validators are randomly selected to add new blocks to the chain instead of having miners compete to find the block’s hash fastest. Ethereum is planning a merge to Proof-of-Stake as part of its Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, and most newer blockchains that have launched in recent years use Proof-of-Stake over Proof-of-Work.

According to founder Zooko Wilcox, Zcash is starting to think about the potential transaction. He told Forbes that the consensus algorithm is now “proven” and has already been successfully implemented in a number of cryptocurrencies, including Cardano, Cosmos, Algorand, and Tezos.

While Wilcox acknowledged the environmental concerns surrounding Proof-of-Work, his primary motivations for the shift have more to do with the greater—to his belief—security and performance benefits Proof-of-Stake offers. He said:

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“I think Proof-of-Work has some security flaws, as has been demonstrated by the 51% attacks that have occurred (when a miner controls a majority of computing power on the network and can steal tokens). And I think Proof-of-Stake can provide a much more powerful kind of security and at a lower cost.”

His views on the security proposition of the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism are in line with Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin. Both argue that 51% attacks are much easier to recover from in Proof-of-Stake protocols because bad actors can quickly be identified, and the community can coordinate to slash the attacker’s funds in a “minority user-activated soft fork.” The same process requires a hard fork and is significantly harder to execute in Proof-of-Work-based systems.  

Since the Forbes interview, Wilcox has published a blog post via Electric Coin Company, the company that launched Zcash, titled “Should Zcash switch from Proof-of-Work to Proof of Stake?” In it, Wilcox presents several arguments of the supposed merits of the move, including improvements in security, energy efficiency, and decentralization.

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Signal Rumored to Be Creating Privacy Crypto Payment Feature

Privacy-centric messaging app Signal is reportedly working on modalities to introduce a crypto payment gateway for users on the platform. However, critics of the plan say the move could bring further regulatory heat on the company.

Signal May Tap Stellar-based MobileCoin Privacy Crypto

According to a report by popular technology newsletter Platformer, Signal is moving towards adding crypto payments as one of the features of its platform. As part of the report, author Casey Newton revealed that the messaging platform recently ran experiments on MobileCoin; a privacy-focused cryptocurrency developed on the Stellar blockchain.

Newton also highlighted the fact that Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike is a stakeholder in the MobileCoin project as further indications of a coming collaboration between both establishments. However, Marlinspike did not confirm if Signal was close to implementing MobileCoin on its platform, telling Platformer:

“If we did decide we wanted to put payments into Signal, we would try to think really carefully about how we did that. It’s hard to be totally hypothetical.”

In his report, Newton, however, stated that inside sources at the company as well as former employees say Signal has devoted resources to working on MobileCoin. Tweeting earlier in January, MobileCoin debunked insinuations that Signal was moving towards integrating its privacy crypto, stating:


“To be clear, MobileCoin is very much not Signal. We’re fans of their work but we are not them. Moxie advises us but Signal is a fiercely independent non-profit. We would love for them to use the tech we made but the choice is theirs and theirs alone.”

Meanwhile, there are indications of significant unrest within the Signal ranks due to the rumored crypto integration as well as a raft of other features under consideration. Some sections of the company reportedly believe that such moves would put Signal on the wrong side of government regulations.

Messaging Firms Mulling Digital Payments

Signal has experienced significant growth in recent times owing to negative reactions concerning WhatApp’s amended privacy policy. The reports of a crypto integration also put the messaging upstart among the ranks of other services looking to disrupt the digital payments niche.

Facebook’s Diem project, previously called Libra, is one of the more popular examples of this growing trend. However, negative responses from regulators across the world have forced Facebook and its collaborators to scale down their ambitions in a bid to smoothen regulatory wrinkles.


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Privacy Coins Monero, Dash, and Zcash to be Delisted on Bittrex, Dash Unhappy with Decision

Bittrex will be removing privacy coins Monero, Dash, and Zcash from its trading platform soon.

Dash privacy coin

The announcement explained that effective on January 15, 2021, Dash, Grin, Monero, and Zcash trading pairs will be removed from the platform. Although no further explanations have been given by the cryptocurrency exchange to justify the delisting, many have hypothesized that this may be a move to ensure that the trading platform is compliant with cryptocurrency regulations, such as know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) policies.

Bittrex may have opted to play on the safe side, with regulators increasingly seeking to investigate privacy coins and their involvement in cybercrime. Privacy coins have long been attractive to criminals for their ability to obfuscate transactions, the amount sent digitally, the wallet address, and the identity of both the sender and the receiver.

Dash bites back

Upon the announcement that Bittrex will delist it, Dash has however commented and claimed that its privacy coin was no more private than the biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, Bitcoin. Through its official account, Dash tweeted:

“From a technical standpoint, Dash’s privacy functionality is no greater than Bitcoin’s, making the label of ‘privacy coin’ a misnomer for Dash. We have reached out to @BittrexExchange to request a meeting with their compliance team. Hopefully this will be rectified soon.”

Crypto regulations in the US tightens

Bittrex’s decision to delist privacy coins comes at a time when the cryptocurrency industry has increasingly been scrutinized by lawmakers struggling to regulate such a budding and dynamic sector. The US Treasury Department has recently issued an announcement proposing new KYC guidelines for cryptocurrency transactions.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has suggested that unhosted wallets should be monitored and cryptocurrency transactions should be compliant with traditional AML laws for fiat.

Exchanges in the US may be looking to avoid sanctions, especially now, as a critical eye has increasingly been directed towards the crypto sector. Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission made a bold move and slapped Ripple with a lawsuit for selling unregistered securities through XRP. The lawsuit was enough to make XRP’s price drastically plummet, sending the cryptocurrency’s market value down by more than 50%.  

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