Cryptocurrencies

Denelle Dixon (Photo courtesy Stellar Development Foundation. All rights reserved)

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Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) have announced an agreement to work together on the development of a digital currency that will be issued by the national central bank. Undersecretary Oleksandr Bornyakov stated that he believes this collaboration will contribute to the development of the virtual asset industry and its integration into the global finance ecosystem. SDF developed Stellar, a free / open source and decentralized protocol for transfers between cryptocurrency and common (fiat) currency. Lumen (XLM) is a cryptocurrency created using this protocol, and its value has grown significantly since this announcement.

Dan Schulman in 2013

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PayPal has announced that from 2021 it will support payments through some cryptocurrencies, which in the initial phase will be Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC). To integrate this new management into its systems, for the legal part it obtained a conditional license for cryptocurrencies, the one known as BitLicense, by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and for the technical part it signed an agreement with Paxos, a known provider of cryptocurrency services and products. Initially, this new support will be limited to customers in the USA, but PayPal plans to extend it to other countries later in the year.

BitMEX's home page

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The founders of BitMEX, a well-known cryptocurrency trading platform, have been formally charged with violating US anti-money laundering regulations. One of them, Samuel Reed, has already been arrested while Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Gregory Dwyer are wanted. In fact, the allegations are multiple because BitMEX is also accused of operating in the US without the authorization of the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission). In August, BitMEX announced the introduction of its operators’ identity verification procedures, but evidently, it was too little and too late.

Ethereum logo

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Ethereum is a platform for a well-known cryptocurrency, but out of the blockchain world – the technology behind cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin remains by far the most famous one. However, the growth of Ether (ETH) transactions of this period led Ethereum to become the most used blockchain platform in recent days, surpassing Bitcoin. This doesn’t mean that the value of Ether surpassed its own record and indeed it’s still far from its highest values. For Ethereum it’s an important period also because at the beginning of August a public test phase of version 2.0 will begin.