CryptoAM: Tick Tock, Russian Govt. Approved Investing, and Cryptojacking Arrests.
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Long time no see! We hope you didn’t miss us too badly. We met a bunch of awesome people at Cryptolina this weekend! We have yet to break out of the slow downtrend we’ve been facing for the last month, and who knows how much longer it could go. We had some nice movement this morning, but it’s not the most promising pump we’ve seen. (Tip: Regardless of whether the trend continues or not, there are some low cap steals out there, you just have to look).
3 things you need to know:
One: Metronome has kicked off its public token sale. Metronome is a new cross-blockchain cryptocurrency. The team is led by Jeff Garzik, a prominent early Bitcoin developer.
Unconventional: The token sale is being conducted via a descending price auction. The price started at 2 ETH = 1 MET and will decrease every two minutes for a week or until the entire supply is sold.
“With Metronome, we have built a cryptocurrency intended to serve as a store of value, method of exchange, machine-to-machine payment medium and other applications.”
Robust: Self-coined as the, “Built-To-Last Cryptocurrency,” Metronome aims to be a true cryptocurrency. Being cross-blockchain compatible greatly reduces the risk of Metronome going down with the ship it was built on. When you want to move MET from one blockchain to another, the MET on blockchain A is destroyed and you receive the equivalent amount on blockchain B. Perpetual inflation should help MET be used for actual payments rather than as a speculative asset for investors to squat on.
Two: Russian banks Sberbank and Alfa-Bank working together to offer cryptocurrency assets to Russian retail investors. The investors will not have direct custody of the tokens, instead, investors will be putting their fiat into an index containing Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum.
“We want to offer our clients a completely transparent entry point for digital assets, fully in compliance with regulatory requirements and which allows investment within Russia in a product that interests them.”
Life Support: Even with thousands of crypto assets being created in the last two years, whenever new methods for buying crypto arise, they always add Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum first. To me this means coins like Litecoin that may be technically outclassed in every way by other cryptocurrencies, are inevitably going to have their lives extended and usability increased by simply increasing the number of people with exposure to them.
Three: 16 people arrested in Japanese cryptojacking case. If you recall last Wednesday’s issue, we discussed the rise of cryptojacking, where software is used to mine currencies like Monero on a victim’s computer without them knowing it. The attacks are prevalent but it seems that the impact of each individual attacker is relatively small; of the 16 people arrested, the highest amount of money that any of those individuals made was just over $1000.
Benevolent Malware?: As far as malware goes, cryptojacking is not very harmful to the victim. At worst, victims will suffer slower performance and reduced battery life. Cryptojackers aren’t stealing anything from you, at most they make a few dollars from each individual machine, its only with mass infection of hardware that they manage to turn a meaningful profit (I would love if someone could provide a differing opinion. Email us).
Also in the news:
TrustToken, Creator of TrueUSD, Raises Another $20m in Closed Token Sale
Paradex is Back Online for Europeans; This Time Without $WANK and $EOS
What I’m reading today:
Blockchain Could Be the Answer to Cybersecurity. Maybe.
Blockchain has the potential to solve many of today’s cybersecurity problems.
e.g. Healthcare Data
Problem: Your healthcare data is disconnected, files often have to be sent from doctor to doctor. Often times there is only a single paper copy of your records, and no backup if anything were to happen to them. It is very difficult to know who exactly has access to your records; one malicious employee at your healthcare provider could have unfettered access to your entire medical history.
Solution: Your health records are stored on a global decentralized ledger. When you want to let your doctor access them, you can use your private key to sign a transaction that grants your doctor read access to your data for a set period of time. Or if he needs to enter in new records, grant him read and write access, but he will never be able to delete any of your previous records, because by the nature of blockchain, those previous entries are immutable. If you move to a new healthcare provider, the process for providing the data would be the same. By keeping your records on a global ledger, you can ensure quick and secure access all over the world.
General Hurdles to DLT solving this problem
Blockchain will only keep your data secure if the underlying code performs as it is expected. It only takes one vulnerability in a smart contract to render everyone’s data in the system at risk.
Many companies have a vested interest in providing/storing your medical records, a new solution is a threat to their business model and profits.
Around the corner:
VeChain mainnet launching by June 30th
Fusion mainnet launching by June 30th
The Augur mainnet is launching on July 9
Market Outlook:
We’re usually fans of looking at 1D trends, but something interesting has been happening over the past couple of days that shows up more clearly on the the 4h chart.
We’ve been trading heavily in one region with a lot of sideways actions. Looking at previous history there have only been a few times this has happened over a timeframe longer than 2-3 days. This is what we call “chop”. According to history (and some Ledger Capital magic…) the longer we trade in this region the more likely it is to continue the overall trend. Reversals over the years in Bitcoin are generally violent, or come off of a slow upwards trend. (See: Feb 6th, Apr 6th, Nov 12th 2017…etc.)
This past hour, we saw a sharp spike in volume and price, finally breaking out of the chop. We got rejected at the 6.8k level however, which is not a good sign for trend reversal. Would have been looking to end up the pump above 6.8k for the bulls to come out and play. I’m looking now for a retracement to 6.65k, or another push above 6.8k.
If we close a 4h abovee 6.8k, I’m likely to long to 7.2k+. If we close between 6.6k and 6.8k, who knows. If we close below 6.6k…it doesn’t look pretty.
Here’s a reminder on what these criteria mean
Long/Shorts are sitting at 72 so we probably won’t be seeing a strong short squeeze, and could be one reason that the market didn’t react more violently to the 5% jump. There have been a lot of people shorting at the 6.8k level (and would have got liq’d) but it looks like many closed their shorts. If the short interest had been higher, we likely would have seen us hold the 6.8k level.