Crypto News

• The international auditing company KPMG cooperates with the firms TOMIA, Microsoft and R3 to develop a blockchain for settlements on telecommunications. In particular, KPMG seeks to solve problems with volumetric data that arise when connecting 5G.
• Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, the largest US cryptobahn and custodial service, believes that in five years the company will be less engaged in trade and more in implementation. Armstrong wants the company to connect people in the crypto industry.
• On July 13, unknown hackers broke into the server of the Moscow IT company “Sitek” and posted a so-called “Job-face” on its website. It is assumed that hackers deleted 7.5 terabytes of data, but before that they partially copied them. Then they shared them with journalists from several publications. Following the results of familiarization with the archives, the Russian service of the BBC concluded that “Sitek” is a non-public contractor for the Russian special services.

So, it turned out that “Sitek” carried out at least 20 non-public IT projects commissioned by the Russian special services, in particular – military unit No. 71330, the newspaper writes. This part, according to experts from the International Center for Defense and Security in Tallinn, is part of the 16th Directorate of the Federal Security Service of Russia, which is engaged in radio-electronic intelligence, but this information has not been officially confirmed. 

• Switzerland has attracted crypto enthusiasts for years and the head of the blockchain-Facebook division, David Marcus is no exception. He published a statement according to which the new coin will be governed by Swiss law.
• The Canadian city of Richmond Hill, with a population of more than 200,000, will start accepting Bitcoins (BTC) to pay municipal taxes.

The Financial Post reports that the local council decided to allow residents and businesses to pay property taxes at BTC.

This is the second city in Ontario that will use the payment processing platform developed by the Canadian cryptocurrency company Coinber. The final decision on the introduction of Coinberry technology by the Richmond Hill Council will be made until August 30.

• TRX’s cryptocurrency has overtaken Stellar, and now it ranks 10th in the Coinmarketcap ranking. Over the past 24 hours, the asset price has increased by 11%, moreover, according to the network creator, the number of transactions and the number of applications on the Tron blockchain is growing at an accelerated pace.
• In Belarus, another crypto exchange is registered, while the platform offers trading pairs exclusively with cryptocurrencies, according to tut.by.The operator of the iExchange site is Cryptotrade, a resident of the High-Tech Park (HTP) near Minsk, within which the authorities legalized the crypto-business.

The Ukrainian businessman Igor Snezhko (share 33%) and two Belarusian – Lyudmila Neronskaya (33%) and Natalia Sharepo (34%) established “Cryptotrade”. The authorized capital of the company is $ 958.8 thousand, but, according to Snezhko, more than $ 3 million was invested in the project.

29 trading pairs are available for platform users, including those with BTC, LTC, ETH, BCH, XRP, USDT. The company plans to expand the number of cryptocurrency traded, as well as add the ability to deposit /withdraw funds in fiat currencies. In addition, “Cryptotrade” has a plan to release its own token – Lexcoin.

• Applications of cryptocurrency ratings CoinGecko presented a new report on the cryptocurrency market for the second quarter of 2019. The document says that the number of initial exchange offers (IEO) is growing, and in the first half of 2019, 72 projects attracted a total of $ 262 million.

In January 2019, the IEO Binance Launchpad platform launched the IEO Madness project, earning $ 7.2 million in 14 minutes to sell Bittorrent tokens.

Despite the fact that the average amount that attracted the initial exchange offers in the first half of 2019 was $ 3.7 million, depending on the project, the amounts vary greatly.

• In Italy, a native of Minsk and a citizen of the Russian Federation Dmitry Vasilyev, who was previously associated with the infamous WEX cryptocurrency exchange (formerly BTC-e), was detained. This writes the BBC with reference to the statement of a close friend Vasilyeva. In this case, the reason for the detention is not specified.

The BTC-e exchange was founded in 2011 and ceased operations in 2017 after the arrest in Greece of Russian Alexander Vinnik and the confiscation of the servers of the FBI site. Subsequently, WEX took over the user’s BTC-e, although it denied its direct connection with the latter. As noted by the BBC, it was Vasiliev who was the owner of the WEX registered in Singapore.

The BBC sent requests to the police and the Italian Ministry of Justice. “No comment,” said Dmitry Gurin, press attaché of the Russian Embassy in Italy.

It is also known that in April 2019, a criminal case was opened against Vasilyev in Kazakhstan on suspicion of misappropriating $ 20,000 Almaty residents with the help of WEX. Vasiliev himself said that he made a deal to sell the stock exchange in mid-2018 and from that moment had no relation to it. At the same time, users began to report problems with the withdrawal of funds on WEX.

• The US Stock Exchange Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has launched an investigation into the BitMEX cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources.

The agency intends to find out whether BitMEX allowed Bitcoin derivatives trading to US citizens without registration in the CFTC. The investigation may take months, sources say.

On March 6 of this year, BitMEX updated its user policy, officially banning residents of the United States, the Canadian province of Quebec and some other regions from trading on the platform.

Alex Zask

EXPi