[“BloomX.app”]

Inilunsad ng Bloomsolutions ang bagong crypto trading platform para sa mga pinoy na “BloomX.app” kung saan pwede mag trade ng crypto kapalit ng philippine pesos (PHP).

BloomSolutions has announced that it is launching “BloomX.app”, a new cryptocurrency trading platform for Filipinos. The app will allow Philippine residents to securely trade over 250 cryptocurrencies in exchange for PHP. Among the cryptocurrencies that can be traded are popular ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the DeFi token Aave, Swipe’s SXP, and Axie Infinity’s SLP. Those interested to try the app can join the waitlist here.

A virtual asset service provider licensed by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, BloomSolutions said it has recognized the need for a “truly modern cryptocurrency app” for the Filipino customer.

Ayon sa kanila, ang kanilang market rate ay manggagaling sa Binance.
Mga screenshots ng platform:





Ang nakikita ko lang na kakaiba dito ay ayon sa kanila, wala silang "wallets" kung saan pwede mong i-store ang iyong crypto, kundi makikita mo lang ang mga nabili mo sa balances na tab. Ito raw ay para ma-enganyo ang mga users na ilipat ito sa kanilang wallets at huwag panatilihin sa mga exchange.

Kung kayo ay interesado dito, pwede kayo mag sign-up sa kanilang waitlist dito na magsisimula sa March 8 at invite-only alpha muna sila hanggang sa huling kalahati ng taon.
Source: https://bitpinas.com/cryptocurrency/philippines-bloomx-app-crypto/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=facebook_page&utm_medium=BitPinas&utm_content=Philippines%20Gets%20New%20Crypto%20Trading%20Platform%20With%20BloomX%20App

Website: https://bloomx.app
Facebook page: https://web.facebook.com/bloomxorg

Key points:

• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday warned that bitcoin is an “extremely inefficient” way to conduct monetary transactions.
  
• She spoke as the cryptocurrency’s price tumbled in morning trading, but remained above $53,000.

“I don’t think that bitcoin … is widely used as a transaction mechanism,” she told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at a New York Times DealBook conference. “To the extent it is used I fear it’s often for illicit finance. It’s an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions, and the amount of energy that’s consumed in processing those transactions is staggering.”

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/22/yellen-sounds-warning-about-extremely-inefficient-bitcoin.html

To say that people buying bitcoin as a transaction mechanism is ridiculous but to say that it is used for illicit finance is even more ridiculous.

Lumalaganap na ang Fintech sa industriya ng banking and finance dito sa Pilipinas. Mapapansin natin na dumadarami na ang mga local at foreign investors na bumubuo ng mga fintech companies dito sa ating bansa. May iba't ibang klaseng fintech companies na nagbibigay ng iba't ibang serbisyo tulad ng digital payments/mobile wallets, digital remittance, blockchain/cryptocurrency, finance at HR. Sa industriya ng Fintech, patuloy ang paglaganap ng blockchain at cryptocurrency, kasama na rito ang Abra. Ang ating bansa ay kumikilala sa mga FinTech companies na ito at may mga espesyal na regulasyon na naka implementa para dito. May mga karagdagan na lisensya na kinakailangan para sa pag operate ng mga Fintech companies kaya't kung ikaw ay interesado bumuo ng start up, mahalagang malaman ang mga ito.

Bumuo ako ng isang infographic para masmadaling malaman ang proseso. Ito ay galing sa iba't ibang source at sa tulong ng guide na galing sa kittelson and carpo consulting.

The headline is exaggerated but it seems like its now extremely difficult for you to withdraw your Bitcoin from BTC since you'd have to provide the source of the fund's report with a description of all your actions such your purchases, exchanges, transfers etc. all with screenshots and in order. Does it seem like to be an exit scam now?

As quote from the article:

Looks like HitBTC have decided to go full scammer, and are stealing balances of users (including me). Probably a good idea to get anything you have there off, and take care not to use. They are locking accounts and making unreasonable demands for private information, which many people *can’t* provide even if they wanted to. And when you don’t / can’t comply, they just keep your Bitcoins instead of closing your account and sending them to you.

Read more about it here

What should the boards know about cryptocurrency & token economy?

While many would rather refrain the topic, board should be concerned and should be talking about these emerging digital currencies. Why? Because they'll risk missing out a market opportunity. Even companies with no intended involvement with cryptocurrencies will have indirect risks. Other concerns a board should have are:

• What are the three basic asset classes?
  How are traditional financial institutions getting involved with cryptocurrency?
  How have regulators responded?
  What questions should boards be asking of management?

As highlighted by McNamara of PwC. It's further discussed here

Hello everyone, for those who don’t know this article defines what a market cap is:

https://cryptobriefing.com/market-cap-is-just-one-way-of-valuing-crypto/

In short, it refers to the total dollar market value of a company’s outstanding shares. Commonly referred to as “market cap,” it is calculated by multiplying a company’s shares outstanding by the current market price of one share.

The crypto community and finance sector commonly use this term so its better to understand this term.

Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin made the surprise revelation that he is an Ethereum (ETH) miner at the Blockchain Summit in Morocco Sunday.

Brin is currently the president of Alphabet, Google’s parent company which formed as part of the tech giant’s restructuring back in 2015, but his “side hustle” is apparently mining the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, together with his 10-year old son.

See here: http://rplg.co/6fc56360#https://cointelegraph.com/news/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-reveals-he-is-an-ethereum-miner

Litecoin & Token Pay have partnered to buy a stake in German bank, WEG Bank AG.

Right now it's only 9.9% stake with options to purchase an additional 90% pending regulatory approval.

See full details here - https://www.tokenpay.com/litecoin

What do you think about this move made? Cryptocurrency is now starting to buy Banks?

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Looking to sell my Medical Token Currency (MTC) for BTC. It’s already listed in HitBTC. Contact me thru pm if interested.

This is from an opinionated article, but according to the writer bitcoin’s recent decline could be reason to worry. Some excerpts from the article:

Given the current state of the technology, bitcoin’s current price of around $7,000 — although still high compared to most of its history — is a relative disappointment. And this disappointment could lead to the demise of bitcoin.

If the price of bitcoin falls below its cost of mining, it will quickly go to zero. The real concern is that if the price of bitcoin continues to fall, mining will become infeasible, and without enough participants providing the computing power to record the transactions, the transactions will be infeasible and bitcoin will become worthless.

You can read more of it here: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-all-it-would-take-for-bitcoin-to-become-a-worthless-cryptocurrency-2018-04-12

Not here to spread any negativity or FUD but the author suggests that the current price drop is greater as compared to the ones in the past (is it worse than Mt. Gox?) Also, those early investors who came in during the hype last 2017 aren't likely to invest again after experiencing great losses, and this may make the price go down continuously then eventually go even lower than mining costs. Is it possible to happen?

According to this video, https://www.facebook.com/cnbccrypto/videos/1688689147880991/

Bitcoin is considered as property and therefore whenever you sell your BTCto cash, there are two transactions. You first sell the ‘property’ to cash value then what you gain from the sale is used as cash. These transactions are therefore taxable.

For HODLers, if you cash out it in less than a year then it would be considered as income so there’s tax for that. If you hodl for more than a year, then IRS will consider it as 20% capital gains.

For those who use Abra wallet, just recently they added Stellar, Bitcoin Gold, DigiByte, Augur, Status (SNT), Stratis and 0x (ZRX).

I've been using an Abra wallet since it allows me to easily transfer my crypto and exchange it to fiat directly to my bank accounts. I personally don't use these other coins that were recently added, but do any of the other Abra wallet users use these coins? More and more cryptocurrencies are being added in Abra which allows its users to easily invest.

Bitcoin Payments In Asia Hold Strong As Cryptocurrency Prices Continue To Plummet

While many of the top cryptocurrencies are down in the dumps, BitPay has raised a total of over $70 Million in capital and processed over $1 Billion in Bitcoin Payments in 2017 .

BitPay’s CEO, Stephen Pair, announced in a press release that one of the company’s future goals is to expand into emerging markets in Asia, which is also one of BitPay’s fastest growing regions for cryptocurrency transactions and wallet adoption.

And despite the price of Bitcoin dropping, Menlo Ventures – whose portfolio includes companies like Uber, Warby Parker and Roku - still decided to invest in BitPay’s Series B round. This was also its first institutional cryptocurrency investment.

“We gravitated towards BitPay because we felt the company had identified a killer use for cryptocurrency in facilitating low cost payment solutions for cross-border commerce and business-to-business payments, which is a massive market poorly served by the existing payment rails,” said Tyler Sosin, a partner at Menlo Ventures.

Read more at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelwolfson/2018/04/05/bitcoin-payments-in-asia-hold-strong-as-cryptocurrency-prices-continue-to-plummet/#2dec21373b09

Just read an article on how much the cost is of getting a coin listed. It turns out that:

According to research from Autonomous Next LLP, cryptocurrency exchanges are raking in millions of dollars from ICO operators seeking to secure a spot for their tokens on high-volume trading platforms.

“It sounds like the market price to list a crypto token on an exchange is $1 million for a reasonably regarded token, to $3 million for an opportunity to get quick liquidity,” the firm wrote. “We don’t know these numbers with certainty, but suspect the order of magnitude to be roughly in line with today’s reality.”

Is still worth it to spend this amount for ICOs to get their coins listed in exchanges?

1. Twitter Frauds
Recently, one of the most common ways for the scammers to trick investors is by Twitter. Many fake accounts have lately attack Twitter with tweets giving assurance of gaining 10x returns.

2. Market Manipulation
Sometimes regulation can be considered as a good thing, mainly when it protects the vast majority of people. Such trading regulations prevent scammers with large bankrolls from taking the market into control and scamming regular investors to open/close positions. Being present, these regulations usually help investors from getting tricked, easily finding out the most common market manipulations.

3. Fake Buy/Sell Walls
The buy/sell walls will not affect you, unless you usually base your trades on chart analysis. You can easily identify a wall when you look at the depth chart of an order book. On this point, as the name tells itself, a wall usually consistently appears as a high wall just on one side of the order book, most times 2-5x larger than the other side.

4. Pump and Dumps

Pump and dump groups’ strategy is to artificially pump the value of a particular coin right before dumping it on the investors who got fooled and thought the chances of gaining more were very high. In industries where 50% gains in a month are easily attained, it’s weirdly amazing how still pump and dump (P&D) groups even exist.

5. Paid Promotion
Even though we might think that many well-known figures of cryptocurrency might be on our side, many of them are usually paid to promote coins in the cryptosphere. Whenever these endorsers are paid to promote various projects, they are required to reveal. Right now, there is no force towards them to do so and they rarely do.

6. Shady/Shoddy Exchanges
Knowing that some exchanges are vulnerable to hacks, some having questionable management practices, others having security flaws, it is very risky to keep your digital assets on these exchanges. Consequently, we recommend to keep your coins in a wallet, such as the Trezor or Ledger Nano S. Also, even when you store your coins in a wallet, you should be cautious when trading on exchanges.

7. Phishing Attacks
One of the most common cryptocurrency scams are “Phishing attacks”. Phishers commonly purchase domains and Google ads imitating popular exchanges. The fact that the fake website looks alike with the real one- once you enter your credentials, the fake site directs you toward the correct platform, therefore, you get stolen, and your account gets empty. To not be a part of this scam, make sure you always type the exchange URL directly into the address bar. More importantly, you should have some type of 2-factor authentication enabled for all of your accounts as well.

Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/ethereumworldnews.com/beware-avoid-these-7-cryptocurrency-scams-happening-right-now/amp/

Founders of a cryptocurrency backed by Floyd Mayweather charged with fraud by SEC

Two founders of a cryptocurrency firm that was endorsed by champion boxer Floyd Mayweather have been charged with carrying out a fraudulent initial coin offering (ICO) by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The company in question is called Centra and it raised $32 million via an ICO. An ICO is a process by which a company can issue a new digital coin in exchange for money. The coin has the potential to be used on a service offered by the company or traded in the future.
Sohrab "Sam" Sharma and Robert Farkas, co-founders of Centra Tech. Inc., masterminded a fraudulent ICO in which Centra offered and sold unregistered investments through a "CTR Token," the SEC alleged in a statement Monday.

The two people claimed to offer a debit card backed by Visa and Mastercard that allow people to convert cryptocurrency to U.S. dollars to spend it in stores. The SEC alleged that Centra had no relationship with either company. Sharma and Farkas created fake biographies of fictional executives and paid celebrities to tout the ICO on social media, the SEC claimed.
One of those celebrities, who was not named by the SEC, was boxer Floyd Mayweather. He posted a picture of himself in September 2017 holding a Centra card.

Authorities in the U.S. have been trying to clamp down on fraudulent ICOs. The SEC clarified in March that it is looking to apply securities laws to cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets. Jay Clayton, the head of the SEC, said that the organization is devoting a "significant portion of resources" to the ICO market.
Centra is not the first ICO that the SEC has gone after. Earlier this year it took action against AriseBank which it alleged raised $600 million.
Still, scams persist in the ICO world which remains a wild west in many jurisdictions. CNBC recently investigated a scam ICO called Gize which raised $2 million.

Read it at: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/03/floyd-mayweather-backed-cryptocurrency-ico-fraud-sec-says.html?__source=facebook%7Ccrypto+