Members Digest October 15th 2018

Bearish:

after a few months of withdrawal delays, cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex has temporarily suspended USD deposits, expecting the situation “to normalize within a week”. Bitcoin is being traded with ~2% premium on Bitfinex, which might be connected to USDT price decline from $1 to $0.98. Reminder: Bitfinex has serious banking problems since 2016, when it was fined by CFTC for offering unregulated margins, so the exchange has to use umbrella companies to process fiat deposits and withdrawals. Bitfinex has been constantly accused in a lack of transparency.

Constantinople:

upgrade has stalled Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet, which might have a profound effect on Ethereum’s release schedule. Some developers think that Constantinople won’t be activated on a mainnet in 2018, because more investigation is needed. Reminder: Constantinople hard fork is aiming to make processing information more efficient, reduce mining rewards by 33% (from 3 ETH to 2 ETH per block), and delay “difficulty bomb” for ~12 months.

Controversial:

Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano (ADA) and CEO of IOHK, and Ken Kodama, CEO of Emurgo, has published an open letter to the Cardano community, explaining the reasons why they were disappointed by the performance of the Cardano Foundation. The authors asked for the resignation of the chairman of the Cardano Foundation, and announced that IOHK and Emurgo were going to take over the main responsibilities of the foundation until at least 2020. Reminder: in 2015, the governance of Cardano was split into three legal entities: IOHK, Emurgo, and the Cardano Foundation to achieve more political decentralization.

Adoption:

Indian’s leading cryptoassets company Unocoin has officially announced the launch of 30 cryptocurrency ATMs in 3 major cities: Bangalore, New Delhi, and Mumbai. The first ATM has been already spotted in Bangalore. Unocoin clarified that ATMs won’t need any banking partnerships, so users will be able to deposit and withdraw INR despite RBI crypto banking ban. Reminder: earlier in April, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) directed all financial institutions to stop providing services to businesses associated with cryptos.