Crypto Market Update (19 June 2018)

Bitcoin Global News (BGN)

June 19, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire

General Market Outlook

Bitcoin, Ethereum and most altcoins surged yesterday and are now holding. Most altcoins are up, and trading volume continues to climb. TRON (TRX) and Huboi Token (HT) are the standouts of the top 100 coins - up about +14% in the past 24 hours. Bitcoin is right around $6,800 for about +3% change and Ethereum is right at $535 for +6% change in the past 24 hours. Market cap for the overall cryptocurrency market grew over $13 billion up to $291 billion total.

Major Headlines

New Crypto Trading Desk for Hedge Funds

Etoro recently announced that it is expanding into the US with ten cryptocurrencies. The company will also be setting up an over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk in London for institutional traders. The platform utilizes fifteen cryptocurrency exchanges to pool liquidity. CEO Yoni Assia spoke on the topic: “We’ve actually set up our corporate team here in the UK to start setting up accounts to trade on eToro. We’ve announced that we’re launching the exchange as well so, between the exchange and the OTC desk, we’re also starting to serve more potential institutions and financial institutions.”

Square Earns New York Bitlicense

This is the 9th Bitlicense given out. Square had launched Bitcoin trading on its Cash App earlier this year with approval in most states, but New York was by far the biggest one without Bitcoin. The app is in direct competition with Venmo, and since early 2016, downloads on Square Cash app downloads averaged 128% percent year-over-year growth each month versus Venmo's 74%. Cash App totals 7 million active users. Many of those customers have been using the Cash app more like a bank account than the company intended, Dorsey said in May. CEO Jack Dorsey said they plan to "lean into" the trend. Square filed for an FDIC license to be an industrial loan company in Utah, American Banker reported in September.

$800,000 Mined With Cafe Computers in China

A group of hackers colluded with computer maintenance companies in China to use internet cafe computers to mine cryptocurrency. There are 16 total suspects who worked together to gain access to the computing power of 100,000 computers across 30 Chinese cities since July of last year. They did this by developing a piece of malware that can specifically mine Siacoin (SC). Cafe owners noticing something was wrong when their computers became extremely slow and their electric bills rose considerably. Notably, it was also during a time when the price of siacoin jumped by 400 percent from $0.002 in May 2017 to over $0.01 in July.

Top 5 Gainers

Open Trading Netwok (OTN) +58.15% at $1.98

ContractNet (CNET) +49.23% at $0.330787

Sphre AIR (XID) +48.89% at $0.122719

InsurChain (INSUR) +36.49% at $0.002205

WhaleCoin (WHL) +33.14% at $0.041673

Top 5 Losers

Fargocoin (FRGC) -27.66% at $2.13

Pundi X (NPXS) -21.80% at $0.008993

Docademic (MTC) -21.75% at $0.315080

Animecoin (ANI) -20.03% at $0.007159

Banca (BANCA) -19.82% at $0.000871