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UnionBank of the Philippines has built out a network it says will make it easier for people without access to financial services to receive money from abroad.

The bank – the country’s tenth largest by assets – announced on Tuesday that it’s launching 11,000 cash-out remittance counters across the archipelago, including in rural or remote areas where citizens may have access to banking services. The counters provide points of contact with the bank’s financial services ranging from smartphone app to full remittance hubs.

For the effort, UnionBank said it was extending an existing partnership with Coins.ph, a regulated Philippines-based company using a blockchain platform to provide remittances and other payments services, as well as a cryptocurrency exchange. Coins.ph also has relationship with Ripple and uses the XRP cryptocurrency as a payments rail enabling Filipinos to quickly send and receive funds.

Related: Singapore Ride-Sharing App Lets Customers Pay With Bitcoin

Dragonpay and other local remittance firms, Cebuana Lhuillier, LBC, PeraHub and Palawan Express, are also providing services for UnionBank’s new counter network.

“With the onset of this pandemic, it has become crucial that our products and services quickly adapt to the challenges presented in this new digital normal,” UnionBank president and CEO Edwin Bautista said. “This cash-out service is just one way for UnionBank to demonstrate its commitment to financial inclusion as we continue venturing forth in tech-ing up the Philippines.”

See also: Philippines Banks to Use Visa’s Blockchain Payments Platform

Both Coins.ph and UnionBank are regulated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) – the Philippines’ central bank.

Related: BitPay Launches Prepaid Crypto Mastercard for US Customers

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The suicide of a 20-year-old Robinhood trader should be a wake-up call for cryptocurrency exchanges that put revenue above customer protection, said a U.S. exec at one of the world’s largest such venues.

Many exchanges were designed to encourage users to trade as frequently as possible, often with money they don’t have, and resembled casinos more than responsible trading platforms, said Joel Edgerton, chief operating officer at bitFlyer U.S.

“There are too many exchanges that are run like casinos and exploit their customers,” he said.

Related: Liquidity on Bitcoin Perpetuals Exchange FTX Catches Up to Industry Leader BitMEX

Edgerton spoke to CoinDesk just over a week after a 20-year-old student, Alexander Kearns, killed himself after falsely believing he had got himself into more than $700,000-worth of debt by trading complex options contracts on Robinhood – an app-based trading platform with a young, retail-oriented following.

It later came to light that the negative balance was a temporary phase in between contract execution – i.e. Kearns wasn’t actually in the red. But Robinhood has come under heavy criticism for allowing amateur traders to access such complex instruments without safeguards to avoid confusion and, in this case, tragedy.

Late last week, Robinhood announced a $250,000 donation to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and vowed to add safeguards to its platform, such as tightening eligibility requirements for complex options trades.

See also: The Chad Index Versus Doomer Internet Money: The Breakdown Weekly Recap

Related: PayPal, Venmo to Roll Out Crypto Buying and Selling: Sources

While Binance’s CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said in response last week that his exchange already implemented a “Responsible Trading” feature, Edgerton, a former head of operations at the insurance arm of French bank BNP Paribas, said the exchange was trying to shield itself from further criticism.

“I would say CZ’s response was mercenary. He is using a kid’s death to pitch his company and Binance is actually part of the problem,” he explained. The platform gets users hooked and their anti-addiction policy “highlights the fact that they built the product to be addictive,” he said.

Any crypto exchange that offered 125x leverage indiscriminately – which Binance began offering in October – isn’t serious about customer protection, Edgerton continued. BitFlyer, which opened a U.S. office in 2017, says it already restricts access to leverage and can flag or even ban users that display troubling trading patterns. The Tokyo-based exchange ranks ninth globally, according to CoinGecko, and is the market leader in Japan.

It was reported last summer a Chinese bitcoin trader killed himself after a 100x position on derivatives exchange BitMEX was liquidated, a loss of about $16.4 million in a single trade. Around the same time, an anonymous student trader said he was having suicidal thoughts after losing thousands of dollars on several leveraged trades on the same platform.

Arthur Hayes, BitMEX’s CEO, has previously defended his business, arguing that in a free market, customers can always move onto other platforms if they worry about being exploited or defrauded.

When contacted by CoinDesk, Binance declined to comment. BitMEX hadn’t responded to a similar request by press time.

See also: BitMEX Sees Biggest Short Squeeze in 8 Months After Bitcoin Surge

Cryptocurrency exchanges have more of a role to play in customer protection, Edgerton said. Regulators worldwide cap leverage for retail investors, both in crypto and in traditional assets, such as equities. Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) halved maximum leverage down to two times the value of the deposit this year.

As such, there’s no reason an exchange should offer 100x leverage on top of highly volatile assets without first checking whether the investor knows what they are doing and that they have the income to cover that level of exposure, argued Edgerton.

“We have a responsibility to provide products that are suitable to our clients,” he added. The Robinhood suicide “is what happens when companies focus on tech and profits rather than doing the right thing for their customers.”

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KPMG has built a suite of tools designed to help both traditional financial companies and fintech startups provide tightly managed crypto-asset services.

Targeting institutional clients, the new KPMG Chain Fusion product lets customers manage their data in compliance with regulations around financial reporting, security and processing needs. The suite allows these customers to collect and organize data from both traditional systems as well as blockchain databases, the company announced Monday.

Sam Wyner, director and co-lead of the Big 4 auditor’s Cryptoasset Services team, told CoinDesk that his team had been working on the project for about a year, building the actual suite of tools since February.

Related: Polychain Capital, Square Crypto’s Steve Lee Invest in Bitcoin Broker’s $5.7M Seed Round

“It’s not unusual for a bank to have tens of systems … and crypto companies have a similar problem where for their blockchain-based systems, they’re fundamentally different, the infrastructure behind them is fundamentally different from what’s happening in traditional systems,” he said. “The same problem that happens is ‘how do you connect all your blockchain based systems to traditional ones, and do that in a way that the organization is trying to operate in?’”

Chain Fusion’s core service essentially creates a standardized data model for all transactions that an organization conducts, he said, regardless of whether they’re an on-chain/off-chain blockchain transaction or a traditional fiat one.

This allows these entities to run “advanced analytics” on the data. To demonstrate this capability, KPMG built multiple use case modules based around actual feedback from companies in the industry, he said.

One example is ensuring that the data on a blockchain matches the information recorded on an entities books, he said.

Related: IBM, Merck Declare FDA-Backed Drug Tracing Blockchain a Success

“If you know you control an address and you think you have one bitcoin on it and you look at the address on the public blockchain, do you have one bitcoin or are you running a fractional reserve?” he said.

Other challenges included finding ways of being able to pull data from databases, including blockchain information, and still be able to run queries.

“We developed it all in a way that we were able to incorporate different types of technology providers and market data and infrastructure providers,” Wyner said.

Wyner declined to say how many companies have already begun using Chain Fusion, saying only that KPMG was discussing the product with “multiple clients or potential clients.”

While he wouldn’t say that KPMG’s name or reputation by themselves necessarily help companies become more comfortable dipping their toes into crypto-asset management, he did note that risk is not new in the financial services industry, and process risk and control are two areas KPMG is comfortable with.

“At least in my career this is one of the first times I’ve really thought of something and carried it all the way to this point with the help of a lot of people on this team, it would never have been possible without the support of our team,” Wyner said. “It’s an exciting time, I’m excited to continue to speak about chain fusion with all of the companies.”

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The full life of a digital asset-backed security (ABS) on a blockchain can be settled in 40 minutes versus the 10 to 14 days it would take in a paper-based setting.

That was the outcome of a pilot first revealed June 11 by mutual fund giant Vanguard in partnership with blockchain startup Symbiont, Citi, BNY Mellon, State Street and an unnamed ABS issuer.

The goal of the project: to see if the decades-old Wall Street practice of repackaging contractual debt – be it car loans, mortgages or credit card debt – into bonds sold to investors, known as securitization, can be simplified.

Related: Novogratz: Galaxy Digital Will ‘Suck’ if Bitcoin Fails to Become an Institutional Asset

“The overall goal is to make the car more affordable to more people,” Warren Pennington, the head of Vanguard’s Investment Management FinTech Strategies Group, told CoinDesk in an interview. “Give ABS issuers more liquidity so they can reinvest in their business, in new car loans, and help make the market for cars more efficient.”

Read more: Mutual Fund Giant Vanguard Wraps Phase 1 of Digital Asset-Backed Securities Pilot

While the pilot didn’t involve a real-world transaction, Vanguard oversaw a process that included several moving parts: packaging car loans into a special purpose entity that houses them, pricing through multiple different parties and an investment bank, working with a trustee to take care of the entity and the custodian to hold the asset and providing information to investors who want to buy or sell based on that information.

In a real-world transaction, the ABS issuer would figure out how to package loans based on loan level detail, and to work with investment banks on temporary and permanent financing. Lawyers would also have to oversee the creation of the entity.

Related: Binance Launching Crypto Exchange in the UK

“Every step of the way it’s very manual, it’s very disjointed,” Pennington said. “There’s a loss of information along the way. Investors would like to be able to see as much of the detail as they can behind the ABS.” 

Smith said Citibank acted as the investment bank, taking the issuance and distributed it directly to the investor, which was Vanguard. The custodians in the pilot, BNY Mellon and State Street, allowed smart contracts to execute autonomously and used a multi-signature approach to confirm the transfer of the instrument. Each of the financial institutions also operated a node on Symbiont’s Assembly blockchain to ensure consensus. 

Overall, phase one of the pilot included creating a new digital ABS issuance and recording the entire lifecycle of the security. Symbiont doesn’t tokenize securities; rather, it focuses on issuing securities that are native to blockchain. 

When the next ABS issuer that Symbiont is integrated with is ready to issue a security, the company plans to go into production with the product, said Symbiont CEO Mark Smith.

Read more: Vanguard Developing Blockchain Platform for $6 Trillion Forex Market

“The limiting factor at the moment is the cadence of the issuer,” he said. “This particular issuer may not have another issuance this year. We have other issuers in the pipeline and the speed in which we can get them onboarded and to be able to do a live transaction will be dependent on their ability.”

While Vanguard is one of the major asset managers working with Symbiont, Smith couldn’t comment on whether the mutual fund giant or another financial institution would be leading the live transaction.

Starting with ABS issuance allows Vanguard to target over-the-counter (OTC) markets and also eventually work towards a future of digital loans, Pennington said.

“There’s an opportunity to extend this out to the origination of the actual loan,” he said. “Then it’s a matter of collecting the digital loans and wrapping them into an entity.”

Vanguard has been working with Symbiont since 2016 and first put the startup’s Assembly blockchain into production in February 2019 in a data distribution project for passive index rebalancing, Smith said. (Assembly is powered by the BFT-SMART consensus algorithm, a solution the company says is more private and has faster transactions times than the Bitcoin blockchain.) The project allows index data to move instantly between index providers and market participants. 

Symbiont is also developing a trading platform with Vanguard to lower transaction costs for the $6 trillion currency market. (The digital ABS pilot was the first time Symbiont had worked with State Street, a custodian bank that’s currently researching digital asset custody but has pivoted from re-plumbing the back office with distributed ledger technology.)

In the digital ABS pilot, the participants did a “shadow issuance” of a real asset-backed security, Smith said. 

In past efforts prior to this month’s announced pilot, Vanguard had already created a digital ABS on blockchain and moved cash between participants on-chain.

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Decentralized lending platform Cred has welcomed former National Security Agency computer scientist Bethany De Lude and Western Union executive Daniel Goldstein as chief information security officer (CISO) and chief technology officer (CTO) respectively, the firm announced Monday.

Dan Schatt, Cred’s chief executive, told CoinDesk the crypto community stands to benefit a great deal from a financial infrastructure that supports the banking of tokens. That the new executives were willing to come in from the traditional financial sector is indicative of an overall maturing of the blockchain community, and a growing consensus that the technology is here to stay, he claimed. 

“You really feel like the tides are turning with people feeling like they don’t have to take such a huge career risk to come into this space,” Schatt said. 

Related: Bitcoin Mining Pool Poolin Partners With BlockFi to Expand Crypto Lending Service

Prior to joining Cred, De Lude served as the first CISO of the Federal Judicial Center, the research arm of the U.S. judiciary, and held security leadership roles at the NSA and multinational accounting firm PWC. Most recently, she was the CISO at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), a non-profit tasked with supervising auditors for publicly traded companies. In a statement, De Lude said she was eager to bring her knowledge of information security “to help Cred build a world-class security organization” as it continues to grow.

“Cred was really built as an infrastructure to bridge the divide between the crypto community and mainstream finance. And that’s what we’ve done. I think that’s what’s so attractive to people like Bethany, because we’re helping to bridge understanding across and on multiple fronts,” Schatt said. 

See also: Crypto Lender Cred Is Offering Investors 10% Interest With Spencer Dinwiddie Partnership

According to Schatt, Cred wanted Daniel Goldstein in the role of CTO with specific technical innovations in mind. In Schatt’s view, increasingly, people will be holding their crypto assets in noncustodial wallets. 

Related: BlockFi Hires Credit Suisse, Prudential Execs to Drive Global Expansion

“That’s one area that we’re putting a tremendous emphasis on and it’s one area that [Goldstein] knows very well having spent a lot of time building microservices and also building his own crypto assets,” Schatt said. 

Before joining Cred, Goldstein served as vice president of digital engineering at Western Union. He also held senior management roles at cybersecurity firm Symantec and Emergent Technology Holdings, a company that facilitates global commerce in emerging markets through innovative technologies. According to a press statement by Cred, Goldstein led the development of Emergent Technology’s Responsible Gold supply chain solution, a blockchain application that tracks gold from mining to vault and its G-Coin digital token. 

“I’m thrilled to support Cred’s mission of providing more equitable and inclusive financial and services utilizing the best of blockchain and traditional fintech,” Goldstein said in the press statement. 

Cred is a global financial services platform with customers in 190 countries. Last year, Cred partnered with a number of crypto exchanges including Binance in a bid to open up its operations to more markets and users. According to Schatt, Cred’s core philosophy is to create equitable and inclusive financial services surrounding credit.

“You can’t build a company like that and believe in that unless you believe in doing it internally as well,” Schatt said. 

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Bitcoin’s price is rallying and traders also increasingly see investment opportunities on the Ethereum network. 

Bitcoin (BTC) was trading around $9,563 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET), gaining 2.5% over the previous 24 hours. 

At 00:00 UTC on Monday (8:00 p.m. Sunday ET), bitcoin was changing hands around $9,298 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase. It began making gains around that time, appreciating 3% to over $9,600. The price is now well above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians.  

Related: Liquidity on Bitcoin Perpetuals Exchange FTX Catches Up to Industry Leader BitMEX

A jump in the bitcoin market Monday after days in the doldrums mirrors the longer-term outlook of Fairlead Strategies’ Katie Stockton, who sees an upward trend for the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. “Bitcoin remains wound up in its consolidation phase, a reminder why it’s a good idea to await breakouts [and] breakdowns,” Stockton told CoinDesk. “A breakout continues to appear more likely than a breakdown from an intermediate-term momentum perspective and would occur above $10,055 in our work.”

A “consolidation phase” is a term used by technical analysts to mark a period of indecision by traders overall. In fact, according to data from aggregator Kaiko, volatility of the top free-floating cryptocurrencies bitcoin, ether and XRP has trended down since June 7. 

“Volume has been muted and volatility is getting coiled,” said Neil Van Huis, director of institutional trading at liquidity provider Blockfills. 

Read More: Bitcoin Spot Volumes Are Weak While Options and DeFi Strengthen

Related: Bitcoin News Roundup for June 22, 2020

Despite the pop Monday, Van Huis continues to expect selling pressure to affect the bitcoin market due to competition in the mining sector. “If we start to make a move up, it could really be interesting as the race for mining equipment comes into focus. This will play into access to financing or sale of bitcoin to cover new costs,” he said.  

“This also could bring some altcoins into focus if bitcoin is battling mining woes,”  Van Huis added. 

Interestingly enough, bitcoin dominance is down from its 70.5% high in January 2020 and has flattened during June. This suggests Van Huis’ thesis that alternatives, such as assets on the Ethereum network, might be of greater interest to traders in June. 

Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and which powers the Ethereum network, is also jumping today. Ether was trading around $242 and climbed 5.7% in 24 hours as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET). 

Decentralized lender Compound and the appreciation of its COMP token is fueling speculative interest, and may be stretching the Ethereum network to its limits and increasing gas prices. On Jan. 1 of this year, the average Ethereum network gas price for running smart contract code was 11.6 gwei [each gwei is worth 0.000000001 ETH). By June 22 that number jumped 157% to 29.9 gwei, with decentralized finance (DeFi) attracting the interest of many traders. 

Read More: The Zcash Privacy Tech Underlying Ethereum’s Transition to Eth 2.0

“The Compound coin hype lately is pushing the on-chain gas price,” said Peter Chen, a trader at Hong Kong-based OneBit Quant.

Chan says the demographics of traders on DeFi is shifting and the increase in tether stablecoin usage is a big factor pointing to the change. “We’ve seen a significant increase of USDT trading volume,” he told CoinDesk. “It’s suggesting Asian traders are now pouring into the DeFi market; the majority was U.S. and Europe before.”

Read More: Tether’s Supply on Compound Jumps to Over $224M in a Week

Digital assets on CoinDesk’s big board are all in the green Monday. The cryptocurrency winners on the day include iota (IOTA) up 4.1%, bitcoin sv (BSV) climbing 3.8% and qtum (QTUM) jumping 3.6%. All price changes were as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).

Read More: XRP Just Isn’t Exciting Crypto Traders This Year

In commodities, oil is jumping Monday, up 3.1% with a barrel of crude priced at $40.60 at press time.

Gold is trading positively, up 0.71% at around $1,755 for the day. 

Read More: Bitcoin Sees Small Gain as Gold Rallies to One-Month High

In Asia, the Nikkei 225 of publicly traded companies in Japan slipped 0.18%. Transportation and real estate stocks left the index in the red. 

In Europe the FTSE 100 index slipped 0.76%. Increases in coronavirus cases led to shares in travel stocks lower Monday. 

The U.S. S&P 500 index gained 0.60%. Shares in tech and retail were higher while travel stocks fell.

U.S. Treasury bonds climbed Monday. Yields, which move in the opposite direction as price, were up most on the two-year bond, in the green 2.2%.

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Citing regulatory concerns, Berlin-based security token startup Neufund has announced plans to freeze its fundraising campaigns and sideline future tokenized equity offerings.

“Many European countries had aspirations to become a blockchain-friendly hub … [T]he authorities have stifled this plan, blocking the innovation in its tracks,” the firm wrote in a blog post Monday.

Launched in 2016, Nefund helped allocate some $19 million in capital through novel equity and security token offerings (STOs), including a blockchain-based initial public offering in 2019. The firm claims to have some 11,000 investors across 123 countries.

Related: Stellar Proposes Changes Allowing Exchanges to Better Enforce Regulations

Read more: Neufund Gets Nod From Liechtenstein Regulator for Token Offerings

In a statement, Neufund CEO and co-founder Zoe Adamovicz said the security token project could not continue to operate in a regulatory grey area. No legal action was ever taken against the startup, yet requests for guidance were not answered due to “fear of new technologies,” she said.

“The problem is that nobody wants to take the responsibility for neither letting innovation happen, nor for banning it,” Adamovicz added in an email to CoinDesk, placing the blame squarely at the feet of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). “We were neither allowed, nor not allowed. BaFin’s default answer is to shy away from risk and responsibility.”

BaFin did not respond to CoinDesk’s questions by press time.

Related: Mauritius Releases Guidance for Regulated Security Token Offerings

Read more: Openfinance Warns It Will Delist All Security Tokens Without New Funds

Adamovicz said the firm will transition to a yet-unannounced project. The current Neufund platform will be maintained including all equity tokens, wallets and post-investment activities, a blog states.

Kyle Sonlin, founder of Security Token Market, told CoinDesk that allocating capital with a token offering requires “different financial players to act in sync.” His firm has seen an upsurge in requests due to compliance requests, he said.

“To get an issuer to the finish line, it takes more cooperation than just providing one piece of the puzzle,” Sonlin said.

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For a second month in a row, the bitcoin market lacks a clear directional bias, with prices largely restricted to a narrow range of $9,000 to $10,000. However, the cryptocurrency’s liquidity on derivative exchanges continues to heat up, a sign of a sustained rise in investor interest. 

On a relatively new exchange like the Antigua-based FTX, the order book depth, as represented by the number of buy and sell orders at each price, now matches the depth seen on industry leader BitMEX. 

One derivative seeing growth is bitcoin perpetuals, a form of futures contract, but without an expiry date and thus without a settlement. Perpetuals have a funding rate that occurs every eight hours and traders holding a position at the funding timestamp receive or pay funding.

Related: Bitcoin News Roundup for June 22, 2020

As of Monday 13:10 UTC (9:10 a.m. ET), the daily average bid/offer spread for bitcoin perpetual swaps for $10 million quote size on FTX is 0.32% compared to 0.28% on BitMEX, according to data provided by the crypto derivatives research firm Skew. BitMEX was founded in 2014 and is one of the largest bitcoin perpetuals exchanges by trading volumes while FTX launched in May 2018. 

The bid–offer spread is the difference between the prices quoted for an immediate sale and an immediate purchase for an asset. The larger the gap, the greater the spread. A small spread implies a highly liquid market and vice versa. 

See also: Bitcoin Price Drop May Be a Bear Trap, Options Market Suggests

As such, one may conclude FTX is less liquid than BitMEX. While that is true, the liquidity gap between the two has reduced substantially over the past two months. “Liquidity for bitcoin perpetual swaps on FTX has caught up with BitMEX,” Skew tweeted Friday. 

Related: Bitcoin Sees Small Gain as Gold Rallies to One-Month High

The bid/offer spread on perpetuals listed on BitMEX and FTX rose sharply after bitcoin collapsed by 40% on March 12. The spread tends to widen dramatically during a price crash when traders offload large quantities of assets within a short period of time. 

The market depth was decimated following the March 12 bitcoin price crash of 40%. However, even then, BitMEX was reporting a lower spread than other exchanges.

FTX consistently reported a higher spread before the March crash and for nearly 2.5 months following the price slide. Notably, FTX registered a spread of 2.75% on May 11, when the cryptocurrency underwent its third mining reward halving. On that day, the spread on BitMEX was 0.63%. 

The situation, however, changed earlier this month, with the spread on FTX converging with that on BitMEX. 

“Over time we’ve seen increasing volume and a growing user base on FTX as more of the crypto ecosystem onboards,” an FTX spokesperson told CoinDesk, adding, “We’ve particularly put an emphasis on growing the liquidity base over the past six months, and this quarter it’s started paying off.”

Trading volumes on FTX surged from $44 million on Jan. 1 to $2.4 billion on March 13. However, volumes have since tapered off to levels seen in January this quarter, although the decline is not just limited to FTX and is seen across major exchanges.

However, FTX and Binance have suffered more than 80% decline in daily trading volume over the past three months, while BitMEX has seen nearly 40% decline, according to Skew data. That explains why BitMEX is still more liquid than FTX. 

Binance’s order book depth, too, has improved over the past three months. At press time, the daily average bid/offer spread on Binance for a $10 million quote is 0.29% – nearly indistinguishable from the 0.28% seen on BitMEX.

Also, Binance’s spread narrowed to BitMEX levels in April, that is, nearly two months before FTX registered a similar decline. 

See also: Bitcoin SV President Hits Out at Binance as Former Critic Becomes Top Miner

Meanwhile, derivative exchanges Deribit and bitFlyer are still relatively less liquid, with bid/offer spreads at 3.12% and 4.86%, respectively. One possible explanation for the relatively low liquidity on these platforms could be the fact that they account for negligible amount of global futures/perpetuals volume. Notably, Deribit, which is the largest options exchange by volume, contributed just 1.3% of total volume traded on Sunday, as per data source Skew.  

Looking forward, both Deribit and bitFlyer and other exchanges are likely to see higher liquidity because institutional participation is expected to increase over the long run. The coronavirus crisis has established bitcoin as a macro asset, according to Messari analysts. Further, legendary macro traders like Paul Tudor Jones II have recently thrown their weight behind bitcoin as a inflation-hedge asset. 

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Fintech giant PayPal plans to roll out direct sales of cryptocurrency to its 325 million users, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Currently, PayPal can be used as an alternative means for withdrawing funds from exchanges such as Coinbase, but this would be a first in terms of offering direct sales of crypto.

“My understanding is that they are going to allow buys and sells of crypto directly from PayPal and Venmo,” a well-placed industry source told CoinDesk. “They are going to have some sort of a built-in wallet functionality so you can store it there.” 

Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin Spot Volumes Are Weak While Options and DeFi Strengthen

It is unclear which or how many cryptocurrencies would be available. The industry source said they expected PayPal “would be working with multiple exchanges to source liquidity.”

A second source confirmed that PayPal is looking to offer buying and selling of crypto and said the service could be expected “in the next three months, maybe sooner.”

PayPal declined to comment on the plans.

San Francisco-based crypto exchange Coinbase and Luxembourg-based Bitstamp were mentioned as likely contenders by the sources. Both Coinbase and Bitstamp declined to comment. 

Related: Coinbase Open Sources Technical Standard to Streamline Token Listings

It’s worth noting that PayPal has a longstanding relationship with Coinbase, going back as early as 2016. In 2018, Coinbase made instant fiat withdrawals to PayPal available for U.S. customers. Last year, European Coinbase users could withdraw to their PayPal accounts, followed by users in Canada. 

Meanwhile, fintech apps that offer crypto are making money. Square, the payments unicorn launched by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, rolled out bitcoin purchases in its Cash App in mid-2018. Cash App reported $306 million in bitcoin revenue in its most recent earnings report.

London-based Revolut, which began offering crypto to users following a 2017 partnership with Bitstamp, raised $500 million in February, valuing the platform at $5.5 billion. Robinhood, the fintech app thought to be fueling the recent retail boom in equities day trading, first offered crypto in February 2018. 

Crypto is increasingly seen as an obvious way to bolster user numbers on fintech apps and create new revenue streams. Indeed, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has made it clear his plan this year is to aggressively monetize Venmo, which has over 52 million accounts.

Around the start of 2020, PayPal posted job openings to ramp up its new Blockchain Research Group. PayPal posted eight engineering positions: four in San Jose and four in Singapore.

Following PayPal’s short-lived dalliance with the Facebook-led Libra project last year, the focus now is expanding its own payments expertise, one of the sources added.

In an interview with CoinDesk earlier this year, PayPal Chief Technology Officer Sri Shivananda said the company wanted its own “perspective and view on [blockchain] technology itself to see how it can help us contribute to the concept of creating an open digital payments platform that can serve everyone.” 

Shivananda said he was unable to comment on any of PayPal’s specific plans.

“We are a strong believer in the potential of blockchain. The digitization of currency is only a matter of when not if,” Shivananda said.

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Bitcoin is one of the only sources of funding available for the “pirate” science site, Sci-Hub, which is quietly engaged in war against copyrights.

Despite Bitcoin’s ability to disintermediate money from politics, a new quantum computer may eventually crack its code. Here’s the story:

You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. 

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A Quiet Revolution
Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub, a database of over 80 million articles from academic journals usually locked behind subscription services, is fomenting a quiet rebellion against copyright funded by bitcoin. The website has been sued by two science publishing houses and reportedly investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice, effectively cutting Elbakyan off the mainstream financial services in the West. Elsewhere, Honeywell unveiled the most powerful quantum computer to date, again opening questions over Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies’ security models. “According to a June 2017 paper, a quantum computer would need to have around 2,500 qubits of processing power in order to break the 256-bit encryption used by Bitcoin,” Decrypt’s Liam Frost reports. 

Confusion at the Top
Zhan Ketuan, the once-ousted Bitmain co-founder who returned to power this month, offered to buy back shares held by his rival co-founder Wu Jihan in an attempt to end the firm’s internal war. Zhan’s offer values the company at $4 billion, significantly down from a market high. Meanwhile, after significant push and pull, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton may be the next U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Clayton was nominated by U.S. President Donald Trump to replace Geoffrey Berman, who initially refused to step down. Finally, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) told crypto businesses they must submit their completed anti-money laundering applications by June 30, although the hard deadline for applications is Jan. 10, 2021.

Crime and Punishment
New Zealand police have seized NZ$140 million (US$90 million) in bank funds linked to Alexander Vinnik, a Russian alleged to have been the controller of the now-defunct BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange. The seizure is said to be the largest in the country’s history by federal police. Meanwhile, a wallet allegedly linked to PlusToken, which has been accused of being a $3 billion Ponzi scheme, has withdrawn 26 million EOS tokens (more than $67 million). (Decrypt)

Pilots, Tests & White Papers
The National Bank of Cambodia has revealed new details about its upcoming blockchain-based payments system dubbed “Project Bakong.” The quasi-digital currency project is a revamp of the Khmer Riel secured by a Hyperledger Iroha blockchain. Meanwhile, a solar energy trading trial, partly funded by the Australia government, run by blockchain startup Power Ledger found the initiative to be “technically feasible” for real world use. Finally, the Italian Banking Association (ABI) said its 700 banking institutions are willing to pilot a digital euro.

Related: First Mover: Compound’s COMP Token More Than Doubles in Price Amid DeFi Mania

Crypto for Social Good
Racial diversity and financial inclusion are good for cryptocurrency and blockchain – and the industry has work to do. At a virtual Juneteenth event put together by the founder of the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain, panelists said crypto has the potential to allow citizens to opt out of what they described as a racist financial system, though people of color must be part of the development of the technology. Independently, Ron Kim, a member of the New York State Assembly, has become a fierce advocate for progressive politics as well as a surprising voice for crypto advocacy. Kim has put forward bills to create local cryptocurrencies and a decentralized standard for contact tracing in a bid to give his constituents self-sovereignty. 

Funding & Finance
Crypto trading platform CrossTower has raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by European tech investor Gerard Lopez. The platform supports highly active order books and tight spreads for crypto-to-crypto trading. Elsewhere, OMG Network’s parent company SYNQA has raised a $80 million Series C fund led by SCB10X, the venture arm of Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank, and Mirai Creation Fund II of Japanese asset manager SPARX Group, and including participation from Toyota Financial Services Corporation, among others. (The Block) Finally, a record $1 billion of Bitcoin and Ethereum options will expire on the Deribit exchange on June 26. (The Block)

Bitcoin & Gold
Bitcoin is reporting moderate gains on Monday as gold, a safe haven asset, rallies amid renewed coronavirus concerns. The cryptocurrency is priced around $9,430 – up 1.5% on the day – having put in lows near $9,260 during the Asian hours, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index. Gold, however, printed a one-month high of $1,759 per ounce early on Monday and was last seen trading near $1,750. 

Looking Through the Water
XRP, the fourth-biggest digital asset by market value, has been left out of 2020’s crypto rally, marking the second straight year of underperformance. The token is down 2% in 2020, while bitcoin is up 30% and ether has gained 76%. Analysts told CoinDesk’s First Mover XRP is likely underperforming because of regulatory pressure, slow growth as a payments solution and a lack of classic proof-of-work mining that generates fresh supply for the trading market. Such negatives have outweighed bullish factors like a reduced pace of sales by the XRP software developer Ripple and signs of progress in a partnership with the payments transmitter MoneyGram (NASDAQ: MGI).  

Start With Gold
Gunnar Jaerv, COO of First Digital Trust, said the tokenization revolution, which could reach more than $544 trillion worth of assets, will be kicked off by tokenizing precious metals by paving the way for regulatory clarity and proving the effectiveness. “Gold has long been a trusted store of value for investors, especially when fiat currencies experience volatility. By tokenizing assets like gold on the blockchain, you are guaranteed the digital rights to your investment,” Jaerv said. 

What Changed My Mind About Bitcoin Narratives
CoinDesk’s Head of Research Noelle Acheson thinks one of crypto’s virtues is its level of debate. Last week, Bloomberg editor Joe Weisenthal and several JPMorgan analysts gave differing views of Bitcoin’s value and performance throughout 2020. Both are centered around the idea that Bitcoin has a central narrative it either hits or misses. “I have always regarded bitcoin’s lack of a clear narrative as a strength. I was wrong – it is both a strength and a weakness,” Acheson writes. “Bitcoin’s main use case is yet to be determined… [and] the demand growth from any one of its many narratives could be enough to push up its value.”

• Blockchain Bites: Trump on Bitcoin, Powell on Digital Dollars and the Truth About Terrorist Financing
• First Mover: As US Stocks Defy Economic Gravity, Bitcoiners Shudder at March Memory

Economists at the Federal Reserve said an earlier version of Libra, the Facebook-linked stablecoin frequently targeted by lawmakers and central bankers as an economic wrecking ball, was unlikely to have lived up to its sovereign currency-killer hype.

Calling “fears of a so-called global stablecoin” “overstated” in a new report published Monday, economists Garth Baughman and Jean Flemming say policymakers may have focused perhaps too acutely on the likely downside of the previous Libra iteration’s multiple currencies backing a new stablecoin. The pair modeled a so-called basket-backed stablecoin in a hypothetical scenario, evaluating the likely impact that stablecoin would have on the economy as well as the likelihood of it being adopted.

Critics argued Libra’s original plan to maintain its stablecoin’s value from multiple currency reserves could destabilize or even displace those underlying fiat currencies. U.S lawmakers tried to freeze the project, Australia’s central bank said no one would use it and France’s finance minister threatened to block Libra over fears it could oust sovereign currencies.

Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin Flat at $9.4K but Investors Are Holding On

The Fed economists wrote that their own modeling discounts that possibility.

“Our model shows that although the basket may have the potential to become important and globally demanded, [the regular ebb and flow of fiat value and trade] make it such that the basket never dominates either of the component currencies,” they wrote. 

See also: Libra Is Ready for the Digital Money ‘Space Race’: Dante Disparte

Their point is in some ways moot. Libra’s project leaders abandoned plans for a single basket-backed stablecoin in April 2020 in a major concession to regulators. Now, Libra’s “global stablecoin” will be a basket of other stablecoins themselves backed by fiat reserves.

Related: US Fed Chair Says Private Entities Should Not Help Design Central Bank Digital Currencies

But the Fed’s paper, written in February and apparently updated a month after Libra’s change, nonetheless raises questions about whether policymakers moved too aggressively against the tech project they blasted for months.

“A simpler question arises: Does a basket currency actually provide substantial value relative to the current system?” they asked. They found that may well be the case in certain circumstances. 

“Although the basket currency will never dominate the sovereign currencies it comprises, we find that there can be substantial gains in world welfare if many sellers accept the basket as payment,” they wrote.

• First Mover: Negative Rates or More Money Printing – Bitcoin May Benefit Either Way
• Market Wrap: Stocks’ Carnage Drags Bitcoin Down to $9K

A hedging instrument for decentralized finance (DeFi) has closed a $2.16 million funding round, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from 1kx, Version One Ventures, CoinFund, DTC Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures and A.Capital.

The funding is for Opyn, which offers crypto-based derivatives, beginning with the oToken, which is a permissionless hedging instrument. The company reports $36 million in trading volume since launch. Others in the funding round include angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, formerly of Coinbase; Robert Leshner, founder of Compound; and Linda Xie, also a Coinbase alum who co-founded Scalar Capital.

Crypto getting down with the risk management business sounds like the death knell of the punk-rock era of the industry. On the other hand, as projects like Opyn become more robust, they will create ways for thesis-driven investors to make money via contrarian positions, and that could be very punk rock.  

Related: Compound Tops MakerDAO, Now Has the Most Value Staked in DeFi

With the surge in demand for the COMP token, many users may have funds that would normally be in cash rather than crypto right now, which could feel risky for users. The ability to insure their USDC deposits on Compound might now be unusually attractive.  

Read more: Options Protocol Brings ‘Insurance’ to DeFi Deposits on Compound

Opyn offers oTokens, which are basically insurance policies, but without insurance adjusters. So here’s how a user would insure their USDC using the product. An oToken would allow them, for a small fee, to recover most of the investment’s value if they turned in the underlying token.

So a user could insure $100 in USDC for $95. The user could unlock the $95 in collateral on their oUSDC token but they would have to turn in 100 USDC to do it. They can do this at any time without any kind of check or verification.  

Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin Spot Volumes Are Weak While Options and DeFi Strengthen

“Opyn is starting a new chapter in DeFi by unlocking options and offering a new and powerful financial primitive that brings stability to a historically-volatile market,” Tom Schmidt of Dragonfly Capital Partners said in a press release. 

The company is working now on v2 of its platform, which will include many new kinds of options. 

“This release will include margining for capital efficiency, enable options spreads and combinations positions, and create the infrastructure to add governance down the line,” co-founder Alexis Gauba told CoinDesk. The update should be released later this year. 

• DeFi Startups Built on Compound Weigh What to Do With $200 COMP Tokens
• Tether’s Supply on Compound Jumps to Over $224M in a Week

Software firm BlackBerry and tech giant Intel have joined the fight against crypto-mining malware with the launch of a detection tool for Intel’s commercial PCs.

Dubbed the the BlackBerry Optics Context Analysis Engine, the tool utilizes “unique” processor telemetry from Intel’s Threat Detection Technology and a mix of machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to thwart the malicious programs, often dubbed cryptojackers.

The technology is also designed to consume limited CPU processing power when in use, BlackBerry said, adding that it “effectively stops cryptojacking” on Windows computers with the tool installed.

Related: EU Supercomputers Hijacked From COVID-19 Research to Mine Cryptocurrency

Cryptojacking involves the installation of malware on a device from a malicious third party in order to hijack computing power to mine cryptocurrency (often monero) without the user’s knowledge or consent.

“Given the cost associated with mining cryptocurrency and the payments of ransomware demands on the decline, cryptojacking becomes an attractive option for threat actors to generate revenue,” Josh Lemos, vice president of research and Intelligence at BlackBerry, said in a press release Friday. “The days of exploiting unsuspecting users for free CPU time are over.”

See also: EU Supercomputers Hijacked From COVID-19 Research to Mine Cryptocurrency

Indeed, cryptojacking has soared in popularity with cybercriminals. According to a recent data breach investigation report by Verizon, “around 10% of organizations received cryptocurrency mining malware at some point throughout the course of the year [2020].”

Related: Hackers Plant Crypto Miners by Exploiting Flaw in Popular Server Framework Salt

Over the last year, a number of major cryptojacking attacks have been discovered affecting many thousands of companies. Browser users and apps on Android and Windows have also been affected.

One attack saw mining malware installed on a company server via a flaw in Salt, a popular infrastructure tool used by major firms such as IBM, LinkedIn and eBay. And in January, Interpol led an operation trying to tackle a malware infecting over 20,000 routers.

• US Agencies Publish List of North Korea’s Alleged Crypto Crimes
• North Korea Is Expanding Its Monero Mining Operations, Says Report

XRP, the fourth-biggest digital asset by market value, has been left out of 2020’s rally in cryptocurrencies, marking the second straight year of underperformance compared with its larger and more popular rivals, bitcoin and ether. 

The token is down 2% in 2020, while bitcoin is up 30% and ether, the native token from the Ethereum blockchain, has gained 76%. 

You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can subscribe here.

Related: Crypto Long & Short: What Changed My Mind About Bitcoin Narratives

Cryptocurrency analysts and investors say XRP is likely underperforming this year because of regulatory pressure, slow growth as a payments solution and a lack of classic proof-of-work mining that generates fresh supply for the trading market. Such negatives have outweighed bullish factors that include a reduced pace of sales by the XRP software developer Ripple and signs of progress in a partnership with the payments transmitter MoneyGram (NASDAQ: MGI).  

“Even throughout this most recent bull crypto market run, there has rarely ever been anyone discussing XRP,” said Jack Tan, managing partner at Taiwan-based trading firm Kronos Research, told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat. 

XRP’s lagging returns follow an abysmal 2019, when the price fell 45% while bitcoin more than doubled. The token’s share of the overall digital-asset market capitalization has tumbled to 3%, from 12% early last year, according to metrics compiled by TradingView.

Mike Novogratz, whose firm Galaxy Digital owns a $29 million stake in XRP software developer Ripple, according to a Q1 2020 filing, said in January at a conference he thought XRP would “underperform immensely again” this year. He wasn’t wrong.

Related: Money Reimagined: Ethereum’s Renaissance Creates an Opportunity – And a Major Test

“We can’t control, nor do we focus on, the price of XRP day to day,” a Ripple spokesperson told CoinDesk in an email. “What Ripple is thinking about is the utility of XRP, and building solutions that solve real problems with global payments.”

XRP has been one of the crypto industry’s most popular assets since 2012. That year, as an alternative to bitcoin, the founders of what would become San Francisco-based Ripple gifted the company 80 billion XRP out of a total 100 billion created. 

The leading software company working on XRP, Ripple is a startup with over 530 employees, according to LinkedIn, and has raised over $286 million in venture capital from firms including Galaxy. Major product offerings from the company include RippleNet and On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), which are used to facilitate fast and cheap payments. 

XRP is notable for an often vocal and devoted community of backers, who sometimes refer to themselves as the XRP Army and support both the cryptocurrency and Ripple. There are also investment firms backing the cryptocurrency. 

“XRP is a perfect currency for what we do,” Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch who now runs Arrington XRP Capital, one of the largest XRP investment funds, said in a phone interview. 

XRP’s properties of being fast and cheap – Arrington said he’s been able to move millions of dollars in the digital asset for as little as $0.45 – is one major reason why the fund likes its future potential.

“Right now we think XRP is dramatically undervalued,” he said. “All else being equal, we’re buyers at these prices. Maybe not leverage buyers, but we think it’s undervalued.”

Just last week, former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Chris Giancarlo said XRP deserved to be considered a cryptocurrency, not a security. Giancarlo is now a senior partner at the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, where Ripple is a client.  

The question of whether XRP might be declared a security has haunted the asset because a declaration to that effect by the Securities and Exchange Commission would likely subject the token and its ecosystem to stricter regulations and potentially enforcement actions. Multiple lawsuits, one filed as recently as May, allege XRP should be a security. 

XRP’s price didn’t really budge in response to Giancarlo’s comments, possibly an indication traders are still waiting to hear from the SEC on the matter.

Another overhang is sales of tokens into the market: Ripple Labs does sell XRP to raise cash, although according to a first-quarter market report published by the company its sales of the tokens dropped to $1.75 million during the first three months of the year, down 86% from fourth-quarter levels. 

One of the biggest users of XRP is the payments transmitter MoneyGram, which received a $50 million equity investment from Ripple Labs last year. Upon completion of the investment in November, MoneyGram announced 10% of the company’s Mexican peso foreign exchange liquidity was already using Ripple’s ODL product to move money.

In February, Ripple Labs executive Ashseeh Birla provided an update on MoneyGram’s progress using its technology:

In the first quarter of 2020, MoneyGram reported it was able to reduce its operating expenses with a $12.1 million “benefit” derived from “Ripple market development fees.” However, there’s no further information about the growth of ODL within the company’s business lines other than that the partnership, valid through July 2023, is expected to continue to reduce expenses. 

Ripple Labs has formed relationships with hundreds of partners, including Bank of America, which has reportedly piloted some of its technology.

But banks might be worried about holding the tokens for fear of having to report any gains or losses to shareholders or supervisors, Haohan Xu, CEO of cryptocurrency liquidity provider Apifiny, wrote in an email message.

“This is especially given the different regulations across the globe, and being exposed to the volatility risk when holding XRP,” Xu said. 

So can demand for XRP be driven by usage or expected usage of its network for payments? How will XRP’s regulatory issues conclude? Does selling pressure from a lack of proof-of-work mining create some concern among traders? 

“XRP is an interesting crypto asset because whilst the fundamentals seem to indicate growth and greater adoption, the price action is showing the opposite,” Simon Peters, a cryptocurrency analyst at multi-asset brokerage eToro, wrote in an email to CoinDesk. 

BTC: Price: $9,432 (BPI) | 24-Hr High: $9,441 | 24-Hr Low: $9,273

Trend: While bitcoin is flashing green at press time, it is still trading within the narrow range of $9,000–$10,000 it’s been largely stuck in for over a month. 

The leading cryptocurrency by market value is changing hands near $9,440, representing a 1.5% gain on the day, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index. 

Prices are rangebound for the 11th straight day amid mixed signals on the technical charts. On the bullish side, the three-day 50- and 100-candle moving averages (MA) have produced a bullish crossover. A similar cross accelerated the uptrend in June 2019 and marked the beginning of a multi-year bull run in October 2015.

However, the three-day MACD histogram, an MA-based indicator used to identify trend strength and trend changes, has crossed below zero for the first time since early April, confirming a bearish reversal. The daily chart, too, is reporting conflicting signals with the MACD hovering below zero and the 50- and 200-day SMAs, signaling a bull market. 

With indicators lacking consensus on the potential direction of the next range breakout, traders will be waiting for a strong directional cue to emerge.

A UTC close above $10,000 would restore the bull run from the March low of $3,867 and open the doors for a $1,000 rally. On the way higher, the February high of $10,500 could offer resistance. 

Alternatively, a move below $9,000 will likely yield a sell-off to the 200-day SMA at $8,267. 

• First Mover: Compound’s COMP Token More Than Doubles in Price Amid DeFi Mania
• First Mover: As US Stocks Defy Economic Gravity, Bitcoiners Shudder at March Memory

Bitcoin is reporting moderate gains on Monday as gold, a safe haven asset, rallies amid renewed coronavirus concerns. 

At press time, the cryptocurrency is priced around $9,430 – up 1.5% on the day – having put in lows near $9,260 during the Asian hours, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index. 

Gold, however, printed a one-month high of $1,759 per ounce early on Monday and was last seen trading near $1,750. 

Related: Bitcoin News Roundup for June 22, 2020

The precious metal looks to be rising as the markets return their focus to the coronavirus pandemic, with the number of new cases rising at a faster pace in Germany, the U.S. and other parts of the world over the past few days. Investors seem worried the major economies may reimpose lockdowns to avoid a second wave of the outbreak, which could worsen an already deep economic crisis. 

Some companies like tech giant Apple have already announced temporary store closures in four U.S. states following a jump in COVID-19 cases last week. 

Authorities in Australia have extended a state of emergency for four more weeks to July 19. Meanwhile, the uptick in the German infection rate caused by an outbreak among abattoir employees has sparked debate about working conditions in its meat processing industry, as noted by popular macro analyst Holger Zschaepitz. 

Hence, it’s perhaps not surprising safe haven assets like gold are drawing bids. A recent study by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis shows the majority of bitcoin is held by those who treat it as “digital gold,” or an asset to be held for the long term.

Related: New Zealand Police Seize $90M Linked to Alleged BTC-e Exchange Operator

Bitcoin’s uptick seen so far on Monday may bring cheer to those who believe in the safe haven narrative. However, a closer look at the markets suggests the cryptocurrency is tracking S&P 500 futures. 

U.S. stock futures, which were down by nearly 1% during the early Asian trading hours, are now reporting a 1% gain.

Further, while gold has gained over 5% in the last two weeks, bitcoin has largely been restricted to a narrow range of $9,000 to $10,000 since the May 11 halving.

As the top cryptocurrency’s rally from the March 13 low of $3,867 looks to have stalled near $10,000, institutional investors are showing temporary exhaustion, according to one analyst.

“On the CME futures, we are seeing some signs that the bulls might be getting tired waiting for a breakout above $10,000. The average daily traded volume is trending down which is not surprising since it follows price volatility. But at the same time open interest is also trending down,” noted Ecoinometrics, a bitcoin analysis company.

As of Friday, futures listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), which is widely considered to be synonymous with institutional activity, registered trading volume of $195 million, down nearly 80% from the high of $914 million observed on May 11, according to crypto derivatives research firm Skew. 

In addition, open interest – the number of contracts traded but not squared off by taking offsetting positions – was $394 million Friday, down 26% from the high of $532 million seen on May 19. 

While futures activity is slowing down, CME options are reporting record open interest. 

Option contracts worth $417 million were open on the CME on Friday, representing a staggering 3,000% rise from the tally of $13 million observed on May 1. 

As such, one may argue that institutional interest in bitcoin hasn’t died down but merely shifted instruments. 

It remains to be seen if the record open interest on options is rolled over to July expiry contracts following the expiry of June contracts this Friday. 

As of this writing, there are 114,000 contracts set for expiry on June 26, according to Skew. If that open interest is not rolled over to July/September, it would confirm what futures activity is suggesting.

“The last two month-end/month-open (end of April/start of May and start of June) both saw large upside moves as stale positions were rolled off and new positions were put on,” Singapore-based QCP Capital noted on its Telegram channel. “We are questioning whether this can be 3 in a row after such a large open interest, comprising mostly upside calls rolls off, or has the short-term institutional bullishness mostly died down.”

Disclosure: The author holds no cryptocurrency at the time of writing.

• Blackballed by PayPal, Scientific-Paper Pirate Takes Bitcoin Donations
• Crypto Long & Short: What Changed My Mind About Bitcoin Narratives

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has told crypto businesses it will need half a year to fully process applications before the hard deadline in January.

The U.K.’s chief financial regulator announced Monday that any company carrying out “cryptoasset activity in the U.K.” must have submitted their completed applications – outlining how they aim to follow new money-laundering requirements – to the watchdog by June 30. Although the hard deadline for applications is Jan. 10, 2021, the regulator says it wants more than six months to go through firms’ submissions.

“The 30 June date allows the FCA to review submitted applications and raise any follow-up questions with firms, with enough time for that process to be completed before 10 January 2021,” the FCA said.

Related: New York US Attorney Geoffrey Berman Steps Down, President Trump Nominates SEC Chair Jay Clayton to Post [Updated]

Businesses that haven’t successfully registered with the FCA by Jan. 10, 2021, will have to cease all activity in the U.K.

See also: UK Finance Watchdog Warns Against ‘Unauthorized’ Crypto Exchange BitMEX

The FCA first told firms they would need to register in January; soon after, the U.K. transposed FATF’s “Travel Rule” recommendation into national law, which made the regulator responsible for ensuring all crypto businesses follow the new anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) requirements.

The FCA brought in guidance for cryptocurrencies last year, where it highlighted what types of tokens currently fall under its jurisdiction. In 2018, it started welcoming crypto startups into its regulatory sandbox, an initiative that allows businesses to set up and test new products and services with temporary and provisory authorization from the regulator.

Related: Russia’s Ministry of Justice Latest to Criticize Proposed Crypto Ban

See also: UK Financial Service Provider to Coinbase, Bitstamp Awarded FCA Payments License

The FCA also appointed its new chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, on Monday. Formerly a director at the London Stock Exchange, he had previously hinted blockchain technology could play a larger role in the infrastructure of the U.K.’s primary stock market.

“You can certainly see distributed ledger technology having an application in the issuance process,” Rathi told CNBC in an interview last year. “I can see that technology being used in settlement too.”

• Binance Launching Crypto Exchange in the UK
• Mauritius Releases Guidance for Regulated Security Token Offerings

New Zealand police have seized NZ$140 million (US$90 million) in bank funds linked to Alexander Vinnik, a Russian alleged to have been the controller of the now-defunct BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange.

The seizure of funds, which were controlled by a New Zealand-registered company, is said to be the largest in the country’s history by federal police. The force’s Asset Recovery Unit moved to freeze the funds amid a global investigation into the activities of the exchange and its operators, according to a report by news source NZ Herald.

U.S. prosecutors have alleged that Vinnik controlled BTC-e, a bitcoin exchange that was used to launder billions of dollars for criminal enterprises. Vinnik, who has been denying the charges for up to three years, was arrested based on extradition orders from the U.S. while holidaying with family in Greece back in 2017.

Related: Bitcoin Sees Small Gain as Gold Rallies to One-Month High

New Zealand police allege that the exchange had no anti-money laundering (AML) controls in place, resulting in criminals laundering crime-related proceeds through the platform.

“New Zealand Police has worked closely with the Internal Revenue Service of the United States to address this very serious offending,” Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said. “These funds are likely to reflect the profit gained from the victimisation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people globally as a result of cyber-crime and organised crime.”

See also: Crypto Exchange Owner Admits Laundering $1.8M in Online Auctions Fraud

Vinnik is now in custody in France after being extradited earlier this year following a ruling from Greece’s Council of State, the country’s supreme administrative court on January 23.

Related: Blackballed by PayPal, Scientific-Paper Pirate Takes Bitcoin Donations

French officials have since charged him with counts of extortion, aggravated money laundering, conspiracy and harming automatic data-processing systems for his alleged involvement in laundering money for criminals.

• Crypto Long & Short: What Changed My Mind About Bitcoin Narratives
• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Spot Volumes Are Weak While Options and DeFi Strengthen

Zhan Ketuan, the formerly-ousted Bitmain co-founder who returned to power earlier this month, is proposing a solution to end the firm’s internal war.

In a letter Sunday, Zhan, who as Bitmain’s biggest shareholder owns 36% of its stock, offered to buy back shares possessed by his rival co-founder Wu Jihan, several founding members and some of Bitmain employees, at a company valuation of $4 billion.

Wu alone controls about 20% of Bitmain and three other founding members own about 15% in total. Bitmain’s employee stock option pool has another 19% and the remaining 10% belongs to external investors.

Related: Bitcoin Miner Maker Ebang Estimates $2.5M Loss for Q1 in IPO Prospectus Update

But Zhan’s $4 billion valuation of the firm is significantly down from a market high seen in the summer 2018. Bitmain had been valued at around $1 billion in September 2017 during its Series A round. When it went on a high profile fundraise in August 2018, it was valued at $12 billion and eventually $14.5 billion in a pre-IPO round.

The offer comes in an effort to bring about negotiations that could end the divisions that have been tearing the company apart since Zhan clawed his way back into the firm after being ousted by Wu last October.

Read more: How Was It Possible for Bitmain to Oust Its Largest Shareholder Overnight?

In addition to causing division among employees, the power struggle is now endangering the firm’s miner manufacturing processes.

Related: Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Makes Biggest Jump in 29 Months

Zhan’s letter had been in response to a Sunday statement on Beijing Bitmain’s official website, which is controlled by Wu, saying that its Hong Kong parent entity had cut off the chip processor supply chain to its Shenzhen factory.

“Bitmain Hong Kong has suspended the chip supply for the time being to Century Cloud Core, which is now controlled by Zhan’s relatives, until we are assured, through negotiation with Zhan’s relatives, that they are committed to protecting the interest of Bitmain’s customers and of the company as a whole,” the statement reads.

Bitmain Technologies Limited in Hong Kong is Bitmain’s offshore sales and procurement center for crypto mining hardware. The bitcoin miner’s manufacturing business relies on computing chips supplied by semiconductor companies.

Since Zhan’s forceful return to the firm, he had seized control of Century Cloud Core, Bitmain’s packaging factory and warehouse in Shenzhen, and paused shipments to customers. According to a former employee at Beijing Bitmain who is familiar with the matter, Zhan’s brother-in-law, Zhou Feng, has been placed in charge of the Shenzhen entity.

In his letter, Zhan responded that, if necessary, he would procure chips directly via Beijing Bitmain, even if that would cause a great deal of loss for the company as a whole.

He further accused Wu of, among other things, forging a resolution passed by a claimed “shareholder meeting” last November at the Bitmain’s Cayman Islands-based holding entity. In fact, the meeting was never held because “several other shareholders including Zhan Ketuan as the biggest stakeholder never received a notice of such meeting ever,” Zhan claimed.

Beijing Bitmain Technology Ltd. is a fully owned subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Bitmain Technologies Ltd. That, in turn, is fully owned by the ultimate controlling entity, BitMain Technologies Holding, which incorporated in the Caymans but also registered in Hong Kong.

Read more: Bitmain’s Power Struggle Takes Toll on Customers as Co-Founder Halts Shipments

When ousting Zhan in October last year, Wu filed to the Hong Kong government to have Zhan’s name removed as a board director at the Cayman holding company.

The two sides now have an ongoing legal case in the Cayman Islands with regards to disputes over Zhan’s 60% voting power at Bitmain.

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Securitize Japan became the first global token issuance platform to join the Japan Security Token Offering Association (JSTOA), the company announced Thursday.

The Japanese subsidiary of U.S.-based Securitize, the company token platform could not join the association until now because JSTOA only accepts Japanese-regulated entities into its ranks. Securitize co-founder and Chief Executive Carlos Domingo told CoinDesk that a leading Japanese financial services company, SBI Holdings, was one of the founding members of JSTOA, and is a Securitize shareholder. 

Six major Japanese brokerages created JSTOA as a self-regulatory organization last year in a bid to consolidate expertise on securities and develop security token business opportunities in Japan. It is a state recognized financial instruments and exchange association that operates as a self-regulated entity. 

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“So we had already talked to them, and some of the members about how as soon as the association was open to non-regulated members, we [wanted] to be the first company but we are not,” Domingo said. 

Headquartered in San Francisco, Securitize expanded its operations to Japan last year after  Japan-based VC firm Global Brain invested in the platform, and has since established a subsidiary company. 

Domingo, who lived in Japan for many years and speaks the language, said there were a number of reasons why Securitize wanted to establish business ties with the country. 

“Japan has been a very forward-thinking country in terms of blockchain and crypto,” Domingo said. 

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According to Domingo, Japanese investors are very active in the blockchain space, and Japan has comprehensive laws on cryptocurrency regulation, although it has had trouble making a clear distinction between digital assets and cryptocurrency. Large financial services institutions are also inclined towards taking advantage of adopting blockchain technology and digitization for securities, Domingo added. 

“So, if you put all those things together, we definitely saw that this was an opportunity and moreover, none of our competitors had any presence in Japan,” Domingo said. 

In his view, cracking the Japanese market is not an easy task for foreign entities. 

“Japan can be intimidating for doing business,” he said, adding that the lack of U.S. or European securities platforms operating in the country gave them a competitive advantage. 

The Chairman of JSTOA and Chief Executive of SBI Holdings, Yoshitaka Kitao, said in a statement to the media, that Securitize brings years of experience and proven market success in developing and deploying security token technology. 

“We are very proud to have them join the JSTOA, and look forward to working alongside them,” Kitao added.

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A solar energy trading trial run by blockchain startup Power Ledger has found the initiative to be “technically feasible” for real world use.

The trial, which was partly funded by the Australia government, surveyed 48 households in Fremantle, Western Australia and found blockchain energy peer-to-peer energy (P2P) trading delivered lower costs “desired by consumers.”

“Power Ledger has demonstrated how peer-to-peer energy trading can incentivise the right outcomes for the grid in a more cost-effective way,” Power Ledger chairman Jemma Green said in a press release. 

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The trial ran between December 2018 and January 2020 as part of the RENeW Nexus Project and used Power Ledger’s blockchain technology to trace the transactions of rooftop solar energy traded between households. RENeW is an Australian national not-for-profit organization advocating for sustainable living.

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A report detailing the findings of the trial and published earlier this month in a joint effort between Power Ledger, Curtin and Murdoch Universities found energy trading could provide localized energy markets with the ability to deliver a more stable power grid, at lower costs.

Other findings included how the Australian tariff structure needed an overhaul in order to make P2P energy trading more attractive to the consumer as well as making it more readily accessible to deal with excess solar energy (during the day) in the grid without the need for government subsidies.

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“Participants had a positive view of P2P energy trading and could see its benefits but stated that changes to the tariff structure would be required to make it attractive,” the report claimed.

Additionally, the project included a study of a distributed Virtual Power Plant (VPP) as well as a microgrid with a 670kWh battery that is to service homes in the “East Village development in Fremantle.”

The Village is a sustainable development initiative featuring smart homes powered by green renewable energy.

In the case of Power Ledger’s initiative, a virtual power plant is a cloud-based distributed power station that aggregates green energy resources for the purposes of enhancing power generation, as well as trading or selling power on the local electricity market.

See also: Thailand Turns to Blockchain to Boost Renewable Energy Push

“This project is a world-first with great significance for how cities around the world can learn to share solar,” report co-author Peter Newman said in a statement.

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