Starting from August 20, users of the US exchange will be able to directly buy and sell altcoins for the US dollar.

The large American cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex is expanding the number of fiat pairs. Starting from August 20, the company’s customers will be able to trade Ripple and Ethereum Classic in pairs with the US dollar.

Representatives of the platform say that over time, they will add other digital money in pairs to the fiat currency. The company will gradually provide this service to users from different countries.

The support of fiat pairs with bitcoin, ether, Tether and TrueUSD appeared on the US exchange in May 2018. Bittrex is on the 24th place in the list of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms.

The developers of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform announced the launch of the Ethereum on Azure, based on “blockchain-as-a-service” model. It is noteworthy that the new solution is based on the consensus algorithm Proof-of-Authority (PoA).

PoA is based on the principle of approved validators and does not require mining.

The new product has a built-in decentralized application – Governance DApp – that gives consortium members the authority to manage the network and delegate their voting right to others. This allows network members to pass a vote on their own behalf to other nodes, if their main nodes are not online.

At the same time, administrators have the right to change the network validators by voting.

Thanks to the Parity WebAssembly client, developers will be able to write smart contracts in convenient programming languages, such as C, C ++ and Rust.

Recall, in February, the developers of Microsoft said that they were working on a decentralized identification system based on public Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin blockchains.

On Tuesday, August 7, crytocurrency was trading at $20,5. It’s taring at $14,5 at press time.

In Friday, August 10, Ethereum Classic average market price went down to $15 and right now it’s $14,5. Three days ago on August 7 it reached the maximum price of $20 in 3 months and later went down 30%.

Ethereum price was going up due to the news of its listings on different platforms. At the beginning of August Coinbase platform announce coin integration and for several days clients were able to trade it. Later on Robinhood app listed Ethereum Classic and American exchange Bittrex added alt coin to USD trading pair.

Ethereum Classic rates were growing August 3-7 but total capitalization went down to $15 billion. Bitcoin crashed from $7400 to $6900. However, the alt coin went back to the same rates before the growth it cost $14,6.

Attackers are improving their software that allows them to mine digital money without asking the permission to use your device. This software can damage your phone or computer.

In the second quarter of 2018, 2,2 million computer around the world were attacked by miner software, Izvestia reports with the reference to Kaspersky Lab research. Attackers discreetly mine cryptocurrency suing your device until it breaks.

This hackers’ attack is called cryptojacking and might cause phone overheating and damage due to additional burden for the computing power. Discreet mining can increase your electricity bill and cause different issues. Besides, the attacker can stop mining cryptocurrency, encrypt your personal data and ask for a ransom.

The number of attacks goes down slowly but the amount of malware that is able to use your device for mining for a long time is growing. Experts suggest in order to protect your device you should be very careful with emails and messages that include attached files sent by unknown people. Don’t click on unknown links, update your software regularly and use antivirus for better protection.

The investor is sure that the agency was quite expected to postpone the meeting on the new financial instrument and it will do it again. The drop has another reason.

According to CNBC analyst and founder of BKCM LLC Brian Kelly, traders do wrong when they sell bitcoin due to the postponement of the US securities and exchange Commission meeting. In his opinion, it was quite expected and on September 30 the commission will not approve it again.

He added that the situation in the market was most likely influenced by a large OTC transaction. After the SEC moved the meeting, the total capitalization of the industry fell by $24 billion just within a few hours.

According to reports of the COT (Commitments of Traders), provided by Commodity Futures Trading Commission, for the week, ended last Tuesday:
? Large speculators (NON-COMMERCIAL) reduced the net position for the sale of bitcoin contracts by 0.09 thousand contracts down to 0.37 thousand. Large speculative players have been reducing the net position for sale for the second week after a two-week increase. The net position has become the lowest in the last three weeks.
? Small speculators (NONREPORTABLE POSITIONS) reduced the net position for the purchase of bitcoin contracts by 0.09 thousand contracts down to 0.45 thousand. Small speculators also reduce the net position for the purchase for the second week in a row.
? Hedgers (COMMERCIAL), usually trading against the main trend, have not changed the net position for sale. It remained at 0.085 thousand contracts.
? Open interest decreased by 0.33 thousand contracts down to 2.73 thousand.
? The bearish index of large speculators (the ratio of the number of sales contracts to the number of purchase contracts) have not changed during the week, remaining at the level of 1.23.

Summary: the information from the COT’s reports on bitcoin reflect some growth of bullish sentiment among large speculators, that have been reducing the net position on bitcoin decline for the second week. Last week, large speculators reduced both purchases of BTC (by 18%) and sales (by 19%), which led to a decrease in the net position by 19%. The continuation of this trend can contribute to the growth of the cryptocurrency.
In the last week, small speculators mainly have been increasing sales, which have grown by 25%. But purchases from small speculators continue to exceed sales more than 2 times. Small speculators usually do not have a significant impact on the market.

In general, CME traders have been cutting open positions for two weeks. The number of trading participants is decreasing – the number of large funds trading on the exchange decreased by 4 to 33 last week. The open interest has been reducing for two weeks. Major players lose interest in bitcoin trading, and this trend coincides with what is happening on the CBOE – the second exchange, where bitcoin futures are traded.

The vulnerability in the mechanism of Bitcoin Cash consensus, able to fatally damage the network of the cryptocurrency, was found by Bitcoin Core developer Cory Fields. He wrote about it in a long post, again stirring up debates on the responsible disclosure of data about vulnerabilities of open source projects.

The problem was that the bug allowed to use the Bitcoin Cash network for self-enrichment, and Fields was afraid that if he told about the bug and someone used it, he would be accused of the attack.

The vulnerability found by Fields can be called a “chain-crushing bug”. Due to the lack of transaction verification, users of two versions of a code may find themselves in two incompatible blockchains. As a result, if a network is distributed in a certain way between nodes and users, it will make it very difficult or even impossible to agree on which transactions can be considered correct. This vulnerability, according to Fields, could divide Bitcoin Cash into two networks and as a result destroy the value of BCH.

Fields is working in an initiative on digital currencies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s media lab, and his main work is focused on developing the Bitcoin Core client. The information revealed by Fields led to a new wave of criticism of the Bitcoin Cash project. Recently, the Bitcoin ABC team announced that it is preparing a number of updates that will be included in the hardfork scheduled for November.

World Bank (WB) has authorized Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) to issue the world’s first bonds on the blockchain technology basis, says a joint press release of the banks.

The new debt instrument based on blockchain will be called “bond-i”. It will be launched after consultations with a wide range of investors who are interested in it. The blockchain platform for “bond-i” was developed by the CBA Blockchain center of advanced technologies.

World Bank has been operating in the debt capital markets for 70 years and it issues bonds in the amount of $50-60 billion annually. The Bank was the first in the world to issue an electronic bond (e-bond) in January 2000.

CoinMarketCap’s bitcoin dominance rate – an indicator that tracks the percent of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization contributed by the leading cryptocurrency – reached 50 percent for the first time since December 19th, 2017.?

On Dec. 19th, the average price of BTC was $17,605.81 across exchanges – an 65 percent higher price than the cryptocurrency’s value today, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index.

Current trading price of ?digital gold? is $6158, Bitcoin capitalization is $105,9 billion which is about $901 million more than the market capitalization of every other cryptocurrency combined. Total market capitalization right now is $210,35 billion.

Bitcoin’s dominance rate has been on a steady incline over the past few months, currently representing a 14 percent increase from May 1st.

In the same time period the market dominance of all other cryptocurrencies have largely been on the decline.

It should be reminded that Omkar Godbole, CoinDesk analyst, believes that bears will push Bitcoin price lower $6000.

Beijing intends to implement blockchain into all economical and social areas of everyday life.

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the Chinese government (MIIT) studies all the scenarios for blockchain implementation in the country. In fact, the MIIT has already put together a couple of proposals on how it would be able to make blockchain technology more mainstream in the country as well as a statement clarifying that the ecosystem itself is a priority in the ministry’s agenda.

The MIIT’s suggestion for promoting adoption is to call upon the country’s IT industry to “unite” under one banner, with the hope that blockchain applications would be developed on an “industrial” scale.

Currently, China is one of the world leaders when it comes to blockchain technology development, but there’s very little progress in the way of adoption, perhaps signaling to the organization that it should focus more on inspiring developers to make products that corporations would want to use.

It should be reminded that in May, MIIT announced blockchain in China showed exponential growth in 2017 and the number of companies who declared that blockchain as their? primary? business reached 450. More than that, MIIT deputy minister encouraged the country to join forces to promote blockchain in all the areas of economical and social life.

Beijing reflects the technological demand raised by business and society.? Industrial and Commercial Bank of China? announced that it would increase its investments to innovative financial technology.

Louis Kwan, the director of credit department, said that the bank is planning to launch three platforms for cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence. Blockchain will also be used in 12 different projects? related to international money transfers,? cryptocurrencies,? e-bills and others. Kwan also reminded that the Bank of China? received 11 patents for blockchain related? inventions.

Facebook has reportedly denied entering into talks with cryptocurrency firm Stellar (XLM), Cheddar reported August 10. Earlier today, Business insider reported that Facebook and Stellar had been considering a potential partnership to build a Facebook variant of a Stellar blockchain, Cheddar reports.?

On Friday, Business Insider published the article stating that Facebook is planning to? develop its own blockchain based on Stellar. Due to the news the trading price of the currency went up 10%.

However, Facebook continues its research of blockchain technology. In June, Evan Cheng, director of Engineering in Facebook transferred to a new position of director of blockchain engineering. He is also an advisor of several? blockchain projects including Zilliqa and ChainLink.

According to ForkLog, David Marcus, vice president of Facebook messenger development leaves Coinbase board of directors to focus on blockchain strategy for the most popular social network.

Earlier, Marcus said that blockchain solutions can be used by social network for cryptocurrency transactions via Facebook Messenger.

The Swiss startup Liquineq has presented bank transfer platform protected by blockchain.? The developers claim that it can handle million transaction per second.?

Cryptocurrency security has its own price? and it’s the speed of the transactions. Bank clients are not happy to wait? for minutes or longer than that for transaction approval and confirmation. Liquineq team is sure they can fix the time issue blockchain has. However, startup is not going to replace? banks, other way around they are going to partner up with them.

Moti Birger, the head of Liquineq, says that company is able to manage different currencies stored in one digital wallet meeting all the anti money laundering and? tax evasion laws. It can also support mobile and desktop apps with the high level os security.

The client is able to set an account in the bank? through Liquineq system by answering a couple of simple questions. Debit card can be linked to the account and can be accessed any time. If a client lost his access to the digital wallet, company is going to freeze the money so nobody can access it, after that it will be returned to the owner, VentureBeat reports.

Before sharding is implemented, Liquineq can provide 10 000 transactions per second. After it’s done it will increase it up to 50 000 per second. Birger claims that it will reach 1 000 000 transactions when the network of countries hits 200.

It’s way more than what Bitcoin or? Ethereum have because they can currently provide 10 transaction per second only.

Liquineq meets all the General Data Protection Regulation accepted in the European Union.

According to the documents received by CoinDesk, in September the largest producer of mining equipment Bitmain plans to raise $18 billion through initial public offering (IPO).?

Thanks to the funds raised through the issue of shares, the capitalization of the Chinese giant can reach from 40 to 50 billion US dollars. Bitmain’s listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange will take place either in the last quarter of this year or in the first quarter of the following year. China International Capital Corporation will act as an underwriter. Around the same time, other Chinese “unicorns” of the mining market – Canaan Creative and Ebang Communication – will hold IPO.

Bitmain one of the most expensive cryptocurrency companies, successfully held pre-IPO in July and raised $1 billion. Then the market value of the company was estimated at $15 billion. For comparison, the US cryptocurrency company Coinbase in April were estimated at $8 billion.

Shortly before that, Bitmain managed to attract $400 million of venture investments from Sequoia Capital. The U.S. IDG Capital and Coatue Management, a Russian company DST Global and Singapore’s EDBI and GIC participated in the same funding round.

If the Chinese company will be able to attract $18 billion, it will press Facebook in the ranking of the largest IPO.

The projected share price and trading volume are not known yet, but investment banks forecast a p/e ratio (price/earnings) of 20 during the first year of public trading.

This forecast is based on the company’s financial performance. Thus, for 2016-2017 and the first quarter of this year, Bitmain’s profit amounted to $3.2 billion. In 2017, the company’s income amounted to $2.5 billion, while just in the first quarter of 2018 this figure reached $2 billion. This year, Bitmain expects to receive $2.5 billion in profits.

Previously, we reported that Bitmain invested $3 million in the blockchain startup tribeOS, which specializes in developing solutions for combating fraud in the advertising business.

Recall that last month Bitmain introduced bitcoin miner Antminer S9j with a hashrate of 14.5 TH/s.

South Korea’s Ministry of Science will promote blockchain technology as a part of efforts to prepare young people for what it calls the “Fourth industrial revolution.” Blockchain technology is included in courses that were recently announced by the Ministry of Science and ICT.??

The Ministry of Science and ICT believes that the country is facing a global transformation called the “Fourth industrial revolution”.? According to the website, there is a focus on supporting innovations across society by creating an environment that promotes autonomous research and development of technologies.

Blockchain A

The developing industries referred to by the Ministry include blockchain, artificial intelligence, cloud storage, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles.

The Ministry announced the development of 40 courses covering these thematic areas. According to the Ministry, the courses will help to improve the employment opportunities for young people.

The Consortium Supports Youth Education

The consortium of corporations, universities, trade associations, industry/academic organizations is committed to increasing employment opportunities for young people through training. The consortium includes such organizations as: SAP, Unity Technologies, PWC, Oracle, Hancom MDS, KBS, Seoul national university hospital and Saltlux.

The project plans to recruit interns in August and will promote through various media such as a website and educational institutions.

South Korea is currently the third largest cryptocurrency market, after Japan and the United States.

Shinhan Bank, South Korea’s second largest bank, has recently joined KT Corp, the country’s second largest telecommunications provider, to develop a blockchain-based platform.

Over the past 24 hours, the cryptocurrency market has recorded a loss of $18 billion, as major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS and Bitcoin Cash, have lost 4-13 percent.?

While bitcoin ended the day with a 4 percent decline in its value, Ethereum lost 13 percent against the US dollar, becoming one of the worst positions on the market, along with NEO.

The tokens recorded their steepest drop in value on August 11, as most tokens based on Ethereum, such as, Aion, Pundi x, Aelf, DigixDAO, WanChain and VeChain recorded an approximately 14-18 percent drop.

Bitcoin Exceeds 50% Dominance

For the first time in 2018, Bitcoin has become the dominant cryptocurrency in the world market, receiving a 50 percent market share, providing a high level of annual income on the dominance index.

The unexpected increase in Bitcoin’s dominance index, which coincided with Tether growth, showed that investors had become reluctant to deals with high risk and high returns, mainly due to a lack of confidence in the short-term market trend.

Over the past few weeks, tokens have lost more than 50 percent of their value against Bitcoin. For example, the EOS, called “Ethereum Killer”, has fallen by 50 percent of the market valuation in the last 30 days due to market volatility.

In recent months, the volume of BTC and the rest of the crypto-market has decreased significantly. At the end of July, when BTC held a promising race to a higher level of $ 8,000, its volume rose by $ 6 billion.

As of August 11, the volume of BTC fell below $4.4 billion, while the volume of Tether (USDT), the value of which is hedged to the level of the US dollar, rose to $ 2.8 billion, which is $ 1.2 billion more than the volume of Ethereum.

Since July, traders have found out that the price trend of small tokens usually corresponds to the price trend of XRP and EOS. Over the past 24 hours, Ripple and EOS have reduced 11 percent of their value against the US dollar.

Where Does the Market go?

Yesterday, many analysts suggested that Bitcoin is testing a significant level of support at around $5800.

The inability of the market to provide a strong momentum in the near future could result in BTC testing at $5500, which may lead to a further fall of the cryptocurrency market.