Dominik Schiener, founder of IOTA, recently had an interview with Voyager. Voyager, a broker in the U.S. is announcing the launch of the IOTA asset on their platform. Voyager already hosts 19 other crypto assets, and it is not allowed in New York due to compliance issues.

Starting the interview, Dominik discusses how he got into the crypto space. I found this interesting, so I am going to share it.

When Did Dominik Schiener Enter Crypto

Dominik entered the space in 2011 by looking for an internet payment solution due to being under age and not being able to use paypal. Through this, he stumbled upon Bitcoin. Soon after, he began mining altcoins and struck gold on a few.

His next venture was a crypto exchange. The exchange ultimately failed due to the lack of regulatory clarity back in 2012 and 2013. He remarks meeting with banks that would abruptly tell him never to contact them again about crypto nonsense. In 2015, Dom got together with 3 other people to found the IOTA project and foundation. their initial token offering only raised $500,000. To put this into perspective, EOS raised Billions of dollars over their offering.

From the very early days, it has been an uphill battle for us.

– Dominik Schiener

Dominik Interview With Voyager

The interview was seamless and easy to listen to. Specifically, the interview was to promote the launch of the IOTA asset on Voyager, but ended up being a full fledged IOTA shill discussing all announcements and aspects of the project. Some exciting things mentioned were the announcement of the partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, hints at more partnership news coming soon, Cordicide test net discussion, and the shift of the marketing into the U.S.

Current Agenda

The current main focus is on development and research for the upcoming protocol upgrade, Cordicide. The team is actively writing code for the first Cordicide Test net which should be coming soon. In addition, the foundation has invited universities to participate and will open up a public network for development once the foundation feels confident.

We want to be the first enterprise ready, permission-less distribution ledger. That will be one of the biggest announcements for the crypto community because almost all projects are still in the proof of concept phase.

– Dominik Schiener

Following these announcements, Dominik is certain they will get stream lined adoption from corporate partners and governments they are already working with and talking to today after the launch.

Iota In the News

Let’s discuss Iota’s recent announcement of their partnership with Jaguar Land Rover. Jaguar has developed a car wallet that utilizes the Iota protocol and the Iota cryptocurrency. The foundation is building upon this and focusing on offering new services to vehicle owners that will also make a more seamless interaction with infrastructure and the government.

In particular, Iota is working on implementing data trading across vehicles. This means drivers will actually be able to sell their data while they are driving. This includes speed, dashboard usage, music, geo-location, and just about everything that could be considered data. Dominik says they are focusing on making this process automated so you can earn money by simply driving everyday.

Another crazy feature they are pushing is the ability for vehicles to begin making money by selling electricity and becoming power or charging stations. Right now Dominik says the team is working to bring this to production with test nets.

Iota Marketing

Surprisingly, Dominik confirmed that they have more announcements lined up for the future. I speculate they keep them hidden to prevent any unnecessary fomo or shilling on the foundation’s part and make sure all the eggs are in the basket before they count them. Currently, he hinted that they have news on working with governments and large corporations, product announcements, and a game plan for launching the first fully integrated crypto product to the market.

Iota Focusing on United States

In addition to upcoming announcements, the foundation already has a stable foot hold in the European basin. Most notable is the partnership with NAPA which includes the European commission and multiple other notable crypto projects. With such a presence in Europe already, Dominik discussed how the U.S. is their next target market.

He mentioned Austin Transportation briefly which was a partnerships that was announced back in early May. One thing is for sure, discussions and talks have already been in the works with multiple companies. He seems quite confident the that companies and even local governments were already sold on IOTA even in the U.S. market.

Before the end of the interview, Dominik also ranks IOTA as one of the top 3 projects in the crypto industry. Only Ethereum and Hyperledger as currently ahead of the project he alluded to. With the upcoming protocol development, this may change though.

For starters, this article is purely speculative, but the aim of it is to shed some light on the macro market view and sentiment. First off, I am tired of hearing Tether this and Tether that. In this article, I want to clear the air and discuss fundamentals of Tether, the Bitcoin price surge, and what truly is driving the parabolic price shifts we are so used to in crypto. With that being said, buckle up.

Nothing should be considered investment or financial advice. Enjoy the ride.

Initial Bitcoin Pump

Let’s draw back to April 2nd when one large investor entered the market. Specifically, this was around the time when there was news circulating about the diminishing OTC supply for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s price right before this pump was hovering around $4,000 and miners were struggling to stay afloat at these levels. Due to the low price, miners were forced to sell as many Bitcoin as possible to simply keep their doors open. This diminished their reserve supplies for months throughout the bear market, and this seems to be where the tables flipped.

Investors, lacking patience, could not find enough Bitcoin for an OTC buy and decided to hit the exchanges instantly pumping Bitcoin close to $5,000.

Bitcoin in the Clear

Regardless of the price jump, there was still a substantial lack of BTC supply on the OTC market. Through April 6th to May 9th it seems this started to continually impact the Bitcoin price. Bitcoin grew organically all the way to $6,000 where a herd of sell orders crowded around the targeted volume resistance. This resistance level, $6,400, was projected to deny Bitcoin and send it plummeting back down around $5,000.

To the surprise of the entire market, Bitcoin broke through $6,400 and headed straight to $8,000. These levels were not expected to be reached until the end of 2019 by a majority of the market. If you notice, Bitcoin then hovered around this level through June 12 almost as if saying, hey I am here to stay.

My guess is that a majority of investors got liquidated on margin trades, their sell orders triggered around $6,400, and FOMO started to accumulate around the market. With Bitcoin professing stability around the $8,000 levels for weeks, these investors re-entered the market further inflating the price to breach that $9,000 level.

Fear of Shorting

With the power level of BTC over 9,000, there was little confidence for investors and speculators to short. In a continual sharp move up, Bitcoin had almost no sell pressure to cut through as investors surged into the market. Regardless of Bitcoin’s search volume on Google, money moved into the market that was not there previously here. This is a clear indicator that the exposure of the market has reached a stable level, and the money entering the market is no longer directly correlated with such metrics.

With Bitcoin pushing upward, the price went as high as buy pressure would take it. This mark was just shy of $14,000 which posts substantial gains of over 3x in less than 3 months.

Tether Not Responsible

Some profess that surges like this are still due to or supported by Tether. Let’s analyze Tether first then. If we take Tether’s price value as a formulaic approached, the printing of the new tokens can be explained easily.

We can see that: Token Price = Market Cap / Circulating supply

In addition, the price per token of Tether is obtained by the average of all the assets it is traded across. Simply, as the assets it trades for increases, so does it’s inherent value incrementally.

From our equation we can see: Token Price is increasing which goes against the purpose of a stable coin. In order to correct this, the circulating supply must then be increased to circumvent the aggressive upward pressure to the token value. As the circulating supply increases, the token price will naturally deflate back to a level $1 stablecoin through natural supply and demand.

By result, the market cap is an after effect of the change in the other two metrics. In reality, the market cap is only representative of the current circulating supply of Tether.

How Does Tether Then “Back” Each Token One to One

If we look back and remember the change in their terms and agreements where Tether is going to be backed by fiat reserves or assets. The word assets right there is how they can facilitate to “print” new tokens while still complying with the same terms and agreements.

For instance, if in their assets they have Bitcoin and the price of Bitcoin doubles, then they can effectively print 2x the original amount of Tether that was backing the original Bitcoin price. This can be done repetitively every time the market surges. Typically, these newly printed Tethers will be pushed into the market by fulfilling future issuance requests or other indirect avenues.

Tether is Still a Volcano

With the arising problems every few months, Tether is still considerably a accident waiting to happen. They have the power to push tokens into an inflated market continually if they seem fit, they do not have to legally redeem or provide any exchange for tokens issued ever based on their original clauses, and they are currently edging closer to holding more “assets” instead of fiat reserves for instant liquidity.

This is the same scenario which eventually caused the 2008 financial collapse and will eventually provide the same outcome here. No, Tether is not responsible for the recent pumps in the market from my opinion, but they are responsible for passive market manipulation, lack of transparency, and being a bad as the banks at the end of the day.

Nothing should be considered investment or financial advice. Enjoy the ride.

With all of the Bitcoin price swings and extreme FOMO happening in the market, we need to stay attentive to the progress of projects more than ever. When the market prices draw attention away from development, we could potentially enter another devastating bubble. Investors go all in on projects during bubbles with only a white paper and get wiped out from margin trading in a single day. We do not want to reset investor confidence in this space before the real bull run takes over.

Those of you who have been in the market for more than 5 years and have experienced these pumps before need to step up and lead in times like this. Yes, price action is amazing, but it overall draws away from the progress and adoption we have worked so hard to obtain. The market still has a very long way to go, so by no means is this a moon shot or a final destination for Bitcoin.

The Future is Here

That being said, there are some amazing things happening in the market from a use case scenario.

This transaction: cost $0.015 USD in fees, took 1.1 seconds, and $1.2 BILLION in value transferred.

The future is here. https://t.co/vie0B79zKC

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) June 26, 2019

CZ caught a glimpse of something that 10 years ago would have been impossible. A whale moved approximately $1.2 billion in Binance coin in only 1.1 seconds. On top of that, the fee for such a large and enormous transfer only cost the whale a grand total of $0.015 USD. Easy to say with this kind of availability across borders, the world is starting to take notice.

Many companies are now diving deep into blockchain technology with hopes of achieving some solutions to empower themselves and enter this emerging market do to stories like this one.

Binance Chain Power

The credit for this large transfer really goes to the Binance team and their Binance Chain. With the adoption of so many projects, Binance chain could potentially look to challenge the industry leader, Ethereum, in the coming bull market. Daily, BNB seems to be added to some exchange or supplied with some new form of liquidity further solidifying its place.

No one would have ever thought that an exchange token would be so powerful. Yet, the use cases for BNB are now far out weighting most of the other top currencies in the market, and it is showing in their price growth over the past several months.

For BNB to over take Ethereum, there would need to be a massive purge on the token market supporting Ethereum and liquidity pools. Although with ETH 2.0 coming to market soon, I personally do not think it will happen any time soon.

Ethereum 2.0 Coming in 2020

Ethereum 2.0 is now planned to be launched on January 3, 2020. Previously, this update was projected to be released at the beginning of 2019, but there were vital bugs found throughout the coding language and consensus protocols which halted all progression.

Investors will remember this as a rocky time for market prices. It all seemed to be turning around until these delays were announced and prices dipped even further into the all time lows since early 2017. In hindsight, there was never anything to really worry about. We are here now and the date has been set for the launch of ETH 2.0. We only have to hope that this time, the update is completed.

In addition, remember that it will take 32 Ethereum to stake a node. It might be a good idea to acquire these ETH before the 2.0 launch gets here.

Nothing should be considered as investment or financial advice. Enjoy the ride.

There is current pressure on the crypto industry by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). This task force, comprised of 36 countries including Russia, was originally designed as global law enforcement to prevent money laundering and fraud. The FATF unfortunately are now targeting crypto exchanges mandating that every exchange must provide them personal clientele information on every account over $1,000.

Although it is not only the exchanges being targeted. Custodial banks, crypto hedge funds, and other investment vehicles are all becoming subject to this proposal.

Crypto Industry on FATF Proposals

Obviously, none of the exchanges approve of these new standards and are very displeased with them. So much so that within 6 weeks, the top names and companies in the crypto industry threw together a V20 crypto meetup in Osaka, Japan, the same week at the global G20 summit. The event is set to take place around the G20 summit which will occur June 28 and 29.

Additionally, they have invited many of the world leaders to attend the V20 summit and plan to scout out many of them in order to give their plea. The countries attending V20 already are Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and France. Each country will be in attendance at the V20 summit through their representatives.

Binance Not in Attendance

Oddly enough, Binance has not confirmed if they will be in attendance or not. Although, recently Binance has made several announcements of their own.

Binance announced the upcoming ban to U.S. citizens for their trading platforms. While U.S. based citizens can still hold their assets on the exchange, they will be unable to trade or exchange their digital assets. This is going to open up a huge market for the other U.S. based exchanges to move into.

Binance Ban in September

Specifically, Binance is removing U.S. traders due to regulatory pressure. In our SFOX article review, we discussed the top expenses for exchanges, brokers and dealers in the crypto industry. They resonated the same conclusion that their largest expense was compliance and regulatory approval.

The reason this is so costly for these companies is because of the litigation involved and fees. Not only is crypto niche, but for companies of these sizes, they have to hire the best of the best to protect themselves. Obviously, that comes with a price tag. On top of that, it has to be global compliance, which has a endless level of complexity.

Exchanges to Replace Binance

When the ban goes into effect, all of the day-traders, investors, and random crypto hodlers will have to find a new place to call home for their digital assets. The top exchanges that will capitalize on this new market are Gemini, Coinbase, and Kraken.

There is a very clear reason why people say, do not store your crypto on the exchange. There have been numerous hacks all around the world and on every single exchange. The most notable hack is Mt. Gox where the crypto industry was changed forever.

Currently, there are still hacks and ransomware attacks going on all around the world. Earlier in 2019, the largest exchange in the world Binance, was even hacked for tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoin. Make sure to always store your assets offline in cold storage unless you are day trading.

As the hacks increase, companies like Marsh will become more relevant. They aim to bring exchanges and brokers to the insurance market. Currently, pricing these clients is still a challenge, but with continual data and exposure to the new market they will start to be accepted. Until this is a reality and every custodial solution has insurance, keep your assets and private keys safe.

Israeli Hackers

From 2016, two Israelis have been hacking crypto users, exchanges, and promoting fake ICOs. The men, Eli Gigi and Assaf Gigi, are brothers from Jerusalem, Israel. In the last week, they were arrested by a cyber unit of the Israeli police force for stealing crypto through an on going phishing scheme. The story was broke on a news outlet, Ynet, and described a net sum of over $100 million stolen in the past 3 years by the brothers. Apparently, the brothers were tied with the 2016 Bitfinex hack which amounted to $1.5 million dollars as well.

Recent news believes the amount to be smaller than the $100 million, but it seems we do not have an exact numbers yet.

Phishing Scheme

The brothers have been stealing cryptocurrency by accessing traders’ wallets through long and persistent methods of social engineering and phishing. The brothers have many means to do this including:

• Staged crypto sites similar to fake ICO sales and Buy Bitcoin sites
• Targeting fake exchange customer services and fake crypto custodian solutions
• Telegram chats with fake offers and services
• Other forums like Reddit, Twitter, and social sites were used as well to lure in new investors

Basically, the traders would get drawn into this scam after a lengthy process of offers and compelling stories too good to be true. Once the person has entered in their private keys for storage, trading or exchange, their coins were gone. This is just a clear reminder to everyone in the market, never give away your private keys.