Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
Crypto adoption news
- The accommodation bookings giant Airbnb has made a surprising reference to crypto and blockchain in a prospectus for its proposed initial public offering (IPO). The firm has registered the prospective with the American regulatory body the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In the document, the company said that its “future success” will hinge on its “ability to adapt to emerging technologies” including “tokenization,” “cryptocurrencies” and “blockchain technology.” “As a result, we intend to continue to spend significant resources maintaining, developing, and enhancing our technologies and platform; however, these efforts may be more costly than expected and may not be successful,” they said.
- The would-be masterminds of a proposed blockchain-powered CNY bond offering may have pulled the plug at the last minute after the issuance’s Chinese “lead sponsor” appears to have developed cold feet. A firm named Longbond had been set to launch the bonds on Friday last week with the China Construction Bank (CCB)’s Labuan, Malaysia, branch acting as the “lead arranger” on the deal, and the Fusang exchange then set to trade the bonds for bitcoin (BTC) and USD. However, it appears the CCB was unhappy with the way the story was reported upon in the media. A strongly worded denial of BTC-related business plans came first, after which Caixin reported that there had been an “unexpected delay”, with Fusang stating that the issuance had been postponed “until further notice.”
Trading news
- Following the bitcoin bull run throughout the past month, average November exchange-traded product (ETP) volumes have increased by 53.5% to USD 173.5m/day, according to CryptoCompare data. Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust Product currently represents the highest market cap of all ETP products at USD 9.1bn. This is an increase of 56% compared to 30 days prior. The OTC-traded product set a record of USD 215m in weekly inflows over the last month, they added.
Mining news
- Core Scientific, a major digital asset mining infrastructure provider in North America, announced it has partnered with Argo Blockchain plc, the publicly-traded crypto miner based in the UK, to host Argo’s Antminer S19s at Core Scientific’s United States-based facilities. Argo’s decision to host with Core Scientific will expand their mining operations in North America, they said in an emailed press release.
- Crypto mining is continuing to surge in Abkhazia, with power outages reported across the de facto state. Opposition leaders have taken to social media to demand that the government takes immediate action. In a Facebook post from the recently formed opposition organization the Abkhazian People’s Movement, a group of politicians chided the government for its recent decision to legalize crypto mining. The group claimed that the move has left people “without heat and light for hours on end” – with the bitter chill of winter approaching. Earlier this year, the state energy provider warned that the grid was being placed under enormous stress.
M&A news
- Ethereum-focused major blockchain company ConsenSys said it has acquired the team and technology of Truffle. Among the blockchain developer tools, the Truffle Suite is a development environment, testing framework, and asset pipeline all rolled into one. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Blockchain and DLT news
- Blockchain technology does not solve the fundamental security problems suffered by all electronic voting systems, according to a new draft paper from MIT. Moreover, blockchains may introduce new problems that non-blockchain-based voting systems would not suffer from. Also, electronic, online, and blockchain-based voting systems are more vulnerable to serious failures than available paper-ballot-based alternatives. Moreover, given the state of the art in computer security, they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, they said.
- Hala Systems, a social enterprise developing technologies to protect civilians from misinformation, said it is now utilizing Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR), an enterprise-grade distributed ledger, to verify data provenance and remove centralized control over data. Hala Systems’ primary product ‘Sentry’ delivers early warnings of conflict and natural disasters to 2.1m people in Syria.