Japanese Bitcoin Exchange Liquid.com has opened two offices in the US. As a joint venture with Virtual Currency Partners, “Liquid USA” is expected to start trading in 2020.

Coinbase & Co. Receive Overseas Competition: Liquid.com, Japan’s largest regulated Bitcoin exchange, is tackling the US market. For this purpose, the Holding Company of Liquid founded with the crypto-consortium Virtual Currency Partners (VCP) a joint venture under the name Liquid Financial USA Inc. (short: Liquid USA). Liquid announced on April 29 in a press release. The expansion follows a successful fundraising, in which also the mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain played a significant role. With the expansion overseas Liquid wants to meet the needs of customers, explains CEO Mike Kayamori:

  “The US is one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency markets, and our community, corporate and institutional clients have expressed an interest in serving the US market.

The chief decentralized officer of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer HTC announces the successor to the successful blockchain smartphone HTC Exodus One this year. In addition to the well-known features such as a crypto-wallet HTC wants to expand the repertoire of his blockchain application for the new device even further.

Only in October last year, the HTC Exodus One came on the market. The smartphone of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer is the first device in its class to have a blockchain on which users can store Bitcoin & Co. The idea: giving users more sovereignty over their data. Finally, the blockchain is stored on a separate area on the HTC Exodus One and thus remains disconnected from the Android operating system.

The Bitcoin course and Ether course get company. In the future, Nasdaq will index the ripple price. This is happening as the United States’ largest electronic stock exchange teamed up with Brave New Coin’s blockchain analysts.

Nasdaq plans to replicate the XRP price in real time in the future. As the company officially announces, the “XRP Liquid Index” will in future show in real time what the price for an XRP is in US dollars. The company wants to refer to the data resulting from their “highly liquid” markets.

Nasdaq works with IOSCO compliant procedures

As Nasdaq further states, it uses an independently verified procedure that complies with the IOSCO principles for mapping the ripple course (XRP). That’s how the ripple course gets in the best of company. As part of previous indexing, the electronic exchange already listed the Bitcoin price and the Ether price

Jaguar and Land Rover riders can soon earn MIOTA in the car. The largest British car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover announces the integration of a so-called Smart Wallet. The announcement is followed by a veritable price-pump.

As autonomous driving gets closer, the communication between the vehicles becomes more important. For traffic data such as congestion information could automatically replace cars in the future. This should be conducive to the flow of traffic and reduce congestion.

But it is still a long way to go until self-driving cars dominate the roads. Traffic data, however, does not necessarily have to be automatically transmitted by machine. Finally, the drivers themselves could send traffic jams or information about the road conditions on certain sections to other road users.

The Russian Ministry of Economic Development is starting to test cryptocurrencies in four selected regions. The Regulatory Sandboxes, which include Moscow, are licensed to test products using blockchain, AI and robotic technology. Meanwhile, neighboring Finland also passed its first regulation on cryptocurrency trading.

Russian news site Izvestia reports that Russia is preparing to test new technologies, including cryptocurrencies and blockchains. In so-called “Regulatory Sandboxes” in four regions of the country, an experimental development of new technologies takes place under special economic and legal conditions.

In the future, companies in Moscow, Perm Krai, Kaluga Oblast and Kaliningrad Oblast will be able to test the application of future technologies in the experimental special economic zones. In addition to crypto and blockchain, neuro and quantum technologies, AI, robotics and VR are among the novelties that the government is giving the green light to.

With the recent price increases, the hope returned that the bottom would be reached. Can this actually be confirmed? Not all Bitcoin enthusiasts share this opinion.

If you look through the virtual forest of leaves, sometimes you get the impression of a very simply knitted world. Those who believe in Bitcoin, of course, are on the side of the cops. The ground has already passed and we all can look forward to the upcoming bull market.

From this assumption, some conclude that every bear is a Bitcoin critic. Of course, one can agree with that: anyone who thinks that Bitcoin is a rat poison that would fall back to zero certainly takes a bearish view on the Bitcoin price.

But how is the world knitted in the short to medium term? Is every Bitcoin fan convinced that the bottom has been reached?

A good week ago there was a discussion on this topic between different Bitcoin enthusiasts. Tone Vays discussed with Leah Walds and Tyler Jenks of Lucid Investment Strategies, Venzen Khaosan of Cryptocurrents, Murad Mahmudov, Willy Woo, David Puell and finally Tuur Demester, the latter of Adamant Capital. Those who have plenty of time are the whole

Discussion to the heart:

So far, most corporate messages have been similar to Blockchain adaptation. Most pilot projects were carried out on private blockchains. Typical use cases are the tracking of supply chains, the settlement of securities transactions or the execution of smart contracts to make processes more efficient. Now a second wave of corporate blockchain use cases is approaching us. Why this is more of a tsunami and affects each and every one of us directly.

The previous blockchain projects of major banks, energy service providers or logistics companies were primarily aimed at optimizing their own infrastructure and value chain. That’s why many of these companies have joined forces to conduct stakeholder transactions and make them more efficient using blockchain features. For the private end customer it was practically never, but above all about their own background processes.

Currently, however, a second wave of corporate applications is approaching us. This time the end customer is in the foreground. It’s about concrete blockchain services and cryptocurrencies for the end user and not for the company’s own value chain – Blockchain goes B2C. The corporations that bring about this change are, however, in part new players whose business model deviates significantly from the previous blockchain pioneers.

The tokenization of assets provides for an increasing merger of traditional and crypto-financial instruments. At the same time, security token offerings (STOs) pose new challenges for regulators worldwide: Which tokens require which regulation? When is a security talk, when is a token an asset?

The Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin has addressed this issue in a specialist article. In it, the agency notes a “paradigm shift” as a result of the tokenization of assets in the form of security tokens.

What is an investment?

The Investment Act, to which BaFin refers in the article, defines an investment as

•     Shares which grant a participation in the result of a company
•     Shares in a property that the issuer or a third party owns or manages in its own name for foreign account (trust assets)
•     Partial loans (equity loans)
•    Subordinated loan
•    Participation rights
•     Registered Notes
•    Other investments providing or promising cash settlement in exchange for temporary lending of interest and repayment or assets