ICON Showing Solid Progress Despite Bear Market

In an exit letter penned by former Head of Research, Markus Jun expressed his confidence that his former employer ICON’s Deblock will weather and thrive in the current market downtrend. He has recently left the company to pursue his own startup.

He noted that that ICON was one of the very few blockchain projects that showed significant progress despite the dismal market conditions.

He commends his former company for its efforts in legitimizing blockchain and cryptocurrencies with Korean Government.

So much so that it has received the Minister Award for being an industry leader in the blockchain industry.

He also reveals that while other big crypto firms lay off talents, ICON is still hiring to fill their talent pool giving special attention to its international expansion efforts with their global accelerator program ICONLOOP in partnership with the Singaporean government.

The initiative continued in Tokyo and San Francisco.

Key to this continued growth is the revelation that ICON is far from being insolvent.

It has been reported that ICON raised 75,000 ETH which the team was able to move to other portfolio leaving $5million of Eth reserves.

This is in contrast to most projects that have either gone out of business or in a money crisis.

Martha Bennet Forrester Research’s Chief analys, has stated that a majority of these ICOs are heading towards an outright extinction in absence of users and funds.

United Arab Emirates And Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia Central Banks To Launch Cryptocurrency

It has been recently reported that the central bank of UAE as well as the Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority will jointly launch a cryptocurrency that is primarily aimed for cross-border digital currency.

However, the said initiative is not for consumer use and will be strictly for bank use.

Details of when it will be released or what type of technology will be used for the initiative are still unknown beside what has been stated above.

According to UAE Central Bank governor Mubarak Rashid Al-Mansouri has inform the public that the institutions are currently studying the technology needed to execute the digital asset.

He expresses a cautious approach with the new digital asset revealing that it will be used only between central monetary authorities.

The UAE Central bank governor also reveals that the two institutions is not yet done studying the emerging technology and has not yet put a framework when the study will be completed as well as who will be involved from both parties.

He also reveals that such an initiative is a first among monetary authorities in different countries on the topic and he is hoping that it will foster similar collaboration in the region.

Digital Bullion Can Now Be Purchase In Onegold

News outlets have reported that Onegold, an online bullion marketplace, has announce that its customers can now purchase precious metals with bitcoin cash (BCH) and bitcoin core (BTC).

The platform’s gold and silver digital products are backed by real gold and silver that is stored in the Royal Canadian Mint which can be redeemed any time using Apmex.

Onegold is a blockchain-based platform that stores precious metals and allows customers to redeem their digital bullion holdings at any time.

This initiative was created by metals e-retailer Apmex and alternative asset manager Sprott.

The company believes that its offering is much better the Gold exchange traded funds (EFT) since theirs are 100% backed by physical precious metals.

The platform is using Bitpay as its cryptocurrency payment processor which has been working with apmex for several years prior to the project.

Ken Lewis, Chief Executive Officer at Onegold, reveals that he is expecting a large number of cryptocurrency buyers from international markets.

He also believes the alternative payment methods will increase the company’s payment transparency and efficiency.

US CFTC Studying ETH And It Use Case In The Ethereum Network

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has issued a Request for Input (RFI) in its effort to better understand the technology, mechanics and markets for Ether in the Ethereum network.

The request was initiated December 11, 2018 at which participants will be able to comment on the request within 60 days from the date of publication of RFI in the Federal Register.

According to the government federal agency it will benefit its FinTech initiative, LabCFTC, to understand emerging technologies as well as for the advancement of oversight of the commodity futures markets and for regulatory policy development.

Moreover it will help them in ensuring the integrity of the derivatives markets, monitoring and reducing systemic risk by enhancing legal certainty.

The inquiry was broken down into several categories that tackles the different aspects of the digital currency.

These include purpose and functionality, technology, governance, market, oversight and regulations, cyber security and Custody.

IBM To Use Blockchain For Agricultural Applications In Africa

The American technology giant IBM has announced an initiative that will help African farmers’ operational efficiency and deal with existing problem through the use of blockchain technology.

This later blockchain initiative will help the company to expand its customer base outside its traditional product and service offering which has been for many years been focused on computer related products both in software and hardware.

In order to achieve this it has teamed up with a Nigerian agricultural startup, Hello Tractor, to test a distributed ledger technology-driven crop management system.

The platform dubbed as Digital Wallet, enables the sub-Saharan farmers reduce post-harvest losses.

By receiving timely information about weather conditions, fertilizers and cultivated-related data farmers and agriculturalist can plan their crop harvest more effectively.

The system also takes advantage of other advance technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to process data gathered from participating users of the system.

This will enable the system to reward users with loan credit scores.

This would give credible 24-hour-updated information to banks and other financial institutions.

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