Physical Bitcoin Futures Coming To Asia

Reports say Coinflex is planning to launch a physically-settled Bitcoin futures to the Asian Market.

This is a similar product offering to the much-anticipated and delayed crypto offering of Bakkt.

The financial product will be available in the Asian Market beginning February 2019 and will offer futures contracts for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum.

According to Coinflex’s CEO Mark Lamb settling futures contracts in the underlying cryptocurrency will help established trust adding that crypto derivatives could become an order of magnitude larger than spot markets due to this.

He speculates that the crypto futures market could grow 20 times the size spot trading markets which are currently the same market size.

One of the unique proposition of the Coinflex’s offering is that contracts will be traded against the stablecoin Tether (USDT) which is pegged to USD.

It also plans to launch contracts against Circle’s USD Coin as well.

Traders who hold long positions will receive Bitcoin, Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash.

Traders with short positions will receive USDT or whatever asset the aforementioned was traded against.

ZKSNARKs Plasma Launched In Ethereum Testnet

There has been a report over the internet that developers at Ethereum Foundation and at a Matter Inc. a blockchain start-up have launched Plasma scaling solution that uses ZKSNARK overt testnet.

In theory, this solution will allow the Ethereum network to process more than 500 transactions per second.

Instead of users verifying transactions, operators proposing blocks must submit a SNARK proving that the new block is correct, which is verified automatically by the smart contract.

No incorrect block can ever be included by an operator, therefore users do not always need to be online and constantly monitor transaction activity.

This initiative is one of the scaling solutions that developers are experimenting with to enable the Ethereum blockchain to be ready for mass adoption.

It is a sidechain solution in which sidechain blocks are cryptographically committed to the mainchain making it possible for sidechain operators to work on the block content.

The solution is still relatively new and the team needs to iron out some issues relating to this approach such as the data availability not yet solved offchain.

One great feature of this scaling solution is the fact that it can work on top of sharding which is another scaling solutions from Ethereum developers.

Plasma scaling solution has the potential of 50x while sharding can provide 1000x making it possible when used together will be able to bring a whopping 50,000x.

Ledger X Launches In CES

Ledger has recently launched its Bluetooth-enabled Nano X device last Sunday at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

With this launch the company would be able to address a major pain point of its users who find it difficult to use the current iteration of the Nano ledger without using laptops or desktop computers.

According to Eric Larchevequ having a mobile application that is working with the Nano X is the big evolution of the hardware lineup.

It has been revealed that the price of the new Nano X will be around $110 USD in the United States and around 119 euro in Europe.

This will be the next generation of their popular Nano ledger line which has sold more than 1.3 million devices worldwide.

It is not clear if there will be any price adjustment for its old model Nano S.

Aside from having wireless capabilities via Bluetooth, the new Nano X has a larger screen and bigger memory than its predecessor Nano S, six times its size.

The Ledger Live mobile version for the device will be available on Google Play and iTunes on January 28.

It is noteworthy that company has decided to release its product in CES which is not regarded as a blockchain or crypto related event.

Nonetheless it seems that the company have left the blockchain bubble and has began to position itself as a consumer product.

In fact it has won the 2019 innovation Award in Cyber Security and Personal Privacy in the said event.

More Bullish Sentiment According To AltcoinAnalytics

The AltcoinAnalytics crypto sentiment indicator aims to capture whether the market is greedy or fearful.

In its recent data, more people predicts cryptocurrency market cap to rise than fall.

This is done by continuously polling and big data analytics.

The pool size of the study varies daily as anyone can participate and see the results on a daily basis via messenger and telegram apps.

In order to get the general sentiment of the public, the organization created a bot at telegram that gather some information about the participants and conduct the automated poll itself.

The first part of the study requires inputting some data about the user.

This part is not required to be accomplished but it would help the organization to have some demographic profile about its users.

After getting information about the user, the bot begins administering the three questions on sentiment.

Once the questions are done, the user can send a text command to see the result of the poll.

It will reveal the average answers to sentiment questions for the past 7 days and show graphs to show data split per week.

The information gathered in the simple pool are valuable information that you can use for your own benefit whether you believe in the wisdom of the crowd or not.

You may want to try it out yourself here: http://t.me/Crypto_sentiment_bot.

Winklevoss Twins Still Committed In Attaining SEC Approval For Bitcoin ETF

The Winklevoss twins have stated that they are still committed in possibly attaining the first SEC approved Bitcoin ETF in the crypto ecosystem.

This was revealed by the brothers during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit January 7, 2019.

They also reaffirm their believe that bitcoin will remain the top cryptocurrency in the space stating that it is the digital gold even stating that it is better being gold than gold.

They also believe that over time, the market capitalization of Bitcoin will surpass that of gold which is around 7 trillion USD.

During the interview the twins also shared their sentiments about the long-term potential of both fiat and crypto exchanges.

Cameron pointed out that fiat on-ramps are crucial to crypto but he predicts that fiat will go digital in the future.

This gave one of the twins the opportunity to plug their USD-backed stablecoin Gemini Dollar (GUSD).

GUSD was launched September 2018 as a fully regulated stablecoin that was approved by the New York Department of Financial Services.

The winklevoss twins in the past have applied for a Bitcoin ETF approval from the SEC twice but have been rejected twice, once in March 2017 and another in 2018.

However, based on what they have said during the AMA, this has not deterred their resolve to bring a SEC approved Bitcoin ETF in the future.

Only time will tell if they will be successful on this regard.

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