Crypto Market Summary: Week of 9Jul18

This week's update covers Industry Growth, Relevance and Tech.
Quite agree with the strategic directions of the entities. In general, will hodl and buy in cautiously given current price levels.

Industry Growth:

1. Litecoin foundation’s acquires shares in traditional bank. A creative precedent for crypto entities to seek growth.
2. Augur’s prediction market is live.
3. Cardano funds research labs in various universities to influence research direction. Research findings are peer-reviewed and scheduled for development if deemed useful. Given infancy of the space, there is not much history to learn from, academia POVs is thus valuable.
4. Binance invests in a proposed decentralised community bank in Malta. If I am not wrong, there are already community-owned banks in US and Europe. Not sure how it will operate. Assuming only governance is decentralised, don't think feature will be valuable.
5. Fujitsu is offering blockchain prototyping service.
6. Grant funding is given by eg Tezos to encourage projects to develop on its platform.

Relevance:

1. Bank of Finland’s digitization adviser thinks cryptocurrency will need institutional backing to succeed as money. Agree. While cryptocurrency will win some market share from fiat regardless, support enhances user confidence, ascribes value, and drives further adoption.
2. UK is testing equity issuance on the ethereum blockchain come Sept 2018. For equity tokens, legal and compliance structures have to be built into codes. Note ethereum could just be a selected test environment.
3. POW coin transaction value has to be < attack cost which limits value of transfers. There is also risk of competition, especially as the blockchain grows in value. The blockchain can however serve as commodity if supply is limited and market awareness is adequate. Eg number of Canadians aware of bitcoin doubled in the past 1 year.
4. Shanghai Stock Exchange is exploring DLT for security transactions (pre-trade, customer registration, issuance, trading, settlement and clearing).
5. MAS recognises certain crypto-tokens help with economic coordination.

Tech

1. R3's paid version of Corda enables nodes to communicate selectively with other public nodes (on Corda or other platforms) and one's core internal systems, effectively meeting the needs of enterprise customers.

Links
https://www.coindesk.com/litecoin-foundation-acquires-9-9-of-bank-in-payments-partnership/
https://www.coindesk.com/augur-is-live-decentralized-prediction-market-launches-after-2-year-beta/
https://www.coindesk.com/a-3-3-billion-claim-has-cardanos-blockchain-solved-proof-of-stake/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-12/binance-backs-plan-for-bank-in-malta-with-digital-coin-investors
https://www.coindesk.com/it-giant-fujitsu-is-launching-a-ready-to-go-blockchain-service/
https://www.coindesk.com/tezos-is-giving-away-grant-money-to-crypto-developers/

https://www.coindesk.com/cryptocurrency-concept-is-a-fallacy-says-finnish-central-bank-advisor/
https://www.coindesk.com/uk-financial-regulators-are-preparing-for-a-world-of-crypto-assets/
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2018-07-11/bitcoin-looks-more-like-gold-than-a-currency?__twitter_impression=true
https://www.coindesk.com/85-of-canadians-are-aware-of-bitcoin-says-bank-of-canada/
https://www.coindesk.com/shanghai-stock-exchange-new-regulation-crucial-to-clear-way-for-dlt/
https://www.coindesk.com/regulators-are-slowly-starting-to-get-it-utility-tokens-are-real/

https://www.coindesk.com/r3-launches-corda-enterprise-with-first-ever-blockchain-firewall/