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India’s Supreme Court has announced a new date for hearing the nation’s case known merely as the “crypto case.” It’s expected to be critical in building the country’s legal framework for the crypto verse. In the most recent hearing, the government was supposed to produce some crypto regulations, but the session was adjourned after a few minutes.

The Crypto Case: What’s New

On last Friday, the Indian Supreme Court’s agenda included an audience in which it would listen to the government’s side concerning cryptocurrency regulations. The same session was also supposed to deal with requests against banking restrictions by the nation’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India. But the course was adjourned after only a few minutes in which not a lot of progress was achieved.

Jaideep Reddy was there, and he talked to the press last Tuesday. His client is the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) on behalf of Nishith Desai Associates. They stand with a petition against the RBI ban.

A new date is confirmed

“The matter started with a counsel for the respondents asking for a passover of the matter (i.e., for the matter to be heard at the end of the list for the day). However, the Bench stated that the matter should be heard and that a passover would not be entertained,” Reddy said. “The respondents are both the government and the RBI, among others,” he clarified. Regarding the banking restriction, he detailed:

The Senior Advocate for IAMAI, Gopal Subramanium, explained to the bench the relevance of this matter. He asked for it to be heard at length, as the case merits. The respondents’ attorney asked for the case to be heard on a non-miscellaneous day. The Bench agreed to the request, so it ordered the case to be heard on July 23. That is once the court’s summer holiday ends.

Mr. Reddy further said that “Mondays and Fridays are ‘miscellaneous’ days of the supreme court and the present matter is considered to be of a ‘non-miscellaneous’ nature.” A court order released recently from Friday’s hearings reaffirmed the new date. “Upon hearing the counsel, the court made the following order … List the matter on 23rd July 2019,” the order reads.

Crypto remains unregulated, but the RBI ban still holds

The Supreme Court ordered the government to come up with a regulation system for cryptocurrencies within four weeks. That was last February, so the government has had twice as much time already. But the subject didn’t come up at all, according to Mr. Reddy “The hearing only lasted for a few minutes, and this [crypto regulation] did not come up, given that the case was adjourned.”

The Indian regulations are being drafted by a multidisciplinary committee led by Subhash Shandra Garg, the Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Finance. The government’s representatives before the Supreme Court informed the Bench that the committee in question was already in the final stages of deliberations.

India’s regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies is being drafted by an interministerial committee headed by Subhash Chandra Garg, Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance. The government’s counsel previously told the supreme court that this committee was in its final stages of deliberations.

In the meantime, the banking restriction effective since last July has taken the Indian cryptocurrency industry into limbo.

Zebpay, which used to be one of the country’s most significant crypto exchanges, had to shut down all exchange operations in India last September because of the banking problem. Unocoin, which was also a significant player, implemented a cash kiosk on October so its users could deposit and withdraw INR. But law enforcement wasn’t able to tell the difference between the machine and an ATM that disobey the RBI ban. So it arrested two of the company’s founders.

Only last Sunday, Coindelta, Indian crypto exchange that’s barely eighteen months old, had to terminate service because of the harm done to its business after half a year’s worth of the banking restriction.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

Bakkt was announced as a project several months ago, and it immediately gained lots of eager fans and supporters that were impatiently waiting for the promised company to become a reality. And who could blame them?

We’re talking about a partnership between Microsoft, Starbuck’s (yeah, the coffee guys are going crypto) and ICE (the firm that owns the New York Stock Exchange) to create a massive cryptocurrency service that would facilitate mass adoption, at last, for Bitcoin and other digital assets.

And it would enable you to pay for your cappuccino using your Bitcoins. But it’s stuck. It’s been stuck for ages as a new problem arises at every step of the way, and that’s making the supporters weary.

See, Bakkt can’t become a real thing without a favorable ruling by the Commodity Future Trading Commission (CFTC), which is slightly weird since digital money is not a commodity at all, but that’s how absurd current regulations are.

The CFTC corroborated last month that it’s reviewing it. But they’re not in a rush to actually do the did (while Bakkt supporters are already quite anxious). Bakkt was supposed to go online during these year’s Q1, which is already gone. And we don’t need to tell you that Bakkt is still offline.

But there’s a hope for an imminent ruling, and it has to do with things happening in other cryptocurrency exchanges, which will be Bakkt’s competition in the fullness of time. This whole situation seems taken out of a novel by Franz Kafka for the eager Bakkt fans who can’t wait for it to go online.

Bakkt?

An elementary idea drives Bakkt: to turn Bitcoin into a legitimate financial instrument. As the world’s main digital asset penetrates the world’s more traditional (and sizeable) financial institutions, the crypto market would change.

It would stop being a market dominated by retail investors which are mainly hobbyists, to become a mainstream market with all the trimmings, much like Forex, the commodities market, stock exchanges and all those financial activities that don’t get the bad rap that the crypto verse has, unfairly, acquired.

As a quick digression, let’s notice that several analysts have said that the retail-driven cryptocurrency market has given us everything it can already.

If crypto is going to grow again, as it has in the past, the only way that will happen is with fresh institutional money from Wall Street, the London’s City, and traditional banks investing in crypto all over the globe. In other words: if a new bullish run is ever going to happen again, it will only be because of corporate money. Bakkt could be the trigger for that.

Bakkt already has a CEO, Kelly Loeffler, who had this to say:

“Bakkt is designed to serve as a scalable on-ramp for institutional, merchant, and consumer participation in digital assets by promoting greater efficiency, security, and utility.”

The main obstacle for this vision is the lack of a reliable process that’s impervious to manipulation. The project is so ambitious, and the system processes so unclearly, that the CFTC could have a hard time making its mind up on this issue because it could find dilemmas and contradictions (at least in traditional financial terms) everywhere in the project.

Future contracts and manipulation

Rumor has it that CFTC is somewhat worried about the possible abuse of Bitcoin future contracts settled in cash. Let’s translate that into plain English. Future contracts become mature at a point in time. That’s when one party has to pay the other one the difference between the spot and the future price. That makes the buyer vulnerable to spot price manipulation.

That being said, Bakkt’s proposal is all about settling futures contracts physically (whatever the heck “physically” means when it comes to digital money). So in Bakkt’s service, buyers would physically get their Bitcoins when the contract matures in such a way that spot price doesn’t come into it at all. But physical settlement contracts do have problems of their own, even if they’re not related to spot prices.

Custodian services by third parties

Third party custodian services make sense for commodity futures exchanges to employ. They minimize the risk of theft and loss. Nonetheless, Bakkt’s idea is to be its own custodian, and that probably won’t make the regulators all that happy because there’s this thing called ” SEC 17 CFR Part 270 – RULES AND REGULATIONS, INVESTMENT COMPANY ACT OF 1940″. It reads like this.

“Currently, investment companies generally must maintain assets relating to these transactions in special accounts with a custodian bank.”

To tangle things even further, it just so happens that regulators already approved one of Bakkt’s parent companies (ICE). Not for cryptocurrency trade but for traditional business, which is to be expected of the New York Stock Exchange’s owners.

That whole context seems to point to a scenario in which CFTC’s decision will hang on its belief about the “reality” of cryptocurrencies as financial instruments. Up until now, the regulatory agency has remained silent as a grave. They explain their reticence by invoking the need to understand the cryptosphere in full before emitting any statements.

The competition

Bakkt is not even online so far, yet it has competition already. And the competitors couldn’t possibly care less about the CFTC’s delay. As a matter of fact, the chances are that they’re enjoying it. Take CoinFLEX. It’s keeping its momentum regarding development.

The UK-based CoinFloor subsidiary can boast support from several crypto celebrities such as Roger Ver (of Bitcoin Cash fame), Mike Komaransky, and the Dragonfly Capital Partners. And they’re receiving a round of fresh money in investments by the Dragonfly Capital Partners and Polychain Capital. These new partners are not only a sign of confidence in CoinFLEX itself but in that the Bitcoin futures business will most likely be approved.

And CoinFLEX is also launching a token of its own, in an attempt to differentiate itself from Bakkt. The coin’s use case would be to reward its customers by decreasing fees and helping to increase liquidity in the exchange. Users will get tokens according to the amount of business they carry out using the platform, especially when it comes to daily volume.

Final remarks

So now you know what’s going on with Bakkt, which is to say, not that much. But the project is still standing, it still has the support of its three parent companies which are the world leaders in their respective niches, and it’s still moving forward. It just so happens that the red tape it needs to cut through is so thick that it probably needs a new pair of scissors.

The most likely scenario is that Bakkt’s launch will remain stuck for quite a bit. Governmental agencies have shown no urgency at all when it comes to dealing with cryptocurrency issues. Just take the SEC and Ripple example: the cryptosphere has waited a very long time for SEC to rule about Ripple’s XRP’s nature. It must decide whether the token is a security or not. It still hasn’t happened and SEC just doesn’t seem to mind about the delay.

SEC’s decisions (as well as CFTC’s) are binding only within the United States. That segment of the market remains influential enough (many of the world’s most influential exchanges are based out of the USA). So even if Asia and Europe are way more active in the cryptosphere, an adverse decision by either agency could send shockwaves all around the crypto world that would start in North America but would affect cryptonauts all around the planet.

Bakkt will happen. It’s unthinkable that Microsoft, Starbucks, and ICE could be stopped if they put their minds (and resources) into a project. Just don’t hold your breath because chances are it will take some more time. Much like the next cryptocurrency bull run.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

It’s no secret that the crypto scene in Japan is developing at an exponential rate, thanks to the friendly crypto regulations being established in the country as well as banks on the way to launching their very own stable coins plus many others.

The latest news from the crypto-friendly country is from the most significant railway company, East Japan Railway Company (JR East). According to local news sources, the company is considering to soon enable the Japanese commuters a well as tourists to pay for journeys with various cryptocurrencies and stablecoins.

Cryptocurrency Payment System via the Suica Smartcard

The railway operator wants to move alongside the changing world as now it’s considering a crypto payment system to be integrated into their payment cards. To ensure that they successfully make it possible, JR East has already invested in a famous Japanese cryptocurrency exchange dealer DeCurrent that was only recently approved by the Financial Conduct Authority (FSA).

With the help of the exchange, JR East would then integrate crypto payments to the Suica payment card which is the famous card in the country hosting up to more than 70 million folks. With the cards, individuals will be able to access various services such as paying transport fees.

Besides, the e-money feature of the card could be used for buying a plethora of items like soft drinks, coffee at vending machines as well as newspapers at station kiosks. The primary objective of the card is to provide commuters a more pleasant trip.

Mass Adoption Boosted

As stated above, as per the reports, the current number of people already using the Suica card is more than 70 million. Therefore, if JR East succeeds in integrating the card with cryptocurrency, it goes without saying that over 70 million individuals could be using cryptocurrency payments in bitcoin and other cryptos.

It’s clear that JR East wants to consider and cater to all their customer’s needs, including those that want to pay for services with the digital currency.

DeCurrent Exchange: The Wheel for the Accomplishment of JR East’s Ambitions

Suica cards currently don’t have options of being topped up with cryptocurrencies. Therefore, those options have to be integrated first, and DeCurrent exchange is the one responsible. Only a few weeks ago, they launched a payment system which Kazuhiro Tokita, president, and representative director of the exchange said would be integrated with Suica card.

However, no timeline yet has been given for implementation of the system on Suica. Besides, JR East is only considering the option and has not provided clear plans as well for the rollout. DeCurrent will debut trading in mid-April and already supports cryptos such as Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Ripple (XRP).

Blockchain technology is slowly but slowly getting into the mainstream ecosystem, and the success of the project by JR East will only boost its adoption.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.