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Free Ross Billboard Spotted in New York’s Times Square

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A ‘Free Ross’ billboard, demanding for the release of Ross Ulbritch, the founder of Silk Road darknet market, was spotted on Times Square on May 21. It appears the ‘FREE ROSS’ movement has leased a billboard in New York’s Times Square as they advocate for the liberation of Ross.

As per a tweet by ‘Clemency for Ross’ the billboard will display the movement’s communication and image for a couple of months. The Twitter account noted that the Times Square billboard was sponsored by “a generous supporter” and not from the site’s donations.

Free Ross billboard sponsored by “a generous supporter” 

Ulbricht was given a double life sentence and is currently in his seventh year in prison. Only clemency can save him now. The 36-year-old was apprehended and incarcerated back in 2013 for initiating Silk Road darknet market that facilitated illicit trades through Bitcoin.

The illicit drugs and fake documents market operated for three years making sales amounting to $214 million before the FBI brought it down in 2013. Ulbricht was found guilty of multiple charges including money laundering, drug trafficking, criminal enterprise and others. 

Ulbricht still influential behind bars

Even while in prison without access to the internet, Ulbricht has been actively contributing to the digital currency community through friends who share his articles on the internet. On Wednesday this week, his Medium account shared an article suggesting a solution to encrypted child pornographic content.

Ulbricht suggested a partnership with the authorities to coach the ‘ZKANN’ system to pinpoint child pornography; by use of seized media, before introducing the system to the world.

After the Silk Road founder was arrested back in 2013, a clemency petition was initiated arguing that his imprisonment was ‘rife with abuse.’ The petition will then be submitted to the United States president asking for a reduction in Ulbricht’s sentence when it gets 300,000 signatures. At press time, the petition has already garnered 291,177 signatures.

Crypto Exchange Bisq Halts Trading due to  ‘Critical’ Vulnerability in Security

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Decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange Bisq has halted trading due to a “critical security vulnerability” until further notice.

The developers said they were investigating the security problem in an announcement posted on April 8, and are warning users not to send any funds if they are involved in any trade.

Bisq is expected to issue a hotfix “within a few hours” for the critical vulnerability, so far an alert key has been used to “temporarily disable trading.”

“Bisq is a proper distributed peer-to-peer network. So you can override the latest alert key functionality that blocks trading. But we highly discourage you from doing this for your own security,” authorities said

The  Bisq exchange is a peer-to-peer application that lets users buy and sell crypto in exchange for fiat currency.

Now let’s take a look at what peer-to-peer exchange is and how it functions, and some of its benefits.

Peer-to-peer exchange is a decentralized form of exchange that is maintained and operated exclusively on software. As the name implies, peer-to-peer means that there is no third party in between. Simply put, P2P or peer-to-peer exchanges allow buyers and sellers to trade with each other directly without having to trust a third party to process their trade.

Since you deal directly with other traders, whose funds are not managed by the owners of the platform themselves, the element of confidence would be higher. That also provides privacy benefits.

Since there is no third party involved, merely the buyer and seller negotiate. Communication between the two parties shall be kept confidential. This only becomes public after the order has been issued and is ready to be applied to the blockchain. Because the exchange happens on the blockchain, no identifying information will be used. In addition, features of blockchain, such as distributed ledger, immutability, and encryption further improve the security of the entire network.

Secondly, fees on the P2P exchanges are far more reasonable. Fees range from 0 percent to 0.7 percent on most P2P exchanges.

Thirdly In a p2p exchange, every transaction occurs in the public ledger of the blockchain. It removes the need to think about the credibility of the counterparties. Furthermore, their KYC information remains in line with the blockchain database. So the risk of identification and other kinds of fraud will be much less.

Are we Heading Towards a Fintech Shutdown in the Wake of Covid-19?

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Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, will entrepreneurs and business executives remodel their enterprises? The world may be moving for a recession following theCovid-19 outbreak, which indicates that financial markets and consumerization are affected.

In the short term, we have witnessed numbers of investors resorting to safer investments, other than digital assets. According to the Financial Brand, this implication is likely to have an impact on Venture capitalist funding of the Fintech industry. Mastercard and Visa even warned investors that sales would drop by at least 2 percent and 4 percent.

Visa has already seen a slump in cross-border transactions, particularly those involving travel services.  The other implication is the fall in stock prices for video conferencing companies. Mastercard and Visa, on the other hand, have reduced their stocks by 12% since February 19, 2020. Compared to the 10% drop in the S&P 500.

Presently, the quarantine policies will likely implicate consumerization. Making people think twice before spending.  People will travel and dine less, as well as minimize their visits to shopping stores. Two days ago, President Donald Trump announced the American economy could be heading for a recession, and the Dow Jones Index dropped to 12.9%. The London FTSE 100  closed at a 4% low, while other leading global financial markets witnessed similar slides.  

Investors have also become skeptical about stocks for payment processors. This is due to a decrease in the amount of day-to-day transactions. This has resulted in low amounts of fees collected.

Factors Signifying a Fintech Slump

The horror of the financial crisis of 2008 is still a fresh memory. The recession resulted in a rapid and sudden fall in the stock market, plus a severe economic interruption. Despite joint efforts on the part of central banks to save the situation and ease the effects of Covid-19; investors have noticed the concern and have blindly dumped their stocks. A CMC markets analyst thinks efforts by central banks are having an opposite effect on the performance of the financial markets. 

  • Businesses that rely on heavy marketing spending for growth are in the blackspot. Most companies usually cut down their marketing budgets during the economic recession. 
  • Fintech related companies will have a problem raising venture funding. Take notes from the 2001 recession that was followed by a tech bubble burst. Valuations for tech companies were high, but after the crash, the valuation slumped. A similar situation is likely to take shape in the nascent fintech. 

Negative Implications of the Coronavirus

Flight to safe investment avenues. Potentially resulting in drying up funding for nontraditional financial services companies. There is a likelihood of early-stage fintech companies having to shut down. 

Limited exports and imports have caused hardware shortages. This has adversely affected companies that rely on digital components for transport transactions, one of which is Square. In addition, lowering the transaction fees that payment companies can collect reduces the valuation of transaction processing firms.

 Positive implications of the Coronavirus

Coronavirus can steer huge traffic flows from fiat currency to digital banking. A trend that will track mobile payment and internet banking technology innovation quickly. Thus, institutions and banks that may have been skeptical about approaches to digital banking might turn to fintech for help. Weakening governments and organizations could loosen compliance and regulation against fintech services. 

In the long run, VCs will have more finances to fund fintech firms once the economy stabilizes. Especially for the companies that withstand the tides of the virus. 

 

US Presidential Candidate Michael Bloomberg Seeks to Create Crypto Regulatory Framework

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Recently reported, a 2020 US Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg sees cryptocurrency as an asset class. In addition, he also mentioned his proposal for crypto regulation.

In a financial reform plan, published on Tuesday, founder and CEO of Bloomberg LP, Michael Bloomberg proposed a ‘regulatory framework on cryptocurrencies”.

His promise sounds similar to crypto-friendly views shared by Andrew Yang who unfortunately drops out of the presidential list on Feb 11.

Compared to anti-bitcoin views shared by Donald Trump last year, Yang stood strong for the crypto community. He showed pro-bitcoin and blockchain views which certainly impressed the entire crypto ecosystem.

Besides Yang, the other pro-crypto candidate, Eric Swalwell failed to proceed further. However, now Bloomberg is likely to be an impressive community by promising a ‘ clear regulatory framework for crypto. ‘Yang despite the tech background and support of the crypto community couldn’t make it and Bloomberg despite having the charge of sexism and racism is making his best to gain traction from the crypto industry.

In a report, he emphasized that digital assets have yet to be backed up by sensible regulations and stated that it will work ‘ with regulators to prove clearer rules ‘ including rules to protect consumers from crypto-fraud, crypto-asset taxation, securities, and requirements for financial entities holding cryptocurrencies.

“Cryptocurrencies have become an asset class worth hundreds of billions of dollars, yet regulatory oversight remains fragmented and undeveloped. For all the promise of the blockchain, Bitcoin and initial coin offerings, there’s also plenty of hype, fraud and criminal activity.

More so, when Facebook announced its plan to launch Libra, Congress has had a strict eye on how a crypto asset will be the threat for sovereign currency, US Dollar. In fact, the social media giant is yet to launch its over-hyped stable coin as it is yet to clear the several criticizing factors shared by regulators across the world, majorly US regulators.

More so, Bloomberg’s proposal towards the crypto industry impressed crypto enthusiasts, namely Binance boss Changpeng Zhao (CZ) who then took to Twitter and write ‘Go, man’. CZ, the founder of Binance crypto exchange has worked at Bloomberg 15 years ago and henceforth, it comes as an exciting note for him. Nevertheless, CZ tweeted as follows;

Go, man! I remember BLOOMBERG as a leading Fintech company when I worked there 15 years ago. We had servers so big that they are called BIGs. I (my team) owned the FutBig (Futures BIG server). We proposed to call it the FuBig first but went with FutBig in the end.