The World’s Biggest Crypto Company Just Opened the Books for Its IPO (Bloomberg) If the word “Bitmain” isn’t aready synonymous in your head with “Bitcoin,” it’s time that it is. The China-based company makes the bulk of the ASIC mining machines that mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. And mining groups controlled by Bitmain oftentimes control more than half of all of Bitcoin’s network hashrate. It turns out mining all that crypto is equivalent to mining fiat. Bitmain, which on Wednesday filed to go public in Hong Kong, had a $742.7 million profit on $2.8 billion in revenue in the first half of 2018. Its return on equity is close to…
The Stellar logo on a bunch of concentric gold circles. This is NOT what happens in real life (via Shutterstock).Stellar’s not-so-stellar few days
Facebook denies friending Stellar
Stellar’s lumen has gone dark on Poloniex, capping a wild few days of rumors and refutation of rumors. Depositing or withdrawing the token has temporarily been halted on the Circle-owned trading platform days after Facebook said it wasn’t working with the crypto company. On Friday, Business Insider published a report claiming, “In recent months, Facebook’s blockchain team, led by the former PayPal executive David Marcus, has met with the open-source payments-technology company Stellar about some of those opportunities, people familiar with the talks told Business Insider.” The BI story cited “a Stellar insider,” for some fairly pro-Stellar spin: “‘They’d be taking the rug out from under the banks,’ the person…
Law raising red flags on crypto exchanges now targeted for repeal
Yes, there’s a tie-in to Tether and Bitfinex
One New York lawmaker wants to undo a big part of the state’s regulation of cryptocurrency exchanges. Yet that very regulation may have raised a red flag about some of the world’s largest—and most controversial—bitcoin exchanges three years ago. Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat from Queens, introduced bill A9899 that he touts as replacing the state’s “BitLicense” rules that were put in place three years ago. It’s not the first time such a proposal has been bandied about the legislature. Last month, Sen. Jesse Hamilton and Sen. David Carlucci, Democrats from Brooklyn and Rockland County respectively, also discussed changing regulations. But now a bill is in committee, where it faces the…
What the Circle/Poloniex deal has in common with Viagra and Cialis
Internet scammers always find new ways to rip off suckers
Lift a rock and you’ll find bugs crawling everywhere. Acquire a cryptocurrency exchange and you’ll find fake Twitter accounts crawling everywhere, too. When mobile payment company Circle announced its purchase Poloniex on Monday (a story we broke three weeks earlier, as we endlessly like to remind readers), Twitter lit up with very positive comments directed toward the exchange. There was just one problem: Many of those accounts appeared suspiciously like bots. As of press time, there were about 820 responses to this Poloniex tweet: Big news from the Poloniex team today!https://t.co/nZdjsKzWBl — Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) February 26, 2018 That would seem wonderfully positive for the company. Except our social media…
