Neironix weekly news

1. SEC postpones a decision concerning five stock bircoin funds until Semptember 21

June 24 SEC published a document where they say that it needs more time to decide on five ETF applications from the investment fund Direxion Investments. The applications were submitted in January 2018.

The decision to accept the application will be postponed until September 21, 2018.

2. South Korea promises to legitimize crypto-currency market in the nearest future

South Korean authorities are going to enact legislation to regulate the market of crypto-currency and blockchain-projects “as soon as possible”.  It was declared to Bloomberg by Hong Syeong-kee – the Head of Virtual Currency Department in the Financial Services Commission of South Korea.

He marked that currently crypto-currency exchanges in South Korea are not ready to store billions of dollars in the crypto currency such as bitcoin and etherium because of the inadequate standards of protection.

Only in June this year from crypto exchanges Bithumb and Coinrail scammers stole users’ funds for 40 m. dollars. Fortunately, the exchanges could recover losses from own funds. These two failures of safety system convinced the representatives of financial regulations of the need to create legislative protections of investors from deceivers.

3. India may adopt the law on crypto currency in September

September may be a turning month in the regulation of crypto currency in India. Earlier Subhash Chandra Garg – minister of economy in India – said that the draft bill about crypto currency may be adopted in the middle of July. However this has not happened because of the disagreements between Securities Council and Indian exchanges and Central Bank.

The first one is in favor of such law, but the second doesn’t consider crypto currencies an asset which should be regulated by the government. 6 April 2018 Central Bank of India issued a circular that prohibits Indian banks to conduct crypto currency transactions. In response to this there were many petitions against such a prohibition and Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) convinced the Supreme Court if India to consider these petitions. The court has found no reason to cancel the prohibition and the law came into force on July 5 and because of that banks had to close accounts of many crypto currency exchanges.

The next hearing on petitions was to be on July 20, but the participants asked to postpone it to September 11 and this request was granted.

Earlier unnamed Indian high official declared: “Crypto currencies are the new phenomenon and governments around the world have faced a big problem”. He added: “Most of officials express big concerns with which everyone agrees… we want to reach a consensus. I think, that also there is a method of regulation which satisfies everyone.

4. SEC rejected the application of The Winklevoss brothers for the creation of bitcoin-ETF. July 27 2018

Securities and Exchange Commission rejected the application of The Winklevoss brothers – cofounders of the crypto currency exchange Gemini. This has caused the drop in bitcoin rate lower 8000 $. Earlier the bicoin price increased up to 8300 $ after the news about CBOE application to register Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) as well as common application for bitcoin-ETF from VanEck and SolidX.

The Winklevoss brothers wanted to make an exchange fund where each share is equal to 0,01 BTC, while its value would be calculated according to the bitcoin rate on the exchange Gemini.

Among the reasons Gemini spoke about there is a low trading volume on the exchange Gemini as the basis for refusal to register the fund. It leads to the high probability of the manipulation of the value of the fund. One more reason is the absence of exchange regulation by the supervisory authorities and it makes it impossible to participate in the exchange.

However from this point of view VanEck and SolidX’s application looks more real, because the value of one share is 25 bitcoins and it restricts access to a high-risk asset. One of the major tasks of SEC throughout the commission existence is risk reduction for small unaccredited investors. Besides, VanEck and SolidX intend to take bitcoin average price by collecting quotations from several exchanges not from the only one as in case of Gemini.

The final decision on VanEck and SolidX’s application is going to be in September this year.

5. Twitter are full of bots that copy Elon Musk’s profile and suggest buying Ethereum

In July in Twitter there was an invasion of bots, which introduced themselves as Elon Musks or other famous people and suggested buying crypto currency Ethereum. The reaction of Twitter management was a bit belated after the situation when on July 17 the heads of Icelandic Blockchain Foundation signed the paper where they paid attention to the incoherence of Twitter management that prohibits all kinds of crypto currency advertising and lets bots bend and misinform users.

In response Twitter began to block every new page with the name of Elon Musk, even if its owner’s name is the same as Tesla and SapceX founder’s name. Nevertheless, it is possible to unblock the page. To do this you need to confirm the identity with the help of a cell phone.

And still this is not a panacea, because you can replace Roman Alphabet by the identical letters of Cyrillic alphabet, for example “a”, and a cursive letter “i” can replace a cursive letter “L” because it looks the same. Perhaps, Twitter management will take into account also these options of block avoidance and configure the filtration system in the proper way, but that’s not for sure. First of all we should be watchful and avoid frankly fraudulent messages.