Blockchain and Bitcoin round-up: 11 December 2017
Following on from Friday’s (8 December) blockchain and Bitcoin round-up, here’s another summary for you busy souls. Featuring the Gibraltar Parliament getting in on the Act; Cboe Global Markets doing some trading; and Waves Platform, Ethereum and Deloitte teaming up.
Rules rock on the Rock. The Gibraltar Parliament has unanimously passed a Bill for an Act to amend the Financial Services (Investment and Fiduciary Services) Act. The purpose is to prepare the legal basis for the introduction of a new distributed ledger technology (DLT) framework which will come into effect on the 1 January 2018 through the Financial Services (Distributed Ledger Technology Providers) Regulations 2017.
Albert Isola, Gibraltar’s minister of commerce, says it is “one of the first jurisdictions in the world to introduce a regulatory framework for DLT businesses thereby providing the regulatory certainty required by quality firms that we aim to attract to Gibraltar”.
♫ Bet your bottom dollar, you’ll lose the blues in Chicago ♫
Over in Chicago, Cboe Global Markets, an exchange holding company, has announced that Cboe Bitcoin futures (XBT) has begun trading – giving the digital currency a boost. The opening price for XBT was $15,000. On Sunday (10 December), its site crashed and Cboe tweeted that “due to heavy traffic on our website, visitors to may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable” but “all trading systems are operating normally”.
According to Cboe, over the last five years, the total value of all Bitcoin outstanding (i.e. “market capitalisation”) has grown from less than $1 billion to over $262 billion. It reckons the total value of all cryptocurrency tokens outstanding is now approximately $423.7 billion.
Waves Platform, Ethereum and Deloitte are creating a self-regulatory body that will provide reporting, legal, tax and accounting, know your customer (KYC) and business due diligence standards for initial coin offerings (ICOs) and the blockchain industry. The organisation will be founded as an association, with Switzerland “being the most obvious choice” for the location.
“We want a seat at the table to be able to shape the future of regulation in the ICO and blockchain space,” says Alexander Ivanov, CEO and founder of Waves Platform. The body will be working with the ICO Governance Foundation (IGF) and other foundations to coordinate on cross-platform ICO disclosure protocols. Over the next couple of months, Waves will be registering the association in Switzerland, creating its executive bodies and issuing proposed industry standards. This process is planned to be finished at the beginning of 2018.
