Early November was calm and steady until BTC started moving upwards and pulled the whole market up by 30 and in some cases all the way up 130%. We saw yet another BCH fork that did not yield any changes to the protocol. Even within cryptocurrency, we’re seeing a struggle between centralized and decentralized use cases. Huge amounts of BTC are being bought up by payment giant PayPal. Speculation about upcoming crypto asset prices are becoming rampant. The market is waking up and so are the scammers so stay safe. Happy reading!

From our Product team

The ideal of cryptocurrency as decentralized peer-to-peer networks turns out to be harder to achieve in reality than it originally seemed. We are seeing a well developed centralized approach to crypto in the form of fiat gateways and a developing (almost) fully decentralized approach of DeFi and smart contracts. Check out this educational break-down by Forbes.

A Citibank internal analysis that draws similarities between the gold market of the 70s and the current state of BTC was leaked. Commenters were quick to say that long-term price predictions are always risky and that the speculation can be seen as a move to spark interest in BTC in Citibank’s clients. The “The Break Down” podcast also explains some of the news in brief.

PayPal has enabled buying and selling BTC on their platform. Since enabling this feature the payments giant has been buying up around 70% of all newly minted BTC. Combined with Cash App and Robinhood, the demand exceeds the rate at which new BTC is minted. There is strong speculation that this is the reason behind crypto’s latest moves.

From our Compliance team

The crypto industry has matured a lot since the speculation and fundraising bubble in 2017. Regulation is a recurrent theme and this is not about to change yet. We have been seeing more enforcement actions and stronger guidance from regulatory bodies up to now and we seem to be entering a phase where countries race towards their own CBDCs.

From our Development team

Bitcoin Cash network saw another fork this month. The proposed update included a so-called “mining tax” (supported by BCH ABC) change which would redirect a percentage of the newly minted BCH to the network protocol operators. This proposal was shut down as the BCHN chain prevailed and continues to be supported as BCH across exchanges

From our Security team

With crypto markets waking up after a relatively stable stint over the past few months, we are seeing a rise in scam attempts. The best thing you can do is to double check the security of your email and accounts, set up 2FA and set unique passwords at the very least. The next thing you can do is to educate yourself about all the ways bad guys can try to scam you.

In case you missed it

We announced our full support for BCH and published an intro to multisignature which could be the future of protecting money on blockhain.

We celebrated our 6th birthday this month and coincidentally also reached 1.5M customers. November was a memorable month!