Crypto weekly is authored by maaria

PRICE CHANGE: WTD/YTD
- BTC ($6,437): +4% / -52%
- ETH ($203): +4% / -72%
- LTC ($53): +2% / -76%
- XRP ($0.47): +12% / -76%
- Crypto Market Cap ($211B): +4% / -65%
- BTC Dominance: 54%

THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO

- Fidelity Investments announced it was spinning off a stand-alone company

dedicated to bringing crypto to institutional investors. The new company,
called Fidelity Digital Assets, is launching with 100 employees and will
provide clients enterprise-grade custody solutions, a crypto trading
execution platform, and institutional advising services. Fidelity Digital
Asset's first customers are being onboarded now and general availability
is scheduled for early 2019. The news is a big signal for institutional
investors who have been unable or hesitant to invest in crypto assets.
Among the most compelling offerings is a custodian service giving
institutional investors a compliant way to secure their assets by holding
them in a physical vault. Link

- Crypto custodian BitGo raised a $57.5 million Series B round, with

participation from Goldman Sachs and Galaxy Digital Ventures, the fund
founded by Mike Novogratz. The funding round was announced shortly after
Fidelity Investments announced it would be providing a custodian service
to institutional investors. BitGo currently provides custodian service for
more than $2 billion in assets across more than 75 coins and tokens. Link

- E&Y published a report that showed that almost one third of ICOs raised

last year have lost "substantially all value," while the vast majority are
trading below their listing price. E&Y analyzed over 80 projects that
raised in 2017 and found that 71 percent still have no working product or
offering in the market. Of the companies that did build a working product,
some have also started accepting payments in traditional fiat currency
(therefore reducing the utility of the token) or have stopped accepting
their token altogether. Link

- Despite the bear market in crypto, M&A activity for blockchain and

crypto-related deals has increased more than 200 percent this year. YTD
there have been roughly 115 deals in the space, which is significantly
higher than the 47 deals completed last year when bitcoin's price surged
to almost $20,000. Though exact data isn't available, reports indicate
that most transactions are occurring for less than $100 million, as larger
companies scoop up talent and crypto assets for relatively cheap. Link

- Genesis Global Trading, one of the largest OTC crypto dealers, said it

had loaned crypto assets valued at more than half a billion dollars to
institutional borrowers including hedge funds and other financial firms.
The firm began lending crypto assets out in March which borrowers used to
short currencies like bitcoin, ether, XRP, bitcoin cash and other coins.
Some of the largest loans were made in Ether, which fell 80 percent from
its highs in March. Link

- Ripple's head of information security announced he was leaving the

company to join Harbor, a startup that provides a compliance platform for
issuers of private securities on the blockchain. Harbor raised $28 million
in April in a funding round led by Founders Fund with participation from
Andreessen Horowitz and Pantera Capital. Link

- Binance, the largest crypto exchange by trading volume, announced a

partnership with crypto compliance and investigation software provider
Chainalysis to implement a new global compliance solution. Chainalysis
will provide Binance with software to monitor crypto transactions in
real-time - in particular, the tool will look for potentially criminal or
otherwise illicit activity. Link

- Huobi, the fourth most popular exchange by volume, announced it was

launching an all-in-one-stablecoin wrapper called HUSD: which would
support four stablecoins including TrueUSD, Paxos Standard, USD//Coin and
Gemini Dollar. After depositing any of these four stablecoins, users will
be able to withdraw into any of the other stablecoins. HUSD is intended to
eliminate the need to choose between multiple stablecoins. Link

- Financial Action Task Force, the intergovernmental body founded to

develop policies for tackling money laundering, announced it would release
new crypto regulations by next June. The report would include guidelines
and enforcement expectations. Link

- Omni, the on-demand property storage and rental marketplace which raised

$25 million in XRP back in January, is now letting its users get paid in
XRP when they rent their items to fellow Omni users. Balances are held in
dollars, but Omni users have the option of withdrawing their cash into XRP
at no additional fees. Omni's storage service allows users to rent out
items they would otherwise keep in storage, as a way to generate some
additional cash. Link

- Cobo, a Beijing-based crypto wallet startup, closed a $13 million Series

A funding round in a bid to expand its services to Southeast Asia and
Africa. The Cobo app already has around 500,000 users (80 percent who come
from China) since launching earlier this year, thanks in part to its
staking pool feature. The Cobo wallet allows users to store proof-of-stake
crypto assets and consolidate them as a pooled force to continue
proof-of-stake mining and distribute block rewards to users on a
proportional basis. Link

- Docusign announced a new integration with Ethereum that would allow its

more than 400,000 paying customers to have records of their signed
documents and transactions kept on the Ethereum blockchain. The
integration is intended for customers who want evidence of their
agreements to exist in a neutral environment. Link

- Civil, the startup creating a new economy for journalism using

blockchain technology, failed to raise the $8 million target for its token
sale and announced it would be issuing full refunds to all of the ICO
purchasers. Civil was ultimately only able to sell $1.3MM worth of tokens
from ~1k buyers. Civil recently made headlines when Forbes announced it
would experiment with publishing content to the Civil platform. Link

- Gary Gensler, former chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading

Commission, said that most crypto sold through ICOs should be considered
securities. This type of classification would subject the coins to greater
scrutiny. Link

- Lazarus, North Korea's infamous hacking group, was behind 14 hacks on

crypto exchanges and stole $571 million in cryptocurrencies since January
2017. Link

• Have some you want to add to the distribution list? Email me at maaria@sound-ventures.com

Maaria Bajwa

maariabajwa@gmail.com ( maariabajwa@gmail.com )
408.306.2185 (cell)

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