Kaleido’s software-as-a-service blockchain solution now works on Microsoft Azure as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

According to an analysis by Keybanc reported by CNBC, the move now gives Kaleido clients access to more than 80 percent of cloud infrastructure clients, with support for the top two providers of cloud services. According to the company, this means that potential future Kaleido clients don’t need to worry about which their business partners use.

“Our customers’ digital ecosystems can now grow and scale wherever and however the participants require,” Steve Cerveny, Kaleido Founder and CEO, said in a release. The news means that Kaleido clients should have less friction adopting its products, because they don’t need to worry about persuading business partners to move from Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure to Amazon’s (or vice versa).

Launched in May 2018, ConsenSys-backed Kaleido was built to make it easier for large organizations to move from blockchain pilots to production. Originally created as a collaboration between AWS and the Brooklyn-based venture studio, it was launched with support for business consortiums in mind.

In its announcement, Kaleido cited building blockchain networks with established brands, such as T-Mobile, Sony, Fox, UnionBank and others.

One Kaleido client, Komgo, provides information for commodity traders, so that single source of truth is available to all market participants. By running on both Azure and AWS, Kaleido makes it easier for potential participants in the network to choose to use Komgo as a source of information, according to blockchain firm.

“As networks on-board new members and scale, these sorts of capabilities from Kaleido are critical to remove friction and tear down barriers to adoption,” Souleïma Baddi, CEO of Komgo, said in the release.

Indeed, as ZDNet reported, many potential enterprise customers have chosen to use more than one major cloud service provider, meaning interoperability between cloud services is key to broadening blockchain adoption.

Kaleido’s Cervezny noted:

“We’ve built our platform across the leading public clouds including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to give our clients the ability to create global, cross-cloud networks. Our customers’ digital ecosystems can now grow and scale wherever and however the participants require.”

Microsoft image via Shutterstock

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a group of international banking authorities, has warned that the growth of cryptocurrencies poses a number of risks to banks and global financial stability.

The committee – part of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), widely considered the central bank of central banks – published a statement on Wednesday, saying that potential risks for banks include liquidity, credit and market risks, operational risk (including fraud and cyber risks), money laundering and terrorist financing risk, and legal and reputational risks.

Although banks currently have “very limited” direct exposure to cryptocurrencies, institutions should still “at a mimimum” carry out extensive due diligence and disclose any exposure to crypto assets to minimize the risks, the committee said.

Banks should further have a “clear and robust” risk management framework to deal with the “high degree” of risk posed by cryptocurrencies.

The risk management framework should be “fully integrated” into banks’ overall risks management processes, including those relating to anti-money laundering (AML), combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) and evasion of sanctions, the committee said.

A “comprehensive” assessment of the risks should be incorporated into their internal capital and liquidity adequacy assessment processes, it added.

Additionally, supervisory bodies should be informed of actual or planned cryptocurrency exposure, along with assurance that the institution has fully assessed and mitigated the risks.

Finally, the committee said that it is working with other global standard-setting bodies and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) to arrive at guidance on “prudential treatment” of banks’ exposure to cryptocurrencies in order to “appropriately” reflect the risks.

Last June, BIS said in its Annual Economic Report that it’s hard to see if cryptocurrencies solve any specific economic problem yet. “Transactions are slow and costly, prone to congestion, and cannot scale with demand,” it said at the time.

BIS tower image via Shutterstock 

DX.Exchange, an Estonia-based platform that soft-launched in January, has opened its market to secondary trading of security tokens. 

Announced today, the exchange now allows companies to list their security tokens previously issued on other platforms. Institutional investors in Europe can purchase the tokens on the exchange for fiat, bitcoin, ether, tether and XRP.

However, to start with, only one such token will be listed on DX.Exchange – its native IGWT token.

Eventually, the platform’s co-founder Daniel Skowronski told CoinDesk, the company will roll out its own technology for asset tokenization, but for now, it will facilitate the trading of existing security tokens.

As for the native token, 18 million IGWT will be offered in a closed security token offering (STO) for a limited time, and afterward, 10 percent of the company’s profits will be regularly distributed to the token holders, DX.Exchange pledged.

Currently, the platform is functioning in a closed regime for some 8,000 pre-registered users, Skowronski told CoinDesk, with the main launch planned for April. Users can currently trade 10 cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ether, litecoin, bitcoin cash, OmiseGo, XRP and others.

They can also purchase and trade ERC-20 tokens backed by real-world securities, such as stocks of Tesla, Google, Facebook, Amazon and 30 more. The stocks are purchased and held by the brokerage MPS Marketplace Securities Ltd. registered in Cyprus.

“Our vision is to bridge the gap between the old world and the new digital world,” Skowronski said in a press release. “We believe that all assets whether its securities, art or real-estate will be tokenized. This tokenization has many benefits but the strongest is the ability to help create wealth for people all over the world no matter their social economic situation.”

Because of the regulatory hurdles, the company doesn’t offer its service to the U.S. users and isn’t planning to do so in the coming months, Skowronski told CoinDesk.

Trading image via Shutterstock

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Bitcoin’s struggle for direction continues amid growing signs of a bull reversal in alternative cryptocurrencies.

The leading cryptocurrency by market value is trapped in the range of $3,800 to $3,900 for a ninth straight day, contradicting the quick move toward the recent high of $4,190 suggested by the long-tailed doji candle created on Feb. 27. The immediate outlook, therefore, is neutral.

As of writing, the cryptocurrency is flatlined at $3,847 on Bitstamp, representing a 0.10 percent gain on a 24-hour basis.

Further, BTC is reporting a meager 4 percent gain on a year-to-date (YTD) basis, as opposed to stellar gains in few altcoins. For instance, litecoin, the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is currently up 83.9 percent on a YTD basis.

Binance coin (BNB) and holochain (HOT) are up at least 140 percent each, while EOS (EOS) and ontology (ONT) have gained 40 percent and 69 percent, respectively, according to OnChainFX.

Meanwhile, both the BTC and USD pairs of LTC, BNB, Tron (TRX) and Maker (MKR) have found acceptance above their respective 200-day moving average (MA) – a widely followed barometer of bull/bear markets.

As a result, speculation that the altcoin market has entered the bull market is gathering steam. However, while few alternative cryptocurrencies seem to have witnessed a bull reversal, the altcoin market as a whole is yet to violate the bearish trend, as seen in the chart below.

Altcoin market cap

On the weekly chart, the altcoin market capitalization (market cap) printed a higher low near $45 billion in early February, signaling bearish exhaustion. However, the trendline connecting January 2018 and April 2018 highs is still intact.

A weekly close (Sunday, UTC) above $64.28 billion (trendline resistance) could be considered an early sign of longer-term bullish reversal.

A bearish-to-bullish trend change, however, would be confirmed, if and when, the market cap jumps above $68.61 billion – a bearish lower high created on Dec. 24.

Bitcoin’s daily chart

The week-long price consolidation in the range of $3,800-$3,900 seen in the above chart has weakened the bullish case put forward by the long-tailed doji candle created on Feb. 27. As a result, the 100-day MA support at $3,670 could again come into play.

On the higher side, a UTC close above $3,950 is needed to revive the short-term bullish outlook.

Disclosure: The author holds no cryptocurrency assets at the time of writing.

Bitcoin image via Shutterstock; charts by Trading View

The Singapore International Commercial Court has ruled against cryptocurrency exchange Quoine after it reversed trades for a total of 3,092 bitcoins (BTC) by crypto market maker B2C2 two years ago.

The court published a case summary Thursday, stating that it found Quoine liable for the “breach of contract and breach of trust” in reversing B2C2’s trades made at an “abnormal” exchange rate back in April 2017.

B2C2 had made seven trades in which it sold ether (ETH) at an exchange rate of 10 BTC per token – approximately 250 times higher than the market rate of about 0.04 BTC to 1 ETH at the time, according to the court document.

The proceeds of the trades were then automatically credited to B2C2’s account by Quoine, and the corresponding amount of 309 ETH was debited. But, a day later, when Quoine discovered the abnormality, it canceled the seven trades and reset the balances to their pre-trades state.

In August 2017, B2C2 sued Quoine, aiming to recover the 3,092 BTC (worth almost $12 million at press time) from the exchange.

B2C2 at the time said that Quoine “had no contractual right unilaterally to cancel the trades once the orders had been effected.”

While the court has sided with B2C2 in its ruling, it declined to order Quoine to transfer 3,092 BTC back to B2C2, given that the price is “substantially higher” than the price in April 2017 when the trades were executed. Back then, a bitcoin was worth around $1,300, while today the price is around $3,850.

“Instead, the plaintiff’s [B2C2] remedy lay only in damages which, if not agreed, will be assessed at a subsequent hearing,” the court said.

This is one of the court’s first judgments involving cryptocurrencies, in which it found that cryptocurrencies have the “hallmark characteristics of property.”

In response to the ruling, Quoine issued a statement on Thursday, stating that it was disappointed with the judgement.

Quoine CEO Mike Kayamori said:

“We are reviewing the judgment and considering our options, including the possibility of an appeal.”

Gavel and bitcoin image via Shutterstock 

Long-time Grin coder “Ignotus Peverell” will receive financial support to work on the cryptocurrency, a move that makes him the nascent project’s third paid team member.

In a weekly governance meeting Tuesday, developers voted to fund Peverell for his work on Grin with roughly $10,000 per month. With 4,919,040 GRIN tokens in circulation, according to CoinMarketCap, the estimated market capitalization of the cryptocurrency is well over $13 million.

Grin, being a relatively new blockchain, went live in mid-January in a bid to implement the privacy-enhancing protocol “MimbleWimble,” designed to obfuscate transaction details such as amount and account addresses. Named after a tongue-tying curse in J.K. Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter books, the name Ignotus Peverell itself is a pseudonym that references a character within the series.

In the context of the Grin community, Peverell was one of the original creators of the Grin project who back in 2016 started the first implementation of the mimblewimble protocol on GitHub.

A user by the name of “Antioch Peverell” – another Harry Potter character reference – was similarly voted up by the community in late February. Before this, user “Yeastplume” was the sole full-time funded Grin developer.

Yeastplume told CoinDesk:

“There’s no [official] roles. We just continue to work on what we see fit, which so far seems to be working okay.”

Emphasizing in a public Gitter channel that being funded for Grin development work was “risky employment,” Yeastplume later characterized the financial support as more akin to donations.

Tuesday’s governance meeting also confirmed the “contract and payment” of security auditing firm Coinspect.

Having decided to conduct a third-party review of Grin’s “cryptographic and consensus-critical code,” community members unanimously voted to employ Coinspect over other auditors such as Quarkslab and NCC last month.

Now, having paid a fee up-front to the company of roughly $17,000, Grin community members expect a draft report by April 20. “It’s going to come quickly. They’ve also already produced one excellent vulnerability report,” stated Ignotus Peverell.

As stated on a Github, the estimated cost of the audit is roughly $80,000.

Funds are sourced from the “Grin General Fund,” which back in December of last year raised 17.28 BTC, with an estimated worth at press time of $66,500 specifically for the purposes of this security audit.

Grin symbol via CoinDesk archives