Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency market, including significant altcoins such as Ripple (XRP), Bitcoin cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), EOS (EOS), Stellar (XLM), and Litecoin (LTC), crashed by at least 10% yesterday. Notably, the crash took place ahead of the Bitcoin cash fork that’s scaring to mutilate the Bitcoin enemy apart. Bitcoin declined below the crucial psychological $6,000 level for only the second time in 2018 in the midst of a market-wide sell-off.
Bitcoin dropped below $6,000 in June but swiftly climbed sharply. The price of Bitcoin nose-dived to $5,534 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange before reversing slightly. The Bitcoin price chart also formed a “death cross,” a term used when the 50-day moving average crosses below the 200-day moving average, indicating the worst is yet to come.
Government level initiatives
China’s Ping An Insurance Group, one of the global insurance giants, and the Sanya municipal government signed a strategic deal for building a “Smart City.” The venture will be powered by blockchain technology, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI). Under the agreement, both parties will cooperate on fintech investment and “Smart City” building as a portion of a chief strategic urban development in China.
For the planned venture to take shape, Ping An Group will pour in 30 billion yuan (over $4 billion) in Sanya “to develop smart city construction, financial products and services, and insurance fund utilization.”
In the US, Great Lakes Science Center, a well-known Cleveland, Ohio-based museum and the educational center has started accepting Bitcoin (BTC) as payment. According to SpendBitcoins USA, a yellow pages kind of directory of retail vendors who recognize Bitcoin as payment, a minimum of two US museums are already taking in cryptocurrency as payment from visitors. They are the St. Petersburg Museum of History in Florida and the Museum of the Coastal Bend in Texas.
The Ohio museum’s decision to accept Bitcoin comes only two weeks before the inauguration of the Blockland Solutions Conference, with the museum’s president and CEO Kirsten Ellenbogen opining that “accepting Bitcoin is just a small part of the momentum to grow a blockchain ecosystem in Cleveland.”
Great Lakes Science Center will supposedly use the service of cryptocurrency payments processor BitPay to process visitors’ payments.
Private sector initiatives
IBM and top Spanish telecommunications firm Telefónica have entered into an agreement to employ blockchain technology to administer global mobile phone call traffic. Telefónica, which is the world’s seventh-largest telecom firm by market capitalization, conducts communications business in 17 nations and has roughly 343 million customers.
The partnership with IBM intends to simplify some of the Telefónica business processes and resolves several challenges in the field, including the trustworthiness and transparency of data registered from various networks when steering global calls.
Particularly, Telefónica, a $51 billion company, intends to employ the IBM Blockchain software for monitoring the certainty and trackability of all global calls and associated information, such as origin, destination, and time period. Additionally, the software will be employed in establishing a group of peers comprising of operators, service providers, sellers, and other parties. According to the publication, entry to the platform will be presented for all members of the chain.
The venture will also supposedly assist Telefónica to discover fraudulent activity as well as resolve issues similar to dispute resolution, business loss due to uncollected revenues, or data disparities.
Forex exchange (FX) settlement giant CLS is launching its IBM blockchain-based netting facility within “a matter of days,” as per the information provided by its Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) Alan Manquard. The announcement was made by the CSO at the IBM Think Tank conference in London on November the 14th.
CLS Group, which supposedly settles, on average, $5 trillion in payment directives every day, is a US FX settlement service provider with high-profile members that consist of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Barclays, and Citigroup. A netting service involves offsetting and identifying the value of several positions or payments that are due to be traded between parties, accounting for variables such as the currency volatility caused by contrasts in time zones.
In such cases, the service is used to put right the remuneration a known party is owed. Manquard supposedly claimed before the conference spectators that CLS would be “be operating the first ‘enterprise-level, open-for-business service’ based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the financial markets.” He additionally told CBR that the facility would “start small” prior to scaling.
US fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen has reported a second funding round to generate $200 million, specifying blockchain among its key development areas. At the end of the first round, closed late October, the company managed to raise $200 million, implying its value to be over $1 billion. During the second round led by the main asset management company Fidelity Investments, the salad chain plans to raise an identical sum.
Specifically, the сapital raised will permit Sweetgreen to concentrate on technology and supply chain advancement, with blockchain referred to as the “most viable solution available” to improve transparency in food supply chains. Sweetgreen, which operates 90 restaurants in the US, is gearing up to use decentralized solutions to monitor food from its contractor to the counter.
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