The cryptocurrency market is once again showing signs of fatigue as Bitcoin (BTC) failed to stay above the psychological level of $4,000. The cryptocurrency has lost about 1.4% in the past 24 hours to trade at $3,941. Other altcoins, unsurprisingly, have been dragged down by the weakness in Bitcoin. Both Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) have lost roughly 1.5% to trade at $134.30 and $0.30347, respectively. Likewise, Litecoin (LTC-$59.09, -1.8%), Bitcoin Cash (BCH-$158.77, -3.4%), Stellar (XLM-$0.1018, -3%), TRON (TRX-$0.0224, -2.1%) and IOTA (MIOTA-$0.2971, -1.6%) are trading in the negative region.
Government level initiatives
Swiss Federal Council meets to determine federal legislation for blockchain advancement
The Swiss Federal Council has begun its series of meetings regarding the implementation of federal legislation for blockchain advancement. By conducting consultations, the Federal Council aims to promote legal surety through blockchain applications so that the industry, especially the financial services sector, can operate based on this regulatory framework. Per the document, the public hearing of the Federal Council will take place until June 2019.
In December the Swiss Federal Council accepted a fact sheet on the regulatory structure for blockchain in the financial industry. The study report states that the country’s current economic act is adequate for blockchain businesses, but needs certain amendments. The regulatory body campaigned for improved legal transparency in a blockchain network for rights owners while making sure that the national anti-money laundering (AML) law applies to decentralized trading platforms.
The Council has now published a draft consultation file suggesting several modifications, including the creation of an online enrollment of rights in the Swiss Code of Obligations and the separation of crypto assets in case of insolvency under the Federal Act on Debt Collection and Bankruptcy.
In order to establish a supervised financial market, the Council also advocated that a new category for distributed ledger technology (DLT) based trading facilities be created in market infrastructure law. In addition, the Authority proposed to amend the long term Financial Institutions Act so that a license becomes compulsory for operating a trading facility under the category of a securities company.
Tribe, a blockchain accelerator, joins forces with BMW and Intel
Tribe, a blockchain accelerator backed by the government of Singapore, has signed a strategic partnership deal with BMW and Intel. Tri5 Ventures, a venture capital firm that supports later-stage startups, envisioned the creation of Tribe, which started its operations in the final leg of 2018.
Existing partners of the scheme include PwC and South Korean blockchain network Icon Foundation. Both BMW and Intel will now provide expertise to the startups selected for support. The car giant will focus on the mobility industry, while Intel will share knowledge gained through its activities in the blockchain and cryptocurrency mining sectors.
Nielsen, which is a reputed data management firm, has joined as one of the partners in the project. The firm will offer something similar to a sandbox that concentrates on risks related to regulatory compliance and other requisite forethoughts while developing a blockchain product on a commercial scale.
Private sector initiatives
Bayer CropScience partners with BlockApps
The agro division of Bayer CropScience, a Pharmaceutical and genetic engineering behemoth, is partnering with BlockApps, a ConsenSys’ Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) start-up. BlockApps is one of the founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the biggest blockchain open-source project in the world. At the end of July 2017, over 150 blockchain firms were members of the EEA, including research firms and fortune 500 enterprises such as JP Morgan and Cisco.
BlockApps is the first cloud partner firm to have joint collaboration with all key cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Since the start of 2018, Germany-based Bayer CropScience has been actively participating in a number of blockchain projects with BlockApps. In June 2018, Bayer, one of the world’s largest biopharma companies, took over the American agrochemical firm Monsanto.
A BlockApps spokesperson said further particulars will be revealed during the Food and Beverage Supply Chain Blockchain seminar scheduled on the 26th and 27th of March in San Francisco. The BlockApps platform intends to offer a configurable business network interoperability platform.
BlockApps Strato was founded in 2015 through collaboration between the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and ConsenSys to make Ethereum (ETH) BaaS available to Azure customers and software programmers.
eToro purchases Firmo
eToro, a social trading and multi-asset brokerage company, disclosed that it had purchased Firmo, a smart contracts development firm. The value of the deal, however, was not revealed by the firm.
Yoni Assia, Co-founder and CEO of eToro, has explained that the acquisition will enable the platform to widen its tokenized assets offering. He said: “We believe that in time all investible [sic] assets will be tokenized and that we will see the greatest transfer of wealth ever onto the blockchain.”
According to the announcement, the team behind Firmo will work on innovations related to the tokenization of all assets of eToro. The innovation process is also expected to involve research and development of infrastructure devoted to the representation of holdings and execution of trade on the blockchain.
Furthermore, Firmo’s technology allows any blockchain to employ financial agreements safely. The system uses a sector-specific smart contract language dubbed “FirmLang,” which can be deciphered into platforms such as Ethereum (ETH), EOS (EOS) or NEO (NEO) using the company’s software.
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