One of my favorite shots from a trip to Gujo earlier this year.
Camera: Fujifilm X-Pro2
Lens: Fujinon XF 56mm f/1.2 R
I’ve visited Japan nearly 20 times in the past two years, but never during autumn. Now that I live here, I finally got a chance to witness the changing of the seasons at Aoyama-itchome (青山一丁目).
CoinDesk:
According to figures provided to CoinDesk from one of the largest jobs sites, Indeed.com, searches for roles involving bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency dropped by 3.06 percent from October 2017 to October 2018. Meanwhile, employer interest in such jobs – that is, the number of job postings – increased by 25.49 percent over the same period.
I wonder how many of those job postings are for real positions with real compensation. A quick glance at CryptoJobsList.com reveals that many blockchain projects are still offering compensation in the form of “% of ICO funds raised”, “profit sharing”, “XYZ token”, or just “competitive”.
Also, there is a distinct lack of ethical behavior when it comes to financial compensation in this industry. I’ve experienced this myself with a previous employer that was consistently 2-3 weeks late with my paycheck. In another job, the compensation was pegged to the company’s token instead of a more stable asset like BTC or a stablecoin. This in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the employer refused to recalculate compensation during the bear market. Do you think contractors are going to put out the same quality of work when their compensation is no 95% lower in value? I don’t think so.
Financial Times:
Switzerland’s main stock exchange has given a green light to the world’s first exchange traded product tracking multiple cryptocurrencies, just as the price of bitcoin, the most popular digital coin, has dropped to its lowest level for more than a year. The Amun Crypto ETP, which will start trading next week on the Six exchange in Zurich, has been designed to track an index based on the movements of five leading cryptocurrencies.
Zurich-based SIX Exchange is Switzerland’s top stock exchange. With a market cap of over $1.6 trillion, SIX Exchange is also the world’s thirteenth largest stock exchange. The introduction of a cryptocurrency ETP on a major exchange like SIX is a big deal, and has the potential to spark the launch of ETP and ETF products in other countries and markets.
Amun’s ETP will have the following weighted allocations at launch – BTC (49.7%), XRP (25.4%), ETH (16.7%), BCH (5.2%), and LTC (3%). Interestingly enough, XLM and EOS, which are currently ranked higher than LTC in terms of market capitalization did not make the cut. Furthermore, XRP’s 8.7% higher allocation over ETH, which is greater than BCH and LTC’s combined allocation of 8.2%, suggests that Amun and perhaps the world of traditional finance in general, is bullish on the future potential XRP.
The ETP will trade under the ticker Hodl, a nod to a favourite exhortation adopted by cryptocurrency investors — “hold on for dear life” — in response to the wild volatility that has roiled the market.
Amazing. Now the trillion dollar question is if institutional investors will HODL.
CCN:
According to a press release today from the Securities and Exchange Commission, both Paragon and another company doing business as Airfox (officially registered as CarrierEQ) have reached settlements with the agency for failure to register their tokens as securities or their token sales as securities offerings. It is a crime in the United States since 1934 to sell virtually anything that can resemble an investment contract without first registering with the SEC or applying for an exemption. The Securities Act of 1934 was one of many pieces of legislation designed to prevent future crashes on the order of the crash of 1929, which led to what is historically referred to as the “Great Depression.”
Who’s next?
My guess is Substratum, a US-based ICO with a rich history of fraud and price manipulation that is in the process of conducting a second ICO.
