Crypto Market Reports

[chrisbizplanner]

Crypto Market Regulation Overview and Prospects Report, Part II

This article is a continuing series of the research done by Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, the research arm of Huobi Pro; It’s a sneak preview of the detailed report of Crypto Market Regulation Overview and Prospects Report. The in-depth information about the crypto asset market, crypto market regulation, the Blockchain industry and technology can be found in www.huobi.pro.

The year.2017 was a revolutionary year for a crypto market industry where the world embraced crypto assets and the market value. The value share increased astronomically leading to market chaos, and that led to the introduction of regulatory policies. Huobi Research summarized the entire regulatory framework based on 2016 Gross Domestic Product and mid-2018: updated related policies.

Graph 1.: Overview of crypto assets and crowdfunding policies in major countries and regions

Source: Huobi Research
In late 2017 and early 2018, several countries have formulated such additional regulations in their respective country’s financial laws. Huobi Research is emphasizing three important trends that are very key to the future.

Ø The USA has become a good regulatory norm for other countries to adopt.US SEC is an important institution assigned the role to regulate the crypto assets, enforcing licensing and taxation compliance. Other countries are expected to adopt the same approach.

Ø Both centralized regulators and self-regulatory organizations are expected to play important roles: Centralized guidance and regulation are becoming so important.

Ø Efforts to improve regulation systems by leading countries and regions will accelerate the formation of global joint regulation among member unions. The paradigm is shifting to centralized regulation and formation of global joint regulation among member unions is gaining momentum.

Huobi Research tracked the crypto blockchain market regulatory policies of major countries and regions in the world, and evaluate their regulations on four ways:

· Whether crypto assets are permitted to be used as a payment tool

· Whether crypto assets exchanges are permitted to operate

Whether investments in crypto assets are permitted

· Whether crypto assets crowdfunding is permitted

· Supervision Strictness Index (SSI) is introduced in the evaluation. The SSI varies from one to four star, which implies the more the star, the tighter the policies and the more unacceptable their attitude towards crypto assets and vice versa.

· North America

· USA: From loose to tight, SEC and other regulatory agencies are emphasizing on securities to crypto assets. SSL ***.

The USA government via its’ regulatory agency called the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) treats crypto assets as commodities instead of as currencies. It doesn’t recognize crypto asset’s monetary attributes, and the regulation doesn’t stop any merchant to accept crypto asset as a monetary tool.

Asia

Japan: The overall regulation is still very loose, the laws to crypto assets especially crowdfunding are about to be implemented. SSL: Payment Service Amendment Act was signed into law on 1at of April 2017 which recognized Bitcoin as a payment system.

South Korea: Policies have been strengthened; Anti Money Laundering(AML) is taken seriously, the main issue. SSL: *** South Korea does not have a relevant law(s) recognizing crypto asset as a monetary tool and does not prohibit any transaction.

Singapore: The overall regulation is still loose, no major change in policies, the environment is very conducive to crypto assets. Expect friendly regulation soon. SSL *. In 2014, the Inland Revenue Authority Of Singapore (IRAS) recognized crypto assets such as bitcoin as a commodity and as a non-monetary. Any transaction made using crypto assets is asset transaction, not a monetary transaction and a VAT is applied.

Hong Kong： There’s no substantial change, enforcement of the regulation is strengthened. SSI:*** Hong Kong does not have a relevant law(s) recognizing crypto asset as a monetary tool and does not prohibit any transaction. Using crypto asset such as Bitcoin.


Europe

United Kingdom: The policies towards crypto assets are unclear and no restrictions yet. SSL *

Russia: From being strict to loose, regulations turning clear and definite, SSI:***.

Switzerland：The regulation is friendly in overall, constantly improving policy, SSI:***

German: The regulatory policies relatively clear and definite, and a lot is improving, SSI: **

This is just a preview from the report of Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, the research arm of Huobi Pro, to have access to the full report; visit www.huobi.pro and www.hadax.com.

Disclaimer: This report is for information purpose ONLY and not intended for

investment/trading advise. Investing in any crypto asset is solely your responsibility and at your discretion.

 

[chrisbizplanner]

Global Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects Report by Huobi Part 1
This article is only a sneak preview of the detailed report of Global Blockchain Industry overview presented by Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, a research arm of Huobi Pro. The article (a glance of the detailed report) is presented in an understandable format for a layperson to understand and follow the trend in the Global Blockchain industry. The Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application’s report consists of in-depth information about the general crypto asset market overview and prospects and the Blockchain industry technology overview.


We are presently in the bearish market, no thanks to 2018 1st quarter retracement but hoping to regain bullish momentum. In the year 2017, Global Blockchain Industry recorded an unprecedented explosive growth in market capitalization from $17.74 billion to $559.76 billion, an AMAZING fit. No asset class has ever experienced such exponential growth in the world. The unexpected happened in the 1st quarter of 2018 where the market prices of Top 5 crypto assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin were 70% below peak. In April 2018, Crypto asset activity drastically reduced. The number of active Bitcoin addresses reached the lowest ebb, which was approximately 70% below peak. Bitcoin transaction volume also was not spared either in the downward movement, reaching a lowest level at 73% below peak and 130 thousand times a day, .
Graph 1.: Top 5 Crypto Assets Prices Index Evolution Chart


Source: Huobi Research
Since the 2nd quarter of the year, some DPoS consensus projects, such as CMT, EOS, and TRX, launched super nodes elections which stimulated the market into a short run rebound. The investor’s expectation of the crypto asset market remains optimistic despite the 2018 1st quarter downslide according to Huobi Research Sentiment Survey.

Ø Market Expectation of 18H2 Trend is Very Optimistic


There was something to cheer about in crowdfunding of 2017. A significant amount of new crypto assets was created, and capital raised more than 23 times more than the total funds raised in 2016. The token sales raised amounted to over 5.6 billion US dollars, surpassing the previous year of 0.24 billion dollars. Some of the individual projects even raised capital over 0.1 billion dollars, including blockchain infrastructure projects such as Filecoin, Tezos, and Polkadot. There was a mixed feeling in 2017 amongst investors, a lot of ICO that sprung up were merely scam and built on non-viable projects and in contrast, an appreciable number of them lived up to expectation. As of April 2018, 67% of those new tokens lost value and ended up trading below their ICO price issuance while some such as Spectrecoin, Zilliqa, TomoChain, etc. performed extremely well during the bearish market, appreciated over 100s or even a 1000 times in value.


Our crowdfunding has been a case of a “white paper crowdfunding” where the token issuers conceal the information while investors know little or none, making it difficult to figure out what is not right. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, in 2018, proposed a new way of crypto assets crowdfunding known as “DAICO” to overcome the flaw mentioned above found in traditional crowdfunding. DAICO stands for “Decentralized Autonomous Initial Coin Offering” and the fund can only be accessed by the crowdfunding team when everything stated in the roadmap has been implemented. A voting mechanism is put in place to decide whether or not the founders are entitled to funds or investors getting their residual funds back in a situation where they are unhappy.

’The Abyss (decentralized game distributer project) is the first project to use DAICO system to raise funds

Since the inception of Bitcoin network, we have had three bull markets, and the latest one is quite different from the previous two.

The first bull market did start in April 2011 and lasted for 60 days. The Bitcoin price rose 38 times from $0.75 to $30.What led to this was the launch of Bitcoin/Sterling exchange in March of that same year. Big media houses such as TIME and Forbes also contributed to the rise. The Bitcoin later had a sudden decline of up to 92% due to Mt. Gox exchange hack,

The second bull market lasted for 12 months which led to Bitcoin to rise 82 times from $13 to $1,147.What triggered this rise was the financial credit crisis in that year and the crypto-friendly policy of some European countries. The price later decreased to $210 in January 2015, which was about 82 %.

The third bull market also lasted 12 months from January 2017 to December 2017. The price went from $789 to $19,343 which is about 320 times. In January 2018, the market bull ended with Bitcoin falling up to $6,000 (69%) in February of this year.

This bullish market report explains the seasonality of Bitcoin and the paradigm shift from peer-to-peer cash technology to consensus blockchain technology of smart contract.

Huobi Research summarized six important potential drivers that can drive the new market bull cycle. The six drivers are:

v Penetration: Crypto finance penetrates traditional finance.

v Application: Only “Use cases + Blockchain” could set the market on fire

v M&A: Blockchain acquiring internet

v Users: blockchain user base will keep growing, pushing up market activity

v Generation: from the younger generation to the masses

v Gender: From male to female

To have access to the full report by Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, visit www.huobi.pro and www.hadax.com.


Disclaimer: This report is for information purpose ONLY and not intended for

investment/trading advise

 

[chrisbizplanner]

Blockchain technology overview and prospects. Part IV

This article is the fourth part of the series of the report done by Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, the research arm of Huobi Pro. The report is an in-depth information about the Blockchain technology overview and prospects. The article shares all the key aspects of the report for the understanding of a layperson. So, it’s a sneak preview of the detailed report of the Blockchain technology overview and prospects.

When the word “economy” is mentioned, what comes to mind is trust. Our economic activities depend on trust either from a third party or the public. The third party introduction can reduce security risk but also has some drawbacks such as high cost of transactions and also security problems such as sensitive data leakage. Lastly, to what degree can a third party be trusted.?

The introduction of the blockchain into the global economy takes care of all the problems listed above. There is a paradigm shift from a centralized system to trustless decentralized. The blockchain is a distributed peer-to-peer network that facilitates an exchange of information in a decentralized environment.

Figure 1.: decentralized cooperation and traditional centralized coordination

According to Xiao Feng, vice president of Wanxiang Holdings, initiator of Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and General Partner at Fenbushi Capital, this blockchain goes through three levels of development:

1. Distributed communication network

This is a peer to peer communications and transmissions to facilitate the exchange of information. The internet has given birth to so many distributed file sharing networks such as Napster, and we have an advanced version of Napster known as Bit-Torrent as the internet is fast evolving.


1. Distributed ledger

Distributed ledger records and synchronizes transactions via the digital system. The distributed ledger is created by a set of rules involving mathematical algorithms and coding which allows anyone no matter the location to take part in ledger creation. This eliminates third-party involvement and rigid KYC process in assessing user credibility.


2. Decentralized and open economic ecosystem

This is a public, distributed and open economic eco-system that gives incentives to value creation and information sharing. A user receives payment by completing a task such as uploading content, mining, staking and so on. This system gives users the incentive to be part of the ecosystem where a central employer is not paying their incentives.

Blockchain Technological Bottlenecks and Solutions
Blockchains are evolved in these three stages of development. The current stage of blockchain has three serious drawbacks which need to be overcome before any advancement could be made. The three drawbacks are privacy, scalability, and interoperability.

Blockchain scaling solution progress

Scalability is critical to overcoming, for blockchain to attract global acceptability. For large-scale commercial applications, there is a need for transaction throughput and latency. What we have presently can only process dozens of transactions per second, which falls far below VISA’s capability to handle 24,000 transactions per second at peak. The scaling solution lies on transaction verification mechanisms (distributed ledger level). And consensus mechanisms (distributed network level) Other solutions to the scalability challenge are side-chain/state-channel, layered structure, sub-chain, and sharding.

Another thing worth to mention is the transaction time of bitcoin and ethereum; their transaction time in a blockchain takes time, approximately 10 minutes and 14 seconds respectively. The VISA services are almost instant. The Bitcoin and Ethereum make use of Proof-of-work and Proof-of-Stake which are responsible for the slow transaction time. For better transaction time, Delegated Proof-of-Stake, and Byzantine Fault Tolerance have to be fully adopted.

.
Privacy Hurdle

The second major challenge facing the blockchain technology and needs to be overcome is privacy. Presently, most blockchains provide pseudonymity, that means, they do not reveal user identity, yet store of values and transactions are transparent to the glaring eyes of any user who wants to check the public ledger. We still have few privacy-focused blockchains such as Monero, Dash, Verge and Zcash which use Ring signatures, conjoin, ZK-Snarks, and Invisible Internet Project


Interoperability Hurdle

The 3rd major challenge facing the blockchain technology and needs to be overcome is interoperability or cross-chain technology. We have private blockchains, consortium blockchains, and public blockchains and all these blockchains cannot communicate with each other. Some of the adopted solutions for interoperability include: Notary Schemes (Ripple), Side-chain Technology (Bitcoin’s Rootstock), Hash locking technology (Lightning Network), Relay Technology (Cosmos and Polkadot), A notable cross-chain technology in use presently is Atomic Swaps.

This is just a preview from the report of Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, the research arm of Huobi Pro, to have access to the full report; visit www.huobi.pro and www.hadax.com.

Disclaimer: This report is for information purpose ONLY and not intended fo investment/trading advise. Investing in any crypto asset is solely your responsibility and at your discretion.

 

[chrisbizplanner]

Blockchain industry overview and prospects. Part III


This article is the third part of the series of the report researched by Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, the research arm of Huobi Pro. The report contains a detailed information about the Blockchain industry overview and prospects. The article shared all the key aspects of the report and previewed the report for easy understanding.

The Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects Part (III) is centered on the five different Blockchain segments of the industry:

Ø Hardware and infrastructure layer

Ø Platform Layer

Ø Middle layer

Ø Service layer

Ø Application layer


Hardware and infrastructure layer

This provides hardware support and harsh power for the blockchain system. It consists of Chip manufacturers, mining pool, and mining hardware producer.

Blockchain project such as like Bitcoin (PoW consensus) use hardware mining technology where the necessary hardware mining is needed. Such hardware mining used by cryptocurrency miners include ASIC chips, GPUs, GUIs and others. Most professional miners prefer ASIC chips ahead of GPUs because of its’ high computational efficiency. The downside of ASIC chips is the high consumption of electricity and can only be used for a specific algorithm. The specific algorithms are Sha-256 for Bitcoin, Scrypt for Litecoin and X11 for Dash.

In the future, miners will concentrate on low-energy mining such as CDN mining and the activities around such mining will increase, bringing new opportunities for mining hardware producers.
Hardware and infrastructure projects

Platform Layer

Platform layer provides infrastructure on the underlying architecture for the blockchain systems. Blockchain platform has various blockchain applications. It ensures cross-chain interoperability and value transfer.

Based on the Huobi Research, we have at least dozens of blockchain platforms at the moment, making the space congested.

Middle layer

The middle layer makes the blockchain applications deployment easier where the developers and users can easily use them. With middle layer, the blockchain applications can be vertically added to meet the needs of decentralized data services, code audits, encryption services distributed storage and others.
Blockchain projects in the middle layer

Service layer

Service layer provides professional services for industry players and enables the circulation of capital and information. In the service layer, we have companies such as media outlets, cryptocurrency market analyses platforms, digital asset exchanges and cryptocurrency wallet providers. It serves as a hub of all transactions, funds and accumulates all information.

What will the future hold for the service providers according to Huobi Research:

v There will be co-existence of centralized and decentralized exchanges.

v There will be aggregated services coming from the market quotes and information providers.

v Crypto asset wallets are likely to be the entry point to the distributed application.



Application layer

This can be referred to as an end-user application. It applies blockchain technology to different industries and a good use case for end users.

Use cases

u It serves as a payment and clearing application.

The application layer ensures no intermediary involvement in payment and clearing system. It also ensures no border limitations and guarantees efficiency.

u Health services application.

It can be used in the implementation and updating of electronic medical records, medical insurance, and remote medical diagnoses.

u It serves as securities, commercial notes and alternative applications.

This gives a comparative advantage to any company that uses the third party. It validates trustless environment and ensures safety and privacy of transactions.



This is just a preview from the report of Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application, the research arm of Huobi Pro, to access to the full report; visit www.huobi.pro and www.hadax.com.

Disclaimer: This report is for information purpose ONLY and not intended for

investment/trading advise. Investing in any crypto asset is solely your responsibility and at your discretion. Seek advice before you invest.

 

[The CC Forums]

Here are the attached images.

 

[CryptoTC]

Great overview.

Even though I invest in cryptos, I still struggle with valuations of these various layers.

How do NEM, ETH, IOTA, NEO and so on have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in value? No one pays to use TCP/IP or IP6. Will they sell d’apps for fiat? Will the developers get regular payments via the underlying platform currency which they will then convert to fiat?

Escrow and smart contract creators take a portion of the trade? If so, we aren’t replacing the middleman, just shifting it to the d’app developers rather than lawyers and banks. If this is supposed to be much quicker and easier, how does the developer make money?

 

[The CC Forums]

H1 @chrisbizplanner Please feel free to post updates. Pulled this from the exchange reports.

Global Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects (2018 H1)

Brought to you by Global Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects (2018H1) - published by Huobi Research of Blockchain Application. Download it below.

Summary:

Crypto assets experienced its third bull market in 2017. This time Bitcoin was no longer the only eye catcher, and a great number of ERC20 tokens were created and flourished. A paradigm shift in the crypto assets market, from consensus on peer to peer cash like Bitcoin to consensus on smart contracts, is forming. Entering 2018, the market started to cool down, until mid-April, along with the super nodes election campaign from some projects using DPoS consensus, the crypto market stabilized and started to rebound in a short run. According to our sentiment survey, global investors are still optimistic toward the market in the second half of 2018, with 71.4% of the responders believe the market cap will increase more than 30%.

Crypto asset crowdfunding exploded in 2017. The funding amount was 23 times that of 2016. In 2018, up to 67% of the new crypto assets we followed were selling below issuance prices, however, a few projects still delivered great performances, such as Zilliqa, Tomochain, Bluzelle etc. We expect more capital to center around quality projects. In addition, the first DAICO was successfully completed in 18H1.New funding models are expected to be more popular in the future. Besides, projects in the US will tilt to regulated funding, following Reg A+ and Reg D.

There will be 6 rationales for crypto market. Penetration: Crypto finance will penetrate traditional finance; Application: Only Use cases + Blockchaincould set the market on fire; M&A: Acquisition of high-quality internet applications through crypto assets will happen; Users: Blockchain user base will keep growing, pushing up market activity; Generation: Average age of users will move up; Gender: More females are expected to enter the market.

Regulations: US SEC announced that most of the ERC 20 tokens may be securities and started to strengthen the regulation using securities market framework. We expect more countries to follow US as an example. Meanwhile, self-regulatory organizations were set up in Japan and Korea. Future picture will become a combination of centralized regulation and self-regulatory. However, joint regulation won’t come out in short run.

We divide the blockchain industry into five sectors: Infrastructure, Platform, Middle layer, Application and Services. In 2017, main competition fell in Platform sector. Attentions should still be majorly paid on Platform layer and Middle layer in 18H2.

Technology: Current blockchain networks cannot support commercial applications at large scale. Scalability, privacy, and interoperability are still bottlenecks. A lot of new solutions emerged, and some distributed ledger technology other than blockchain also appeared, such as DAG and hashgraph. Technology improvement will even accelerate in near future.

 

[CryptoTC]

Just got an alert for this thread update. Looks like you combined and updated the Huobi reports.

Very infographics heavy reports there. FYI some of these can be found on Huobi home page. I’m not affiliated, just passing along the info.