The second week of December has been exciting for the cryptocurrency markets. Perhaps the biggest news is that Basis will shut down and refund remaining funds to investors. The stablecoin startup cited an unfavorable regulatory environment as the reason for closing its business. Basis had already raised $133 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Ventures to be one the most well-funded stablecoin projects. It aimed to build an algorithmic stablecoin maintaining price stability with the US dollar. Basis's founder explained that considered alternative paths to regulatory compliance, but ultimately realized its token investment contacts allowed little flexibility.
Here is the rest of the week in review:
The Boerse Stuttgart Group announced plans to launch a cryptocurrency trading platform in the first half of next year. Germany's second-largest stock exchange is partnering with German fintech firm solarisBank to engineer the trading infrastructure and banking relationship. The group is also seeking regulatory approval to offer multilateral trading facility for its crypto trading marketplace, which will allow matching buyers and sellers of financial instruments electronically. Boerse aims to allow support for trading coins and initial coin offering (ICO) tokens, as well as custody services, after launch. The trading application under development is called Bison and advertises no-fee trading and open order books to incentivize increased liquidity.
Nym Technologies offers an ambitious vision of the future: anonymize everything. The startup is backed by Binance Labs and recently completed its incubator program. Nym is gathering top academic researchers to create fully autonomous, untraceable cryptocurrency. It aims to work off of improvements to MimbleWimble, the privacy protocol that fuses transactions on a blockchain. Its first step is developing a wallet that offers network level anonymity for coins. That means the wallet will hide information about transactions, including the sender, receiver, amount, location, and IP addresses. The current Nym team consist of privacy activists and cryptography experts. Nym believes it will ultimately solve the problem of electronic surveillance through implementations of mix networks, which allow parties to interact anonymously and securely.
Crypto prices fell again this week to a new low of $100.5 billion Saturday before a slight bounce. Bitcoin (BTC) tested $3,100, and Ethereum (ETH) collapsed to $80. In the top 100, the biggest losers are Factom (FCT), down 37 percent, MOAC (MOAC), down 33 percent, and Burst (BURST), down 33 percent. The biggest gainers are Waves (WAVES), up 50 percent, Syscoin (SYS), up 30 percent, and BridgeCoin (BCO), up 22 percent. Traders and investors are still watching if crypto can convincingly hold the critical $100 billion level.
The author owns a small amount of BTC.