Binance Enables Credit and Debit Card Purchases for Crypto

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Binance, the world’s largest crypto to crypto exchange has recently announced its partnership with Simplex (a payment processing company) to allow Binance users to purchase cryptocurrency using credit cards. This step forward helps bridge the gap for users who wanted a more direct method to purchase bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on Binance.

If you already have a Binance account you can check out the service at https://www.binance.com/en/creditcard/, or you can easily register for a Binance account to start trading a variety of cryptocurrencies with ease.

Building On Binance’s Onboarding Infrastructure

While Binance is one of the more user-friendly cryptocurrency exchanges, having to purchase bitcoin or cryptocurrencies elsewhere before transferring them to Binance wallets to begin trading was a bit too daunting of a challenge for many users new to crypto. Now, Binance has cut out the extra step for users looking to quickly purchase and trade cryptocurrencies all on the same platform. This improvement is a solid step forward and strengthens Binance’s position as the leading cryptocurrency exchange by volume traded.

To start, Binance will be allowing users to purchase bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and XRP with credit or debit cards, with no word on whether they will be opening up other cryptocurrencies in the future.

BNB in Uptrend Despite Continuing Bear Market

Although bitcoin and the rest of the crypto markets have been taking quite a beating in this bear market, BNB (Binance Coin) has been in a steady uptrend since late November. Both the dollar and bitcoin pairing have been progressing upwards on the weekly charts (shown below), with the first significant pullback against bitcoin having come this latest week. This being said, if the rally continues it looks like BNB could eventually challenge its previous highs in the future, something that most other cryptocurrencies are very far from doing.

Binance Partners with Simplex for Payment Processing

To make this possible, Binance has partnered with online payment-processing provider Simplex. This isn’t Simplex’s first foray into the crypto space, since the company is already partners with BitMart and Mycelium, and partnered with KuCoin in late November of 2018. Simplex looks to be providing a much needed service for various cryptocurrency exchanges out there, ensuring that users can easily purchase cryptocurrency on their favourite exchanges using their credit or debit cards.

While Binance has notified that not all countries and US states will be able to take advantage of the feature, this is a limitation from Simplex’s side of things.

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao Focusing on Speed, Security and Adoption

Talking about this partnership, it’s clear the Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is continuously looking to push cryptocurrency adoption while improving the current systems and gateways. This partnership with Simplex helps improve both the onramp for new crypto users along with the infrastructure for existing Binance traders.

On the Binance blog’s announcement post the Binance CEO talked about how the necessity of building fiat gateways for the crypto industry’s growth: “The crypto industry is still in its early stages and most of the world’s money is still in fiat. Building fiat gateways is what we need now to grow the ecosystem, increase adoption and introduce crypto to more users.”

You can follow Changpeng “CZ” Zhao on Twitter @cz_binance, and to stay up to date with the latest bitcoin and cryptocurrency news be sure to follow @NewsCoinToday.

Ethereum Classic Launches on Coinbase

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Coinbase has completed the launch of Ethereum Classic across all of its services and platforms, with Ethereum Classic now available to buy instantly across the Coinbase consumer mobile app and web interface. Coinbase users are now able to easily buy and sell ETC for traditional fiat currencies like British Pounds and Euros. Ethereum Classic joins Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin as the fifth cryptocurrency asset currently supported on Coinbase’s consumer platforms.

The last cryptocurrency asset to be added to all of Coinbase’s platforms was more than eight months ago, when Bitcoin Cash was added on December 19th, 2017, despite being originally planned to be added on January 1st, 2018. Bitcoin Cash’s sudden acceleration in its launch was preceded by a spike in its price, seeing it rise up to more than $8,000 USD before the listing, leading to an investigation which eventually found no insider trading had occurred amongst Coinbase employees.

ETC Price Reaction to Coinbase Addition

Since its significant lows of $10.13 on August 14th, Ethereum Classic has now risen up in value by 40% in the past three days, with the price currently $14.30 at the time of writing. While this doesn’t quite compare to the highs of $21.22 reached earlier this month, Ethereum Classic’s 40% rise in price came at a crucial time, with ETC’s price at its lowest point in 2018 as it was retesting last year’s support of $9-10.

Below is the current daily chart for ETC/USD from TradingView:

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Coinbase Exploring Other Assets

In the brief blog post announcing the ability to buy and sell Ethereum Classic, Dan Romero, Vice President and GM of Coinbase Consumer also mentions that Coinbase is well aware of the requests to add more assets on their consumer mobile app and web interface. He goes on to link to Coinbase’s blog post from July, where they announced the exploration of five new possible assets (Cardano, Stellar Lumens, Basic Attention Token, Zcash and 0x), before echoing that the Coinbase team is working hard to make more assets available to Coinbase app and web users around the world.

The complete launch of Ethereum Classic on all Coinbase platforms marks a solid step towards seeing at least one or two more assets also launch on Coinbase consumer by the end of 2018. Of the five contenders, Stellar Lumens (XLM) and Cardano (ADA) are considered by many as the likeliest contenders. This is largely due to their significant market caps, with XLM having a 4.3 billion USD market cap and ADA sitting only slightly below at 2.6 billion USD.

Ethereum Classic’s Value and Future Asset Additions

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Both XLM and ADA have a significantly higher market cap than Ethereum Classic, but are worth much less than Ethereum Classic at the time of writing (XLM at $0.22 and ADA at $0.10) due to their much larger circulating supply and significantly lower trading volume. When considering the value of a cryptocurrency, while the total market cap should be considered, looking at the volume of an asset over the past 24 hours can give you a much better sense of its use-case and actual value.

Ethereum Classic is the sixth cryptocurrency in total 24h volume at the time of writing – higher than Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Litecoin. It’s also important to consider how far above Ethereum Classic is in terms of volume compared to these other possible assets being explored by Coinbase. Zcash’s past 24 hours volume of $85 million USD comes closest to ETC’s $485 million USD in volume, with Cardano and Stellar Lumens trailing right behind at $75 million USD and $68 million USD respectively.

Of the five assets being looked into, Basic Attention Token currently has the lowest market cap at $216 million USD, with one BAT valued at $0.21. BAT also has the lowest volume of the five contenders, with $4.19 million USD of BAT circulating over the past 24 hours. It will be interesting to see how many assets will be added by Coinbase on what kind of timeframe. It is unsure whether Coinbase is looking to add one of these assets or all five and on what kind of timeframe, however, it looks like Ethereum Classic will surely be joined by at least another new asset on Coinbase in 2018.

Ethereum Classic White Paper Breakdown Soon!

With Ethereum Classic now added to Coinbase and available to a much larger market of consumers, it will be worth keeping an eye on Ethereum Classic’s price as it shapes throughout the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you’re looking to learn more about Ethereum Classic, we highly recommend that you visit the website EthereumClassic.org where you can learn more about the Ethereum Classic project.

News Coin Today has been preparing an Ethereum Classic white paper breakdown, where we will go through the Ethereum Classic white paper and provide an in-depth explanation regarding the project and its scope. Until we post our ETC white paper breakdown, you can enjoy reading the Ethereum Classic white paper here.

Keep an eye on News Coin Today for the latest cryptocurrency news and blockchain learning resources!

Understanding the Basics of Blockchain Systems

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shutterstock_722242618Before delving into Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, it’s important to have an underlying foundation of knowledge of blockchain systems. Below is a comprehensive post which underlies the basics of blockchain systems and the varying technologies that can power them.

Blockchain systems are a coalescence of three main principles: private key cryptography, a distributed network with a shared ledger, and an anchoring reason or goal to support secure and recorded network transactions. These three form the basis of blockchain technology, generally defining it as a secure and decentralized ledger that cannot be tampered or altered. Most importantly, a blockchain network eliminates the need for a trusted third-party, as it is able to create a trustless system.

A Trustless System?

A trustless system doesn’t define a system that is untrustworthy but rather is used to connotate a system that isn’t reliant and overtrusting of any single party or distributor of information. This is because blockchain systems distribute trust rather than collectively dumping it upon a trusted third-party, like many centralized services work today. In blockchain technology, trust is placed on the governing protocol of the blockchain, whether it be proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, or another kind of consensus mechanism which approves transactions and additions to the blockchain.

This being said, there is no exact definition of what a blockchain is. While many choose to define blockchain a “decentralized ledger of transactions”, there are many blockchains which are not associated to a cryptocurrency (like Walmart’s supply chain database and recent patent for a blockchain-based health care records system), others which are not recorded publicly (like MasterCard’s blockchain APIs) and are not decentralised.

Defining Blockchain Systems

The Verge has an in-depth article which explores the history and definition of blockchain technology, wherein University of British Columbia associate professor of archival science Victoria Lemiuex states:

“In general, if the transactions are gathered together in blocks, and it is blocks that are secured on the chain using cryptography, and it is designed to be tamper-resistant and produce immutable records, the system qualifies as a blockchain,”

Associate professor Lemieux further explains that even if the above can be seen as a definition for blockchain systems, there are many distributed ledgers that denote themselves as blockchains even when their transactions aren’t organized in blocks. This is why it’s best to think about blockchain in terms of the technology being used, rather than absolute adjectives like trustless or immutable, which might not be applicable in all cases.

How Does Blockchain Technology Work?

A Blockchain system is a cryptographically secured chain of blocks, each block containing a set of data. This dataset can be anything, from a history of transactions to any other kind of record keeping. Let’s break everything down briefly to make blockchain’s innate security easier to understand:

  • A block is a collection of data.
  • Each block‘s information is cryptographically encoded using a mathematical equation into a 64-character string called a hash.
  • If anything is changed in a block‘s data or contents, even just one letter or number, the resulting hash is also completely changed into an entirely different hash.
  • This means every block‘s hash is always unique.
  • Every block includes the previous block‘s hash as part of its data. Let’s call this a memory hash just to make the next section easier to understand.

The mathematical work required to create these cryptographically encoded hashes is called proof of work, as it validates the set of data. In the case of Bitcoin, the proof of work algorithm ensures a block of transactions are valid and legitimate before they are verified and stored on the public blockchain. Proof of work algorithms necessitate a lot of computational power, which is why blockchain systems like Bitcoin function by allowing users around the world to contribute their computational power and act as “miners”. In compensation, a reward is given to the first successful miners who have verified transactions on a completed block using the proof of work algorithm.

There’s also a different kind of blockchain protocol system called proof of stake, but we’ll be going over proof of stake and how it differs from proof of work in a future post.

Why Blockchain Systems are Difficult to Tamper

Because of the If a block’s data is changed or missing, the block’s hash will be different to the memory hash present on the next block. Because a block’s data contents also include the memory hash, and is a factor in that block’s hash, if one tried to cover up their data tampering by changing the memory hash on the next block to match the altered block’s hash, then they would have to continue the process, effectively changing every single block in the blockchain.

It is this structure, using cryptographically obtained hashes to define and secure each block, which makes blockchain difficult to tamper with. However, the decentralised nature of many blockchains also plays a large part in making these chains of information secure and unchangeable.

The Security of Blockchain Systems

In the case of a decentralized blockchain system, data is processed through the proof of work or proof of stake protocol by a network of users acting as a consensus mechanism before all updating the blockchain at the same time. Every participant in the blockchain is continuously contributing some of their computing power into maintaining and updating new data entered into the blockchain.

All nodes (contributing computers or servers) are connected and communicating about the validity of each transaction or information being added into the blockchain. Once all the nodes come to the same conclusion about the data contents within a block, they all approve and add it to the blockchain at the same time. This results in a shared and distributed ledger of transactions (in the case of a cryptocurrency blockchain like Bitcoin) that cannot be altered or tampered.

Coinbase Commences Final Testing for Ethereum Classic

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After recently announcing support for GBP currency on Coinbase, a tweet from Coinbase’s account announced that their engineering team has begun final testing for the inclusion of Ethereum Classic on the Coinbase platform. Along with this, the tweet mentions final testing is expected to be complete on Tuesday, August 7th, which would allow for inbound ETC transfers through Coinbase Pro and Coinbase Prime to begin.

The tweet also includes a link to the Coinbase team’s blog on Medium, which further outlines how ETC will be rolling out on Coinbase’s various services:

Once testing is complete on August 7th, the Coinbase team intends to allow 24-48 hours of inbound ETC transfers through their Coinbase Pro and Coinbase Prime services. After this, Coinbase will enable trading through Coinbase Markets, and once sufficient liquidity has been established Coinbase will then open trading through their Pro and Prime platforms.

Pre-2017 ETC Holders and Coinbase Consumer Listing

The Coinbase blog post outlines that customers who previously held Ethereum Classic due to the 2016 Ethereum hard fork, and who chose not to withdraw their funds before January 2017 will receive a corresponding Ethereum Classic Credit on their accounts. Coinbase also includes a couple of frequently asked questions in their blog post, explaining that their testing completion date of August 7th is an estimate and can be subject to change. Along with this, they specify that Ethereum Classic will be available everywhere Coinbase is supported, leaving no locations excluded from the listing.

Lastly, Coinbase has specified that once sufficient liquidity is established on Coinbase Pro and Coinbase Prime, Ethereum Classic will be listed on the consumer version of Coinbase. In the post, Coinbase estimates about one to two weeks of trading on the Pro and Prime platform before Ethereum Classic makes its way to Coinbase consumer.

Ethereum Classic Price Jumps Upwards

As a result of this announcement, Ethereum Classic saw a strong rousing in price, moving up around 14% to briefly reach highs of $16.97 before settling down at $16.43 at the time of writing. As long as the retrace doesn’t dip below the $16.00 level, this Coinbase announcement will have brought ETC back from the recent bleeding in price for Ethereum and various other altcoins.

Below is the 1h chart of ETC/USD on the BitFinex exchange:

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Chart is from TradingView.

Ethereum Classic’s Future After Testing and Listing

As the days move towards the completion of testing and its subsequent listing on Coinbase’s markets, it’s likely we’ll see another surge in ETC’s price. As liquidity is established, Ethereum Classic’s subsequent listing on Coinbase’s consumer platform will open it up to a massive amount of customers all over the world. While some believe that this listing will see Ethereum Classic’s price reach and surge beyond its previous all-time high of ~$42.00, with the recent trend of the market it seems unlikely to see such a strong performance.

News Coin Today is not a source of financial advice. Always do your own research before pursuing any financial investments. 

ETH and Altcoins Follow Bitcoin Bloodbath

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After a significant 8% drop in Bitcoin’s USD price the past few days, the cryptocurrency market has continued to bleed significantly with Ethereum and many other altcoins following the negative trend. Ethereum suffered a 12% drop in the past few days (currently at $410 at the time of writing), moving down from the comfortable levels of support it had established around $450. ETH’s low wicked down to $395, with the next major support seemingly sitting at the $365 mark.

While Bitcoin’s price has continued shaking out in the $7,200-7,600 range, many altcoins have suffered large drops similar to ETH, past their expected levels of long-term support.

Below is the 4h ETH/USD chart, with the 12% drop highlighted:

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This drop in Ethereum’s price has seen serious bleeding across a variety of other coins, with some of the biggest losers over the past 24 hours being Waltonchain (-16.60%), ICON (-15.54%), Wanchain (-14.68%) and Vechain (-13.20%). Other coins which also dropped by more than 10% today are PundiX, PolyMath, Dent, Golem, and Mithril.

Larger coins like Bitcoin Cash (-5.29%), Ethereum Classic (-4.09%), OmiseGO (-6.46%), NEO (-4.04%), Stellar (-6.83%) and 0x (-6.13%) have also been suffering over the past 24 hours.

While some coins like EOS, Tezos, and Komodo especially have recovered and are doing positively on the 24h timescale, many other coins continue to reach for new bottoms. Today’s hit of drops only underscores the relative negative downtrend over the past couple of weeks for Ethereum and various other altcoins.

Ethereum looks like it will be hugging the $410 support line, with it possibly turning to resistance very soon. Despite Ethereum’s recent drop following Bitcoin’s, ETH/BTC has risen steadily over the past 10 hours (+3% on the high wick over the past 10 hours), offering the possibility of some breathing room for Ethereum and other altcoins, while Bitcoin possibly suffers its next drop.

Below is the 1h chart of ETH/BTC:

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Bitcoin has also moved slightly below the previously anticipated $7,500 support, and is priced $7,380 at the time of writing. If the $7,200 level breaks for Bitcoin, it looks like $7,000 is the only possible point of support before dropping back down to the $6,800 price.

News Coin Today is not a source of financial advice. Charts are from TradingView. 

Bitcoin Drops Down to $7.5K Support

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The USD price of Bitcoin dropped around 8-9% over the past two days, moving down from its previously settled support of $8,100 to reach lows of $7,460 before arriving at $7,538 at the time of writing.

While there is some support around the $7,200 range, Bitcoin’s price could swiftly drop to $6,800 or $6,600 if this is the beginning of a new downtrend.

Below is the 4h BTC/USD chart with the drop highlighted by the box:

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The mentioned supports of 7,200, 6,600 and 6,800 are shown below, also 4h BTC/USD:

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It seems like the bull run which began from the low $5,800 range has tapered off and is now trading in the $7,750-7,550 range for the past 24h at the time of writing. We’ll have to wait to see whether the ~$7,500 support can provide a bounce back to test $7,700 and eventually $8,000 resistance levels again in the next couple of days.

Bitcoin’s current percentage of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization is currently 47.90% at the time of writing according to CoinMarketCap.

News Coin Today is not a source of financial advice.

News Coin Today Twitter Launches!

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News Coin Today’s Twitter is up and running! You can follow @NewsCoinToday for news and site updates.