Top News from Last Week to This Week

Highlights from Polkadot’s  2019 recap with strong focus on Asia: 3 tours of China; Polkadot Incubator launched with Longhash out of Singapore; Polkaworld hackathon saw twenty-two teams compete in Hangzhou, China. http://bit.ly/2SJljJ4

In advance of the  Bitcoin Halving，Bitmain to Further Cut Half of Its Personnel by Chinese New Year.  Prior to that,  Jihan Wu just recently started a round of salary increase for all employees, and most of the employees apart from the management have got about 20% increased salary. http://bit.ly/2udR4Qr

WSJ: How China’s New Cryptocurrency Could Track Money Flows, Challenge Facebook’s Libra. https://on.wsj.com/39B8aYJ

Ousted Bitmain Co-Founder Wages Battle for Control in Court. https://bloom.bg/36likuB

Global Coin Research: A Look Back on 2019 and Our 2020 Vision. http://bit.ly/35o46aO

Global Coin Research’s Top 10 Stories of 2019. http://bit.ly/36lYSOh

  Investments and Finance

Maskbook founding team Dimension.im secures strategic investment from HashKey Capital. http://bit.ly/2SImqsJ

Shenzhen-based asset management firm Penghua Fund put in an application for a blockchain-focused exchange-traded-fund (ETF), Penghua Shenzhen Stocks, to China’s securities commission, CSRC. If approved, it’d be the country’s first publicly available blockchain ETF fund. http://bit.ly/39sad1f

  Exchange News
 

Talo and Amber Group have introduced KeeperDAO- a protocol that economically incentivizes pooled participation in ‘keeper’ strategies which manage liquidations and rebalances on applications spanning margin trading, lending and exchange. http://bit.ly/2QDBvJf

Binance DEX announced that the total number of projects on Binance Chain currently reached 165. http://bit.ly/37vUk8c

South Korea slapped the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb Korea with a tax bill of 80.3 billion won ($69.3 million), marking the government’s first taxation on cryptocurrency trading.  http://bit.ly/2sHvKCj

CTO of Bitfinex: In 2020 top-tier exchanges will enter in a more mature phase of the crypto-industry where the technological battle will intensify (Lightning Network support, DEXes, non-custodial trading, …) http://bit.ly/2ZIiPw2

Huobi Indonesia Launches Rupiah Fiat Gateway. https://prn.to/2ZIHgcZ

Coins

IOTA says it has resolved mainnet issues; network transactions are going through. The network was reportedly unable to process transactions for 15+ hours on Wednesday. http://bit.ly/2QLcaNs

Argo Blockchain is installing new 3,616 Bitmain machines to increase its mining capacity by 75%. http://bit.ly/37vMg7u

Blockchain peer-to-peer content sharing platform DLive will migrate from Tendermint-based protocol to the TRON blockchain, and use BitTorrent’s decentralized file-sharing system, BTFS, for storage.  http://bit.ly/2QBkvU2

F2pool founder thinks that Cosmos maybe the second Ethereum. http://bit.ly/35hyZ0z

🧳 Business
 

While Apple rejects the dapp world, it’s South Korean rival Samsung is encouraging them—another sign that the East is leading the way in Web3 technology. http://bit.ly/37q4fvK

⚖️Regulations

South Korea is setting up a task force to research the possibility of launching a state-backed digital currency. http://bit.ly/2QDBbdI

To relieve the difficulty of financing cost of small and medium-sized enterprises, Guangdong launched a blockchain-based financing platform and issued the first online unsecured blockchain financing loan in China. http://bit.ly/2Qn362k