 Hi everyone, this was a pretty exciting week for crypto enthusiasts, wasn't it? Bitcoin crossed the 11,000 benchmark in under 24 hours after breaking the most important level of $10,000 on Friday. Ethereum hit a 10-month high, while crypto markets saw solid green by the end of the week. We explored the main factors driving the rally this time, and they are very different than they were in late 2017. For example, Bitcoin futures show growing signs of institutional interest. Consumers' hash rate hit a new all-time high, and the planned Bitcoin block reward halving set for May 2020 is still 333 days away. As many experts pointed out, BTC going above the key psychological $10,000 mark is likely to trigger FOMO. According to fanstruts, Tom Lee, Bitcoin now can easily take out its all-time high. Other experts such as Bitcoin maximalist Tony Vaze, however, disagree. I actually don't think it's important at all. The 10,000 benchmark did nothing to slow down prices back in 2017, and it looks like it did nothing to slow down the prices here in 2019. Let's take a look at the latest market updates. So Facebook's once highly secretive, cryptographically sealed crypto project has now been released out into the open, with a white paper published, and it plans to make this available to the public in 2020. Libra is the name that they've chosen to become Facebook's version of a stablecoin that is somewhere between what I'd say PayPal and Bitcoin. It claims to be decentralized, but it won't be permissionless, which is a big difference. Users will be able to access Libra via Calibra, Facebook's new financial services subsidiary that promotes financial inclusion, providing digital walls for people with or without bank accounts. This will be built into WhatsApp, Messenger, and it also will have its own app. This overall grand plan is to bank the unbanked, not a small feat given that 1.7 billion people all around the world do not have access to traditional financial services, but it's also not a particularly original idea because Bitcoin advocates have been talking about this for about 10 years now. The project will be led by the social media giant's cryptocurrency chief, David Marcus, who is formerly of PayPal. Perhaps surprising for a project with so much disruptive potential, it has forged partnerships with 27 major players in the financial and business world, including Visa, Uber, and MasterCard even. And the news has overall been met with some mild skepticism, but also ranging to outright hostility. One of the most notable was perhaps Maxine Waters, who's the head of the House Financial Services Committee in America, who said the following about the prospect of a Facebook crypto. Given the company's troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action. There are of course many hurdles, both regulatory and other ones, that Libra has to overcome, and the very simplest of all is whether it even has genuine use cases. Mobile money, for example, is already widely used in many parts of Africa and in New Zealand. Also, Libra might not even be available on Facebook's biggest market, which is India, because right now there's a ban of blockchain-based currency transactions. And finally, what is the real reason behind this project anyway? Is it really a humanitarian project to bank the unbanked? Or is it just a corporation's fight for survival in the face of calls to break it up by the US government? One recent Guardian report suggests that Facebook usage has actually gone a lot down despite the social media giant's claims that it has gone a lot up. Our correspondent Giovanni has talked this week to Joseph Lala's, CEO at Bison Trails, a founding member of the Libra project, and also to Matthew Weissel, CEO of Aram Capital. So let's have a look at the key issues that they covered. There was a very noble and very ambitious cause that the Libra Association was trying to do, which was truly trying to bank the unbanked and create seamless payment systems, a global payment process, and seamless remittances globally. And that was, for us, was a very mission-aligned initiative. You have 28 founding members. They each spent roughly 10 million to be a part of this network, so you already have a significant amount of money and backing here. If you then take the transactions that are being done by Visa, by MasterCard, and so on, the Facebook can take a significant chunk here. A lot of people in this world, they have obviously issues with Facebook, and they have publicly expressed them, because Facebook is a monopoly. They have so much data, and they have been in negative press, of course. But with the approach that they're taking, I'm not so much concerned about this, because we have to go away with the thought that this will be a Facebook coin. This is a consortium coin. Member of the Libra Association will have one vote, equal vote, and all the decisions that are going to be made on a governance, from a governance perspective, are going to be made democratically. So right now it's like a federated network with all of the Association members, and over time you can move towards a permissionless system. As the network grows and scales and becomes more stable, you can start to open that up and allow more access to it. New revelations arose this week concerning now defunct cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga CX. Quadriga founder and late CEO Gerald Cotton, who died last December, was siphoning off customers funds from the exchange, apparently, and using them to trade on rival cryptocurrency exchanges and fund his expensive lifestyle. This is all according to the latest report published by the exchange's bankruptcy trustee, EY. So apparently, between about 2016 and the end of 2018, when Gerald passed away, over $200 million in cryptocurrencies were used by Cotton. While conducting his fraudulent trading activities, Cotton was not that great at it and faced a bunch of major losses, which then considerably impacted Quadriga's reserve because he was kind of using customers money. For instance, around 21,000 Bitcoin were moved by Cotton to an unidentified exchange, and now only 8 Bitcoin are left out of all of that. The rest had been lost following liquidation. But there's more. Cotton also was creating fake accounts on Quadriga, which he then used to buy crypto from consumers using fake fiat currency, which is very confusing. And as Quadriga's legal trustee, audit firm EY has been trying to recover $190 million worth of crypto that had gone missing after his death, as apparently he was the only one who knew where the private keys are, and now I think we understand why. However, efforts to retrieve these funds has really not brought any success, and that does not seem to be a surprise knowing what we know now. As of May, the firm had just $21 million at its disposal to cover $160 million in liabilities that's eight times more. EY believes that the several properties and luxury vehicles that belong to Cotton and now his widow were actually purchased using Quadriga users funds and should therefore be liquidated. And now on to some more serious news with our expert Maxwell. Satoshi Nakamoto's identity is not known to the public. But if it were to be known, it would be as a writer. A short story writer. His masterpiece, the Bitcoin White Paper. Well, now he is branching out into longer form nonfiction writing. Two books under Nakamoto's name have mysteriously appeared on Amazon. The Wave and Ripple Design Book and the official Bitcoin coloring book. How do we know it's him? Well, in the bio for the author it says, Satoshi Nakamoto is the renowned inventor of Bitcoin. The word renowned is somewhat bombastic and could suggest the author is a certain right, er, if you catch my drift. I mean, he does have a lot of legal fees at the moment. The titles themselves are considerably less cryptic than Bitcoin. The first, Wave and Ripple Design Book, is a bit on the nose. And the second, the official Bitcoin coloring book is even less cryptic. Although it claims to be printed on a brilliant white paper. It was also reviewed by Ethereum creator Vitalike Buttering, JP Morgan CEO Damon James, and billionaire investor Bored Buffett Wharton. If you want to get your hands on a copy, it will be available June 28th. But I know I don't. Ripple announced a new partnership with Money Transfer Giant Moneygram this week. According to their agreement, Ripple is now going to become Moneygram's key partner for payment and foreign exchange settlement with digital assets. So in particular, this partnership is going to allow Moneygram to transfer money from one currency to another using XRP, Ripple's native token, as the bridge currency, which can then reduce the operational cost for Moneygram. As a part of this deal, Ripple has invested $30 million in the company's shares, but there's also an option for them to invest $20 million more. The shares were bought at a price three times higher than their market value. Moneygram has in the past been relying on traditional foreign exchange markets to settle transfers, which requires that someone purchase the currency in advance. But now, through its partnership with Ripple, settlement times are supposed to drop from one hour down to just a few seconds, which is really fast, and the transaction fees from $30 down to a fraction of a penny. Following this announcement, Moneygram shares skyrocketed by over 152%. This can be seen as another rather major step for a cryptocurrency entering the mainstream, because Moneygram is one of the biggest players in the global romance market with $1.4 billion in annual revenue and operations in 200 countries. Since Bitcoin is now trading around $10,000, I've decided it's the perfect time for me to take a vacation, and this means that Hodler's Digest is going to be on a hiatus. 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