Today, on August 22, Alessandro Palombo, founder of Jur, said in our program "CoinNess Online Investor Meetup (Phase 5)" that there is a large demand for legal services in the global market, and the annual legal market valuation is about $800 billion (for the US market only). However, current legal solutions are slow and inefficient, so the existing justice system must be improved in accordance with the actual demands, according to him.
"We make the legal contracts more intelligent through smart contracts and blockchain technology. On the one hand, it is creating a "smart court" for the future, while on the other hand, individuals can manage their own contracts and disputes," he stressed.

Since Litecoin's halving, weekly median transaction fees are down 22%, roughly in-line with its market cap losses. Weekly transactions are also down roughly 5% since the halving. But not all metrics are down. Weekly adjusted transaction volume is up 21%, which means that more money is being transferred on the Litecoin network since the halving. And that's not all. Weekly active addresses are also up by about 35%, although most of that increase comes from a single spike in network activity around August 10.
Overall, Litecoin's halving event is sending mixed signals. Both bulls and bears will find meaningful metrics to point to that support their arguments, but the reality is that Litecoin's 2019 halving isn't necessarily telling us much about what to expect for Bitcoin in 2020.
If there is a lesson here, though, it's this: despite all the speculation during the months before the Litecoin halving, not much has actually changed about how people use Litecoin. The price drop is probably related more to broader crypto market forces than to anything halving-related. And the underlying fundamentals of the Litecoin network remain intact.
With Bitcoin's halving in 2020, we can expect prices to follow broader market trends and other network metrics perhaps ticking up or down. But Litecoin's experience suggests that Bitcoin's halving may well bring a similar lack of drama.

According to the official news of 58COIN, it called on digital exchanges of the industry to break the silence and jointly promote the establishment of industry standards, especially to standardize the maintenance margin, which determines the crucial value of liquidation, in a way to bridge the gap between investors and trading platforms. To this end, 58COIN decided to take out 2,000 BTC to launch the "Contract Standard Funds" to promote the formation and development of contract market standards. Also, it declared that all investors who encounter "non-standard liquidations" on the popular platforms from now on, if standards met, can apply for the "non-standard liquidation compensation" from "contract standard funds."
Click 'Read More' for details.

Based on CryptoCompare's Exchange Benchmark grading, AA-graded exchange volume is up 29% while lower quality volume still predominates. Exchanges with grades AA represented 5% (31 billion USD) of total aggregate volume in July, while those rated A and B represented 19% (119 billion USD) and 8% (47 billion USD) respectively. Trading volume is still dominated by lower quality exchanges, with D-E rated exchanges representing 64% combined (316 billion USD).
Click 'Read More' for details.

WR Global announced that it will enable the deposit and withdrawal of SKM and BIX at 10:00 UTC on August 22. The SKM/BTC trading pair will be launched at 04:00 on August 23, and the BIX/BTC trading pair will be available at 05:00 on the same day.

As of 05:28 (UTC) on August 22, Coinhills statistics show that the US Dollar remains the most traded national currency for Bitcoin with a significant market share of 71.23%, followed by the Japanese Yen (20.13%), the Korean Won (5.17%), the Euro (1.65%) and the British Pound (0.68%).

The original operator of Zaif, Tech Bureau, announces that the company has came up to the conclusion to discontinue its cryptocurrency exchange business once it completes the refunds for all customers who possess remaining balance which refunds can be made.
Click 'Read More' for the basic policy of refund.

Citing statistics from alternative.me, the Fear & Greed Index currently reads five, six units lower than yesterday, creating a new low and indicating the fear of crypto market intensifies with the sentiment holding "Extreme Fear."
As per the index, a value of 0 means "Extreme Fear" while a value of 100 represents "Extreme Greed."

Singapore-based perpetual contract trading platform Bybit announced to launch the asset swap function, in a bid to allow customers to trade perpetual contract of different cryptocurrencies more conveniently. Currently, it support the following cryptocurrencies to swap: BTC, ETH, EOS, and XRP.
Click 'Read More' for detailed steps.

As of 03:00 (UTC) on August 22, the global index of Bitcoin (BTC) price continues to decline, dropping to the $9,900 level. BTC now marks $9,931.72 with a decrease of 6.23% in the past 24 hours.
The CoinNess.com Bullish vs. Bearish Indicator shows our four-hour technical bias on BTC is "Strong Sell" with 14 indicators sending out selling signals, two showing neutral signals, and two indicating buying signals.
The broad market is still trading downwards, with only 8 out of Top 100 cryptos by market cap rising.
The global market cap reads $258.53 billion, and the 24-hour trading volume is $63.86 billion.
Major Coins
1. BTC quotes show 9,904.29 USDT on Binance, $9,922.60 on Bitfinex, and $9,899.32 on Coinbase Pro;
2. CoinNess.com Market Index presents quotes for major cryptocurrencies besides BTC as following: ETH marks $184.98 (-4.43%); XRP marks $0.2634 (-3.06%); BCH marks $297.76 (-4.64%); LTC marks $71.85 (-4.13%); EOS marks $3.47 (-5.17%); ETC marks $6.08 (-1.92%).
Top 3 Gainers and Losers in Cryptocurrencies
1. Top 3 gainers among Top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap: RIF (+7.70%), RDD (+1.78%), and GNT (+1.32%);
2. Top 3 losers among Top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap: EGT (-37.45%), ALGO (-10.98%), and NRG (-10.38%).
Top Gainers and Losers in Categories
1. No gainers;
2. Top 3 losers among 24 categories: Anonymous Currency (-7.29%), Side Chain Concept (-6.83%), and Data Service (-6.39%).
Cap Flows of Coins/Exchanges
1. Top 3 capital inflows within the last 24 hours: DASH (+$786.16 mln), XMR (+$452.59 mln), and ZB (+$63.56 mln);
2. Top 3 capital outflows within the last 24 hours: USDC (-$90.90 mln), XRP (-$38.28 mln), and EOS (-$22.08 mln);
3. Net inflows/outflows of exchanges: Binance (-$15.10 mln), Bitfinex (-$22.97 mln), and Coinbase Pro (-$10.00 mln).

Citing the news released by Crypto Watch, the Japanese virtual currency exchange bitFlyer announced to suspend the deposit and withdrawal of LSK at 04:00 UTC on August 23 due to the soft fork.

According to the official announcement, the trading platform ZG.com will enable the deposit and withdrawal of EHD at 06:00 UTC on August 22. The EHD/USDT trading pair will be launched at 06:00 on August 23.

Crypto custody provider Anchorage announced that clients who hold Stellar Lumens (XLM) can now receive inflation awards with their Lumens in custody, and Anchorage clients who hold Tezos (XTZ) can receive baking returns through delegating their baking rights either to Anchorage's baker, or to any other third party baker.
Stellar has a fixed inflation rate of 1% per year written into its protocol. Clients can delegate their votes to a specified inflation pool, and receive inflation awards. In addition, clients who hold Tezos can now delegate their baking rights to their preferred baker, which will enable them to receive baking returns at a rate of roughly 7% annualized.

At present, Bitcoin (BTC) has fallen below the $10,000 threshold. Citing the Bitcoin analysis of Jins, the in-house crypto analyst at CoinNess.com, in regard to the recent performance of BTC, neither the reduction of trading volume nor the number of transactions with a large amount releases the signal that the main force participate in trading. At the same time, the number of BTC whale transfers is particularly small, which indicates that it is difficult for the small- and medium-sized investors to maintain the high-level trading enthusiasm in the current market. From this perspective, BTC may have a basis for further decline.
Taken in the price pattern, BTC has apparently formed a shorts-dominated pattern in which two long green candles siege multiple short red candles, indicating that the bearish signal below the 60-day moving average is clear.
Although the power brought by support level at $10,000 was strong before, the price has already broken below the threshold. In the short-term period, BTC needs to release a lot of selling pressure to regain its upswing.
Judging from the performance of transactions, the number of transactions that involve in an amount of 10 BTC and above has not increased. The number of whale transactions marked 474 on August 21, setting a new low for half a year. Obviously, it is hard to make out the transactions initiated by the oversized main force, which shows that the current market is still dominated by small- and medium-sized investors.

Monitored by CoinNess.com, from 00:00 to 02:00 (UTC) on August 22, BTC registered a net outflow of over $102 million in the past two hours.
1. The Top 3 net cap inflows in the crypto market are: KCS (+$654.9 k), TRX (+$607.4 k), LTC (+$597.1 k);
2. The Top 3 net cap outflows in the crypto market are: BTC (-$102.43 mln), ETH (-$5.71 mln), XRP (-$2.21 mln).
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Citing data from Binance, BTC continues its dropping trend, decreasing below the 9,800 USDT. Currently, BTC, which just dipped to 9,791.24 USDT, marks 9,846.31 USDT.
For more alerts on real-time market changes, add your portfolio at "Watch List" to enable the Intelligent Market Monitor, seizing more investment opportunities.

Monitored by CoinNess.com, as of 00:00, August 22 (UTC), 1) the number of Bitcoin active addresses is on a day-to-day increase of 5.82%, marking 661,100.
2) The number of Bitcoin on-chain transactions is 333,100 with a day-to-day increase of 0.86%.
3) The number of whale transfers (over 100 BTC each) is 474 with a day-to-day decrease of 1.86%.
4) Active addresses on Ethereum report 394,000 with a day-to-day increase of 1.23%.
Note: On-chain transactions and active addresses of a cryptocurrency have a positive correlation with its price.

The White House issued two advisories on drug purchases in the United States with specific references to cryptocurrencies.
The advisories, addressed to both financial institutions and digital payment platforms, state that "convertible virtual currencies" (CVC), particularly Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Monero, can be and have been used for illicit substance purchases on the clear, deep, and dark nets.
The advisory defines CVC's as virtual currencies easily liquidated into stable fiat currencies such as the dollar.
Specifically noted is the drug fentanyl, a Schedule II controlled substance whose illicit cousin enters the United States through Mexico or China, per the advisories.

According to the data of OKEx's contract, as of 00:00, August 22 (UTC), among the rich accounts of OKEx Bitcoin quarterly contract, the proportion of long positions (27.43%) is in excess of that of short positions (17.74%), with a gap of 9.69%.
Among the rich accounts of OKEx Ethereum quarterly contract, the proportion of short positions (16.66%) has fallen behind that of long positions (18.95%), with a gap of 2.29%.
At present, the number of BTC contract positions increases to 57,300 BTC, and the number of ETH contract positions also experiences an increase, rising to 454,300 ETH.

1. Binance will adjust the daily interest rate for borrowing USDT to 0.0275% (from 0.0225%), starting from 0:00 (UTC);
2. OKEx announces that Pledgecamp (PLG) will be the project of its seventh token sale on OK Jumpstart. The first subscription session will open at 02:00, and the second session will open at 05:00.

[Cryptocurrency]
1. Tether will issue the stablecoin backed by off-shore RMB;
2. Nasdaq lists Ripple's XRP on new Nasdaq website index;
3. SEC freezes $8 million in VERI in alleged fraudulent token offering scheme.
[Exchange & Wallet]
1. Singapore-based Huobi announced support for two autonomous loan making vehicles, the infamous MakerDao and a similarly open-sourced Compound protocol;
2. The Japanese virtual currency exchange DeCurret announced to handle Ethereum (ETH);
3. Gemini announced business operation in Australia.
[Others]
1. Major Austrian telecom operator A1 has started accepting cryptocurrencies as payment in seven selected shops in Austria;
2. Bitcoin miners halt operations as rainstorm triggers mudslides in China;
3. California court issued a summons to OPSkins Group.

As observed by CoinNess.com, statistics by CoinTrendz.com show BTC was mentioned 136 times on Twitter in the last hour, holding the first position. The top 10 mentions of cryptocurrencies are as follows: BTC (136 mentions), ETH (49), XRP (39), LTC (36), EOS (22), LINK (21), BCH (18), USDT (14), TRX (14), XMR (14).

According to a court file released on Aug 15, the California court issued a summons to OPSkins Group, WAX and several of their high-level employees in response to a civil complaint filed on Aug 12 by Crypto Asset Fund and affiliate Digital Capital Management.
The complaint included 12 charges, including fraud, unlawful business practices and violation of the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934. In particular, these concerned the accused's initial coin offering (ICO) of WAX tokens.
According to the complaint, Crypto Asset Fund and affiliate Digital Capital Management invested $1.2 million worth of Ether (ETH) in a pre-sale for WAX's ICO in Oct 2017, an ICO that they say WAX should have registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Citing data from BTC.com, as of 21:05 UTC on August 21, the number of unconfirmed transactions on the BTC network marks 8,736. In addition, Bitcoin's mining difficulty marks 10.18 T and is estimated to increase by 2.35% to 10.42 T. The 24-hour transaction rate (txs/s) marks 3.69 txs/s, with the network hashrate reporting 73.04 EH/s.

According to Finance Magnates, announced via a press release from the company on August 21, Trade.io said it will not renew its licensing agreement with Forbes Media, effectively ending its one-year relationship with the Forbes-branded cryptocurrency portal, called Forbes CryptoMarkets.
"This decision was not taken lightly, and was made with the trade.io clients and token holders in mind. We simply felt our time and resources were better spent on marketing, the exchange and TIO Markets," Trade.io said.

According to The Block, sources close to blockchain giant R3 say its engineers and senior management fundamentally disagree over the future of Corda. "They lost sight of the main game – building something that brings value to users," a former employee who left this month suggested, adding management had closed itself off to outside suggestions.
The engineers say they've lost faith in the tech, saying it lacks scalability and "doesn't perform well," as well as questioning Corda's long-term viability; pointing to alleged 5-figure monthly bills for cloud services.

Travelport, a business and consumer travel services provider, announced it is using IBM's Hyperledger Fabric to guarantee commissions paid to travel agencies. According to a statement released on August 20, the blockchain was designed with input from IBM, travel management company BCD Travel, and three unnamed hotel chains. The system aims to "put the lifecycle of a booking on the blockchain," to reduce the amount of payment disputes.
In 2018, Travelport processed over $83 billion of travel spend over $2.4 billion in net revenue.

According to a commentary article released by Bitcoin.com, The World Bank and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia announced in 2018 a permissioned Ethereum-based blockchain to facilitate the end-to-end issuance of bonds between financial partners. The Bretton Woods-created financial institution hopes to make debt capital markets far more efficient with a bank-to-bank blockchain network. At the same time, the World Bank's bond scheme has been scrutinized for corporate and political collusion with global leaders and Fortune 500 multinational corporations.
So far the World Bank and its partners have issued more than $114 million into the Bond-i experiment, but they eventually want to process $50 to $60 billion worth of debt capital on a blockchain.

According to The Securities and Exchange Commission website, the organization filed charges against Reginald "Reggie" Middleton, a self-described "financial guru," and two entities he controls, Veritaseum, Inc. and Veritaseum, LLC (collectively Veritaseum). The Commission's complaint, filed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, alleges that the Defendants marketed and sold securities called "VERI" tokens on the internet, inducing retail investors to invest based on multiple material misrepresentations and omissions. Among other things, Defendants allegedly knowingly misled investors about their prior business venture and the use of offering proceeds, touted oversized – but fictitious – investor demand for VERI, and claimed to have a product ready to generate revenue when no such product existed. The complaint further alleges that Middleton manipulated the price of the VERI tokens trading on an unregistered digital asset platform. The complaint also alleges that Middleton recently moved a significant amount of investor assets and then dissipated a portion of those assets, transferring them to Middleton's personal account.
As of 17:25:59 UTC on August 21, $775 million worth of VERI (97,750,350 VERI tokens) have been moved from the address starting with 0xd74791 to the address starting with 0x8572a7. The transaction hash is fafcb5e65029914db2b3d1625d8cadfa746e80715728691a09d594af5fbf636e.
According to the Whale Alert analysis, due to the low transaction volume of VERI, which current circulating amount merely reaches $17 million, the developers might have moved or unlocked the locked tokens.