Speaking at last month's 4th Annual DC Blockchain Summit, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo lays out his position on how he and his colleagues can rise to the challenge of applying effective regulations to "exponential" technologies - such as blockchain.
Click 'Read More' to read his speech in full.

Jackson Palmer, a marketing specialist, coder and technologist best known for inventing Elon Musk's favorite crypto, has suddenly taken his Twitter private and has likewise removed countless of videos on cryptocurrencies.
What happened is unclear, with the archive pages going back to April 2nd.

Crypto analyst Joseph Young tweeted about India's latest proclamation of its stance on crypto.
"India's central bank released its fintech regulatory sandbox framework today (April 19), explicitly excluding crypto. It's a shame when many major governments in Asia like Japan, Korea & Singapore have taken the approach of regulating the crypto market."

The Central Bank of Russia published a report on benefits and deficiencies of central bank digital currencies (CBDC). The Russian mega regulator stated in the report the diminishing role of cash and a global move towards payments digitalization. This trend prompted many regulators to consider the launch of central bank digital currency, CBDC.
"From the users' point of view, CBDC might have numerous characteristics and become an alternative both to cash money and deposits," the report states.
Among the potential benefits, the Central Bank pointed out lower transaction costs and mentioned that such cryptocurrency may become a less risky and highly liquid asset available to a broad public.
The central bankers expressed concerns that in the environment of low inflation and low interest rates CBDC may compete with deposits in commercial banks.

Citing data from RatingDapp and RatingToken, the Ethereum blockchain sees the launch of 55 DApps in total since March, 70% of which manage to stay for 99 hours. Even more jaw-droppingly, 25% of these new DApps fail to make it through the first ten hours.
The longest-surviving DApp would be sound_money_coin, which has been active for more than 700 hours. However, sound_money_coin is an ERC20 coin which has no real application.

Citing an official announcement, HCoin will list the second token project of its IEO platform Gold Medal, TuTor, on April 25th.
The trading of TUTOR/HKDT will go public at 13:00 (UTC) on April 26th.

Ripple Labs, the entity behind XRP which controls circa 50 billion XRP, has apparently sold 20 million XRP worth circa $7 million on April 18th.
It appears that the sale occurred Over-the-Counter (OTC) with the XRP price slightly down at the time of writing in contrast to some gains for ETH and BTC.

Earlier this week, Russia's Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseev shared his thoughts on the country's developing cryptocurrency laws. Speaking on the sidelines at the Economic Forum in Yalta, the Minister says the main aim of the proposed "digital assets" law is to legalize ICOs.
He added that he expects the bill to be reviewed by the Duma in May.
Experts also warn that restrictions on buying digital assets by non-accredited investors will lead to enforcement issues. Indeed, the main building blocks of cryptocurrency are that they're borderless, apolitical and decentralized.
Therefore, Russian lawmakers are slowly finding out just how impossible it is to regulate something that is un-regulatable by design.
Click 'Read More' to see the argumentation in full.

Huobi Global announces that it has re-opened the deposit of THETA at 12:30 (UTC) on April 19th, after the mainnet was launched.

The exchange Coineal will list IZIChain (IZI) at 08:30 (UTC) on April 26th. The trading of IZI/USDT starts at 08:30 on May 6th.

Malta, a small nation that became known as the "blockchain island" for its friendly approach to cryptocurrency-related businesses, has seemingly been dominating the cryptocurrency markets when it comes to trading volume.
According to CryptoCompare's March 2018 Exchange Review, monthly trading volume from Maltese-registered exchanges increased 56% since February, leading the crypto market by volume.
Behind Malta were Hong Kong and South Korea, as these countries saw trading volume flowing through exchanges registered there by 54% and 21% respectively. The report notes that in March, Malta-registered exchanges traded $56.1 billion, while those in Hong Kong traded $53.1 billion, and those in South Korea traded $40.2 billion.

According to the official announcement, 58COIN Regular Contract completed the Week 13 Settlement at 09:58 (UTC), April 19, and was also the Week 2 Settlement after the implementation of Isolated Margin. During the process, the apportioning mechanism has never been activated. The Isolated Margin model has been in operation for 9 days. The new model enables the independent calculations against various cryptocurrencies with the estimated liquidation price as the only risk indicator, besides, opening positions with unrealized profits, two-direction opening and 100x leverage are still supported.

Citing the official announcement, 58COIN has completed the newest upgrade of its exchange framework. Kaily, Director of tech at 58COIN, remarked, "The upgrade mainly targets at improving the matching efficiency, functionality, as well as the stability of service. So far, the matching efficiency has been up by nearly 40%, while the functionality and stability have accomplished the fifth iteration."

CNNS will go live on gate.io's Startup platform on April 22. While the CNNS team allowed holders to transfer CNNS to "My Account" at a ratio of 1:1 for further withdrawals, they set off a wave of panic buying in OTC markets, where the demand for CNNS is becoming higher.
To earn more CNNS, invite your friends to download the CoinNess App or share our news flashes with your community. Remember, time and fortune wait for no one.

According to CoinPost, Kitano Hajime, a Mizuho Bank economist, expressed his view on the latest boom on BTC on a show of TV Tokyo. He believed that BTC rose to $5,000 owing to the decreasing trust on International Monetary Fund (IMF).

A number of BSV blocks have been orphaned with the network going back in history (reorganizing) by six blocks or more. The BSV community now confirms that such reorganizing activities were not double-spend attacks but a short-term pressure test that won’t cause any losses, according to security firm Slow Mist, which agreed to the BSV community’s statement.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) of the People's Republic of China has published a list of 101 demonstration projects for network security technology application, where six blockchain projects are included.
The selected blockchain projects highlight the following areas: "Internet +," digital invoice system, digital data storage, security risk monitoring, government information publicity, etc.

According to IMEOS, it tweeted, "New version EOSIO v1.7.2 released on GitHub by blockone-devops. This latest version contains stability and miscellaneous fixes."

EOS New York addressed in a Medium post the topic of decentralization of tokenized assets created and issued on EOS and the need to establish a pool of resources for the open-source development of solutions that improve the core EOS function.
EOS New York proposed to provide a structured and scalable system that allows for DApp developers to deploy tokens under the eosio.token system contract and essentially abstract trust away from one key pair to at least 15 out of 21 Block Producers which are elected by the stake-weighted vote of token-holders. Besides, the team also proposed to establish a "commons development program" funded by voluntary on-chain economic activities.

The ICON Foundation which drives the South Korean blockchain project ICON announced an enhanced partnership with VELIC, a newly launched cryptocurrency exchange that participated in its ICX Station accelerator program on April 19. VELIC will provide listing opportunities for projects working with ICX Station. With this partnership, VELIC will support the listing of ICON DApps on its exchange. As a listing partner, ICX Station will be able to provide projects coming through the program with an avenue to liquidity. VELIC will support the IRC2 standard, thus lowering roadblocks for any ICON based token project seeking liquidity.

Huobi Global announced that it would exchange users’ VEN with VET at a ratio of 1:100 before 10:00 (UTC), April 20. Currently, Huobi Global has suspended the deposit, withdrawal, trading, and manual exchange services for VEN and opened corresponding services, except for the manual exchange service, for VET.

According to Liquid, it will alter the current API and the URL of developer documentation on April 26.

Prime Lite will be launched in the coming two weeks, WENG Xiaoqi, CEO of Huobi Global said. It will focus on the high-quality projects which fail to be listed on Huobi Prime. It shares similar procedures with Huobi Prime, but faster and simpler. Besides, Huobi will disclose the plan for Huobi Chain in Q2. As for Binance's delisting for BSV, WENG said Huobi would consider the delisting according to the user's will.

On April 17, GMO Internet launched the official wallet, AkashiQ.R Wallet, for CryptoChips. This wallet supports management and remittance for cryptocurrencies and it only accepts BTC as the payment for now.

Citing statistics from alternative.me, the Fear & Greed Index currently reads 61, three units fewer than yesterday, indicating a decrease of greed in the crypto market.
As per the index, a value of 0 means "Extreme Fear" while a value of 100 represents "Extreme Greed."

Two weeks from now, token-holders for the Aragon application will put the efficacy of its on-chain governance model to the test.
The Aragon project, launched in 2016, is envisioned as a way to offer users the tools to build decentralized organizations that are secured cryptographically and run natively on top of the Ethereum blockchain. However, starting as early as February of this year, the core developers behind Aragon have expressed interest in launching a version of the App on the Polkadot blockchain network.
Now, token holders of Aragon are deciding between two competing Aragon Governance Proposals (AGPs) that will effectively approve or restrict such plans to build the application outside of Ethereum. The vote is set to begin on April 25 and last for 48 hours, and the final results of the voting cycle will be announced April 27 at 16:00 (UTC).

SSAndrew Yang, the United States 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate, released a new policy for the regulation of the cryptocurrency space on April 20. The new policy statement titled "Crypto/Digital Asset Regulation And Consumer Protection" emphasized on the need for regulating the digital asset place and also listed the actions Yang would do for the cryptocurrency market as the President.

EMURGO, the investment arm of Cardano, announced the launch of Seiza - a Cardano blockchain explorer, at the IOHK Summit. Seiza will be released before May-end. Its name is derived from the Japanese word for "constellation," as it reflects EMURGO's Japanese heritage and its ambition to be an all-encompassing blockchain navigation guide for users. Seiza will enable ADA holders to immediately track any of their transactions on the Cardano blockchain, which has already validated more than 2.4 million blocks.

Japan’s equivalent to Amazon, e-commerce giant Rakuten, has started accepting account registrations for its new cryptocurrency exchange, Rakuten Wallet.
The firm said in an announcement it’s also planning to soon launch a mobile App allowing users to trade cryptocurrencies, as well as to make deposits and withdrawals.
The firm received a license for its cryptocurrency exchange late last month from the Japanese Financial Service Agency. The exchange is therefore registered with the Kanto Local Financial Bureau as a virtual currency exchange service provider under the country’s Payment Service Act.