Bahrain Wants Indian Crypto Businesses

It has been reported that the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB) is actively inviting Indian blockchain startups to take advantage of business opportunities in the country.

According to the report EDB wants Indian companies to setup headquarters in the country which offers a conducive place to do business for banking, blockchain, crypto assets, robo advisory and remittance.

EDB is a public agency that is responsible for attracting investment into Bahrain.

The Senior Manager of EDB, Manager Dalal have revealed that India is a key market for his country which was confirmed by EDB Managing Director Simon Galpin adding that his company is keen to top not only early startups but scale-ups as well.

Galpin noted that Bahrain is a great test market for companies which want to diversify outside of their home country like India.

EBD states that there are several benefits for companies to move into Bahrain, these include simplified licensing process for foreign corporations, tax incentives, generally crypto/blockchain friendly jurisdiction as well as unlimited access to Gulf and Middle Eastern markets.

One More Indicator Signals Bitcoin Price Bottom

It has been revealed that a technical indicator that takes into account bitcoin’s price and trading volume is recently signaling the cryptocurrency may have already bottomed in the last month of 2018.

The technical indicator is commonly called the volume-weighted relative strength index or under its shorter name money flow index (MFI).

This is used to identify buying and selling pressure and has a range of 0- 100.

A higher or rising MFI indicates that there is increasing buying pressure while a MFI that has a decreasing MFI is considered a sign that there is an increasing selling pressure.

The indicator essentially validates or confirms price trends, however, this indicator often diverges from the prevailing market trend.

Bullish divergence is widely considered an early warning of bearish-to-bullish trend reversals.

A number of indicators are already pointing to bullish reversal which mirrors historically what happens general a year ahead of the mining reward halving appears high.

Major US Retailer Removes Visa And Looking In to Bitcoin Lightning Network

News reports abound that a major US retailer is no longer accepting Visa credit cards at its chain of Smith’s food and drug store.

According to Mike Schlotman Visa has been misusing its position and charging retailers excessive fees for a long time, it has the highest merchant fees than any other credit card brand.

In fact the credit card company is set to increase its fees again which made the matter worse for merchants as they usually get brunt of the charges, not unless they will pass on the cost to their customers which will make them less competitive.

Prominent crypto bull and founder of Morgan creek, Anthony Pompliano picked up on the opportunity and ask to be connected to the right people within the company to explore options they can explore with regards to accepting cryptocurrencies using the bitcoin lightning network.

According to him the Morgan Creek Ditigal team will fly to meet them and get them hooked up with the Lightning Network nationwide.

Soon enough a member of the management team of Kroger brand reached out to Pompliano to make the meeting happen.

Only time will tell if the meeting will bear fruit but one thing is certain Visa is becoming less and less attractive to merchants due to its excessive fees especially when other technology are already in existence that give faster, more transparent and cheaper option.

Circle Seeking $250 Million Funding Prior To IPO

There have been news reports that Circle, the internet financial firm based in Boston is seeking to raise $250 million in order to further expand its operations and product offering.

It has been revealed that the company was able to raise approximately $246 million from several big investment firms which include Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, the Digital Currency Group, and Pantera Capital.

The fund raising campaign comes just before its initial public offering (IPO) and may be part of its strategy to gain a larger market share from its competitors such as Coinbase and other crypto-related firms.

The company is running several subsidiaries including Circle Invest, Circle Trade, and Poloniex, a digital cryptocurrency exchange which it acquired sometime in 2018.

According to the company they are anticipating incremental growth of institutional adoption catalyzed by Stablecoin usage, advancement in custody solutions, regulatory clarity and improvement and innovation in core crypto infrastructure.

Circle is planning to fight market manipulation in the crypto space by using advance market surveillance tools.

Standard Bank To Launch A Blockchain Platform

According to news reports the Standard Bank is launching its own blockchain-based payment system in the first half of 2019.

The new initiative will be built on top of the Hyperledger Fabric which is a distributed ledger technology hosted by the Linux Foundation and was initially contributed by Digital Asset and IBM as the result of the first Hackathon.

The Standard Bank will use a limited and private blockchain and will feature a user-friendly web-based interface that would be available worldwide.

The project is a great opportunity to improve their services and immerse themselves into the crypto space, however, the main aim of the project is to address several hurdles that its customers currency face when making foreign exchange payment.

As it stands customers has to go through a three-step validation and approval process for their transactions before their transaction to be completed.

The highest number of unsuccessful transactions were ultimately terminated during this tedious process.

With the new service the bank hopes to lower the risk of transaction cancellation and improve customer satisfaction as a result.

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