– Paxful saw an explosion of activity among African users in 2018
– Bitmain and Huobi have confirmed plans to lay off staff
– Fortnite Retail Row has started to accept XMR
– ICOs will return within “18 months” and ETH will “rebound aggressively”, according to BitMex CEO
– The influx of money from traditional investors has led bitcoin to behave more like a traditional asset, reports WSJ
Bitcoin marketplace Paxful saw an explosion of activity among African users in 2018.
Revealed to CoinDesk, Paxful increased its transaction volume by 130% since January 2018 with an average of $21 million a week, compared to $8.5 million in 2017.
The growth was driven in part by Paxful’s user base almost tripling in Ghana, with ~41,000 accounts, and more than doubling in Nigeria to ~321,000 accounts.
According to Paxful CEO Ray Youssef, African bitcoin traders accounted for 41% of all of the platform’s new users in 2018. On average, their transactions are worth less than $90 each.
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Cryptocurrency mining giant Bitmain and major crypto exchange Huobi have confirmed plans to lay off staff amid crypto market harsh decline, according to South China Morning Post.
Bitmain said in a statement that the company is undergoing “some adjustment to our staff” as it continues to build a sustainable business.
Huobi representative said that the company is “optimising staffing” by cutting its worst-performing employees.
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Fortnite Retail Row, the merchandise store for the popular online video game Fortnite, has started to accept Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency as a payment option.
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Initial coin offerings (ICOs) will return within “18 months” and Ethereum (ETH) will “rebound aggressively”, BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes told Cointelegraph.
“Once there are new issues, then Ether will rebound aggressively. When the ICO market returns, Ether will quickly test $200. The timing of the ICO rebirth is 12 to 18 months out,” said Hayes.
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The influx of money from traditional investors has led bitcoin to behave more like a traditional asset, reports Wall Street Journal.
“Bitcoin’s correlations to other assets aren’t strong, but they are measurable. On a scale of -1 to +1, ranging from completely inverted to perfectly correlated, bitcoin traded at about a 0.84 correlation to gold over the past five days, according to data from research firm Excalibur Pro Inc. That isn’t unexpected for an asset its backers bill as a new version of the yellow metal. Bitcoin also traded at a 0.77 correlation to the Chicago Board of Options Exchange’s VIX index, which measures market volatility,” says WSJ. “It makes sense that bitcoin would trade in step with the market’s “fear gauge.” With central banks over the past decade flooding global markets with liquidity and with extremely cheap borrowing costs, money found its way into riskier assets. And there is no riskier asset than a rebel currency.”