Bitfinex has settled with the US CFTC, and anyone can now upload their prenuptial agreement as an Ethereum smart contract. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 22:
- Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex has settled for an amount of $75,000 over trading violations with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The reason for this, as provided by the CFTC, is that they found that “Bitfinex permitted users to borrow funds from other users on the platform in order to trade bitcoins on a leveraged, margined, or financed basis. Bitfinex did not actually deliver those bitcoins to the traders who purchased them. Instead, Bitfinex held the bitcoins in deposit wallets that it owned and controlled”, which is in violation with the Commodity Exchange Act. In an official statement, Bitfinex “admits nor denies the CFTC findings”, but does that the exchange “has made significant changes to the way in which U.S. customers engage in financed trading on Bitfinex”.
- Thanks to a couple in Singapore, anyone about to get married can add their own prenuptial agreement as a smart contract to the Ethereum blockchain, making it the “first ever pre-nup on the Ethereum Blockchain”. Gaurang Torvekar and Sayalee Kaluskar decided to draw up a template that anyone can download and use for their own marriage. The terms uploaded by the couple include the agreement to “spend at least 100 minutes on a date-night every 10 days” and that “no party shall claim that their recipe is better than that of the other party’s”.
- Slock.it has released a new proposal framework for The DAO in order to tackle several vulnerabilities that were recently highlighted. The DAO’s Curators will only accept smart contracts that adhere to this Proposal Framework. The proposal includes the following guidelines:
- All Proposals must include a pre-vote. The pre-vote, while informal, must reach at least 10% ‘yes’ votes and have majority support. Note that the “min pre-vote quorum” might get adjusted after the DAO acquired some experience.
- Simple wallet or account addresses are prohibited: Proposals must be smart contracts.
- Proposals only accept payment from The DAO once and exclusively, for a fixed amount.
- Proposal contracts allow for the return of all remaining ETH to the DAO upon request at least for the first 3 weeks.
- All payouts to the Contractor start 3 weeks after the Proposal is accepted.
- Microsoft intends to “produce a cross-chain identity solution that can be extended to any future blockchains or new kinds of decentralized, distributed systems” with the help of Blockstack Labs and ConsenSys. Details on the project aren’t provided, but “an open source framework will be made available on Azure in the coming weeks”. With this announcement, Microsoft becomes the latest technological giant to explore blockchain identity systems, which is one of the more popular use cases of blockchain technology.
- The price of Bitcoin continued to push higher this week, increasing by another 10 percent to a current exchange rate of about $569 per BTC. As Bitcoin even peaked above $580 per coin, it could be a matter of time before Bitcoin reaches a price of $600 per coin. The winner of the week, however, was Ethereum as the price of the popular alternative to Bitcoin even managed to gain eighteen percent over the same period. ETH is now trading at around $13.77 per coin.
