GCR

Top News in Asia from Tuesday to Today 

Binance is apparently testing a British pound stablecoin on its native blockchain, Binance Chain. https://bloom.bg/2wILrrA

Facebook is currently scheduled for a June 18th release of a white paper explaining its cryptocurrency’s basics. And that the cryptocurrency would indeed be pegged to a basket of currencies rather than a single one like the US dollar to prevent price fluctuations. https://tcrn.ch/2wEATcO

Ex-Bitmain CEO to publicly launch new business Matrix within a month, with Bitmain being the largest customer. According to Chinese media,  Matrix has been undercutting the standard industry interest rate when offering loans to partners. The company’s full suite of products also include digital currency custody, asset management, lending and OTC trading services, similar to digital currency banks.

Japan’s Latest Regulatory Update: custodian service providers will now have to share the same level of accountability for the risks as exchanges; exchanges must find a third-party operator to keep hold of the users’ money; FSA is not directly regulating anonymous cryptocurrencies or privacy coins such as monero and zcash; STOs and more.http://bit.ly/31dizFL

IEOs are literally coming to the West – our top takeaways from the first GCR workshop with Richy Qiao on IEOs.

Most Clicked on From the Last Newsletter

Justin Sun paid US$4.57 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett. http://bit.ly/2XpBv1H

^{Binance’s research team believes stablecoins will replace Bitcoin (BTC), the flagship cryptocurrency, as “the leading quote currency.” It also confirms that Tether (USDT) remains the dominant stablecoin as other stablecoins are “lagging in terms of trading volume and market capitalization”. http://bit.ly/2Xqeegb}

BitMEX Ventures, the investment arm of Seychelles-based HDR Global Trading, poured an undisclosed amount of funding into cryptocurrency exchange Philippine Digital Asset Exchange (PDAX). http://bit.ly/2wBhcTa

The financial services unit of family-owned property firm Stan Group has signed an MOU with Hong Kong-based financial technology startup Liquefy agreeing to work together to set up a blockchain-based exchange for Hong Kong investors seeking access to property investment opportunities. http://bit.ly/2XlRr5e

?Deals and Funds
 

Galaxy Digital EOS Fund along with Kleiner Perkins led a $1.8 million seed funding round for Azure’s blockchain-based gaming rewards platform. http://bit.ly/2wDltpl

UK-based fintech TrueLayer has received $35 million in funding from Chinese financial giant Tencent and Singaporean investment company Temasek.http://bit.ly/2wGIyXY

Exchange News

Huobi will be kicking off its Huobi FastTrack program with a slate of five coins; Origo (OGO), Atlas Protocol (ATP), Fusion (FSN), NKN (NKN), and Skrumble Network (SKM). Using Huobi Token (HT), users will be able to vote on which coin should be listed on Huobi Global. http://bit.ly/2wIJF9S

OKEx announced its third OK Jumpstart token sale of En-Tan-Mo (ETM), which is scheduled on June 10, 2019. https://yhoo.it/2wIW51r

? Coins and Mining

Block.one’s new social media application costed the company $150 million to build,according to CEO Brendon Blumer. Additionally, the company that built the EOS blockchain, is in the middle of another equity buyback in order to bring on more strategic investors. http://bit.ly/2wGxQRp

Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has detected a major uptick in monero (XMR) cryptojacking malware targeting China-based systems this spring. http://bit.ly/2wIM3NU

Privacy-centric cryptocurrency Grin is finalizing its timeline for its first-ever network hard fork, according to a proposed timeline uploaded by Grin core developer Quentin Le Sceller to Github dev community forum Gitter. http://bit.ly/2I0Tnee

TrustToken Partners With Binance to Enable In-Exchange TUSD Minting and Redeeming. http://bit.ly/2HZzxQz

Chinese-based blockchain platform NEO has implemented a new iteration of its consensus algorithm, the Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism (dBFT 2.0), on its mainnet. http://bit.ly/31bonj4

Business

Finnish peer-to-peer (p2p) platform LocalBitcoins quietly removed in-person cash trading from its service, to “adapt to the current regulatory environment.”http://bit.ly/31g0jLN

Barrels of Oil May Be Paid for Using Crypto One Day, Head of Russian Energy Giant  RosneftSays. http://bit.ly/2EVriDc

Binance Labs graduated 13 projects from its incubation lab, with burgeoning companies exploring iGaming, anti-phishing solutions, decentralized oracles and crypto security solutions among other projects.

South Korea’s largest power provider has signed a contract with two domestic power suppliers to establish a blockchain-powered system for transacting Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). http://bit.ly/2HZK4Lh

South Korea’s national postal service Korea Post is planning to apply blockchain technology to its billing system. http://bit.ly/2HZuCz2

Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles to Serve as CTO of New Japanese Blockchain Venture. http://bit.ly/31egSIf

China led the world in blockchain application in the past month. http://bit.ly/2EWE7wT

Thailand’s largest commercial bank reverses its statement that it would use XRP “soon”. http://bit.ly/2wIGZsQ

Regulations

Judge Freezes Funds in Accounts Belonging to Embattled Brazilian Crypto Firm: A Sao Paulo court has blocked funds in bank accounts linked to Grupo Bitcoin Banco — with 726,630 reals (about $188,000 at press time) frozen. http://bit.ly/2HYvPGK

Japan: Tax Authorities Say Crypto Traders Owe Them $93 Million. http://bit.ly/31hbDr0