October 27th, 2023

Regulatory Caution Among Asian Nations Amid Reports of Illicit Financing

With a plethora of reports of crypto-related terrorist financing having been published in recent weeks, it’s understood that Asian nations may be looking to exercise caution when it comes to the current ongoing process of establishing regulatory guidelines for crypto.

That’s according to a report published by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Thursday. The use of cryptocurrency by Hamas to fund its attack on Israel is being seen as the catalyst that may drive authorities in various Asian nations to take a more cautious approach to regulating digital currencies, according to analysts cited by the publication.

Raj Kapoor, the founder of India Blockchain Alliance (IBA), commented on these recent developments, stating:

”It is a kick on the backside for most governments. All regulatory bodies will take a closer look at crypto regulation. Governments will need to start implementing new rules and regulations.”

At the recent G20 summit held in New Delhi, a joint declaration called for the regulation, supervision, and oversight of crypto assets, among other measures. The declaration emphasized the importance of supporting “a coordinated and comprehensive policy and regulatory framework.”

Kapoor stressed the importance of revisiting the declaration and developing solutions to implement its objectives.

Renewed scrutiny

Events in Palestine in recent weeks have led to renewed scrutiny when it comes to monitoring illicit financing activity via cryptocurrency. Only days following the recent Hamas attack, Israeli authorities moved to freeze specified crypto accounts.

That scrutiny has continued in recent days, with more accounts having been frozen on crypto platforms such as Binance, while more still have been identified as suspicious, with requests for further information having been submitted in respect of over 200 additional accounts.

On Wednesday it emerged that the United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had sanctioned a Gaza-based crypto platform.

Potential over-reaction

While crypto-related terrorist financing has been widely publicized, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis warned on Wednesday that crypto’s role in this illicit activity has likely been overstated. In its blog post on the subject, the firm stated:

“Although terrorism financing is a very small portion of the already very small portion of cryptocurrency transaction volume that is illicit, some terrorist organizations raise, store, and transfer funds using cryptocurrency.”

Additionally, Chainalysis stated that it had seen “overstated metrics and flawed analyses of these terrorist groups’ use of cryptocurrency.” Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research at non-profit crypto advocacy group Coin Center, also believes that reporting on the matter is not balanced. Taking to X, he stated:

“Sensational early reporting on the scale of Hamas crypto fundraising significantly misstated the amounts involved.”

Coin Center’s Director of Communications, Neeraj Agrawal, highlighted an article which claimed that crypto “fueled Hamas’ terror attack on Israel” in its title, only to reveal within the body of the article that “cryptocurrency is still far from the largest funding source for terrorism.”

Anndy Lian, a Singapore-based author and inter-governmental blockchain adviser, noted that while some countries may consider banning cryptocurrencies as a solution, this could merely drive illicit financing underground and make it more challenging to trace and halt. Lian argued that cryptocurrencies are traceable and trackable, unlike traditional fiat currencies like US dollars.

Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/community/articles/6531dbf64a59da6222691216/

Anndy Lian

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com

j j j

February 16th, 2023

India calls for uniform crypto regulations as Asian markets grow amid boom and bust cycle

‘One country alone cannot do everything’ if regulation is required, says India’s financial minister as she leads the push for uniform rules in the group
New Delhi’s call is likely to resonate with Southeast Asia, a popular destination for crypto investors, after a string of high-profile collapses last year, observers say

Indian businessman Saurabh Tiwari’s interest in cryptocurrency grew after he made a significant profit on a bunch of different tokens within a few months of buying them in 2020. But the boom soon turned to bust following a series of events such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX last year.

“I am now down 60-70 per cent (on these investments). It does not make sense for me to get out,” says 29-year-old Pune-based Tiwari, who also lamented that India lacked a crypto market regulator to protect investors like him.

India, president of the Group of 20 (G20) this year, is leading the push for crypto regulation and is proposing uniform regulations across the group’s members. The move is likely to strike a chord especially after a string of crypto exchange failures, bankruptcies and fraud allegations last year spooked global investors.

“If it requires regulation, then one country alone cannot do anything,” India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told reporters in New Delhi this week.

“We are talking with all nations, if we can make some standard operating procedure which is followed by everyone making a regulatory framework, and if it can be effective,” she said ahead of a G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in the country later this month.

The proposal to jointly regulate crypto markets is likely to be watched closely in Southeast Asia, a popular destination for crypto investors and entrepreneurs.

Singapore and Hong Kong have well-regulated crypto markets, but most of the governments in the region are just beginning to understand the power of cryptocurrencies that could open up new financing opportunities.

Asian investors have also been shaken by crypto’s boom and bust cycles, following last year’s Terra-Luna’s US$40 billion implosion, the collapse of Three Arrows Capital and the bankruptcy of FTX that wiped out around 25 per cent of the crypto market capitalisation.

This year’s G20 chair India is set to meet global finance ministers and central bank governors later this month. Photo: AP

Southeast Asia, with nearly 700 million residents, has one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, with some 480 million of them being active internet users. The region is expected to have the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2030 and has emerged as a fertile ground for hundreds of crypto and blockchain start-ups.

There are more than 600 crypto or blockchain companies currently headquartered out of Southeast Asia, according to a report by global investment platform White Star Capital.

Consumers in countries like Vietnam and India have been among the fastest worldwide to adapt to cryptocurrencies, but authorities in many places have not yet found a path to govern the ecosystem effectively.

Rajagopal Menon, vice-president of India’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange WazirX, said the Indian government had probably realised that the only way to “mitigate the bad effects of crypto” was to have a global consensus on a regulatory framework that exists for traditional banking.

A tough terrain

Crypto assets have been around for more than a decade, but it is only now that efforts to regulate them have gathered pace as they have evolved from niche products to mainstream speculative and payment instruments.

Evolving regulation around them is tricky because countries will have to train regulators in new technology skills and keep tabs on thousands of market participants who may not be subject to typical disclosure or reporting requirements.

Crypto assets refer to a wide range of digital products that are privately issued and can be stored or traded using primarily digital wallets and exchanges.

The assets are merely codes that are stored and accessed electronically and may or may not be backed by physical or financial collaterals or pegged to the value of fiat currencies.

In markets with crypto regulations, certain entities are typically authorised to carry out specific activities. Many functions in mainstream financial activities such as lending and deposits are now replicated in the crypto world, leading to more calls to harmonise the system.

Some countries such as Japan and Singapore have amended or introduced new legislation to cover crypto assets and their service providers, while others such as India are at a drafting stage.

The lack of uniform regulations across different nations leave space for traders and companies to flock to jurisdictions with more lenient or no regulations, and exploit arbitrage opportunities that creates cross border risks to the financial system, analysts say.

“Unregulated guys can do anything they want. Having uniform regulations will help regulated entities like ours to compete well with the unregulated players,” said Bo Bai, executive chairman and co-founder of Singapore-based MetaComp, an accredited payment services provider including for digital tokens. “I think it will be very helpful to establish a harmonious set of rules for all the crypto service providers.”

He said consumers from unregulated markets had flocked to the company in recent months despite having to undergo an extensive screening process, as they were realising the value of safety in the wake of the recent global contagion.

The logo of FTX is seen at the entrance of the FTX Arena in Miami, Florida. Photo: Reuters

Industry executives say last year’s collapse of FTX revealed systemic flaws that need to be plugged and that harmonising regulations would help.

“Some of those failures were issues of poor design and poor governance with no oversight. It’s not a failure of the underlying technology. FTX is a brilliant case of those governance failures,” said Esme Hodson, chief compliance officer of SC Ventures, a business unit of Standard Chartered Bank which invests in disruptive financial technology.

“The financial system requires innovation but that should not come at the cost of stability and exploiting any kind of customer vulnerability,” Hodson added.

New Delhi could take a leaf from regulated markets like Singapore and Dubai and strive to find a middle ground among nations especially in the region to restore confidence among crypto investors, analysts say.

“India has the technical know-how in IT and has been trying to introduce a regulation on cryptos,” said Raj Kapoor, founder of India Blockchain Alliance. “Investments in crypto are quite strong in Asia, including in South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and even Pakistan.”

Other industry executives say uniform regulations would help aspects such as reducing arbitrage, but could end up delaying implementation of laws locally because of the time it will take to reach a common point.

“Ultimately, the ideal approach to regulating cryptocurrencies is likely to be a balance between these two perspectives, where countries adopt a common set of principles while still retaining the flexibility to tailor regulations to their specific circumstances,” said Anndy Lian, a partner at Singapore-based Passion Venture Capital and author of the book NFT: From Zero to Hero.

Source: India calls for uniform crypto regulations as Asian markets grow amid boom and bust cycle | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)

Anndy Lian

www.anndy.com

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November 22nd, 2022

Cardano futures: ADA price pressure to persist amid FTX fallout

The recent FTX crisis has caused a whirl in the crypto world with many investors pulling out their assets from the market that’s already dominated by bearish sentiment.

Cardano’s ADA, has been on a bear run in 2022, losing over 89.8% of its gains since the all-time high of $2.9706 on 3 September 2021 to $0.3032 on 21 November 2021.

How do Cardano futures work and where could the cardano futures price be headed? Read on…

What are cardano futures?

Cryptocurrency futures are contracts between two parties that are betting on the future price of a digital asset. When traders purchase a cryptocurrency’s futures contract, they gain exposure without owning the underlying coin, agreeing to pay a certain price for the asset in future. When the futures contract expires, however, the trader has to settle it – in other words, they buy the coin.

The Cardano blockchain was launched in 2017 as a third-generation cryptocurrency platform. It has a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and was designed to be a more scalable, sustainable and interoperable version of Ethereum. For this reason, the blockchain’s supporters labelled Cardano the “Ethereum killer”.

In September 2021, Cardano gained smart contract capability, allowing for the creation of decentralised apps (dApps), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), games, new cryptocurrencies and more.

ADA is the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency named after the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace. The coins are used as a secure exchange of value and to pay for transaction fees

Cardano futures, therefore, are contracts between two parties that have agreed to buy and sell a specific amount of ADA at a specified price. Cardano futures are often known as Cardano perpetual futures or cardano perpetual swaps.

Traders who purchase ADA futures are betting that the price of the cryptocurrency will surge in the future. If that happens, they will profit from the price increase. If the price of Cardano falls, however, they will lose money.

Cardano futures history

Cardano futures started trading on Binance at the end of January 2021. They enjoyed bullish momentum, jumping by more than 4,100% between January and May 2021. The surge came as Cardano continued development of its smart contract capabilities and launched a peer-to-peer testnet to a small group of users.

After a slight dip in July 2021, the ADA futures price climbed to the all-time high of $2.9706 on 3 September 2021. The rally came ahead of the blockchain’s Alonzo hard fork, which introduced smart contract capabilities to Cardano.

Following the bull run, the ADA futures contract dipped by more than 35% by 27 October 2021 and continued on a downward trend.

Cardano futures price fell to $0.3032 on 21 November 2022 amid negative market sentiment. The recent news on the downfall of the FTX crypto exchange and its native FTT token added to the bearish price action.

What is driving cardano futures?

The collapse of the FTX crypto exchange affected many major cryptocurrencies, cooling investor sentiment. CoinMarketCap data showed that the total cryptocurrency market capitalisation fell below $800bn on 11 November, when FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the lowest level since early 2021.

“Although aftereffects of the FTX shock will still likely surface at some point and the industry will have to adopt more financially transparent operation and come under stricter regulatory oversight, the worst part may have passed,” Bitbank crypto market analyst Yuya Hasegawa said in his weekly view.

Meanwhile, the Cardano blockchain saw a spike in activity between 9 and 14 November as the number of new addresses on the blockchain surged from 0 to 11,240, according to data on Cardano Blockchain Insights.

The network, however, had seen a surge in the number of transactions on 8 November, which surpassed 391,000 as FTX crashed.

Cardano’s founder, Charles Hoskinson, said in a live YouTube stream on 9 November:

“I think this might be the bottom, one of the last ones to deal with. It’s going to be hard to predict how bad it will be, and it could certainly potentially be very bad. There are not many more firms that were like FTX or Alameda or like, Three Arrows Capital, and so forth. At least in this cycle, I truly do hope that this is the last cycle of this nature.”

In other cardano futures news, Hoskinson told CoinDesk on 18 November that Cardano is looking to launch a new privacy blockchain and digital asset which he stated to be something “the enterprise absolutely wants”.

Cardano futures price prediction for 2023 and beyond

Algorithm-based prediction websites did not provide cardano futures forecasts, so let’s have a look at the latest ADA/USD outlook.

In line with the latest downward price action, algorithm-based forecasting service Wallet Investor gave a bearish ADA price prediction at the time of writing (21 November) noting that ADA was “a bad long-term investment”.

Based on its analysis of past price performance, Wallet Investor predicted that the token could fall to $0.01016 in 2023. The site did not provide an ADA price prediction for 2027.

DigitalCoinPrice, on the other hand, gave a bullish ADA to USD price prediction expecting the token to grow to $0.39 by the end of 2022 and reach $1.30 on average in 2025. By 2027, the site predicted that the price of ADA tokens could reach $1.59. Its long-term token forecast showed the cryptocurrency reaching $4.35 by 2030.

Meanwhile, Anndy Lian, the chief digital advisor at the Mongolian Productivity Organisation and author of ‘NFT: From Zero to Hero’, told Capital.com that mid-term technical indicators looked bearish (as of 21 November). He added:

“Sellers’ pressure increases in the cardano market. I hope the longer term potential factors like Midnight and USDA can change things for the better.”

News that the group behind Cardano, Input Output Global, is planning to release a new privacy-focused blockchain could have a potential effect on ADA futures, Lian added in his cardano futures price prediction.

In addition, the launch of USDA, the first fully fiat-backed regulated stablecoin on Cardano, will start trading in early 2023, could lead to a hike in the cardano futures price.

“If executed well, I see this will help ADA decentralised finance ecosystem, thus bringing in more liquidity and support into the network,” Lian added.

Final thoughts

Remember, analysts’ and algorithm-based predictions can be wrong. If you’re considering entering the cardano futures market, we recommend you always conduct your own due diligence, looking at the latest news, a wide range of analyst commentary, technical and fundamental analysis. Note that past performance does not guarantee future returns and cryptocurrency markets remain extremely volatile. And never trade money you cannot afford to lose.

Source: https://capital.com/cardano-futures-price-prediction-ada