The number of Bitcoin ATMs worldwide are soon reaching the 5000 milestone. View in browser

“I would hope that all private companies can see the value of having a stateless currency that all people can access, and is not bounded or constrained by any one corporate entity.” ~  Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square
Market State

The price of Bitcoin reached new yearly all time high as it crossed the $9000 level last Sunday. Bitcoin even traded as high as $9420 in the last 24 hours. Currently it is sitting at $9118. The overall crypto market has gained $38 billion during the week. Top altcoins have all followed the price surge. Ether rose by 13% to $270. Ripple and Litecoin also enjoyed notable gains fueled by positive news. Ripple have announced that 14 new banks and financial institutions have signed up for RippleNet. Litecoin’s price has gone up by 300% since the beginning of the year as Litecoin halvening is less than 2 months away. Halvening reduces the block reward of a coin by half every few years. There will be much less of a daily supply of Litecoin and more demand for the coin which will lead to price surge.

In just last month 306 new Bitcoin ATM (BTMs) were installed globally. This increases the number of BTMs from 4690 to 4898. We are soon approaching 5000 Bitcoin ATM worldwide milestone. This shows that interest in Bitcoin is still strong. Bitcoin ATMs are supporting more cryptocurrencies with Ether and Litecoin being the most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. A technical analyst at Fundstrat Global Advisors, a market research firm suggested that the price of Bitcoin will rise even more once it reaches the $10000 level. According to the analyst when Bitcoin hits $10000 Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) will quickly materialize in the crypto market which will drive the price of Bitcoin to new all time highs.  
Check the latest Bitcoin Price
Quiz of the week

What are the fundamental characteristics of a true cryptocurrency?

  1. Open, public, decentralized, borderless and censorship resistant
  2. Private, anonymous, centralized, censored and borderless
  3. Open, public, neutral, centralized and censorship resistant

Scroll down to see the answer at the end of the newsletter.
Top stories of the week
Telegram’s Gram Token is Going on Public Sale

Telegram’s Gram token will be offered to the public starting from 10th of July. In 2018 Telegram raised $1.7 billion through a private token sale limited to accredited investors, which was one of the largest ICOs in the cryptocurrency history. The Gram tokens will be offered by the Liquid exchange but with no involvement with Telegram. A full public sale is set to take place in October 2019. However Gram Asia, a korean firm, which is the largest Gram token holder is partnering up with Liquid exchange to liquidate a portion of its Gram tokens in July. At the moment it is not public how many Gram tokens will be sold at what price. Gram will be the native token that will run on the Telegram Open Network (TON). TON is currently being built by Telegram and will launch in October. Buyers will have to go through full KYC procedure. Users from a list of countries including Japan, Korea and the USA will not be able to participate in the token sale.

Facebook Coin Partners Are Revealed

We have seen Facebook news every week as its cryptocurrency is getting closer to launch. Last week Facebook’s cryptocurrency partners have been revealed by a community of crypto and blockchain enthusiasts called The Block. More than 20 high profile firms have signed up to support Facebook coin and participate in the consortium called the Libra Association. These partners include well established payments, retail, and technology firms such as Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, Andreessen Horowitz and Uber. Each firm will pay $10 million for the privilege to run a node and verify and maintain Facebook coin transactions. Meaning that these companies will have unlimited access to transactional data. Facebook coin will bring mainstream attention to the crypto industry but it will never compete with Bitcoin as it doesn’t have the fundamental characteristics of a cryptocurrency.  
$150 Million New Tether Entered The Market

Tether’s market capitalization reached a new all time high. It is up by $1.4 billion since April  2019. The value of one Tether is pegged to one US dollar and it is supposed to be one-to-one backed by US dollars. However recently it turned out that is not the case as we have reported in our previous newsletter. Instead only 74% of the Tether supply is backed by the US dollar. Last week new Tethers have been printed in a value of $150 million on Ethereum blockchain. The newly created Tethers have been sent to Tether’s treasury. According to CTO of Tether, Paolo Ardoino the amount is “authorized but not issued” and will be used to fulfill future issuance requests. The price of Bitcoin and the creation of Tether are quite closely linked together. When someone purchases Tether they are likely to use it to obtain other cryptocurrencies which is usually Bitcoin. Last week’s price surge may be the result of the new Tethers.
City of Baltimore Struggles With a Cyberattack

City of Baltimore has struggled with cyberattack since 7th of May. Hackers have infected about 10000 government computers and demanded to pay 13 Bitcoins which was then worth about $76000. The ransomware has completely froze the city’s computer system that the officials were locked out of their email accounts for nearly a month. City services such as emergency systems continued their work over phone. The hackers leaked private documents on social media to pressure officials into paying Bitcoin. However the mayor of the city refused to pay the ransom. The city has spent an estimated $18.2 million at taxpayer’s expense to recover everything that they have lost. The cost of recovery far outweighed the ransomware. The cyberattack could have been easily prevented if the government had updated their software. Microsoft’s 2017 Windows update would have protected Baltimore’s computers.

Coinbase Card Is Now Available in Six More European Countries

Coinbase launched its cryptocurrency debit card in six new European countries. Coinbase Card was first launched in the UK in April 2019 and allows users to spend their cryptocurrencies in millions of locations where Visa is accepted as well as withdraw cash from ATMs. The debit card is now available for users in France, Ireland, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. The card has two forms, a physical contactless card and a virtual card that comes with its mobile app and syncs directly with Coinbase accounts. Users can select which cryptocurrency to spend. Coinbase Card supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin and ERC-20 tokens. Coinbase card charges users 2.49% in fees, 1.49% fee to convert into fiat money and 1% in transaction fees.

Visa is launching a blockchain product

Visa is looking to speed up cross-border payments with their blockchain-powered business-to-business (B2B) payments service called the Visa B2B Connect. B2B Connect is a new platform designed to help financial institutions to sidestep the slow correspondent banking network by enabling transactions by businesses directly from their bank to the recipient bank. The network partially utilizes Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that is also used in cryptocurrency. Participating banks can choose to integrate to Visa B2B Connect APIs (Application Program Interface) to enable direct bank-to-bank payments. Transactions will settle in near real time and clients will receive notification upon the finality of their payment.
Tweet of the week
Meme of the week
Crypto word of the week

A Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is database that is replicated, shared, and synchronized across a network made up of a large number of computers. A distributed ledger is a database held and updated independently by each node. Every single node on the network processes every transaction locally and then vote on them to make sure that the majority agree with the blocks they just validated. DLT is a data-sharing system that allows real-time multi-party tracking and distributed machine-to-machine interactions.
Quiz answer

What are the fundamental characteristics of a true cryptocurrency?

The correct answer is “A”.

Open, public, decentralized, borderless and censorship resistant

Thank you for reading :) 

Have a great day!

Cheers, 
MrCoin
💌 hello@mrcoin.eu
📞 +36 16 555 333
MrCoin

96 Kensington High Street, London, W8 4SG, UK

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