Blockchain Report — 8/7/2018
By: Christopher Durr
Tags: Investing, News, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin

Summary: dYdX Closes $2 Million Seed Round; No, You Can’t Spend Bitcoin At Your Local Starbucks; Germany’s Second Largest Stock Exchange Will Launch An ICO Platform

dYdX Closes $2 Million Seed Round

According to TechCrunch, the decentralized financial derivatives protocol dYdX recently closed a $2 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain. The round also included a number of other prominent investors, such as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and co-founder Fred Ehrsam and serial investor Elad Gil.

dYdX founder Antonio Juliano said:

“The main use for cryptocurrency so far has been trading and speculation — buying and holding. That’s not how sophisticated financial institutions trade…The derivatives market is usually an order of magnitude bigger than the spot trading or buy/sell market. The cryptocurrency market is probably on the order of $5 billion to $10 billion in volume, so you’d expect the derivatives market would be 10X bigger. I think there’s a really big opportunity there.”

dYdX will allow for traders to easily short or do leveraged trading for any ERC20 token in the future. Juliano said that the purpose of the platform is not simply “shorting your favorite shitcoin” but to create a mature financial product.

No, You Can’t Spend Bitcoin At Your Local Starbucks

According to The Next Web, Starbucks announced it would be joining and support Bakkt, a project that will leverage Microsoft’s cloud solutions to create an infrastructure to manage and use digital assets. These digital assets will be regulated.

As a result of the partnership, several news outlets incorrectly reported that it would soon be possible to spend Bitcoin to buy coffee at Starbucks. However, that’s not the case. A spokesperson for Starbucks said:

“It is important to clarify that we are not accepting digital assets at Starbucks. Rather the exchange will convert digital assets like Bitcoin into US dollars, which can be used at Starbucks…At the current time, we are announcing the launch of trading and conversion of Bitcoin. However, we will continue to talk with customers and regulators as the space evolves.”

Germany’s Second Largest Stock Exchange Will Launch An ICO Platform

According to Coin Telegraph, Germany’s second largest stock exchange Stuttgart Borse has revealed that they will develop a platform for initial coin offerings (ICOs) and a multilateral crypto trading venue.

In May, the exchange revealed a proof of concept of its zero-fee cryptocurrency trading app called Bison. Bison is scheduled to be released in September. Now the exchange is looking to create an ICO platform as well.

The ICO platform will facilitate digital token issuance, corporate financing, and the representation of rights and assets. The CEO of Stuttgart Borse said that the move to create a cryptocurrency trading platform is a response to “demand from both retail and institutional investors for a regulated and reliable environment for trading with cryptocurrencies”

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