[Community Post] European Crypto Weekly Updates - Issue #15

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Etienne Brunet - August 04, 2019

Hi Everyone,

This is issue #15 of my European crypto newsletter aiming to give updates on corporates, startups and regulation in Europe.

Everyone is talking about San Francisco as the epicentre of everything in crypto. Well, I wanted to shed light on Europe and show how exciting the ecosystem is.

Who’s behind this? - Unspent

This section aims to give the opportunity to introduce some of the best European founders. Most people loves their products but don’t know who are the founders behind them. Hello World.

Background: Philippe is a French single founder bootstrapping Unspent and focusing on providing a product that's simple and valuable to its customers. This story is very relevant with the recent acquisition of Interchange by Kraken.

Hi Philippe, you recently launched Unspent, a crypto-asset portfolio management app that presents itself as “simple enough for newcomers, and powerful enough for serious investors”. Can you share a bit about your background?

I’m an entrepreneur at heart and I’ve been a software engineer for several years. I love building stuff that helps others in some way and I’ve both created as well as worked for a couple web companies where I was able to do just that. Just before launching Unspent, I worked at Buffer for three years, building social media tools for thousands of businesses and individuals. About a year ago, I set out to build a service that makes it easier to participate in the cryptocurrency industry that many have become fond of, including myself. That’s where Unspent comes in!

The full interview is available on Medium

European Startups

• BitPay, a payment processor that allows merchants to receive payments in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, has suspended its operations in Germany indefinitely as Germany has publicly stated that they want crypto companies to apply for a license starting in 2020 [Source]
• The European subsidiary of Japanese crypto exchange bitFlyerlaunched a simplified Bitcoin buying and selling services for the European traders. It is an extension to its already existing pro-traders services, called Lightning [Source]
• Blockchain analytics startup Elliptic, MIT researchers collaborate to detect money laundering in bitcoin using machine learning. ‘Elliptic’s data set is a time-series graph of 203,769 bitcoin transactions and payment flows. The analysis found that 2% of the analyzed transactions were illicit, 21% were licit, and the remaining transactions were labeled as unknown.’ - Lots of unknown unknowns [Source]
• Instant crypto loans firm Nexo is launching a MasterCard-branded cryptocurrency credit card. - Some may remember XAPO credit card that got shut down and more recently the Coinbase card. Let’s see how many people actually want to use their crypto [Source]
• Gibraltar-based crypto derivatives exchange Quedex has secured a license from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC). - This may help the company to attract institutional clients [Source]
• Youniqx Identity AG, a subsidiary of the Austrian State Printing House, has developed a cryptocurrency hardware wallet, named Chainlock — enables the offline storage of private keys allowing access to cryptocurrency wallets [Source]
• Blockchain launched their exchange called The PIT, a custodial exchange. [Source]

Corporates

• English Premier League football club Leicester City FC announced the renewal of its partnership with multi-asset and cryptocurrency investment platform eToro [Source]
• NYC-based enterprise software firm R3, known for its enterprise blockchain platform Corda, has doubled the size of its London Wall office “There is enormous opportunity for London post-Brexit. While there clearly remain some uncertainties, we believe the city is well placed and established to thrive in the coming years. ‘‘ R3 CEO David E. Rutter - At least someone is happy with the Brexit outcome [Source]
• The Swiss Financial Services Standards Association (VQF), the oldest and largest SRO in the country, said that 7% of its membership is connected with crypto-related businesses [Source]
• BCB Group and Bitstamp announce partnership to enable GBP transfers. New partnership will allow Bitstamp's customers to deposit and withdraw funds denominated in GBP [Source]

Regulations / Universities

• A report published by fintech firm Bitpanda and market research company GlobalWebIndex notes that the gender distribution among European crypto holders is 78% male and 22% female. Female crypto investors are 30% more likely to be in the top 10% of earners — 21% versus 16% of their male counterparts — and 3.3x more likely to be so than the “average woman.” [Source]

Fundings:

• Germany-based Bitcoin (BTC) bank Bitwala announced that it received €13m (almost $14.5m) - This is a huge news. Bitwala is the banking service offering a free current account with a built-in bitcoin wallet as well as BTC trading options. What’s cool is that they are built on top of SolarisBank and thus can focus on building the crypto native tool. They already have users in 31 EEA countries and operates as a regulated entity [Source] - Also have a look at the press release of Earlybird when they invested back in September 2018 [Source]
• Smart Valor has secured a fresh $3.25m round of investment, led by Venture Incubator, alongside Tally Capital and other Asian and U.S. investors. With the news, the startup is announcing a new exchange operating from both Switzerland and Liechtenstein that will provide custody, trading and brokerage services [Source]

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