Alex Rathod, Author at Toshi Times

Alex Rathod

Bank Priorities: Crypto Too Risky, Money Laundering Better?

As Scandinavian banking giant Nordea makes headlines for alleged involvement in money laundering, a certain irony emerges when banks are quick to decry cryptocurrency whilst engaging in corrupt practices. Helsinki-located banking giant Nordea has been implicated in a money-laundering operation in which it is alleged to have accepted criminally-sourced funds from banks based in Lithuania and Estonia. The revelation is said to relate to a larger money laundering case in…

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Partner with Ripple and Coil to Create “Pro-Poor” Payments Infrastructure

The Gates Foundation is to use Ripple’s Interledger Protocol to address issues of financial inclusion in the developing world. The use of blockchain as a tool for doing good has slowly been taking steps toward becoming a tangible reality in recent weeks. As ToshiTimes reported recently, Binance announced that with immediate effect, 100% of its listing fees were to be donated to charity. Now, according to a tweet from the…

Spread the FUD and Buy the Dip: How the Rich Get Richer

Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase famously labelled bitcoin as a scam in September 2017. Later it turned out JP Morgan is buying crypto. In a disruptive market, the wealthy know how to play their hand to make sure all the cards stay with them; it has been this way since time immemorial. Cryptocurrency is the latest market in which this is happening. Let’s take a look at how they…

Binance Announces All Listing Fees Will Be Donated to Charity

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has announced that “starting immediately,” the business will be donating 100% of its listing fees to charity. The potential of blockchain to do good is an often-touted notion by those explaining the benefits of the technology to the uninitiated. That it holds the power to overcome financial exclusion for many who find themselves outside – whether because of infrastructure, geopolitics or some other factor –…

SEC to Review 9 Bitcoin ETF Applications by October 26th

The SEC has set a deadline of the 26th of October for reviewing nine previously rejected applications for creation and listing of bitcoin exchange tradeable funds (ETFs). The prospect of the creation of a bitcoin ETF was one of the hottest stories over the summer, however the rejection of a series of applications to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dampened many hopes of seeing such a product before 2019.…

Fortnite Gamers Find Themselves Targets of Malware Which Steals Bitcoin

The latest season of the popular video game “Fortnite” has found itself as the unwitting bait in a scam targeting gamers, for which malware which steals bitcoin wallets has been disguised as game cheat tools. Whether or not you’re a gamer, you’ve probably heard of Fortnite’s unparalleled addictiveness as a massive multiplayer online survival shooter, in which players from all over the world compete simultaneously and fight to the death…

Block.one Steps in to Prevent Voting Cartels Among 21 EOS’s Block Producers

The folks behind Block.one have vowed to use a cache of 100 million EOS tokens in order to tackle voting cartels emerging within the EOS network. Block.one launched one of the most successful ICOs in history, having raised $4 billion as of June this year through sale of their ERC20 tokens. The EOS network is now live, its ICO having ended over the summer, and with the launch of the…

Ripple to Take Lead in New Coalition Lobbying for Pro-Crypto Government Oversight – Advocates to be Paid in Crypto

A new coalition of tech start-ups is launching a lobbying campaign to try and convince lawmakers to regulate in a pro-crypto manner, and wants to pay these advocates cryptocurrency for doing it. A group of tech firms from Silicon Valley have banded together to form a business coalition with the purpose of lobbying for a favourable stance on crypto, as institutions like the Securities and Exchange Commission are in the…

Pornhub Partners With PumaPay to Accept Crypto as Payments

Fewer Than 1% of Pornhub Users Are Paying with Crypto

Pornhub’s incorporation of a cryptocurrency payment option clearly hasn’t got the viewers as hot as they thought. The potential of a crypto-porn partnership caused a lot of excitement in early spring of this year. In April, Verge (XVG) announced to great fanfare that it would partner with Pornhub, to provide a crypto payments option for customers of the adult website. Since then there have been numerous stories which have seen…

European Union Markets Regulator Prolongs Crypto Derivatives Restriction

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has chosen to extend restrictions it had imposed on contracts for differences (CFDs). This includes crypto-based contracts and essentially means crypto derivatives. ESMA announced the three-month extension in a press release today, saying that it had been “carefully considered”. A CFD is essentially a contract between two parties, through which the buyer bets on the direction of the market regarding a particular asset. The difference between…