Raúl Marcos' Crypto News #4: China bans ICOs. How to value cryptoassets. Decentralized lending and margin trading.

There is no other news in cryptoworld: China has defined ICOs as an illegal fundraising tool, banning any future ICO and any trading related to them.

Since the news, the global crypto market has lost ~30bn, with Chinese tokens leading the losses. One of the most affected tokens has been NEO, a project similar to Ethereum that was gaining traction to do ICOs, and now it’s not clear how it will be affected (in my opinion, it’s still a great project with a strong community, but this will obviously affect them).

To fight a bit the panic, I’m sharing this article :P

Ok, China is banning ICOs, but China banning something shouldn’t be news. And yes, in the short term ICOs and Chinese exchanges will stop, but in the long term, regulation can help to bring institutional investors. Also, it can protect people, something very much needed in a country where projects don’t post their ICO terms even during the ICO, or where no personal information is asked by exchanges.

Why should we trust that companies are not going to use their power in a harmful way? Why should we trust that Google is going to honor their “Don’t be evil”? Well, we shouldn’t, no company should have that much power. And in a decentralized world, that’s possible.

Chris Burniske is one of my preferred authors, I always recommend what he writes. This time he talks about his model to explain cryptoassets valuations, taking into consideration the current and future value, and how the market sentiment changes.

0x is a protocol for trading tokens that is going to be used by decentralized exchanges like Ethfinex. On top of that protocol, people are starting to build some other interesting things, in this case, decentralized lending and margin trading. I truly believe this is the future, you shouldn’t need a centralized exchange to sell your tokens, you only need to find a buyer! And good luck to China banning this.

This is a great example of one of the problems of blockchain-based projects: even the most successful ones are developed by few people. Funnily enough, ideas are being decentralized, but they are developed by teams more centralized than ever.

In this case, one of the devs of AEthernity quits after having problems with the CEO, and he even threats to sell attack vectors to profit from the knowledge of the project (!!!).