The Thursday Recap #5

Hello, and welcome to the Thursday Recap and below you'll find out about the latest goings-on here at Recap HQ as well as some of the more interesting crypto news stories of the past week.

Congrats to our Twitter competition winner Raymart!

In celebration of our Binance integration last week we held a Twitter competition. We had loads of entries and have just announced our lucky winner who gets £500 worth of Bitcoin and a Recap subscription. Congratulations Raymart!

Zuckerberg fronts Congress on Libra

Mark Zuckerberg found himself back at Capitol Hill, in front of the House Financial Services Committee defending his company’s plans for Libra. According to the BBC, Members of Congress raised concerns over Libra’s potential for use in money laundering, disrupting the global financial system (criticisms that are levied at most cryptocurrencies) and whether Libra will give Facebook too much control over a lot of financial data. It appears that the Facebook Overlord is undeterred in his plan to launch this cryptocurrency even in the face of 8 companies leaving the Libra Association.

We look forward to seeing how Libra pans out as time goes on - but boy, do they have an uphill challenge ahead.

Bubble popping revelations from the Ex-CFTC Chair

Christopher Giancarlo, who left the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) at the end of his five-year term as chairman back in April has made quite the revelation in an interview with CoinDesk.

Summarising slightly, what has been said in the interview is that the CFTC, the Treasury, the SEC and the National Economic Director (at the time) Gary Cohn, sought to pop the bitcoin bubble by introducing bitcoin futures. In doing so, they introduced pessimists into a market-driven by an optimistic view. As Giancarlo put it “we believed that, should bitcoin futures go forward, it would allow institutional money to bring discipline to the value of the cash market”.

The introduction of regulated futures markets, such as those provided by Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), are seeing daily volumes north of $515 million. These exchanges offer cash-settled contracts with no bitcoin required to make a short or long position. This has certainly led to an influx of institutional investors, but will this be the limiting factor in the price of bitcoin in the future? Or will be big guys come onside with the bitcoin bulls and help take the bitcoin price even higher?

Account Dashboard

The account dashboard is coming along and starting to look rather slick.

Onboarding improvements

The team shipped a small release on Monday evening, taking away some of the pain in getting started with the Recap app. We have removed some of the upfront requirements of verifying your email address and securing your encryption key in order to get you into the app faster.

Bitfinex Integration

The next target on our exchange list is Bitfinex. The Bitfinex API seems to be very comprehensive, and we are yet to find any “gotchas”. We’re gearing up for a launch in the next couple of weeks if everything goes to plan.