Investors have swung wildly between risk-on and risk-off postures, as Sino-U.S. trade tensions rise and fall. While crypto-volatility is still too strong for most investors to stomach, there could be a more reliable refuge for investor value. 

At present, equities-averse money has very few places left to go. The Swiss National Bank recently intervened to dampen the price of the safe-haven Swiss Franc (CHF) and keep interest rates negative. The strength of the greenback is not supported by attractive returns and faces trade tension risk.

GRAM tokens are finally coming to investors, Telegram says. The company behind the second-largest cryptocurrency sale expects to ship tokens in the next two months, the New York Times reported yesterday.

The issuance will end a saga that began almost two years ago, when a handful of private investors put $1.7bn into the proposed Telegram Open Network.

If you’ve ever had to buy a used car, you know how easy it is to be taken for a ride. Between rolled-over odometers and new cars that have never seen a drop of oil, secondary markets are a rusty minefield of hidden problems and iffy maintenance.

Now, one of the leading auto giants is exploring blockchain solutions for China’s used car market. The Beijing Mercedes-Benz Sales Service Company (BMBS) is leveraging a blockchain-based “Vehicle Residual Value Management Platform” for used cars in the Chinese capital.

Cryptocurrency markets are in the midst of a significant sell-off, with top digital assets losing over five percent in value over the past twenty-four hours. As the Bitcoin price has now fallen through two key support levels, analysts are predicting further losses, with BTC likely to fall below $9,000.

• The four-hour and daily time frame shows that multiple head and shoulders patterns are close to reaching their bearish targets
• Technical analysis highlights the $55.00 level as a possible turning point for the LTC/USD pair

Litecoin has fallen to its lowest trading level since April 2nd this year, as the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization sold-off sharply during Wednesday’s U.S trading session.

Coin burning is a method by which cryptocurrencies keep their market value high and attempt to offset inflation. When a large portion of a coin’s supply is removed, that coin experiences heightened demand, and as a result, the coin’s price goes up.

At least, that’s how it works in theory. In practice, any price increases that occur immediately after a coin burn usually get lost in the noise. The effects of coin burns are usually overshadowed by the long-term price volatility of the entire crypto market, as shown below:

Sharding is widely hailed as a solution to blockchain scalability. But projects that implement sharding technology may be introducing new security risks into their blockchains, according to the CEO of Solana, which could make them vulnerable to consensus attacks.

Tether is back in the news, but this time it’s just moving house. Large numbers of the controversial dollar-valued token are migrating to Ethereum from Bitcoin’s OMNI layer, resulting in a boom in active USDT-ETH addresses. 

Street cred, meet Decred. For reasons we don’t entirely follow, the crypto OG has released a short-form rap track to help announce its new privacy credentials. Because hell, why not? And to our Ginuwine astonishment, it’s actually pretty damn good.

Economists have long recognized the relationship between economic growth and investment in R&D. The correlation is as strong as it is intuitive: more investment in innovation leads to greater productivity, driving economic growth.