Bitcoin trading volume may be posting lows across the board, but back in DeFi Babylon things are not so gloomy. Babel Finance reported a tremendous growth rate ever since the investment by NGC Ventures, a Venture Capital fund loosely associated with NEO.

Everybody likes a good supply-sapping token burn. The first quarterly kilning of native exchange tokens took place in October of 2017 at Binance, and burning is now conducted by Huobi and Bitfinex, as well as Tether when trouble brews and people want their real dollars back, among others.

Zk-STARKs have been long hyped up as a replacement for Zcash’s Zk-SNARK system, for one simple reason: they don’t require the trusted setup, which (if compromised) could allow an attacker to mint unlimited coins.

The Monero team has been especially vocal about that possibility, speculating in 2017 on including Zk-STARKs in the roadmap. Fluffypony even ‘promised’ a STARK-based sidechain on Twitter.

It’s always hard to say goodbye to an ex- in which you’ve invested so much… but Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire seems to have no problem with dumping the baggage.

Circle has announced that it is “doubling down” on efforts to “build a more open, global and accessible financial system” – and that as part of that endeavor, it is spinning off its troubled Poloniex exchange.

An Asian investment group will inject $100M into the new entity, Polo Digital Assets, Ltd. and the exchange will cease working with U.S.-based traders as of November 1st, 2019.

• Nano remains bearish over both the short-term and the medium-term
• The four-hour time is showing that bulls need to stabilize price above the $0.850000 level to increase buying interest.
• The daily time frame shows that the cryptocurrency is trading inside a huge wedge pattern.

Nano is coming back under downside pressure towards the $0.800000 level, with the cryptocurrency eroding over fifteen percent of its early-month gains.

Bitcoin is back below $8,000 today, dragging down most of the altcoins with it. Virtually the entire market is down with figures ranging from 1% to 3%, though Holochain and BSV are exceptions with +5% and +2% performances on the day.

Stablecoin provider Tether is considering creating an algorithmic alternative to its popular USDT token – possibly allowing traders to use cryptocurrency as collateral – as a means to provide another route to issue and trade USD-pegged assets.

Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Tether and affiliated exchange Bitfinex, told Crypto Briefing the company was researching a new algorithmic stablecoin, possibly to be known as the ‘USDTX’.

BlockFi has formally announced the introduction of BlockFi Institutional Services. Previously a retail hodler-focused company, it is now introducing enterprise-grade financing solutions for digital assets for institutional investors like market-makers, funds, exchanges, and family offices.

Binance has just upped the ante as the futures trading platform raises the bar with a new 125X leverage option on Bitcoin futures contracts.

If you seek to profit from falling Bitcoin prices, or you simply find the current levels of volatility to not be stimulating enough, the Binance futures trading platform is available for short or long contracts that are bigger — and riskier — than ever offered before.

Proving the origin and authenticity of retail products has often been proposed as one of the key use cases of blockchain, but it was largely the turf of companies like VeChain and recently, IBM. Cardano is now jumping into this field with both feet through a collaboration with New Balance, the athletic wear and sneaker brand.