February 2019 Market Update

There have been some monumental updates within the crypto-verse in February, including significant movements from big corporates like Samsung and JP Morgan Bank.

On the 20th of Feb, Samsung confirmed that their upcoming S10 smartphone will feature a inbuilt crypto wallet, which will also include a vault to store and safeguard crypto wallet keys. This is a big move towards worldwide adoption, and we suspect it will be only a matter of time until Apple will include a similar feature in their smartphones too.

On Feb 14th, JPMorgan & Chase, ones of America’s four largest banks, announced it would be releasing their own blockchain backed cryptocurrency called JPM Coin. This is the first time a bank in the US has done so, setting this as the first step of the banking industry’s move into crypto. The news has seemed to have had little effect on banking industry targeted cryptos; Ripple’s XRP or Stellar Lumen’s XLM – in fact, the prices of these coins have continued to increase.

In other news, Wyoming has passed new crypto-friendly regulations for digital assets, a progressive move following Ohio’s announcement to accept tax payments in crypto.

Closer to home, the South Australian government is planning to use blockchain technology to conduct elections, a significant play in increasing voting accuracy and transparency for our mates across the ditch.

Over the past month, we have seen a healthy increase in the global market cap, including three relatively stable periods, an 11 billion dollar pump on the 9th some bullish movement from the 19th till now. Let’s hope the 29th brings us some similar action 😉

In global adoption, we have continued to watch a heavy increase in daily trade volume in many countries with destabilised currencies.

According to MyLocalBitcoins.com statistics, Venezuela, Colombia, and Argentina are hitting record highs in weekly Bitcoin trading volumes, and this trend seems to be continuing across Africa too. There are now  111 countries where cryptocurrency is not restricted or illegal.