Key Points
- Starbucks looks likely to utlise blockchain technology to create digital currency
- Telegram ICO Update - $2.55bn is estimate of potential crowdsale
- Circle Announces Acquisition of Poloniex Crypto Exchange
Starbucks Coin? CEO announces proprietary "digital currency"
Starbucks is likely to utilize blockchain technology as part of a new payments app, executive chairman Howard Shultz said Tuesday.
- During Starbucks’ January earnings call, executive chairman Howard Schultz warned that bitcoin would not be the currency of the future, instead suggesting that some other trusted, legitimate digital currency off of the blockchain technology could take its place.
- Those cryptocurrencies, Schultz said at the time, would have to be legitimized by a brick-and-mortar establishment, “where the consumer has trust and confidence in the company that is providing the transaction.”
Telegram ICO Timeline of Events
Durov promised "something big" in December 2017
December 2017 | "Planning something big" - CEO Pavel Durov
- Looking back, it seems obvious what CEO Pavel Durov really meant when he told Bloomberg that he was planning "something big" in the new year for Telegram.
- Investors started telling CoinDesk in late December that Telegram was looking at doing some kind of ICO.
January 2018 | Telegram will raise $14.7bn over lifetime if all tokens sold
- Working out the math, we found that if every single gram were sold under the specified formula, the TON would raise $14.7 billion over the course of its lifetime.
February 2018 (Early) | $850m raised
- Techcrunch found Telegram's Form D, which revealed the company was 25 percent oversubscribed from the $600 million its offering circular had targeted for the private sale. It raised $850 million.
February 2018 (Late) | $2.55bn potential crowdsale
- Business Insider reported - the total crowdsale that could go as high as $2.55 billion.
- Quartz cited a per token price of $1.45, significantly up from the prior round, whose offering circular cited a per token price of roughly $0.30. That price ultimately rose to $0.38, due to the larger size of the initial round.
Crypto M&A - Circle To Acquire Poloniex Crypto Exchange
The deal was announced on 26th February.
Potentially one of the largest acquisitions in the space, if not the largest.
Some reports put the acquisition price tag at $400 million, Circle execs did not confirm that number
What is Circle X?
- At the core of this transformation is what Circle refers to as "Circle X" - the concept that, in the future, exchanges will not be broken down into types at all.
- Poloniex allows trades of roughly 100 different cryptocurrencies and crypto tokens, exchange users have had to move those funds to platforms like Circle's to convert into fiat.
- Circle will be able to leverage its existing regulatory compliance work to accelerate the addition of a number of fiat currencies into the exchange service.
Circle president Sean Neville told CoinDesk:
"Rather than seeing a single Star Wars-type token that is good for everything across the galaxy, we'll see a proliferation of tokens that have different functions."
New competition for Coinbase, tZero, and Templum
- This new type of exchange could not only give traditional cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase a run for their money, but could also compete with alternative trading systems (ATS) like tZero and Templum, which focus on listing crypto tokens that are regulated as securities.
- Instead of cryptocurrency exchanges being different to stock exchanges and cash markets, Circle believes all that trading will happen in one place - in a seamless backend.