Binance denies it’s being shut down in Japan

Contrary to reports from Japanese news outlet Nikkei , Binance has denied rumors that Japan’s Financial Services Authority (JFSA) is planning to issue a warning requiring the cryptocurrency exchange desk to shut down its operation in the country.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has taken to Twitter to refute claims made by Nikkei, deeming their coverage as a case of “irresponsible journalism.”

“ We are in constructive dialogs with [the JFSA], and have not received any mandates,” Zhao assured users. “It does not make sense for JFSA to tell a newspaper before telling us, while we have an active dialog going on with them,” he continued.

Earlier today, Nikkei reported that the JFSA will likely deliver a shutdown warning to Binance in the coming days or weeks. The purported reason for the penalty was that the cryptocurrency exchange desk – which has several employees in Japan – has reportedly been operating without government approval, according to the local outlet.

While Binance was originally founded and headquarterted out of China, it later moved its offices to Japan to avoid the increasingly restrictive regulation from the Chinese government. Since then, the company has also set up offices in Taiwan.

For the record, Binance is currently the exchange desk with the highest trading volume in the world, according to CoinMarketCap.

Responding to the Twitter chatter about the Nikkei’s supposedly inaccurate coverage, Zhao took a moment to praise social media for giving a voice to his company.

“ The upside is now we have a voice too,” Zhao wrote. “A big upside. I think it outweighs the negative.”

[H/T @BTCVIX ]

Cryptocurrency startup Tether claims it was robbed of $31 million in tokens

Tether noted in a now-removed post on its site that nearly $31 million worth of tokens were stolen from the treasury in which it stored its dollar-pegged cryptocurrency.

The company said that it won’t redeem any of the stolen tokens, and will attempt to prevent them from entering other exchanges.

While Tether has been able to identify the address in which the hacker is holding those stolen funds, it hasn’t yet understood how the attack took place. As such, it’s temporarily suspending its backend wallet service for partners, and is updating its Omni Core software client to prevent the missing tokens from being used in any transactions.

The company, which offers cryptocurrency tokens valued at US$1 each, has already been under scrutiny for allegedly being owned and operated by the same people who run Bitfinex, a British Virgin Islands-based Bitcoin exchange that’s been hacked in the past .

It’ll be interesting to see how the cryptocurrency community reacts to this news as more details come to light. We’re keeping an eye on this, so stay tuned for more as it happens.

Clash of coins: Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash can(‘t) coexist in harmony

This is a tale of two Bitcoins. After a fork in August that created Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), we have reached yet another crossroad. While another hard fork was planned around middle of November to boost Bitcoin’s block size, this fork is now dead in the water .

The lack of consensus among the Bitcoin community was cited as the reason for abandoning the so-called Segwit2X plan.

Abandoning the fork lifted the Bitcoin price from $7,200 to $7,800 as traders realized their worst fears (an ugly chain split) would be avoided. However, excitement hasn’t lasted.

Bitcoin is now trading at around $6,000 at press time, as traders and investors fear that Segwit by itself will not create enough capacity to scale. Indeed, at the time of this writing, there are over 140,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions.

Bitcoin Cash was the surprise winner in all of this, at least temporarily. The currency which had been drifting steadily downward was lifted as high as $2,600 in a dramatic pump following the news of Segwit2X’s cancellation. While the price has since experienced a 50 percent retrace, spectators were stunned at the sudden rise.

The lack of a clear path for Bitcoin’s scaling issues are having a serious impact on Bitcoin’s price. As more users discover Bitcoin and its popularity increases, there is a growing danger that it will be a victim of its own success.

We talked with Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output Hong Kong, who elaborated the challenge facing Bitcoin:

Bitcoin’s high prices may have drawn users like bees to honey but many are likely not savvy. There is a high degree of confusion among these users that is making matters worse. A lot of them can’t probably tell the two Bitcoins apart from each other.

We talked with Fran Strajnar, CEO of Bravenewcoin, who thinks we are going through yet another round of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). “I think the current FUD is very confusing to the millions of new people pouring into the crypto space for the first time,” he said. “‘Bitcoin,’ ‘Bitcoin-Cash’ is enough to confuse people as it is.”

Altcoins are no stranger to the phenomenon of pump and dump. There are people out there who have the ability to increase the price of a particular coin and when there is enough buzz around a coin, it is simply the matter of dumping it and making a neat profit.

Kumar Gaurav, chairman of Auxesis Group and founder of Cashaa has this to say on the recent increase in BCH (also referred to as BCC) prices:

Gaurav is of the view that Bitcoin has gained relative maturity with the passage of time:

Fran also adds his voice:

The good news is that as more people discover cryptocurrencies, there is space for both flavours of Bitcoin to exist and prosper. As for the bickering within the Bitcoin community, you can’t really rule out more forks or more Bitcoin variants in the future either. This is just the way cryptocurrencies are.

As Hoskinson puts it:

Perhaps democracy is the biggest winner and a byproduct of cryptocurrencies, and that is the silver lining.

This post was originally published by The Cointelegraph . Check out their excellent coverage and follow them down here: