China to release several blockchain standards

Summary:

• China hopes to release three blockchain standards this year
• Australia wants to facilitate settling insurance payments for disabled people
• The United Arab Emirates to permit initial coin offerings as source of company funding

Tuesday is another day of lacklustre trading on the cryptocurrency market. Major virtual currencies are quoted at similar levels to yesterday. Thus, no one should be surprised that the capitalization of the whole cryptocurrency market stands at around $220 billion being almost unchanged in comparison to yesterday. The market capitalization of the most famous cryptocurrency sits near 115$ billion. Today’s newsflow concerns China’s blockchain standards, an idea to utilize blockchain to help disabled people in Australia, and UAE’s new planned rules.

Let’s start with news from China, where blockchain standards are being developed by the China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI). Three blockchain standards, which will be probably released this year, will cover issues of smart contracts, privacy and cryptocurrency deposits as reported by China Money Network. According to Li Ming, the director of the research lab, the standards will serve as basis for other national and global standards. The standards will include, for example, information security standards, or process and method standards. A need for the international blockchain standards was stressed by several figures from the industry as the use of the technology is increasing.

BITCOIN still lacks clear direction.  BITCOIN is trading in the vicinity of the $6550 handle at press time and the upside seems to be limited by the short term resistance zone (blue rectangle on the chart above). Source: xStation5

Secondly, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), one of the biggest Australian banks, is cooperating with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the governmental science agency, to test a blockchain solution facilitating a settlement of insurance payments for people with a disability. The solution could help reduce the amount of paperwork needed to obtain funds from the National Disability Insurance Scheme as well as the amount of receipts people with disabilities need to obtain. Such a solution would be for sure beneficial for people that are more severely disabled and therefore every additional activity may be troublesome for them. According to the announcement published on Tuesday, CBA and CSIRO have developed an app being a part of trial to explore the potential of blockchain in creating “smart money” (also known as programmable money, enabling to exchange more parameters within transaction than traditional money transfering only a value).  

ETHEREUM has marched higher nearly a 1.5% over the past 24 hours therefore it can be viewed as an outperformer among other coins. The cryptocurrency with the second largest capitalization is trading slightly below the $225 handle on Tuesday morning. Source: xStation5

Last but not least, the United Arab Emirates announced that it plans to introduce new rules concerning initial coin offerings (ICOs). Under new regulations companies would be able to use ICO as a method of funding. “The board of the Emirates Securities & Commodities Authority has approved considering ICOs as securities. As per our plan we should have regulations on the ground in the first half of 2019”, said Obaid Saif al-Zaabi, the head of the securities regulator. Moreover, Zaabi said that the watchdog is currently in talks with stock exchanges in Abu Dhabi and Dubai to develop a marketplace where new digital assets could be traded.