The Blockshine Singapore team has compiled some research about the state of Digital Assets in May 2019 and what the outlook is for the assets, the underlying technology and the regulations around them.

1. May 2019
STATE OF DIGITAL ASSETS

2. Table of Contents
• State of Cryptocurrency Exchanges
• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Security Token Platform
• Mimblewimble Protocol
• Other Notable Blockchain Platform
• State of Major Blockchain Firms
• Enterprise Adoption
• Global Regulations
• Recent Blockchain Conferences
2

3. State of Cryptocurrency
Exchanges

4. Launched BitTorrent Token IEO on the
Binance Launchpad.
Successfully launched several other
IEOs and led the exchange market to
transform ICO model to IEO model.
3
Huobi announced Huobi Prime- A better
path to premium projects.
The platform has successfully launched
two other different projects.
They also introduced its SMART-Chain
2.0 evaluation model to fit into the
current market.
Coinbase launched Coinbase custody to
introduce support of staking Tezos,
MakerDao governance to follow.
Coinbase custody is building the world’s
leading crypto-native custodian.
15th
Jan 2019 - Cryptopia released
notice of hack citing “significant losses”.
New Zealand police has been involved
in the investigation.
Cryptopia reopens its platform in read
only mode and on its way to a full
recovery.
The exchange has been hacked for
around $20 Million worth or
cryptocurrency during the recent
hack.
They are conducting intensive
investigation on the incident.
Bittrex launched its first IEO In early
March, 2019, and subsequently
cancelled the IEO due to significant
changes in the business status of the
project.
The exchange has announced its
‘first’ IEO and successfully launched
on 3rd April 2019
Source: Coindesk

5. State of Bitcoin

6. ● Bitcoin on-chain transactions have been increased steadily in the past few months.
● Largely due to a project called Veriblock (VBK) which secures other blockchains via the “Proof of proof”
consensus mechanism.
● VBK’s transactions have continued to rise since the testnet launch in October 2018.
● The testnet ended on March 4th, and it correlates with the decline in transactions per day on the Bitcoin
blockchain.
● During the testnet period, VBK accounted for as much as 40% of transactions on the BTC network.
VBK's mainnet launched on March 25th, and currently accounts for 30% of BTC transactions.
Bitcoin Blockchain Transactions
4
Source: BraveNewCoin
Source: Coinmetrics

7. 5
#LNTrustChain
Twitter users pass the “torch payment” from one person to another, adding 10,000 Satoshis (worth ~
$0.34) to the payment before sending it further along.
250+ people, 37+ countries, 0.041 BTC+ and it is keep growing.
Tippin.Me
A bitcoin lightning application takes off with many sending tips through the lightning network to each
other. Receive tips and micro-payments everywhere with this Lightning Network wallet. And you can
Cash out anytime.
OpenNode
Bitcoin lightning network’s payment platform announced a plug-in for Shopify merchants, spurs
lightning network adoption.
Bitcoin Lightning Network
Source: 1ml.com
Source: Coindesk

8. 6
● Bitcoin price moved within a tight price range in Q1, 2019.
● A sudden move up price action has been seen on the 2nd April 2019 where Bitcoin has
moved from USD $4100 range, and reached $5000 range in just under 30 minutes.
Bitcoin Price

9. 7
● Bitcoin blockchain hash rate bottomed out during Dec, 2018.
● The network hash rate is constantly increasing during Q1 2019.
● Potentially due to new mining models and/or older model started to mine Bitcoin
again.
Bitcoin Blockchain Hash rate
Source: Blockchain.com

10. State of Ethereum

11. The No. and volume (amount of capital) of ICOs declined
significantly compared to 2017. In 2018, there were over
1100+ ICOs have raised capital successfully.
The ICO market is transitioning towards initial exchange
offering (IEO) model.
SEC publishes first ICO no action letter, and releases a
framework for token sales.
Initial Coin Offering (ICO)
8
Many Jurisdictions are leveraging existing security
regulatory framework as the STO standard. (e.g. USA,
Germany, Switzerland) Others are currently working on STO
regulations or have laws covering STOs.
Overall, people are now proactively looking into security
tokens from a legal and regulatory perspective.
For STOs to grow further, the crypto finance market
infrastructure needs to develop further including STO
exchanges, custody solutions, reliable rating & quality
research, technical standards & APIs.
Security Token Offering
(STO)
Source: Coindesk, PwC

12. The State of Decentralised Applications
(Dapps)
9
The top active Dapps on the Ethereum
networks is mainly consists of gaming,
gambling, exchanges’ Dapps.
Real life use case:
• 0x Project where it built on top of the
Ethereum providing a decentralised
liquidity layer for the exchange, and allow
users to directly exchange tokens within
their browser.
• Brave Project - a 2nd layer protocol built
on top of Ethereum blockchain provides a
blockchain-powered web browser by
focusing on privacy in nature has reached
60K verified publishers.
Source: State of the DAPPS

13. Successfully forked at : Block 7,280,000
The hard fork mainly introduced 5 updates along with
some other minor changes,
• An upgrade which will efficiently detail and process
the information on the ETH blockchain.
• Optimise large scale code execution on the
blockchain, and make contract verification easier and
efficient.
• The contract storage pricing method will be made
simpler.
• Scaling solution based on off-chain transactions and
state channels.
• Reduction of block reward by 33% (Thirdening),
effectively delaying the difficulty bomb.
Ethereum Constantinople
Hard Fork
10
Ethereum Node
Counts
Source: Etherscan
The Constantinople hard fork is a major step and the 2nd
phase of Metropolis project, preparing ETH in transitioning
towards a fully Proof of Stake consensus state in the future.

14. State of Security Token
Platform

15. Security Token Platform
tZero security token exchange has be
launched in late Jan 2019, allowing
investors to trade their tZero tokens.
The platform is still a work in progress
where tZero is finding ways to add
more tokens, improve liquidity, they
have also announced that they are
launching a Bitcoin trading app this
June.
Konkrete in Australia, launches end to
end security token platform.
The platform is now able to create
compliant security tokens for
investors in Australia, New Zealand,
Singapore, and the USA.
11
NASDAQ powered DX.exchange
announced at the TOKEN2049
conference that it will begin to
list security tokens.
The exchange initially only
focusing on non-security token.
It is also launching its own token
to showcase the new service
and help to fund the company.
Source: Coindesk, Nugget’s News
In the US, any instrument defined as a ‘security’ is regulated by the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC), including security tokens

16. 12
The State of Stablecoin
At least 60 different stablecoin projects are live, the number of stablecoin projects has dramatically increased
over the past 12 months with Tether leading the sector.
Stablecoins will continue to see an increase in listings on the cryptocurrency exchanges.
Source: Coindesk
Crypto startup Carbon is partnering with AZTEC Protocol, a privacy tech
development firm, to leverage AZTEC’s privacy technology for Carbon’s
CUSD stablecoin. The privacy-enabled CUSD is set to go live on the
Ethereum mainnet in the third quarter of 2019.
Crypto startup TrustToken has launched its second
stablecoin – one pegged 1:1 to the British pound.
Coinsquare will launch eCAD which is the Canada’s first fiat-backed
stablecoin. The stablecoin offering will allow it to continue exploring how to
optimise financial services including aspects around cross-border
transactions, P2P lending, merchant solutions, etc.

17. Mimblewimble Protocol

18. Mimblewimble Protocol
● The private and Lightweight mimblewimble
blockchain.
● Mainnet: 15th
Jan, 2019
● Active development since 2016
● Grin is launched fairly- free of ICO, pre-mine or
founder’s reward.
● Scalable confidential cryptocurrency
● Mainnet: 3rd
Jan, 2019
● Active development since March 2018
● Beam is launched with no premine, no IEO,
its governance model is backed by treasury.
13
Mimblewimble is a privacy-oriented blockchain protocol with mysterious origins. It attempts to make transactions
completely opaque, while still allowing for external verification.
The Mimblewimble protocol describes how transacting parties will work to build a valid transaction using their public/private
key pairs, used to prove ownership of transaction outputs, and interactively chosen blinding factors.
These blinding factors are used to obfuscate the participant's public keys from everyone, including each other, and to hide
the value of the transaction from everyone except the counterparty in that specific transaction.
The protocol also performs a process called cut-through which condenses transactions by eliminating intermediary
transactions. This improves privacy and compresses the amount of data that is maintained on the blockchain.
Source: Tari Lab

19. Notable Blockchain
Platform

20. Other Notable Blockchain Platform
More than 100 EOS contributors had
over 2700 commits approved in the
past 9 months despite the downward
pressure on the crypto market as a
whole.
Straight after the mainnet has been
brought live, there were numerous
bugs/issues presented in the EOS
network where the main development
team had to do an emergency patch
to the network.
Tron’s development team has also
grown from 2 to over 40 in size and
according to Justin Sun- The CEO of
Tron project, The growth of TRON’s
core development team has allowed
its blockchain engineers to specialise
and has enabled them to stabilise the
TRON blockchain.
Tron CEO also bought BitTorrent,
created a BitTorrent token (BTT),
concluded an initial exchange offering
at Binance where at the peak the
token was trading at 10X above of the
initial price.
14
Monero successfully forked
again on 9th
March, 2019.
The upgrade introduced
1. Added privacy features and
improved security.
2. Invalidated pre-fork ASIC
miners.
XMR development team has
scheduled the protocol upgrade
twice a year in order to achieve
“ASIC resistance”.
Source: Coindesk

21. State of Major Blockchain
Firms

22. State of Major Blockchain Firms
Bitmain IPO filing has expired on 25th
March, 2019 on the Hong Kong Stock
exchange (HKEx)
The mining giant also conducted firm
wide restructuring in early 2019.
They have also released several next
generation cryptocurrency miners to
the market.
Neutrino, a blockchain intelligence
start up has been acquired by
Coinbase for $13.5 million.
The acquisition has been criticised by
various market participants where
users questioned the controversy
behind the core executive team of
Neutrino.
Since then, Coinbase announced that
it would be “parting ways” with any
controversy Neutrino employees.
15
Blockstream has launched a bitcoin
blockchain satellite to the space in
early 2019.
Users now can sync bitcoin
blockchain and lightning data without
even using the internet.
With the Lightning network service,
the satellite messaging API will now
allow users to send encrypted
messages to each other from
anywhere on Earth and make
payments for receiving those
messages.
Source: The Block Crypto

23. ENTERPRISE ADOPTION

24. JP Morgan Coin
● JP Morgan recently created a digital
coin specifically for payments.
● It is the first U.S bank to create and
successfully test a digital coin
representing a fiat currency. JPM
coin will be issued on Quorum
enterprise blockchain.
● BoC reportedly being the first bank user of
the blockchain platform for home buyers
● BoC have partnered with China UnionPay
to explorer blockchain for payment
systems
● They have 11 patent applications for
blockchain, ranking 20th in the global
business and ranking first in the domestic
banking industry.
Banks of China Adoptions
16
Traditional financial
service firms are
progressively embracing
blockchain technology in
2019.
Source: Coindesk
Enterprise Adoption

25. ● Facebook publicly revealed in May
2018 that they are developing
blockchain solution, reports claimed that
the social media giant plans to develop
a stablecoin solution backed by a
basket of foreign currencies.
● Mizuho announced it would launch its own
cryptocurrency platform and even release its own
stablecoin.
● Daiwa- second-largest brokerage in Japan confirmed
it had completed a trial of a blockchain post-trade
processing solution.
17
Facebook Blockchain Japanese banks unite to launch DLT
finance platform services
Enterprise Adoption
Source: Coindesk

26. ● Fidelity Digital Asset Services will initially
provide storage for Bitcoin but has plans to
expand this service to Ether and three or
four of the other largest cryptocurrencies by
market cap.
● The company will help its clients execute
trades and provide other support.
● One of the most risk-averse investment funds is
taking the plunge on crypto investing.
● Two American public sector pension funds have
reportedly backed a new cryptocurrency industry
venture capital fund with a large tranche of a
combined $40 million investment.
18
Fidelity Investment Morgan Creek, US pension fund
investment in cryptocurrency
Source: Coindesk
Enterprise Adoption

27. Global Regulations

28. Global Regulations
Pursues a robust cryptocurrency and blockchain
technology landscape where it shifts from a neutral to
a more hands-on approach to regulating the industry.
19
Moving to allow blockchain based securities to be
issued and traded in the country. The amendment will
also allow businesses to be licensed to operate as
depositories of securities and digital tokens. On 13th
March, Thai securities and exchange commission
approves first ICO portal for KYC and due diligence.
The Australian Treasury released an issue paper exploring
the advantages and disadvantages of ICO.
The discussion paper notes that innovations in Fintech
could be potentially transformative for the Australian
economy and that ICOs should not be ignored.
State Colorado signs crypto friendly digital token act,
Wyoming government official signed a bill into law labelled
the utility token bill.
Two new bills from US congress aim to create a
competitive regulation to foster the growth of blockchain
industry.
We are currently seeing a progressive regulatory environment at a global scale to accelerate and
improve the current state of the cryptocurrency market. Startups are embracing regulations, working
with the regulators to bring cryptocurrency market to a mature level.
Source: Coindesk

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