Speaking on stage at BlockShow Asia 2019 in Singapore, True Global Ventures 3d founder Dusan Stojanovic said the time to invest in crypto collectibles is “right now.” Some investors regard Bitcoin as a “safe haven” asset, and see high demand for it in a world of economic uncertainty. But Stojanovic sees the same value in crypto collectibles, especially in the gaming sector. He claimed that such collectibles could function as recession-resistant assets. Crypto collectibles are a category of digital asset that are backed by non-fungible tokens — each token is unique and no two are the same. He sees great …

Today during a panel at BlockShow Asia 2019, a group of cryptocurrency industry leaders announced the creation of a protocol that aims to maintain privacy while complying with Financial Action Task Force (FATF) regulation. The FATF’s so-called “travel rule” requires virtual asset service providers (VASPs) like cryptocurrency exchanges to collect and share personal data during transactions. The creators of the proposed protocol say that it enables VASPs to transmit this information in a highly private and secure fashion. The consortium released a whitepaper for the protocol yesterday — it’s called OpenVASP. The whitepaper outlines a protocol that would let VASPs …

Speaking at BlockShow Asia 2019, Proof of Capital managing partner Edith Yeung called out American regulators for leaving blockchain-based ventures in the dark. These companies are commonly domiciled in Singapore, Switzerland, or Hong Kong because “they have no idea of what is happening in the US. They don’t want to touch it because of the legal tension.” Some exchanges are in fact leaving the US amid continued regulatory uncertainties. Last month, Poloniex spun out from Circle to form a new exchange that will not allow American customers to trade on its platform. Binance also specifically established Binance US in conjunction …

During day two of BlockShow Asia 2019, Pepo founder and CEO Jason Goldberg hosted a keynote to present his new product. With 15,000 users and more than 45,000 peer-to-peer transactions to its credit, Pepo aims to change the way people create content for the crypto community. “We are already among the biggest DApps in the world. We are now number 12, and we aim to reach the top really soon,” Goldberg said. “Pepo is the result of almost four years of research and listening to the crypto community.” The app is available for download on Apple and Android devices, and …

Institutional investors aren’t being overlooked at BlockShow Asia 2019. At a panel titled “Unlocking Yield In Cryptocurrency Assets — Encouraging Institutions To Enter The Industry,” a number of crypto leaders shared their thoughts on how to make emergent financial technology accessible to mainstream financial entities. Speakers included Jasper Lee, Managing Director at eToro Group Asia; Justin Chow, Head of Business Development Asia for Cumberland; Saharan Nair, Chief Business Officer at CoinSwitch; and Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO at Bybit. Moderated by DataDash founder Nicholas Merten, the panel covered the role of institutional investors within the crypto world, and the challenges …

The bridge between crypto and fiat is getting stronger. Speaking on stage at BlockShow Asia 2019, Chief Scientist and CEO of decentralized AI marketplace SingularityNET Ben Goertzel announced new support for conventional PayPal transactions to support the purchase of the platform’s AGI tokens. “We’re excited about this. It opens the door for new ways to promote and grow the network,” Goertzel said. This move grants SingularityNET easy access to PayPal’s 286 million users. Earlier iterations of this marketplace required customers to pay for AI services offered by AI agents in the network using the AGI utility token. But this conventional …

Speaking during an on-stage panel at BlockShow Asia 2019, QUOINE co-founder Mike Kayamori said he has always been in favor of crypto regulation, but has begun changing his mind: "Crypto is evolving, and the government can't try to regulate things it still doesn't understand.” Kayamori said he’s “always been a pro-regulation person,” but there is cause for being careful. “Politicians have their own agenda," he said. "I am still in favor of crypto regulation, but [it] needs to be done very carefully." Crypto regulation has been one of the hottest topics at BlockShow Asia 2019, with almost every speaker offering …

The security experts at BlockShow Asia 2019 agree: creating a unified blacklist for scammers and fraudsters is not only difficult, but it’s not enough to solve these issues within the crypto space. Cryptocurrency service providers like exchanges already maintain their own separate blacklists. Combining these into one list may look useful, but it’s not especially easy to do. Ulisse Dell’Orto, managing director at Chainalysis, pointed out the need for a “high level of evaluation about how data is gathered.” He said that in some cases, companies simply use an algorithm to do this heavy lifting. That makes it difficult to …

French payment firm Ingenico has partnered with Singapore-based crypto startup Pundi X to enable its customers to receive payments in crypto using smartphones. Pundi X has integrated its point-of-sale payment gateway (XPOS) into Ingenico’s mobile portable POS solution APOS A8, the firm announced on Nov. 12. Through this partnership, merchants around the world using Ingenico’s Android-based APOS A8 will now be able to accept a wide number of crypto as payment options. Transactions will be processed directly through Pundi’s XWallet mobile app Specifically, installing the XPOS module on an Ingenico POS terminal will enable payments in cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC), …

Speaking at a panel today at BlockShow Asia 2019, VeChain founder Sunny Lu suggested that token value is mostly arbitrary. The panel was titled "Creating Token Value — Are Monetary Gains Hindering Blockchain Innovation?" and it also included Eddy Travia, co-founder and CEO of Coinsilium; Matthew Roszak, chairman & co-founder at Bloq; Greg Wasserman, co-head of principal investing at Galaxy Digital; and Dr. Pavel Kravchenko, CEO & co-founder of Distributed Lab. But Lu’s commentary broke through: “99% of a [token’s value] is linked to speculation, and not to the value that solution can bring to society. This causes many startups …

Experts at BlockShow Asia 2019 agree: Bitcoin is just cryptocurrency while blockchain is a new connectivity framework. Speakers at a conference panel titled “Collaboration in a Decentralized Ecosystem: Why Government And Corporations Need It” included Patrick Yeo, Venture Hub Leader at PwC Singapore; Vinay Mohan, Managing Director of ConsenSys Singapore; Veronica Tan, Director at Infocomm Media Development Authority; Alan Lim, Program Director at IBM Blockchain Technologies; and Yi Ming Ng, Managing Partner of Tribe Accelerator. All participants pointed out that the main features of blockchain technology go far beyond Bitcoin. They enable ecosystem connectivity by sharing information in trustless, decentralized …

Elixxir President Jim Dolbear thinks the question of when quantum computing will become real is a bad one. Speaking on behalf of Elixxir founder David Chaum at BlockShow Asia 2019, Dolbear suggested that it is highly likely that whoever perfects quantum computing will use it secretly. He referred to code-cracking efforts by the United States during World War II: “In the history of World War II, if you crack people’s code, you don’t tell them. This is what happened between the United States and Germany. The United States knew a bunch of codes and secret communications from Germany, but they …