Gatecoin to Reopen During August
A new announcement was made today by Gatecoin, in which the details regarding the exchanges plans to resume trading activity are described. Gatecoin will reopen on Wednesday, August 17th, 08:00 GMT and there will be no trading fees until September 1st, 2016, in an effort to draw back clients to the Hong Kong-based exchange. New assets like Augur and DigixDAO tokens will be available as well as the fiat currency, CNY. Users will also be allowed to withdraw 10% of their ETH holdings that were stored on Gatecoin at the time of the hack, while the other 90% are considered Ethereum Debt (ETD). Gatecoin explains through an official blog post:
"We cannot confirm an exact date, when ETD will be reconciled for ETH, however, we continue to work towards repaying the total amount and are still committed to ensure that all clients receive their funds in full."
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Bitfinex Hack Update
Bitfinex has recently stated that it plans to "socialize" the losses among Bitcoin holders. It is still unclear what this means exactly, but one can assume that the losses are to be distributed by all users, and not just the holders of the affected wallets. Bitfinex annouced on its website:
"We are still working out the details,however, we are leaning towards a socialized loss scenario among bitcoin balances and active loans to BTCUSD positions."
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Barclays Shows Interest in Smart Contract Technology
A 15-page position paper detailing Smart Contract terminology, automation, enforceability, and semantics has been released this week by Barclays in association with the university College London, as an effort to research and develop smart contract templates to be used in the banking industry. Security and enforceability are one of the main concerns regarding smart contracts, as Barclays investment bank CTO Lee Braine noted:
"How would you stop such a smart contract from executing if it was necessary? How would you change its behavior to reflect a defect that had been fixed, and you then need to deploy a corrected version?"
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Coinbase Will Enable Ethereum Classic Withdrawals
Coinbase announced yesterday, that it will be allowing users to access and withdraw their Ethereum Classic holdings, although no deposit or trading features will be implemented as there are no current plans to support ETC on Coinbase or GDAX. Coinbase stated through an official blog announcement:
"At this time, Coinbase is not planning to support ETC trading or transactions on our platform. We will only be making this credit available to send off-platform."
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Coinsource Becomes the America's Largest Bitcoin ATM Operator
Coinsource has recently added 4 new Bitcoin ATMs in New York, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, becoming the biggest Bitcoin ATM network operating in America and boosting global access to Bitcoin. There are currently 369 Bitcoin ATMs in America, out of the 718 worldwide. Coinsource CEO Sheffield Clark said:
"We are extremely proud to be America’s number one Bitcoin ATM network, but it is our customers and the cryptocurrency phenomenon that deserve the credit. Bitcoin has proven to be one of the world’s highest performing investments. As Bitcoin becomes even easier to use and is accepted as payment in more and more venues, the list of users and use-cases has increased exponentially."
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