The five-year-old exchange, which was regulated by the Thai Securities and Exchange Commission, will not seek to hold a Digital Asset Exchange license for the year 2020 and has therefore asked its customers to withdraw their funds before Nov. 1, 2019.
Thailand’s leading cryptocurrency exchange Bitcoin Co. Ltd. (BX.in.th) is closing down all of its trading operations.
The exchange has assured its users that support and guidance will be available during the fund withdrawal process and thanked its customers for their loyalty over the past five years.
The exchange announced its decision to discontinue trading on Sept. 2. The official website of the exchange states:
“Bitcoin Co. Ltd. has decided to discontinue offering digital exchange services and wallet services at our BX.in.th website in order to focus on other business opportunities.”
Customers need to withdraw their funds before Nov. 1, 2019.
The website further stated that all deposits will be disabled after Sept. 6 and trading will be halted as of Sept. 30.
Thailand’s push for innovation
Cointelegraph previously reported that while the Thai-based crypto exchange is closing its doors, the Customs Department in Thailand intends to use IBM’s Tradelens blockchain solution to track shipping in the country’s ports.
Patama Chantaruck, vice-president for Indochina expansion and managing director of IBM Thailand, said at the time that IBM’s TradeLens will provide the Thai Customs Department with an automatic and immutable tracking tool, which will lead to a more secure, transparent, efficient and simple workflow.
Tezos Foundation Issues Batch of Grants to Smart Contract, Explorer Projects
The Tezos Foundation has issued grants to projects submitted in response to its latest request for proposals.
Per a Sept. 10 announcement, the foundation has released 14 new grants to projects targeting the advancement of the Tezos project. Recipient projects prioritized developments such as applications built using Tezos smart contracts, Tezos block explorers, tools for smart contract development, Tezos-focused training resources and marketing initiatives that improve awareness of the ecosystem.
Range of recipient projects that won Tezos grants
The foundation accompanied the announcement with a description of the projects, of which one focuses on the improvement of a Telegram bot for monitoring various events on the Tezos blockchain, including transactions, missing block endorsements and double-baking.
Other projects will work on Tezos-related learning materials and tools, such as a refined documentation platform for users, the improvement of the TezBridge documentation with detailed text manuals, as well as the expansion of the original Tezos.help website into a self-sustaining library.
Following the approval of the grants, the Tezos Foundation began distributing funds. The grants’ financial details were not disclosed.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, major Latin American investment bank BTG Pactual announced that it is planning to shift its security token offerings onto the Tezos blockchain and smart contracts platform. Dalma Capital, which partnered with BTG Pactual, is also planning use Tezos to tokenize a variety of assets, including real estate, equity, lending, as well as global sports clubs.
Tezos Becomes Latest Blockchain to Tap Chainlink for Oracle Services
Pricing feed protocol Chainlink has integrated with yet another blockchain, this time Ethereum rival Tezos.
Announced Thursday, Chainlink’s decentralized pricing oracles will provide real-time data for Tezos community projects after teaming up with Smart Chain Arena and Cryptonomic, a pair of independent Tezos developers.
Pricing oracles like Chainlink provide the infrastructure necessary for scaling digital-asset products, especially in the DeFi space. Digital assets are sold on various secondary markets, making price discovery inherently difficult.
Oracle solutions like Chainlink organize and vet price feeds from on- and off-chain sources to construct a reliable price average. The firm’s oracles have been integrated in various forms into Google, Oracle and SWIFT plus cryptocurrency projects such as bZx, Polkadot and crypto lending giant Celsius Network.
Smart Chain Arena and Cryptonomic are two firms in the greater Tezos ecosystem. The former firm produced the SmartPy language, which will be used for crafting the smart contracts necessary to deploy Chainlink’s oracles.
“We recommend Tezos developers use Chainlink when building smart contracts as Chainlink’s secure decentralized oracle network makes possible a plethora of new use cases across DeFi, Equities, Insurance, and much more”, Cryptonomic co-founder Vishakh said in a statement.
Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov told CoinDesk in a phone interview that many firms are switching to contracted oracle solutions due to the inherent difficulties of building a decentralized pricing feed.
Nazarov said the undertaking is similar to making an entirely new blockchain itself.
“Oracles are like a big onion … The more you dig into them the more layers of problems you discover. There’s a reason they don’t build it into a chain and there’s a reason they don’t encourage people to build their own”, Nazarov said. “It’s because the depth of the problem initially isn’t obvious.”
The integration was sponsored by a grant from the Tezos Foundation, according to a blog post from Cryptonomic. The Tezos Foundation did not return a request for comment by press time.
