Bloomberg Quint reported on Sept. 12 that the exchange aims to make shorting easier by offering immediate access to multiple counterparties from a single platform.
New York-based cryptocurrency brokerage and trading platform Tagomi allows its users to lend or borrow Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) to facilitate long or short trades.
Per the report, to short crypto assets, traders currently have to “call a host of brokers and trading desks to find the best rates for borrowing and risk the market moving against them during the time it takes to put on a trade.”
The state of shoring in crypto
Tagomi’s chief operating officer Kevin Johnson commented on the difficulty of applying such strategies to crypto:
“In other asset classes this would be done with one click, but in crypto it’s very long and tedious to try and put a short on. ”
Shorting: part of the puzzle
Dennis Chou, director of trading at Pantera Capital, noted that the ability to short is important to traders. He noted that it is not only useful to those wanting to bet against crypto, but also to those looking to apply quantitative strategies, relative-value trades and hedging. He commented:
“The crypto space is volatile, so if you can’t short, you’re missing part of the puzzle.”
As Cointelegraph reported at the end of March, the New York State Department of Financial Services has granted a BitLicense to Tagomi.
ConsenSys Fully Acquires Ethereum Infrastructure Provider Infura
Ethereum (ETH) venture production studio ConsenSys has announced that it had fully acquired Infura, a blockchain infrastructure provider that the firm previously backed.
According to the blog post published on Oct. 4, Infura will continue its operations as a wholly owned business unit within the studio. Infura also noted that ConsenSys’s founder Joseph Lubin was one of the startup’s early investors.
Centralization criticism
Infura is providing Ethereum infrastructure for building decentralized applications, allowing developers to deploy their solutions without hosting their own full node. In July 2019, the firm launched Infura+ and introduced three new subscription tiers.
In March 2019, digital asset research company Delphi Digital published a report pointing to the alleged centralization of the startup. The report argued that by using Infura, developers rely on the infrastructure entirely operated by ConsenSys and hosted by Amazon Web Services, which creates a single point of failure that decentralization is designed to avoid.
In late September, ConsenSys launched the Impactio platform to bring transparency into philanthropy in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund.
Coinbase-Backed Securitize Launches Compliance Tool for P2P Transactions
Securitize, a digital securities platform backed by major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, has announced a new tool that assures that secondary market transactions of digital securities are compliant with regulations.
According to an April 22 blog post, Securitize Instant Access streamlines the creation of compliant peer-to-peer transactions by investors in private securities. To ensure that transactions meet the necessary requirements, Securitize uses smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
To initiate a transaction, investors privately create an indication of interest to sell their digital securities with a web link, which can be posted and shared across various channels. The blog post further detailed:
“Once an issuer decides to enable the Instant Access feature, any potential buyer who has KYC/AML approval from, and is registered with the issuer, can purchase the digital security from the holder if the holder has shared the transaction link with them. Only transactions that meet these KYC/AML requirements and adhere to any applicable transfer restrictions imposed by the issuer via the DS Protocol will be permitted.”
Securitize is currently offering instant trading of private securities linked to five companies, including venture capital funds, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Carlos Domingo told Bloomberg.
Securitize’s steady development
In March, Securitize and Tokyo-based LIFULL revealed plans to jointly create a funding platform using digital securities to invest in real estate. The new platform aims to revitalize homes in Japan that have fallen into disuse or been abandoned entirely.
Last August, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission registered Securitize as a transfer agent. The registration allows the company to operate as an official keeper of records about changes of ownership in securities.
