Faced with a whopping number of user signups, a very popular Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange has decided to limit new customers, Bloomberg reported.
Binance.com is adding “a couple of million” registered users every week, with 240,000 people signing up in a single hour on Wednesday (Jan. 10), chief executive Zhao Changpeng told Bloomberg Television. Binance was the world’s most active crypto exchange over the past 24 hours, according to Coinmarketcap.com, representing $6 billion worth of digital currency trades. At 11 percent of trading volume, Tron was the exchange’s most popular asset.
Another heavily traded cyrptocurrency, bitcoin, tumbled more than 12 percent from its high after South Korea’s Justice Minister Park Sang-ki said a bill is being prepared to ban all cryptocurrency trading on the country’s exchanges, CNBC reported. But the cryptocurrency rebounded – and gained back a little more than half its lost value – in a 7 percent rally after Reuters reported that South Korea’s presidential office said the planned ban “had not yet been finalized.”
In other bitcoin news, Goldman Sachs said bitcoin’s use as a real form of money is not as easy as it seems. In a CNBC report, the firm said while the cryptocurrency could thrive like a dollar, yen or euro, it would most likely face many challenges.
While the investment bank found some evidence that demand for cryptocurrencies comes from regions with “currency instability and/or capital controls,” other data suggests pure speculation. Inherently, bitcoin has been seen as speculative, as the cryptocurrency soared quadruple digits in 2017 alone.
In an ironic twist, attendees at a popular cryptocurrency conference will actually not be able to use bitcoin to pay for the event: The conference is only accepting cash, the New York Post reported. Due to network fees and congestion, organizers simply decided to institute a “no cryptocurrency” policy.
And one financial regulator that avoided investing in cryptocurrency regrets not doing so, CNBC reported. Bart Chilton, a former commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has long had concerns over cryptocurrency and has said since 2012 that it needs to be regulated.
And while Chilton said he would have sought an investigation into the currency’s “precipitous price changes” in 2017, Chilton said massive price volatility has since “mellowed out.”
“I wish I had been investing when I told everybody to be careful,” said Chilton, who now invests in bitcoin and Ethereum. “I had a lot of my friends that said, ‘You told me not to invest.’ They would have been millionaires.”
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