Crypto Blog

Welcome to a brief overview of the Ethos Team. The title was not click bait in anyway. You are about to be introduced to a team unlike any other in the Crypto Space. A true band of Heroes that exhibit and hold all the right qualities and traits needed for success when embarking upon a Crypto adventure as challenging as the one that lie before them: Mass Adoption.

Shingo Lavine – aka Superman – Founder and CEO – the leader of this band of super heroes!

Ethos is Shingo’s brainchild and is deeply passionate about Ethos’ mission of bringing cryptocurrency to the masses. Aged just 20 he has assembled an impressive world-class team of elite engineers and executives for the Ethos opportunity.

Shingo is the author of the original Ethos Whitepaper “Democratizing Cryptocurrency.” It is his vision and goal that all others that stand beside him have chosen to follow and support him with.

Stephen Corliss – aka Ironman – Ethos’s Jewel in their crown – the guy that has age, experience, charisma and an edge over everybody else in this technologically edged game.

Responsible for Ethos’s global corporate strategy and company expansion. Ex-COO of BlackRock. Took their sell side business from analogue to digital and was instrumental in ensuring cross border activities adhered to regulatory requirements. Was instrumental in achieving daily trade volumes in excess of $300bln. He has experience coming out of his eyeballs!

Vishal Karir – aka Batman – The brains of the operation and the guy with all the money!

Vishal holds the CFA qualification, is a Portfolio Manager and Quantitative Investment Researcher with over 17 years of investment and technology experience at BlackRock and Morgan Stanley.

He was responsible for the development and management of a range of BlackRock model portfolios. This is the guy that will help mastermind the “One Click” feature of the Universal Wallet.

Tim Simmons – aka Cyborg – The guy that can literally speak to computers and make magic things happen.

Tim leads engineering and development efforts at Ethos. He was the Lead Software Architect at Citrix, a $13B multi-national software company, where he led development of their remote access technology powering their Fortune 500 customer’s distributed cloud scale server farms.

Tim was also CTO for iTrade and Roper Technologies, a $26B diversified industrial and private equity company with investments in technology and SaaS. 

Kevin Dean Pettit – aka The Green Lantern – whatever this guy can imagine materializes.

Prior to Ethos, Kevin worked as a Portfolio Management Senior at Freddie Mac, where he was responsible for bringing new products to market and formulating and implementing the strategy of a $22B investment portfolio.

Christine Mangosing – aka Wonder Woman – Simply because she a woman not to be reckoned with for all the right reasons!

Christine is the Senior Designer at Ethos, responsible for helping establish the brand’s visual language. Christine has accumulated over 12 years experience developing rich and evocative brand identities and creative solutions for a roster of clients that include Toyota Canada, Red Bull Music Academy, Warner Music, Barrick Gold, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Rocscience Inc.

This supreme collection of super heroes have many sidekicks that are ready and able to assist them at the drop of a hat and that are just as valuable and crucial in achieving Shingo’s/Superman’s goal of Democratizing Cryptocurrency and bringing Crypto to the masses!

Ethos is a game changer for this space and will without a doubt over the next year make it considerably easier and more attractive for the mainstream layer of retail investors to access. Our band of heroes are only just getting started on their adventure and there are still plenty of challenges and battles that they will need to fight and win ahead of them.

Good luck to the Ethos Team.

It depends on the Investor

In my day to day job I am a Financial Adviser. I use TA daily and consider it an important factor to consider before investing. Why? Because it can sometimes help establish the rationale behind price movements and give an insight into how the wider investor base is feeling.

Many Retail and Institutional investors in this space (maybe as much as 30%) believe TA is important and they use it to determine the majority of their trading strategies.

Whether you believe in TA or not, it does drive a large portion of price action in whatever market you are investing in due to the number of investors basing their decisions off of it.

How important is TA to consider in Crypto?

In my own experience using TA has proven fruitful when choosing to enter or exit a position. However, I personally believe that Fundamentals trump TA where Crypto is concerned.

The disparity between the Whales (Institutional investors) and Retail investors is huge in this space. This is largely the reason, along with a few others, as to why Crypto is so volatile and difficult to apply TA to. Whales have the ability to dictate price action and preemptively trade positions that they will trade out of at a later date after they have moved the price in their favour.

How do they do this?

Coinmarketcap indicates that Cryptocurrency as an entire market is valued at around $375b. Some believe this to be a hugely over inflated valuation. The same people estimate that for every $1 invested, $50 is added to the perceived market cap. If this is true, then a more realistic valuation for the Market would be around $7.5b in terms of FIAT.

If this same ratio is applied to daily trading volume then Cryptocurrency is sitting at around $400m (based on a daily average of $20b).

This then means that if a Whale (or a collection of Whales (a Pod!)) has $100m dollars to trade with, then theoretically speaking they would control 25% of the markets trading volume for the day.

I recognise that this is very much napkin math and pure speculation. But even if the ratios are halved, it still puts too much control of the market in the hands of Whales. This is where I’d like to see regulation step in. I’ll save my thoughts for another time on that one.

Is Technical Analysis a modern day Religion?

Getting back to TA.

TA appears to be a mathematical based belief system that cannot be proven or disproven. If enough people choose to use it and implement it, it essentially becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. TA attempts to represent crowd psychology, enthusiasm and sentiment through numbers.

In my belief, TA does work and can be used as part of a trading/investing strategy but as things currently stand with; next to no regulation, a potentially huge variation in realistic valuations, a huge disparity in wealth, and a potentially premeditated and coordinated effort to manipulate prices by Whales TA will struggle to get a real foothold.

The only answer in my opinion is to consider both TA and Fundamentals when entering or exiting a position. Remember, it’s a game of emotions. The charts reflect how we feel as investors. The TA simply try’s to turn those emotions into numbers on a page.

Just some of my own thoughts.

Good Luck all!

• At last… – Finally, a US Judge has ruled that ‘Cryptocurrency is a Commodity’. A judgment such as this typically indicates that Regulation will follow shortly after. This ruling will make it easier for Regulators (the CFTC in particular) to now agree upon Regulation suited for the Crypto Market and to then have it passed by Congress. The CFTC have deemed Cryptocurremcy a Commodity since 2015, but until now have not had any direct or indirect official judicial body share this view. Another step forward for Crypto entering the mainstream as it gains specific classification.
  
• Twitter Plague – Just as Crypto has risen in popularity so have the number of Scammers attempting to defraud. At the moment Twitter is beginning to feel like the film Bladerunner. A constant battle to try and identify who are the real Humans and who are the ro”bots”. It’s actually really getting out of hand and the levels of sophistication are only increasing. Many of the larger accounts on Twitter have needed to issue warnings almost on a daily basis to their followers warning them if the potential Scams associated with their accounts. Twitter has now chosen to acknowledge this increased fraudulent activity with an aim to stamp it out or at least reduce it in part. No official statement or strategy has been issued by Twitter but they have claimed that they are working with other platforms (such as Facebook) to stop these attacks at source. Jack Dorsey, Twitter Co-Founder and CEO said simply “We are on it!” Time will tell.
  
  • In the mean time, DO NOT “Send XX to XX Account in exchange to receive XXX back”. You will be waiting a very long time for any return.

• Bitcoin is losing its Currency use case – Bitcoin transaction volumes have reached a new two year low even after the much awaited implementation of SegWit. It appears SegWit has arrived too late to the party to make a real difference and build on BTC’s use case of one day becoming a currency used to trade…
  
  • Why are transaction volumes dropping though? My thoughts on this are simple. The HODL effect and FOMO. Crypto investors have become so fearful that they might miss out on the next big parabolic move upwards that no one is using their Bitcoin, or Altcoins to buy anything with besides other coins, essentially creating a rotation of FIAT in Crypto.
    
  • The HODL effect has now reached an all time high. Volumes are at a two year low and we are sitting at a Market Cap of $450bln. We had the same transaction volumes in March 2016 when the Market Cap was just $8bln. The market is paralyzed. Very little new money is entering the market since the recent lows back in early February. The market is in a stagnation period with no one wanting to move.
    
  • Add to this the $250bln that entered the market back in December at all time high prices and we have even more HODLERS awaiting a potential breakeven point before they potentially liquidise their positions.
    
  • All the time transaction volumes fall/stagnate, one of the fundamental use cases for Crypto, being a means to trade with is being diluted. Which will, indirectly or directly, affect the perceived value of the coin in question. It feels as though we are in a vicious cycle now with no one wanting to make the first move.
    
  • How do we get out of this? We need a catalyst. We need a partnership or real world infrastructure disruption. The Novelty is over and now it is time to bring Crypto to life. We urgently need to get out of Project/ICO mode and move onto implementation and disruption mode!
    
  • We need real world application or a partnership that everyone can get behind and remember that Crypto has a use case and that is to improve upon current infrastructure. It needs to demonstrate clearly and practically how commercially and socially valuable it can be in day to day living/working/playing. It only takes one of the 1500 in circulation… C’mon Crypto – I’m still Bullish!

• Twitter Co-Founder to help Crypto penetrate mainstream – Jack Dorsey, co-founder and ex CEO of Twitter launched his current Business, Square back in 2012. Square specialises in providing low cost, mobile based Point of Sale facilities and services to retailers internationally. The original inspiration for Square occurred to Jack Dorsey in 2009 when Jim McKelvey (a St. Louis friend of Dorsey at the time) was unable to complete a $2,000 sale of his glass faucets and fittings because he could not accept credit cards.* Jack is considered a forward thinking entrepreneur and disrupter of existing infrastructure. Jack has chosen to turn his attention to Bitcoin. His aim is to look at ways and means of integrating the use of Bitcoin alongside his existing payments infrastructure. Square use a combination of offline and online payment systems to ensure that retailers can transact in as many ways as possible. Bitcoin’s transactional issues has largely stemmed from its lack of scalability. Previously all transactions were required to be processed online/onchain in real-time. With recent offline/offchain orientated tech upgrades to Bitcoin it is quite possible that Dorsey is looking to connect the dots between Square and Bitcoin’s tech to enable more people globally to make use of his payments system. Win win in my view for both parties.
• Tax Authorities start their annual hunt – With the Tax Year coming to end across many jurisdictions around the world, it should come as no surprise that Tax authorities have started looking for a piece of the Crypto Pie gains that have been made throughout 2017. Tax authorities are targeting the source of trades, the Centralised Exchanges. It was widely reported last year that Coinbase were approached by the US Tax authority – the IRS. Coinbase were taken to court and the result was that they were asked to provide the trading records of 13,000 individuals in order to assess if tax were owed. The Belgian authorities have now chosen to do the same, targeting a Finnish based exchange. This approach by Tax authorities is likely to continue as long as Crypto regulation remains lax and centralised exchanges exist.
  • We have created a guide that might help you better understand what tax if any is owed and how to pay it – Cryptocurrency Taxation.
• Amazon considers its own Cryptocurrency… and further world domination – Lendedu.com a Survey company polled 1000 Amazon customers who used Amazon within the last 30 days and asked a range of questions based on what additional services would they consider using if Amazon launched them. The survey indicated that over 51% of customers would be happy using an Amazon based Crypto Coin, this rose to 57% of Prime users. The survey extended to other areas of finance such as Bank Accounts, Savings Accounts, Mortgages, Loans and Insurance. The results were largely positive and in favour of using Amazon for these services. The results seem to be reflective of the overall trust that Amazon consumers have in Amazon. 52.6% stated that they trust Amazon “very much so” with only 1.93% claiming to be “very skeptical”.
  • This report comes at a very appt time. Many Crypto projects are trying hard to disrupt, integrate and replace many existing systems. Our question in our last 2 Miniute Brief was based on “What is stopping any of the major players and regulatory authorities from starting their own Cryptocurrency?” It would seem nothing. It would also seem that the large majority of consumers, based on the survey results, would feel comfortable using a form of Crypto based technology with existing, well established and trusted organisations. Will this help or hinder Crypto’s development and adoption is still a total unknown…

• BOE Governor talks about the advantages and disadvantages of Cryptocurrency – In a speech at the Scottish Economics Conference Bank of England (BOE) Mark Carney made a number of sweeping statements, some positive, some not so much. Let’s break down his most poignant ones..
  • “Cryptocurrencies have failed as a form of money”.
    
    • Ok, I have to give him this one. Yes, fundamentally Crypto so far has failed at being a “true currency”. By that I mean a fair means to buy and sell goods and services. Some will argue this but let’s be fair, how does that guy who bought a Pizza for 10,000 BTC now feel? Not great. I’m sure there have been a whole host of similar situations using alternative coins. As things stand Crypto is largely being used as an Investment vehicle and a sphere in which to test and implement new Blockchain based technology. Eventually, when regulation steps in, prices will start to stabilise and only then might Crypto start to be used as a true form of currency.
  • “The time has come to hold the crypto-asset ecosystem to the same standards as the rest of the financial system,”.
    
    • This is a great statement and one that I am glad the BOE Governor himself has made. Crypto needs credibility. It is managing to garner a large portion of media limelight but only because of its volatility. As ‘hodlers’ we are now used to this and embrace it. Most of ‘Average Joe Public’ are not and never will be until they feel its “safe”. By safe I mean as safe as the DOW Jones has been this past month – one rollercoaster to another, one with a park attendant at the helm and one without.
    • Being held to the same standards as FIAT and other regulated Financial Assets and Activities places Crypto on the same playing field. It allows the institutional players to legitimately and directly participate in Cryptocurrency. Yes, it will have an immediate adverse effect upon the freedoms and growth rates we now enjoy with crypto, but it will ultimately lead to a better Crypto market. It’ll drive out ‘shitcoins’ and give a solid base for quality coins to build from.
  • “For many reasons the crypto-assets in your digital wallets are unlikely to be the future of money,” “But that is not meant to dismiss them. Their core technology is already having an impact. Bringing crypto-assets into the regulatory tent could potentially catalyze innovations to serve the public better.”
    • This statement is something I think about often and one that I believe is a huge threat to the entire Crypto space. What is stopping any of the major players and regulatory authorities from starting their own Cryptocurrency. ICO’s pop up every few days, we invest almost blindly into them believing that they might be the next big thing. But what would happen if Amazon, Facebook, JP Morgan, the BoE, the FED… created their own Crypto? They have immediate “credibility” (kind of). Yes, this goes against the undercurrent of anti-establishment embedded within Crypto Culture but let’s not forget “We” are still small fry. Cryptocurrency still only accounts for 0.3% of all Global Assets. It only takes one motivated large player to disrupt the disruptee. I know that there are many arguments that claim that this cannot happen and will not. But I disagree.
    • Yes, Crypto/Blockchain is the future but Mark Carney makes valid point when he says – “For many reasons the crypto-assets in your digital wallets are unlikely to be the future of money,”.
  • Lets see what regulation brings and the space evolves in 2018. I’m willing to bet that it will likely change in a way no one expected.