The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) is aiming to boost innovation in cryptocurrency and distributed ledger technology (DLT), by easing some of the existing rules.
FINMA has published a guideline for the upcoming FinTech license, which will allow FinTech projects to raise outside capital of up to 100 million Swiss francs ($100 million) with relaxed requirements.
The license, due to be introduced on January 1, 2019, will allow FinTech projects to accept public deposits, as long as they are not invested and no interest is paid on them. Another important requirement: an institution with a FinTech license must have its registered office and conduct its business activities in Switzerland.
A television host in New Zealand has become the victim of a bitcoin scam, with fraudsters impersonating him to promote a suspicious cryptocurrency business.
According to The Next Web, the scammers claimed Daniel Faitaua doubled his money instantly after they showed him how to buy $250 worth of crypto on-air. But Faitaua said that has never owned any bitcoin, and any claims to the contrary are simply false.
“I just want you to stop for a second. Wherever you are, just stop,” Faitaua said during an on-air plea. “A number of websites have been posting a story saying this show, Breakfast, had a young bitcoin investor on for a chat, and during the chat, he helped me invest money, which I made a huge profit on straight away … Well, that’s a lie. It is fake news, and whatever you call it — it’s not true. It is a scam,” he said. “The interview they say we did never happened. I have never invested in bitcoin, and therefore I never made the profit they say I did.”
In other news, virtual asset market Bitfinex and its sister Ethereum ERC20-orientated exchange Ethfinex announced that customers will now be able to trade all six major stablecoins on both exchanges.
“At Bitfinex and Ethfinex we are dedicated to providing a high quality, unbiased meeting place for every ecosystem and customer,” the company write in a post on Medium. “We were the first to introduce alternative stablecoins onto our platform, including Dai (an Ethereum collateralised stablecoin), and now proudly introduce the following established stablecoins: USDC, True USD, Paxos, and Gemini USD. All stablecoins on Bitfinex and Ethfinex will be traded against USD.”
And Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), one of the top-five hospitals in the country, announced that it is partnering with Korean blockchain startup MediBloc to find better ways to store and share patient data.
Synho Do, director of the Laboratory of Medical Imaging and Computation, a joint venture of MGH and Harvard Medical School, told CoinDesk that the hospital is expanding research in areas “from medical image analysis to health information exchange by leveraging our cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
Currently, hospitals, research bodies, insurance and pharmaceutical companies all keep their own patient data that can’t be shared securely and are usually in incompatible formats.
“In collaboration with Medibloc, we aim to explore potentials of blockchain technology to provide secure solutions for health information exchange, integrate healthcare AI applications into the day-to-day clinical workflow, and support [a] data sharing and labeling platform for machine learning model development,” explained Do.
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