Germany

“World’s Largest” Darknet Marketplace Has Been Shut Down

12/01/2021 by Idelto Editor

Popular darknet marketplace DarkMarket, which hosted an estimated half million users, was shut down by German police authorities in a raid conducted over the weekend.

Announcements from prosecutors in the cities of Koblenz and Oldenburg indicated that the operator of the marketplace was headquartered somewhere near the border between Germany and Denmark. The marketplace’s server was officially turned off yesterday.

“Police in the northern city of Oldenburg ‘were able to arrest the alleged operator of the suspected world’s largest illegal marketplace on the darknet, the DarkMarket, at the weekend,’ prosecutors said in a statement,” according to Barron’s.

The illegal marketplace for drugs, SIM cards, stolen and fake credit card data, counterfeit money and more reportedly ramped up in usage this past year as many dealers had to take their businesses online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With just a few clicks of a button, customers could buy what they pleased from any of the 2,400-plus vendors on the marketplace by paying with the censorship-resistant currency bitcoin. There was a total of 4,650 BTC and 12,800 of the shitcoin XMR involved in over 320,000 transactions facilitated by the marketplace, according to prosecutors.

Darknet marketplaces have long been active use cases for bitcoin. Bitcoin’s censorship-resistant qualities assure that users can rely on it to buy goods on the black market, regardless of third-party restrictions or global borders. It should be noted, however, that the use of bitcoin is pseudonymous, not completely anonymous.

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German Stock Exchange’s Crypto Trading App Surpasses $1 Billion Volume This Year

07/12/2020 by Idelto Editor

Germany’s Second-Largest Stock Exchange’s Crypto Trading App Sees Record Volumes: 1 Billion Euros This Year

Cryptocurrency trading on the app provided by Germany’s second-largest stock exchange, Boerse Stuttgart, has hit record volumes. One billion euros in cryptocurrencies have been traded on the exchange’s crypto trading app, Bison, so far this year.

1 Billion Euros Crypto Trading Volume

Germany’s second-largest stock exchange, Boerse Stuttgart, announced Monday that its cryptocurrency trading app Bison has reached a total trading volume of 1 billion euros (over $1.2 billion) so far this year.

The cryptocurrency trading volume on Bison also hit record highs several days in November, exceeding 35 million euros. The number of active users of the Bison app has also increased by 180% to 206,000 during the same time period.

“The increase in user numbers and the trading volume on Bison in the current year have far exceeded our expectations,” commented Ulli Spankowski, CEO of Sowa Labs GmbH, the subsidiary of Boerse Stuttgart Digital Ventures GmbH which developed the Bison app. He added:

The positive development shows that with simple and reliable trading we are making the right offer in an exciting market environment for cryptocurrencies.

Using Boerse Stuttgart’s Bison app, users “can trade bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, bitcoin cash, and ripple (XRP) free of charge and at the prices displayed in the app,” the announcement details.

Boerse Stuttgart also operates a regulated cryptocurrency exchange called BSDEX (Börse Stuttgart Digital Exchange). The company explained that “BSDEX meets the regulatory requirements in accordance with section 2, paragraph 12 of the German Banking Act (Kreditwesengesetz).” Customers can use the exchange to buy and sell bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, and XRP.

What do you think about Boerse Stuttgart’s record crypto trading volumes? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Bitcoin’s Market Cap Is More Valuable Than the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights Reserves

05/11/2020 by Idelto Editor

At its current price per unit, the decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin’s market valuation has surpassed the overall value of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Drawing Rights market (SDR $281 billion). Since the massive global market rout on March 12, bitcoin has risen over 323% since the crypto asset’s $3,600 low in 2020.

The price of bitcoin has increased a great deal in 2020. Especially after the global market crash that wiped out nearly every commodity and stock under the sun. Even then, the price of bitcoin (BTC) had a hard time in mid-March, as prices shuddered to a low of $3,600 on ‘Black Thursday.’

At press time, with over 18.5 million BTC in circulation today, the crypto asset’s market cap is larger than the Special Drawing Rights market (SDR) created by the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF).

Bitcoin’s market valuation is currently hovering above $285.5 billion and data from the IMF shows that the 204.2 billion SDR (equivalent to about US$281 billion) is allocated to members. The SDR is considered a global reserve asset and it was developed to be a supplementary international reserve asset.

The SDR derives its value from a basket of five different fiat currencies including; the British pound sterling, the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen, and the Chinese renminbi.

Of course, with more than a quarter trillion U.S. dollars in value, BTC’s market cap has a long way to go to catch up with gold’s multi-trillion dollar market cap. At the time of publication, gold’s market valuation is around $9 trillion dollars.

The entire BTC market cap needs to jump over 3,500% from the current $285 billion market valuation today. Still, in October 2010, the price of a single bitcoin was around $0.12 per coin, and the value has increased by over 12.7 million percent since then.

Bitcoin’s market cap had already surpassed the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights market in 2017. But the price dropped and bitcoin saw a three-year-long period that many traders considered a bear market.

No one is certain how long it will stay above the IMF’s SDR this time around but many traders and analysts expect much higher BTC prices from here. Meanwhile, the entire crypto market cap of all 7,000+ digital assets is nearing the half a trillion mark ($426B). Bitcoin (BTC) is currently swapping for $15,613 per coin at 6:00 p.m. EST on Thursday evening.

What do you think about bitcoin (BTC) surpassing the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights market valuation? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

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German Court Rules to Limit Authorities’ Access to People’s Data

19/07/2020 by Idelto Editor

The German constitutional court has ruled that the police and intelligence officials have too much access to people’s personal mobile phone and internet data. A win for privacy activists, the court has directed the government to amend applicable laws to better protect the privacy of German citizens.

Current Data Access Laws Unconstitutional

The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled Friday that police and intelligence officials have excessive access to people’s personal phone and internet data. The court judged that the current laws which govern the manual procedure for obtaining information on subscriber data are unconstitutional and the privacy of German citizens should be better protected. Reuters described:

The court ruling is a victory for privacy activists who had said there were not sufficient limits on when and why federal police or domestic intelligence can access the names and addresses or even e-mail passwords and mobile phone PINs of users.

One of the lawsuits which the ruling is based on was filed in 2013 by Katharina Nocun and Patrick Breyer of the Pirate Party with around 6,000 joint plaintiffs. The court ruled that the authorities had been allowed to access data for causes that did not meet the threshold of legal interest and current laws violated the right of citizens to phone and internet privacy.

According to the court, “Neither the existing laws regulating under which circumstances telecoms companies such as Deutsche Telekom can hand over the data, nor the ones determining why investigators can request such data, are in line with Germany’s Constitution,” the publication conveyed.

This ruling means that Germany’s Telecommunications Act and several other laws will need to be revised. The court has ordered legislators to amend the laws by Dec. 31, 2021.

Friday’s decision followed another by the constitutional court that Germany’s Constitution protects the privacy of internet users living outside the country. The court ruled in May that the Federal Intelligence Service is bound by the Constitution when surveilling foreigners’ telecommunications. Noting that their current process of collecting and analyzing such data is unconstitutional, the court ordered that the unconstitutional parts of the law be rewritten by the end of 2021.

What do you think about the German constitutional court’s ruling? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Germany Takes Over FATF Presidency With New Guidance to Help Countries Apply Crypto Standards

04/07/2020 by Idelto Editor

Germany Takes Over FATF Presidency With Plans to Help Countries Fully Apply Crypto Standards

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has a new president as Germany took over the presidency from China. The intergovernmental organization also highlighted the need for more guidance on cryptocurrencies as many countries have not yet fully implemented its revised crypto standards. Another review has also been announced.

Germany Now Leads FATF

The FATF has a new president, Dr. Marcus Pleyer of Germany, who succeeded Xiangmin Liu of China. Pleyer serves as Deputy Director General in Germany’s Ministry of Finance. His two-year term as the president of the anti-money laundering watchdog began on June 1.

Pleyer presented his objectives at the lastest FATF virtual plenary, which took place on June 24 and published on Wednesday. Regarding the organization’s “new standards on virtual assets,” he declared: “The German Presidency intends to build on this work, focusing on the opportunities that technology can offer, by launching an initiative to monitor risks and explore opportunities.” Compared to China, Germany is much more crypto-friendly; the country began regulating the industry early this year and at least 40 banks in the country have reportedly expressed interest in offering crypto services.

At the plenary, the FATF also revealed the outcome of the 12-month review it conducted on how each country implemented its new cryptocurrency standards. Overall, “both the public and private sectors have made progress in implementing the revised FATF standards, in particular in the development of technological solutions to enable the implementation of the ‘travel rule’ for VASPs [virtual asset service providers],” the intergovernmental organization detailed.

While insisting that there is currently no need for revised standards on crypto assets, the FATF “did highlight the need for further guidance on virtual assets and VASPs.” The FATF believes, “This will help members of the FATF global network, many of whom have not yet fully implemented the revised standards, to make the necessary progress,” noting:

The FATF will continue its enhanced monitoring of virtual assets and VASPs by undertaking a second 12 month review by June 2021.

The subject of stablecoins was also discussed at the plenary, “particularly those that have the potential to be mass-adopted,” often referred to by regulators as “global stablecoins.” An example of a global stablecoin is the cryptocurrency libra, originally proposed by social media giant Facebook. The FATF has prepared a report on global stablecoins for the G20 as requested. The anti-money laundering watchdog believes that global stablecoins “could potentially cause a shift in the virtual asset ecosystem and have implications for money laundering and terrorist financing risks.”

The FATF further confirmed that its crypto standards apply to stablecoins and no amendments to the standards are required at this time. Nonetheless, it recognizes that “this is a rapidly evolving area and that it is essential to continue to closely monitor the ML/TF [money laundering/terrorism financing] risks of so-called stablecoins, including anonymous peer-to-peer transactions via unhosted wallets.”

What do you think about the FATF imposing its standards on the crypto industry? Let us know in the comments section below.

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