The Cryptocurrency Informer

(00:25) As most of us in the crypto space can attest to, exchanges are a dime a dozen. There are some, like Coinbase (Pro) and Binance, that most people in the space of heard of and/or used. There are others that never quite penetrated the mainstream crypto audience like the aforementioned exchanges. OKEx, although perhaps not a household name in the United States, certainly ranks up there with some of the aforementioned exchange giants. On CoinMarketCap, OKEx is listed as the 11th exchange, based on traffic, liquidity, and trading volumes – not to mention,  they are the self-proclaimed world’s largest futures trading platform. Plus, they are one of the largest exchanges in China. All that to say that OKEx has certainly earned it’s position as one of the giants in the world of cryptocurrency exchanges.

As the cliché goes though, the bigger they are, the harder they fall – and it certainly seems like OKEx is falling pretty hard today.

(01:14) Two big events occurred for OKEx today – all withdrawals were suspended, and the founder of the exchange, Mingxing Xu, was reportedly arrested. OKEx is understandably attempting to save some face and act like everything is alright. According to a press release from OKEx: “As of 3:00 am UTC today, Oct. 16, OKEx has suspended digital asset withdrawals temporarily. We would like to assure users that the security of funds on OKEx has not been affected. Additionally, all other operations on OKEx are functioning normally.” This news obviously doesn’t bode well for any OKEx users that have coins currently held on the exchange.

(01:50) Regarding the alleged arrest, Cointelegraph reports “OKEx founder Mingxing Xu, also known as Star Xu, has reportedly been questioned by the police, Chinese news agency Caixin reported today. According to the report, the executive was investigated “at least a week ago” and has also been absent from work for some time.” There are reports that the arrest and the suspension of withdrawals are not directly related, but the timing certainly seems to indicate otherwise. Hopefully this will get sorted soon, but it’s one more in a long list of exchanges currently being accused of illicit behaviors.

(02:23) There’s been a lot of hype this week about FIL, aka Filecoin. Filecoin is an ICO from a few years back that raised over $200 million dollars – however, this week, the coin has gone live. Filecoin calls itself the “decentralized cloud” with a superior network and a dynamic distributed storage network for data, Coindesk says “The new token is very likely to make history as the fastest newly live blockchain to reach a market capitalization of over $1 billion”, and Shapeshift CEO Erik Voorhees says “this is easily one of the most professionally built, carefully-executed, and *valuable* projects that has emerged from the ICO era.”

(03:00) A good amount of hype, and it’s certainly interesting to see the launch of an ICO that wasn’t actually some sort of scam. So, aside from buzzwords, what exactly is Filecoin and what does it do? According to the Filecoin documentation: “Filecoin is a peer-to-peer network that stores files, with built-in economic incentives to ensure files are stored reliably over time. Users pay to store their files on storage miners. Storage miners are computers responsible for storing files and proving they have stored the files correctly over time. Anyone who wants to store their files or get paid for storing other users’ files can join Filecoin. Available storage, and the price of that storage, is not controlled by any single company. Instead, Filecoin facilitates open markets for storing and retrieving files that anyone can participate in.”

The Filecoin blockchain has a native crypto, FIL, and the storage miners are paid FIL to store user data. With the launch, a number of exchanges have listed FIL – however, as of recording, we aren’t seeing a huge spike in price like we saw with the recent UNI token. In fact, the coin seems to be slowly dipping – although, that’s no indication of the overall success of the blockchain, or even the coin itself, given how early it is.

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That’s it for this week’s episode of The Cryptocurrency Informer. For all the tax pro listeners, congratulations on finishing the extended tax season! Don’t forget – if you want to read more about each of these stories, go to talk.bitcoin.tax and click on The Cryptocurrency Informer link. Every episode is accompanied by a number of relevant links for each story, so you can do your own in-depth research on the topics that interest you.

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