NexChangeNOW Daily Briefing – Friday April 17, 2020

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What Moved Global Markets
Coronavirus update:
– Global cases: More than 2,153,700
– Global deaths: At least 143,600

  1. Britain extended its nationwide lockdown for at least another three weeks. Switzerland will start gradually relaxing from April 27 the drastic restrictions it brought in last month.
  2. The number of people hospitalized for the novel coronavirus and related deaths in New York fell to their lowest levels in more than a week, adding to evidence that the hardest-hit state was finally controlling its spread.
  3. Three Chinese companies have vaccine candidates in clinical trials, CNBC’s Eunice Yoon reports from Beijing. One company, Nasdaq-listed Sinovac, has already started enlisting volunteers to receive the first experimental doses. The company aims to complete safety and efficacy trials by June.
  4. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 fell in choppy trading as Wall Street grappled with more concerns over the coronavirus outbreak and dismal economic data
  5. The 30-stock Dow was down about 200 points, or 0.8%, around 12:30 p.m. ET. The S&P 500 dipped 0.2%. The Nasdaq Composite, however, rose 0.55% as Amazon and Netflix reached record levels.

Crypto Prices (from CoinMarketCap)
Bitcoin: Up 6.78% to $7,095.36
Total trading volume (24h): $44.72+ billion USD

Ethereum: Up 11.26% to $170.28
Total trading volume (24h): $22.47+ billion USD

3 biggest movers 24 hours
Biggest Mover 1: Internxt (INXT) is up 69.39% to $1.28
Biggest Mover 2: Morpheus Labs (MITX) is up 55.73% to $0.006801
Biggest Loser: GoalTime N (GTX) is down 64.24% to $0.400612

What Moved Crypto Markets (i.e. digital assets)

  1. Ant Financial has launched its consortium blockchain platform “OpenChain”. The platform is aimed at helping SMEs deploy blockchain applications faster and cheaper. OpenChain’s transaction speed is said to be “several times faster than public blockchain platforms like Ethereum”. Ant Financial’s OpenChain supports use cases in industries such as supply chain finance, product provenance, digital invoices and charitable donations.
  2. Tone Vays’ account was banned by YouTube and a video that he uploaded this morning was removed for being “harmful and dangerous.” Youtube, therefore, continues to restrict, and outright ban accounts, producing cryptocurrency-related content. Both the channel and the video are now back online.
  3. Open Finance money market protocol, Compound, is officially moving to decentralize the nature of its governance by going live with a token-based model on Thursday. That basically means a single contract call that switches the admin from being an address controlled by the team to being the COMP token holder contract. Coinbase Custody is adding support for COMP and the governance process.
  4. The popular blockchain company Algorand announced a partnership today with Eterna Capital and Borderless Capital. The three entities launched a platform for projects looking to build decentralized applications on the Algorand blockchain network called Eterna Borderless Venture Studio (EBVS). The result is Eterna Borderless Venture Studio – the first venture studio for developers and entrepreneurs aspiring to explore Algorand’s blockchain network. EBVS will provide an array of tools and resources for creating decentralized applications and also support existing projects in transitioning to the Algorand platform.

Other Specialties
Fintech: Stripe, Silicon Valley’s most valuable start-up, has raised a $600 million funding round that boosts its valuation to $36 billion. The San Francisco-based payment company’s revenue is largely tied to growth in online shopping. The digital payments company highlighted the recent COVID-19 outbreak that is “pushing the economy online” and says several years of offline-to-online migration are being compressed into several weeks.
Healthtech: Mobile apps used by EU countries to help contain the spread of the coronavirus should comply with the bloc’s privacy rules and seek people’s consent to use personal data, but exclude location data, the European Commission said on Thursday. The Commission said the mobile apps should be approved by public health authorities, installed voluntarily and deleted once they are not needed. The apps should be based on anonymised data and work with other apps in other EU countries.
AI: The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a $30 million (£23.7m) grant to further research in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Smart cities: Real estate investment firm Rastegar Property Company announced plans to build a “living wall” on its 26-story condo development in Dallas. The wall, made up of more than 40,000 plants, is estimated to capture more than 1,600 pounds of carbon dioxide and produce 1,200 pounds of oxygen each year. The wall is expected to cost up to $1 million and will have internet of things (IoT) sensors to monitor the plants’ health.

NexChangeNOW Pick of the Day
Andreessen Horowitz Seeks to Raise $450M for New Crypto Fund