NexChangeNOW Daily Briefing – Wednesday March 11, 2020

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    What Moved Global Markets

    1. After a historic sell-off on Monday, Oil prices jumped by almost 8% on Tuesday. Stocks rose in wild trading on Tuesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded 585 points higher, or 2.5%. Earlier in the day, the 30-stock average was up 945 points. The S&P 500 was up 2.7% after jumping 3.7%. The Nasdaq Composite advanced as much as 3.8% before trading 2.9% higher. 
    2. U.S. President Donald Trump said he will ask Congress for a payroll tax cut and other “very major” stimulus moves to ease the economic pain of the coronavirus, but the details remain unclear. Japan’s government said it planned to spend more than $4 billion in a second package of steps to cope with the virus. U.S. shale producers, including Occidental Petroleum Corp, meanwhile, rushed to deepen spending cuts that could reduce production.
    3. White House officials told CNBC that Trump pitched a 0% payroll tax rate that would last through the rest of this year.
    4. Coronavirus update: The situation in the US might worsen in the nearest future, according to health officials. Harvard University asked its students not to return to campus after Spring Break and said it would begin moving to virtual classes.
    5. The rapid spread of coronavirus has wiped almost a third – or $70 billion – off the world’s top 20 listed airlines and reshuffled global rankings, elevating Air China into third place behind U.S. rivals.

    Crypto Prices (from CoinMarketCap)
    Bitcoin: Up 0.13% to $7,928.54
    Total trading volume (24h): $42.05+ billion USD

    Ethereum: Down 0.23% to $201.76
    Total trading volume (24h): $17.82+ billion USD

    3 biggest movers 24 hours
    Biggest Mover 1: Contentos (COS) is up 365.98% to $0.054951
    Biggest Mover 2: HollyWoodCoin (HWC) is up 161.50% to $0.000238
    Biggest Loser: Agrocoin (AGRO) is down 66.87% to $0.034263

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

    1. Bitcoin derivatives traders were anything but bearish during Monday’s crash, data reveals — options volumes set a giant $200 million all-time high. According to figures collated by monitoring resource Skew Markets, volatility which saw BTC/USD descend to two-month lows of $7,625 sparked a surge in options trading. Aggregate volume from CME Group and exchanges such as Deribit and OKEx totalled $198 million as the week began. The figure easily eclipses the previous record of around $175 million seen in February.
    2. Tether (USDT) is now available on Aave, a non-custodial lending platform formerly known as ETHLend. The top stablecoin by market capitalization appears to be signalling its move into Ethereum (ETH) decentralized finance (DeFi).
    3. Binance has officially apologized to the Steem community following its involvement in a major centralization scandal involving Tron founder Justin Sun. In its letter posted on March 10, Binance affirmed that it “stays neutral and has no interest in on-chain governance beyond the Binance ecosystem. Binance also provided records of its powering down of all the 31,730,000 STEEM tokens it had staked in support of Justin Tron’s allegedly “hostile takeover” of the blockchain.

    Other Specialties
    Fintech: Cybersecurity accreditation and certification non-profit Crest has been awarded a grant of $1.4m (£1m/€1.2m) by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help increase cybersecurity capacity in African and Asian markets and provide safe and secure access to digital financial services for the unbanked.
    Healthtech: The NHS is working with Google, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to provide the public with accurate information about COVID-19 and prevent the spread of “fake news”. Google will provide easy access to verified NHS guidance when someone searches for information on the virus, while both Twitter and Facebook are directing users to the NHS website. Twitter published a blog outlining its efforts to protect public conversation around the outbreak, which include launching a search prompt feature to ensure “credible, authoritative content” appears at the top of your searches. It also worked with the NHS to suspend a false account posing as a hospital, putting out inaccurate information about the number of cases. The NHS is working with Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to verify more than 800 NHS accounts, including hospital trusts and local commissioning groups with blue ticks. It has also introduced new ‘knowledge panels’ – prominent pop-out boxes of information – as part of Google search on mobile, to provide NHS information about more than 250 health conditions, including Covid-19.
    AI: Researchers have discovered evidence that nature really does make us happy, by using AI to analyze photos on social media. The National University of Singapore team used automated image recognition tech to analyze more than 31,500 photos uploaded by people from 185 different countries. They found that images tagged as #fun, #vacations, and #honeymoons were more likely to contain elements of nature such as plants than images tagged as #daily or #routines. The results also showed that countries where more photos of nature were tagged as #fun — such as Costa Rica and Finland — tended to have high rankings in the World Happiness Report 2019.
    Smart cities: Bloomberg Philanthropies has launched a new programme of support to help American mayors respond to the rapidly evolving coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic. It aims to provide cities with virtual technical assistance, coaching and accurate information to help local leaders on the frontlines of the public health crisis. The network will also provide mayors with up-to-date information on the virus from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and work to help them understand how to act on it.

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