Gemini Europe is planning an expansion on the European continent and is playing the cards right lately. In the new move, the United Kingdom and EU affiliate of the Winklevoss twins' US based crypto exchange Gemini appointed a new chief compliance and money laundering reporting officer.This is part of the expansion of the firm into the transatlantic market. The new appointee called Blair Halliday will oversee Gemini Europe and its compliance program in the region. A press release published on January 28 showed that he will be based in London and will report directly to the managing director at the exchange of UK and Europe, the former executive at Sterling Bank Julian Sawyer.As the new Gemini Europe chief compliance officer, Halliday will control the operations of the exchange in Europe. His experience as a compliance officer for the crypto finance firm Circle across the Europe, the Middle East and Africa region showed that he successfully directed the firm's global anti-money laundering compliance program.Before this role, he was the executive director of financial crime and compliance at the UK fintech firm CashFlows and a CCO at the New York Stock Exchange owner International Currency Exchange.The cryptocurrency news also show that Halliday worked at the Royal Bank of Scotland for 14 years in many different roles focused on tackling financial crime. This is why the Winklevoss twins decided to approach him as an expert in compliance.For those of you who did not follow the altcoin news, the Winklevoss twins released the "Crypto Needs Rules" ad campaign in 2019 which made a very strong bid to remold cryptocurrency's image with an emphasis on robust regulation and compliance-driven practices.

“The concept of thoughtful regulation itself was first developed out of the lessons learned in these [E.U. and U.K.] markets over centuries. Our ethos — to ask permission, not forgiveness — was a first in the crypto industry and both honors and continues to build on Europe and the UK’s tradition of thoughtful regulation,” Cameron Winklevoss said in a blog post in December 2019.

At the time, one senior Gemini executive also noted that the firm believes crypto investors "deserve the exact same protections" and standards as people in traditional markets.

The cryptocurrency news today show that the offline cold storage cryptocurrency wallet service GK8 is now offering a bug bounty of up to $250,000 to the first person who can hack its products. The wallet creator offers a relatively big sum for hacking the GK8 which is essentially a "hack-proof digital vault" which needs to be in direct or indirect connection to the Internet.As such, they will place 14 Bitcoin (BTC) (at a price of over $125,000 now) in its wallet. Therefore, anyone who succeeds in breaking into this wallet will pocket the proceeds and an additional $125,000 prize.The bounty program is designed and will run from February 3 through February 4. According to the Israel-based wallet creator GK8, the high-security custody solution for digital asset storage will allow banks and other institutions to fully access and manage their cryptocurrency holdings and related information without connecting to the Internet.The firm's website claims that the product has been designed to "minimize the wallet’s attack surface and block attackers' influence on security-critical components.” Also, the wallet creator has pointed to state-sponsored attacks and stealth APT (advanced persistent threat) cyber threats.The Zcash news show that one founding scientist in this cryptocurrency named Eran Tromer has endorsed the project and contended that the cold wallet solution developed by GK8 will set a new standard for high security cryptocurrency custody offerings.

“Having only outbound unidirectional communication and then building the rest of the cryptographic protocols around it using multi-party computation, validation protocols, the transmission of policies to the environment, all while preventing the injection of malicious inputs from the internet back into the cold wallet," the developer said.

In an industry where it is always need to be one step ahead of potential threat vectors, bug bounty programs like these from the wallet creator GK8 and others serve as a useful "stress test" for cryptocurrency firms which are probing the security of their solutions.In December 2019, we saw that the AirSwap decentralized exchange protocol also announced the launch of its bounty program with rewards up to 20,000 in DAI, without setting a time limit for the bug holders.

The Deutsche Bank researchers claim that cash will maintain its importance for a while even with the growing usage of cryptocurrencies and other forms of digital currencies as we are reading in today’s cryptocurrency latest news.In a January 2020 report that was published by the Deutsche Bank researchers claimed that besides the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies and the hostility towards cash payments by some governments we cannot see the end of the cash era. An excerpt from the report reads:

“Cash is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. However, a real digital payment revolution has been underway for the past ten years. Cash is losing ground as a payment method. Several countries have recently removed large notes worth $100 or more and implemented policies to replace traditional payment methods with digital solutions.”

 In Asia, electronic payments are the norm, gaining this status only in recent years, with platforms like Alipay and WeChat pay experiencing massive transaction numbers. For the Peoples Republic of China, the war on cash is coinciding with the efforts of the government in Beijing to gain more surveillance and bigger control of the financial dealings of its population.As it was reported in a previous occasion by DC Forecast, other nations like Malaysia and Australia are set to limit cash transactions. According to the report, the drives for decreasing cash payments by various states have the aim to take out of circulation large currency notes which are supposedly used widely for black market deals.But Deutsche Bank researchers claim that the end for cash is not in the near future as few reports show people still prefer to have cash as a security instrument in the eyes of expanding uncertainties and dangers in the financial and political world. It appears that even billionaires like Warren Buffet are increasing their cash holdings. Reports emerged in the second half of 2019 that Berkshire Hathaway which is owned by Buffet, is sitting on a $128 billion cash pile, the largest cash bucket the company ever had since before the 2008 crash.  While rejecting the argument of cryptocurrency surpassing cash, the Deutsche Bank report claimed that private digital currencies pose certain risks to global financial and political stability. After the publication of Libra, the digital currency of Facebook, few governments started to consider the creation of their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

CherrySwap v2 is an automated market maker that makes rate swaps and shows how DeFi can absorb the traditional finance by simply creating a similar mechanism in a permissionless manner so let’s find out more in the upcoming latest blockchain news.Bitcoin was the direct result of the crypto analysts and cryptographers that experimented in the world of finance and after 11 years, the alternative cryptocurrencies are creating a new wave of experimentation. This is why it is also very important to establish a solid understanding of basic financial operations. CherrySwap is a crypto-based money market maker protocol that works on improving the interest rate swaps.The interest rate swaps are a very simple way of hedging interest rate risk or simply making money on a position. There are two sides to the trade and if one side pays a fixed interest rate and receives payment based on the floating interest rate, the other side will receive a fixed interest rate and will pay out the other party based on the floating rate. These instruments are traded against usually against the benchmark such as the London Inter-bank offered rate and this rate is calculated by the top banks in London. This is often used as a global standard for finances. CherrySwap introduces a mechanism where the investors can be a part of the liquidity pool and earn profits without needing a lot of money or capital.In order to become a liquidity provider, one has to deposit DAI into the CherrySwap contract to mint an equal amount of CherryDAI. This Dai is then lent out on the Compound and the liquidity provider can earn profits through the pool rewards for putting money into the pool. The traders can take positions against the liquidity pools so the pool can take long and short positions and if more traders take positions on one side, the cost will increase. This feature doesn’t improve the pool profitability if the traders pay the increased cost but can serve as a rebalancing mechanism for the liquidity pool utilization.The usage has a huge impact on liquidity and if the utilization reaches 100 percent, this means that there is money in the contracts to be taken out. based on the Compound, CherrySwap contracts are likely for DAI interest rates and the contracts are not tied to any treasury bond index that can make up to $500 trillion swap market.