Earlier this month, the major cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced the introduction of a new Basic Attention Token derivative product. Following this announcement, BAT surged by nearly 11% in the coming altcoin news but one technical index estimates that a correction could be underway soon. A recent blog post showed that the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume revealed that it will launch a Basic Attention Token (BAT) perpetual contract on its crypto derivatives trading platform, Binance Futures. This instrument will be leveraged and paired against the stablecoin Tether (USDT). The BAT/USDT perpetual swap is scheduled to start trading on February 13 at 08:00 AM (UTC) where traders will be able to select any leverage from 1x to 50x. As the co-founder and CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao said, the high leverage on this contract makes it able to meet professional traders' demand for such products.

“We have seen an increase in institutional participation in trading, and these professional traders seek out the most efficient ways to trade very quickly, both in terms of cost and performance,” he explained.

The announcement about Basic Attention Token (BAT) and its price appears to have sparked a lot of interest among the market participants in the BAT which are pushing its price up significantly. Despite the bullish impulse, however, the cryptocurrency could face a retracement. As the launch date of the BAT perpetual contract nears, the demand for this cryptocurrency could increase. And if Basic Attention Token is able to close above the recent high of $0.322, it could climb to $0.369 or $0.394. Currently, BAT is ranked at the 31th position on the total cryptocurrency market cap chart, and is up by 2% on the day, trading at a price of $0.28. Its volume is significant and the cryptocurrency could post even more gains in the future as its acceptance on exchanges goes smoothly. Besides this altcoin, we can see that almost every coin is in the green today. The Bitcoin price news, for instance, are showing that BTC managed to rise by 3% only this afternoon and is at $10,135, again in the five digit zone and with a stable momentum. The biggest gainer in the top 10 is Tezos (XTZ) which added 12% to its price only today, getting closer to the $4 mark.

The South Korean ICO project Contents Protocol, shut down today and now the users will get the 26,877 ETH returned. There were many legal obstacles but also business challenges as well which were considered the reason for the shut down so let’s find out more in the crypto news today. The details can be seen on the modified homepage of the project. The public ICO ended in December 2018 and collected about 7,000 ETH which was the funding goal but the remaining 22,000 ETH came from the private token sales. The project was combined with a content platform that was developed by Watcha and the goal was to reward the platform users with the CPT Token once they interact with the platform and giving up their data. The platform failed to do so. The team was motivated with ‘’negative perception towards cryptocurrency’’ and said that the high volatility and complex user experience were the problems for the failed mission. They also struggled to find other content platforms. Finally, the team said there were ‘’uncertain legal and accounting risks’’ as another part of the reasons for the shutdown which required ‘’serious deliberation.’’ The team revealed that they spent about $1.5 million during operation time and most of the gathered money was going into legal and agency fees. More than 1,500 ETH was categorized as agency fees as well and a commission for conducting the ICO. The team of the South Korean ICO project was left with 27,000 ETH and 2,000 of which came from the ETH/Bitcoin trades. The company later sold 20,000 ETH for 500 BTC and was able to purchase more than 22,000 ETH for 490 BTC. The project will return the funds to all of the CPT token holders based on the 0.84 ETH for 100,000 CPT ratio which was calculated by measuring the circulating supply of the tokens. It is also worth knowing that this is not an investor refund. The supply calculations include all circulating tokens and some of them were allocated to the team, advisors and other members of the community. The portion of the team was reportedly sold to the market and the advisors’ portion is much less which still could be partially owned by the original holders. Contents Protocol didn’t reply to the requests for comment.

The Central Bank of Russia made the announcement in the second half of December that it will test its state-backed cryptocurrency within a regulatory sandbox. It looks like the test is now over and they have been completed as we are reading further in the following crypto news. According to a local report, the Central Bank of Russia has completed its pilot project for the issuance and circulation of “digital rights”. This gives the opportunity to digitize goods, services, securities, and other assets as well. Utilizing the platform, any organization can issue a digital token. According to the report, this will increase the opportunities for business when the question is attracting capital whilst at the same time creates new convenient investment tools for the consumers. Speaking on the subject was Ivan Bank, Director of Financial Technologies, who said:

“This was one of the largest sandbox projects. We studied in detail the new business model and its relevance to market needs. An important detail of the service is the use of hybrid tokens, which make it easy to adapt to the needs of business and consumers and provide flexible solutions to attract investment. Based on the results of the piloting, the Bank of Russia proposed to include in the draft federal law “On Digital Financial Assets” the provisions necessary for the introduction and development of such decisions in the emerging digital assets market, which were supported by government agencies and businesses.”

 According to the report, the blockchain platform will have the ability to begin its activities as soon as the federal law “On Digital Financial Assets” goes into force. Allegedly, this draft bill is already written. DC Forecasts back in December of 2019 that the Central Bank of the Russian Federation is testing cryptocurrencies backed by real assets in a regulatory sandbox. Then, the head of the bank, Elvira Nabiullina, noted:

“First of all, we need to understand what will be the advantages to our citizens, for business, for example, compared to instant payment systems, because the issue of the digital ruble can have serious consequences leading to changes in the structure of the financial market, deposits outflows, and funds redistribution.”

The Namecoin market capitalization reached $8.61 million and more than $3,1333.00 worth of the coins were traded on exchanges in the past 24 hours. Namecoin traded 0% against the US dollar during the one day period which ended on February 16^th. One namecoin can now be bought for $0.58 or 0.00005686 BTC on a few exchanges including C-Patex, Cryptopia, and WEX. Over the past few days, Namecoin was trading up 2.6% against the dollar and the namecoin market capitalization reached $8.61 million. Namecoin NMC cryptocurrency started trading 14.2 percent lower against the US dollar during the 1-day period and over the past week, Namecoin has traded 15.4 percent lower against the US dollar. Namecoin has a market cap of $7.23 million and about $7,305.00 worth of coins traded on exchanges in the past day as we are reading more in the Namecoin news today. One Namecoin NMC coin can be purchased now for about $0.49 or 0.0000498 BTC on crypto exchanges including Altcoin Trader, Cryptopia, YoBit, and C-Patex. Namecoin NMC is a proof-of-work coin that uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm and Its genesis date was April 13t, 2011. The total supply of the coin is 14,736,400 coins and the official Twitter account is @namecoin and the Facebook page is extremely accessible. In the recent altcoin news, we can see that, the popular crypto researcher and analyst Willy Woo posted on Twitter about his opinion on the type of altcoins of interest to investors and regardless how nuanced the altcoins are or manifested as protocol coins, utility coins and non-fungible coins, the only two types that have actual relevance to investors as Degenerators and Oscillators. On the other hand, there are only a few Oscillators and one of the most surprising examples of such a coin is Dogecoin (DOGE). The cryptocurrency was made as a joke and is now ranked at number 30 by its market capitalization and is considered as an Oscillator. Woo says that Dogecoin proves the store of value properties and to qualify, the coins have to keep up with Bitcoin/USD gains. In order to find oscillators, the coin has to oscillate around a horizontal line for at least one full bull-bear cycle which is around every four years but more than one cycle is better.