Bitcoins and Cryptobits around the World

Ukraine, Russia, Venezuela Beat China & US in Crypto Adoption

• Chainalysis announced yesterday the countries that earned the top three spots in the Global Crypto Adoption Index which was, Ukraine, Russia, and Venezuela. “While trading and speculation are important to the cryptocurrency economy, we wanted our index to emphasize grassroots adoption by everyday users,” the blockchain intelligence firm said. They intend to highlight the countries where most residents have moved the most significant share of their financial activity to cryptocurrency.
  
  The Global Crypto Adoption Index

Blockchain news

• In Chongqing’s Chinese city, two major hospitals are piloting a blockchain-powered digital billing platform, as announced by East Money. The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University and the Chongqing People’s Hospital have circulated 15,000 blockchain-powered bills to patients under the project thus far, per the platform’s administrators. The municipality’s Chongqing Municipal Finance Bureau said that the platform allows patients to settle their bills in real-time using a widget for the e-pay platform WePay.
  
• The Seoul Metropolitan Government has committed to invest USD 4.8m in a “post-coronavirus pandemic” R & D fund for small- and medium-sized AI, blockchain, biotech fintech firms. As stated by Newspim, the city government said it would subsidize blockchain firms and other IT startups if they can establish they are using the funds to power industry 4.0-related research projects amid fears that an economic retardation will derail tech progress in the South Korean capital.
  
• Indian transnational technology company Tech Mahindra has announced its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build solutions based on blockchain technology, as stated by The Economic Times. Tech Mahindra should introduce blockchain solutions for the aviation, telecom, and healthcare supply chain built on Amazon Managed Blockchain to worldwide customers using AWS and other major organizations.
  
• Blockchain platform Zilliqa (ZIL) has announced its 2020-2021 gathering of selected companies participating in the ZILHive Accelerator program, a 6-month blockchain startup accelerator designed to support early and late-stage startups that are using or looking to use the Zilliqa protocol to build blockchain solutions. The emailed press release said that the eight companies had been selected to promote blockchain development within Open Finance (OpFi), and these are: Rupiah Token Propine, Notabene, MugglePay, Moonlight, CommX, Moonlet, and Lumiere.

The Crypto Exchanges

• A small exchange in Slovakia, Eterbase, published on its Telegram channel yesterday that hot wallets for six of its listed cryptoassets had been compromised on Monday: bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), XRP, tezos (XTZ), algorand (ALGO), and Tron (TRX) has been stolen. The amount moved to public addresses is currently worth nearly USD 1.6 million. They added that they contacted all centralized exchanges that might be receiving these illegal funds.
  
• OKEx has announced that it is crypto project accelerator OKEx Jumpstart now supports mining on its platform. As announced during the press release, holders can stake their OKB tokens 14 days before each new Jumpstart project is launched to earn rewards and staking incentives.
  
• Crypto tax reporting firm, Austria-based Blockpit, and Germany-based Crypto Tax announced their merger to offer various compliance and tax services under one roof. Per a report, the companies want to enter new markets in 2021, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, South Korea, and other EU countries.

Legal news

• The trial regarding the Australian entrepreneur and self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor Craig Wright, the estate of his late business partner Dave Kleiman, and the ownership of possibly billions of dollars of BTC and intellectual property which Kleiman’s family claims Wright owes them, has been postponed to 2021 after the chief judge of the Southern District of Florida in the US decided to delay all jury trials in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Law360 reported.
  
• The Canadian law firm Miller Thomson that is representing creditors of the defunct crypto exchange QuadrigaCX has hired consultancy firm Kroll, who is working with blockchain forensics specialists Coinfirm, to help the firm’s investigation into USD 190m of lost user assets following the death of the exchange’s founder, Gerald Cotten in December 2018. The announcement said that Kroll and Coinfirm would be analyzing a subset of transaction data.

And then there’s more news!

• British online food order and delivery platform Eat has added cryptocurrency payment support for its France subsidiary, as the website shows. The company has partnered with the cryptocurrency payment provider Bitpay to enable its users to pay in Bitcoin (BTC) for food deliveries from over 15,000 restaurants across France.
  
• The head of Venezuela’s crypto regulator, the National Superintendency of Cryptoactivities and Related Activities (Sunacrip), said that Twitter has taken down its official account, @SunacripVe. Sunacrip boss Joselit Ramirez posted on his twitter account that Twitter’s move was a “political” one that had nothing to do with the American firm’s stance on crypto. Ramirez added that Sunacrip had already set up an alternative handle on the platform. Twitter has previously banned accounts run by the Central Bank of Venezuela and other government organs.