Private Equity Moris Beracha Wuani

Staff of the nation’s largest pension is trying to sell a new investment model to its sometimes skeptical board By Chris Cumming The board of the nation’s largest pension still has plenty of questions about a proposed shake-up in its private-equity strategy, roughly two years after the pension’s staff began developing the plan. Ben Meng, chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, on Tuesday detailed the proposed new strategy for private-equity investing, arguing that without it the underfunded pension system could have trouble hitting return targets and making its required payouts to retirees. Mr. Meng, who joined the $337 billion fund last month, argued that the new strategy was necessary to get more exposure to the best-performing private-equity managers. “We need private equity, we need more of it, and we need it now,” he said. Calpers’ private-equity reform has attracted some controversy si...

By Daniel Palmer A Brazilian investment bank is planning to raise millions of dollars through the offering of a security token. In an announcement Thursday, Banco BTG Pactual said it will back its blockchain-based token with distressed Brazilian real estate assets, with the expectation of raising up to $15 million. It will also establish a secondary market following the sale in order to provide liquidity to the tokens. The offering will allow investors to invest in the Brazilian real estate market and, based on the performance of the tied assets, receive periodic profits. International investors will be able to purchase the token, called ReitBZ (RBZ), through a “low-cost, tax-efficient structure,” said the bank. BTG Pactual CEO, Roberto Sallouti, said: “The technology associated with this offering allows us to be a pioneer in providing access to asset classes that have historically been difficult for global retail...

  T heblockcrypto.com Pantera Capital , a blockchain and crypto-related venture firm, has raised $125 million in its on-going third round of funding, CoinDesk reports . The $175 million funding round is expected to close in March. Pantera partner Paul Veradittikit is hopeful the company will secure the remaining funds, although he admitted the crypto winter had made it more challenging to gather funds. So far, high net-worth individuals, family offices, and those with the ability to move money fast have contributed to the fund, he said and he would continue meeting with institutional investors. According to Pantera’s pitch deck, the new fund is aiming to “invest in later stage rounds to support the more mature companies” at between $3 million to $8 million per investment. Half of the capital is allocated for follow-on funding, which will go towards investing in around 30 to 50 firms – depending on much funding is secured in the current ...

By Adrian Zmudzinski The vice president of blockchain and digital currencies for IBM , Jesse Lund, said that he expects Bitcoin’s ( BTC ) price to eventually hit $1 million. Lund made his prediction during an interview with comparison and news platform Finder.com, published on YouTube on Feb. 20. Towards the end of the interview, Lund was asked what he expects the price of Bitcoin to be on this new year’s eve. He answered that he thinks it is going to be higher than the current price, clarifying, “I’ll go with $5,000.” He then continued his prediction, adding: “I see Bitcoin at a million dollars someday.” Lund explained that he “likes that number,” given that “if Bitcoin is at a million dollars, then satoshi is on value parity with the U.S. penny.” He noted that at such a value, the whole network would have over $20 trillion of liquidity. He then suggested that such liquidity could change corporate payments and high value payments in general, concluding:...

Asian farmers and voters ready to reap benefits of new technology Hara incentivizes farmers to provide certain data by making it redeemable for digital tokens that can later be exchanged for fertilizer and other necessities. (Courtesy of Hara Token) By JUSTINA LEE and ERI SUGIURA, Nikkei staff writers SINGAPORE/TOKYO -- After wiping the sweat off her brow and adjusting her straw hat, Liswati walks along one of her fields under Indonesia's hot tropical sun, eventually squatting down to inspect her crops. Instead of jotting down some notes with a pen and paper, she keys information about soil quality and other conditions into her smartphone. With very little effort, she has given thousands of others involved in Indonesian agriculture -- from government officials to nongovernmental organizations -- data that can be analyzed and possibly utilized to boost the country's farm output. The underlying technology? Block...

By Ana Berman An official from Spain’s central bank , the Bank of Spain (BDE) believes that Bitcoin ( BTC ) is unable to resolve the problems faced by major payment systems. BDE’s Deputy General Director for financial innovations and market infrastructure, Carlos Colesa, gave his opinion on the leading cryptocurrency in a report published on Sunday, Feb. 17. The study dubbed "Bitcoin: a solution for payment systems or a solution in search of a problem?," is marked as an “occasional paper,” according to Cointelegraph en Español . This  means that the Bank of Spain does not necessarily share the stance of the author. Colesa compared Bitcoin to traditional payment systems and financial intermediaries. First, he says that the Bitcoin blockchain processes only 250,000 transactions daily, which is a relatively small volume for a global system. For instance, major Spanish retail system, the Sistema Nacional de Compensación Electrónica (SNCE), reportedly...

J.P. Morgan’s new virtual coin appears to be reigniting investors’ faith in the market Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images Bitcoin is on course to breaking a six-month stretch of continual losses, as analysts predict a cryptocurrency bull run on the horizon. Since July, bitcoin prices have tumbled from a peak value of $8,160 (£6,310) to $3,480 (£2,690) at the end of January 2019, according to ranking site CoinMarketCap .  The digital coin has been gaining momentum over the past few weeks, however, with prices sitting at around $3,920 (£3,030) as of Tuesday morning.   If values remain at or above their current levels until the end of February, bitcoin will score its first positive month since values began plummeting last summer. Mati Greenspan, senior online market analyst at trading platform eToro, told  The Independent  that bitcoin’s recent gains “may well suggest that the long-awaited bull market is not far away”. But...

Anna Baydakova General Motors Financial, the financing arm of the automaking giant, said Monday that it is partnering with blockchain startup Spring Labs on solutions for identity verification. The startup – which counts former Trump economic advisor Gary Cohn on its board of advisors – said that GM is exploring the acquisition of a stake alongside other use cases. A spokesperson for GM Financial declined to comment on the possibility of GM or its subsidiary becoming a Spring Labs shareholder. “We are actively exploring the development of auto finance and GM specific use cases, in addition to the identity verification products being developed,” co-founder and CEO Adam Jiwan said via a spokesperson. He added that the blockchain network Spring Labs a working on at the moment will be available in private beta for the partners inQ3, and the live network is scheduled to launch in early 2020. In a press statement, Mike Kanarios, chief strategy off...

by Nathan Rodriguez   Binance Coin has reportedly extended its latest gains, thus it set a new all-time high in Bitcoin-denominated value. Also known as BNB, it is the token issued by the world’s largest digital currency exchange by trade volume called Binance. Setting A New Record At press time, the aforementioned token was trading at around 0.002619 BTC or $9.60. It is worth noting that before it reached the new figure, it was only able to reach 0.002688. This was believed to around 10:00 UTC Monday. This is basically the crypto’s highest price in its entire one and a half year history, as per the data from Binance. The company said to have first listed BNB for trading sometime in July 2017. Since then, the token was successful in receiving at least 9,600 percent return on investment, particularly from its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) on December of the same year and with a price of $0.10. At the same time, the BNB still has a lot of ways to go...

By Moris Beracha .- The high levels of volatility of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world have led investors to look towards price stable “Stablecoins” or crypto assets. These are digital assets designed to maintain a stable price, linked to a stable fiduciary currency, or that are related to products or other cryptocurrencies. The advantages of backed cryptocurrencies are that currencies are stabilized by assets that fluctuate outside the technological realm, that is, the underlying asset is not correlated, reducing financial risk. The main Stablecoins are: Tether (USDT) is the best-known example of stablecoins. Originally launched as Realcoin, the project was founded in November 2014 and has two tokens: USDT and EURT, pegged to the dollar and the euro. Both cryptocurrencies are connected to the Bitfinex exchange house. TrueUSD (TUSD) is another token pegged to the dollar that is part of the TrustToken platform. Digix Gold (DGX) ...

By Marie Huillet      Crypto asset brokerage Voyager Digital — co-founded by the ex-CTO of Uber — has gone public on Canada’s TSX Venture Exchange. The news was announced in an official tweet from Voyager on Feb. 11. Shares are traded under ticker symbol VYGR.V, as a company blog post outlines. The listing comes following the completion of a so-called reverse takeover — also known as a reverse initial public offering or backdoor listing. Last week, Voyager had announced that its merger with former shell company UC Resources Ltd. was nearing completion. The moved allows the crypto brokerage to qualify as a TSX Venture Tier 2 Company. Generally, a reverse takeover occurs when a privately held company merges with a publicly traded company — thereby bypassing at least some of the bureaucratic scrutiny involved in the process of going public, including regulatory issues and due diligence. Upon completion of the deal, the buyer gains automa...

By Helen Partz   Global investment bank Credit Suisse and Portuguese Banco Best have completed end-to-end fund transactions on blockchain , according to a press release published Feb. 7. The financial institutions have reportedly processed every part of the fund trade process by implementing a blockchain-based decentralized platform, FundsDLT. Designed to improve the efficiency of fund transaction processing with the use of blockchain and smart contracts , FundsDLT would purportedly reduce the time between request and the settlement from delivery of the order to trade processing. Within the initiative, Lisbon-based Banco Best — specializing in banking , asset management and trading — was responsible for the Application Programming Interface (API) integration, and also developed a dedicated application to collect client experiences. An end-to-end or mutual fund transaction represents a pool of money from a group of investors that is put into...

By Yogita Khatri A commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) believes a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) will ultimately be approved. Robert J. Jackson Jr., in an interview published by government-focused news source Roll Call on Wednesday, said : “Eventually, do I think someone will satisfy the standards that we’ve laid out there? I hope so, yes, and I think so.” A number of bitcoin ETF proposals have filed for SEC approval, but none has yet got the green light. Jay Clayton, chairman of the SEC) has said he doesn’t see a pathway to a cryptocurrency ETF approval until concerns over market manipulation are addressed. The SEC has to date  rejected at least 10 such proposals. Last August, it turned down  seven filings from ProShares, Direxion and GraniteShares. A day later, though, the regulator said it would review the proposals. In July, the SEC for the second time rejected  Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss’ proposa...

By Moris Beracha .-  2018 was a negative period for some of the world’s most important cryptocurrencies. The value of Bitcoin, Ethereum, LiteCoin, Ripple among many others, dropped over the previous year and a large number of investors lost millions of dollars. However, countries such as Russia still maintain their hopes in digital assets and despite the price crash, the interest in cryptocurrencies remains. According to financial consultant Olga Prokhorova, the new generations of entrepreneurs are looking to make some kind of investment with tokens, because they trust that this will be the future. In an interview with the news channel of Federal Press, the also representative of the “International Financial Center”, cited data from a study published by the University of Cambridge suggesting that the number of users with identity to perform some type of transaction in the cryptocurrency ecosystem has grown to more than 35 million worldwide. T...

By Yogita Khatri Opera now lets Android users buy ethereum’s ether (ETH) cryptocurrency directly from its browser-based wallet, it announced Wednesday. For the new service, Opera said it has partnered with regulated crypto brokerage Safello to provide the cash-to-crypto exchange. The feature allows payments with credit and debit cards, along with “trusted” payment networks including Swish in Sweden. At launch, ether purchasing is available only in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, however. Safello – which is registered with Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority – will verify users who make purchases using Sweden’s BankID and Denmark’s NemID citizens’ identity solutions. Topping up a wallet with ether should take “less than a minute,” according to Opera. Charles Hamel, Opera’s crypt product lead, said: “We think that the next important phase for crypto will come from usage and that for it to reach wider adoption, it has to be easy to buy and e...

IT COSTS more money to make bitcoin than the cryptocurrency is worth. Producing a single bitcoin now costs $4060 on average, but it is valued at less than $3500, according to an analysis by JPMorgan Chase. Bitcoin relies on volunteers to process transactions. Their computers race to solve a mathematical puzzle once every 10 minutes. Finding a solution processes a batch of transactions and whoever gets there first is rewarded with some bitcoin. Purchasing and running these computers is expensive. As more people joined the race, the puzzles have become harder to solve, requiring more computer power. It is estimated that the bitcoin network uses as much energy as Ireland. Bitcoin’s price has tumbled in recent months from a high of nearly $20,000 in 2017. The result is that processing transactions is no longer profitable. However, this will probably cause people to drop out of the race, making it easier and economically viable again. Published in: https://...

By Helen Partz Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey has again expressed his pro-Bitcoin ( BTC ) stance, revealing that the sole crypto he holds is BTC, according to a tweet on Feb. 6. The known Bitcoin supporter has revealed his cryptocurrency of choice following a recent interview where Dorsey claimed that he still believes that Bitcoin will be the the native currency of internet. In a thread of the tweet that amassed over 5,000 likes, Dorsey reiterated his previous statements regarding the biggest and oldest cryptocurrency, also calling it a “great brand.” He wrote: “Bitcoin is resilient. Bitcoin is principled. Bitcoin is native to internet ideals.” When asked about the particular features of Bitcoin that excite Dorsey the most, the bitcoin bull has again pointed at Bitcoin’s potential to become the internet’s native currency. Specifically, Dorsey responded: “Everything. Mostly I think it has the greatest chance of being the Internet’s native cur...

Imagen destacada por  florin  / stock.adobe.com By Aaron Wood Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), an Ethereum ( ETH )-based token backed by Bitcoin ( BTC ), has launched today, Jan. 31, according to a press release on the network’s website . The currency is a joint initiative by blockchain security firm BitGo , Kyber Network liquidity protocol and others. BitGo announced the development of the coin backed 1:1 with Bitcoin in October 2018. A statement by the firm then said that Wrapped Bitcoin will provide users with a “wide variety of new decentralized use cases including on decentralized exchanges ( DEXs ), as collateral for stablecoins or lending, for payments and flexible smart contracts within the Ethereum ecosystem.” WBTC is an ERC-20 token, which are tokens designed and used solely on the Ethereum platform that make the streamline the creation of new tokens. ERC-20 tokens provide a sort of template by which developers can build a new token, spari...