Top Social Gainers for 4th Feb 2019

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• Quadriga

Geral Cotten, the CEO of Quadriga, a Canadian crypto exchange, who suddenly died on December 9th, was the only one with private keys to Quadriga’s cold wallets, which hold around $150 million.

Cotten’s wife recently testified that only a minimal amount of the exchange’s coins were kept on a hot wallet; most of the assets were located in a cold storage personally maintained by Mr. Cotten.

“Transfers from the cold wallet to the hot wallet would occur when the hot wallet was running low and withdrawals were being sent to users. The transfer of coins from the cold wallet to the hot wallet was performed manually by Gerry.”

Cotten employed this practice in an effort to thwart hackers and possible inside jobs. According to court documents filed Jan. 31 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the exchange has been locked out of $145 million in Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether and other digital tokens .

Experts were brought in to try and hack into Cotten’s computers and cell phone, and attempt to circumvent an encrypted USB key. The had only ‘limited success’ according to the court filing.

The story prompted a lengthy discussion about asset security and best practices for crypto exchanges. Changpeng Zhao, Binance CEO, also chimed in, tweeting that the situation could’ve been avoided by using multi-sig wallets:

In that same thread, somebody expressed a need for an efficient DEX solution; Zhao replied saying Binance is working on it.

• BTT

Less than a week in, BitTorrent’s new token (BTT) is continuing to impress. The coin’s currently up 55% for the last 24hrs, and has been positively dominating Binance’s top trading pairs as of late.

As of this writing, BTT/BTC is currently the top trading pair on the exchange, way ahead of TRX/BTC, BNB/BTC, ETH/BTC and XRP/BTC:

The BTT hype has reached the coveted ‘fake airdrops’ level, as Tron recently warned about “a significant number of websites, ICOs, and airdrops offering fake BitTorrent (BTT) have appeared on the Internet.”

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming short-term success of BTT has managed to trickle down to Tron, as Justin Sun’s project recorded the highest 24hr gains among all top 10 cryptoassets.

All other things aside, Trx seems to have managed to successfully dodge the majority of the latest bear market. The coin’s currently up 5.6% for the day, and 92.0% (!) for the last 2 months.

• LTC

February is proving kind to Litecoin so far. The sixth biggest cryptocurrency has maintained a solid upward trend for the past 4 days, starting the month at $31.65 and climbing to a 2 week-high $34.50 yesterday morning.

The coin has experienced a short-term downside correction since, but still maintains the $34 support level.

In a recent tweet, Litecoin also shared the news that Börse Stuttgart, Germany’s 2nd largest stock exchange, has launched a new cryptocurrency trading app supporting BTC, LTC, ETH and Ripple after a year in development.

• Neo

Neo seems to be trading for several reasons, not the least of which being a new, hour-long interview with Da Hongfei, the platform’s cofounder, where he discusses Neo 3.0 upgrades, Onchain and Ontology distinctions, infrastructure focus and some community concerns.

For the most part, Hongfei’s answers seem to have resonated with the Neo community:

Neo has also recently promised new details about its anticipated 3.0 upgrade to be announced at the 2nd annual NEO DevCon, which will take place in Seattle on February 16th-17th.

In a recent tweet, the company also announced that it’s offering free tickets to the events for students and developers upon review.

• Jack/Dorsey

Nobody likes Jack Dorsey.

Co-founder and CEO of Twitter was recently on a massively popular Joe Rogan podcast, where he once again expressed his belief that BTC will be the internet’s native currency.

“[Bitcoin] was something that was born on the internet, that was developed on the internet, that was tested on the internet…It is of the internet.”

Dorsey is also the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company which lets users trade in Bitcoin. He mentioned on the podcast that the company currently has no plans to add other cryptocurrencies to the app.

Even BTC shilling couldn’t save Dorsey, however, as both him and Rogan were lambasted following the interview on Youtube, Reddit, and - of course - Jack’s own social media platform.

The overwhelmingly negative reception of the interview has little to do with crypto though: it seems to stem mostly from Twitter’s approach to policing free speech on the site.

For what it’s worth, crypto enthusiasts themselves don’t seem to be fans of Dorsey’s interest in the field:

• Superbowl/Sunday/Bitcoin

Finally, the crypto crowd seems to have been as disappointed as everyone else with what was one of the most boring Super Bowls in recent memory.

Some have also predicted that Bitcoin will drop following the game, and planned to use that as an opportunity to stock up on the coin:

Even the Ringer, one of USA’s biggest sport sites, recently ran a tally of all Super Bowl-related bets, and made sure to include BTC’s price action in the roundup:

Soooo, was the prophecy true? Did the Superbowl dump happen? Was it as majestic as foretold?

Eh, not really.

The coin was on a steady upward swing when the game started (as you can see on the graph), and while it did experience a slight correction around the time the game ended, it was nothing to write home about.

The choppy action continued for most of the night, and the biggest cryptoasset in the world is currently almost breaking even for the past 24hrs.

Underwhelming…just like the Rams.

As always, visit SANbase to explore these and other trends in more detail!