Crypto News: NYSE, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Vechain, Coinbase, Factom (30th of July - 5th of Aug) Intercontinental Exchange creates Bakkt On 3rd of August Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) has announced today that it plans to form a new company, Bakkt. ICE is an American company that owns exchanges for financial and commodity markets, and operates 23 regulated exchanges and marketplaces. This includes ICE futures exchanges as well as the New York Stock Exchange They will be working with Microsoft, Starbucks, BCG (The Boston Consulting Group) with Starbucks looking into expanding payment options for their customers This is actually huge news for cryptocurrency and surprisingly it didnt have that much impact on the price. Northern Trust Corporation entering crypto On 2nd of August Northern Trust Corporation, a 129-year-old Chicago based investment management, asset, and administration company plans to enter into the crypto business on July 31, 2018. In addition to adding a number of new blockchain features for managing its private equity workflow, the company, which has almost $10.7 trillion in assets. Companies like Coinbase Inc., BitGo and others have started offering or are close to offering custody services to institutional investors. They are planning to compete through lower fees than existing crypto custodians. Another bullish sign for crypto that didn't move market. VeChain Big News On 3rd of August VeChain has announced that they are working in partnership with DNV GL, on public blockchain technology usage to rapidly advance drug traceability, monitoring, security, and auditing. China is currently facing a tragic vaccine scandal, where it was recently discovered that Chinese vaccine manufacturers provided hundreds of thousands of faulty and falsely documented vaccines to Chinese school children. In VeChain’s drug and vaccine traceability solution, highly sensitive IoT devices will capture and record to the VeChainThor Blockchain all data involved in vaccine manufacture and transport including getting vaccines from manufacturers, storage facilities, cold chain distribution, hospitals, and even usage. There are some unofficial links to the goverment and this sounds like a huge news for Vechain. Vechain is currently on 21st place in terms of mcap. Commonwealth Bank Blockchain Trail On 30th of July The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has announced the completion of a cross-border shipment that utilized blockchain to track goods in the supply chain. CBA is the biggest bank in Australia and one of the top 10 biggest in the world with market cap of around 112B USD. 37,000 pounds of almonds were shipped from Australia to Germany and were tracked via a private blockchain platform developed by the bank on top of the ethereum network. The CBA said the blockchain-based system stores the data of containers, documents and financial transactions on a distributed network. As such, different partners can simultaneously view and track information about a shipment in real-time – data including the shipment's status or the temperature and humidity of the containers. Seems like a bullish sign for blockchain and especially logisitcs projects and ETH. Coinbase Custody adding tokens On 3rd of August Coinbase Custody has annouced that they are exploring a range of new assets. Initially this is only for storage only, and will be working to add them as quickly and safely as possible. At this time, they have not yet considered these assets for trading. Coinbase Custody is a custodial service for institutional clients optimized for storing large amounts of cryptocurrency in a highly secure way. Coinbase pointed out that asset additions to Coinbase Custody have no bearing on whether they will be added to other Coinbase products but I personally think additions like these have a very positive for these cryptos anyway. Some of the cryptos are: Ripple, EOS, Monero, Cardano, Stellar Lumens, NEO, Vechain, Dashh, NEM, ICON and Steem. For full list check the blog post. Factom updates On 2nd of August Factom has filed a new patent with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office that allows verification of documents on a blockchain with multiple digital signatures Factom project is looking into data integrity and compliance and are building on their platform’s offerings for governments, businesses, and non-profits. The patent describes a process for peers to verify digital documents with various types of digital signatures. Additionally, multiple signatures of different types (e.g. metadata or instructions) can be used on a single document. While filling for patents is a controversial subject it is normal for them to try to gain advantage over competition. Where are at the race stage where the project will try to grab as many patents as possible in the march to adoption. Factom is on 115 place in terms of mcap. Not a financial advice.