Crypto News Roundup for January 15th, 2020

With the price of bitcoin now up an astounding 23% so far in the first half of 2020, Markets Daily is back with the stories moving todays markets.

Listen or watch all the new CoinDesk podcast episodes wherever you want.

ABOUT

Tune in as CoinDesk podcasts editor Adam B. Levine and senior markets reporter Brad Keoun run down recent action in the markets, interesting longer-term trends and some of the most important crypto industry developments of the day.

On today’s episode:

Bitcoin price takes a breather but traders have their eyes on a bigger prize
Tokenized gold futures launch on FTX exchange
A new LinkedIn report says that "Blockchain" is the highest valued skill moving into 2020
US Securities regulator warns investors that IEOs aren't much better than ICOs
BTC ETF application withdrawn by Bitwise after the US regulator SEC says they will not approve
Controversial figure Craig Wright's recent filing is making waves with claims he can now access more than 1 million bitcoin
Big exchange Binance has taken a 500 million won ($432,000) stake in BxB,
Venezuela Leader Nicholas Maduro announced that airlines must pay for fuel with "El Petro"

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HOST

Adam B. Levine

Adam B. Levine joined CoinDesk in 2019 as the editor of its new audio and podcasts division. Previously, Adam founded the long-running Let's Talk Bitcoin! talk show with co-hosts Stephanie Murphy and Andreas M. Antonopoulos.

Finding early success with the show, Adam transformed the podcast's homepage into a full newsdesk and publishing platform, founding the LTB Network in January of 2014 to help broaden the conversation with new and different perspectives. In the Spring of that year, he would go on to launch the first and largest tokenized rewards program for creators and their audience. In what many have called an early influential version of "Steemit"; LTBCOIN, which was awarded to both content creators and members of the audience for participation was distributed until the LTBN was acquired by BTC, Inc. in January of 2017.

With the network launched and growing, in late 2014 Adam turned his attention to the practical challenges of administering the tokenized program and founded Tokenly, Inc. There, he led the development of early tokenized vending machines with Swapbot, tokenized identity solution Tokenpass, e-commerce with TokenMarkets.com and media with Token.fm. Adam owns some BTC, ETH and small positions in a number of other tokens.