The US Congress has called for the Libra project to be halted by July hearings

Four members of the US Congress have sent an open letter to Facebook asking them to stop the Libra project at hearings on July 16 and 17.

The letter claims that the Libra network has the potential to destabilize the US monetary policy and the dollar:

“The project raises major issues of confidentiality, trade, national security and monetary policy, not only for Facebook, but also for investors, consumers and the global economy in general,

is mentioned in the document.

The letter also argues that the Libra could become “an insufficiently regulated platform that will facilitate illicit activities and money laundering.”

On July 16 and 17, the head of the Libra project, David Marcus, will attend two hearings in the US Congress. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not made any public comment since Libra’s official announcement.

FCA prepares a ban on crypto derivatives

The UK Financial Regulatory Authority (FCA) has announced that it will publish a draft ban on the sale of crypto derivatives. Bitcoin futures and CFDs would become unavailable to retail investors.

The supervisor considers that these derivatives are too risky for this type of trader.

Meanwhile, FCA has authorized the first investment fund in digital assets – Prime Factor Capital. The company now has the ability to manage 100 million euros of criptomoends for its customers.

Prime Factor Capital is the first crypto hedge fund approved in the UK to date. The team is made up of former employees of Blackrock, Legal & General, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.

Gemini applies for dealer broker license

The Gemini Exchange, owned by the Winklevoss Brothers, will require a broker-dealer license from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

This is the first step towards becoming an alternative regulated trading system in which customers can trade digital securities.

Gemini has collaborated with the dedicated tokenized securities platform, which uses the Gemini Dollar (GUSD). The exchange is likely to facilitate the trading of such securities on its own platform after obtaining the license.

A cloudclocking technical problem crashes many cryptos sites

On July 2, Cloudflare had technical problems for about half an hour. During this time, many sites worldwide have not worked. These include CoinmarketCap, Coinbase, BitMEX, itBit and Poloniex.

Due to technical issues with our partners, Poloniex is currently unavailable for trading. We work with our partner to resolve these issues as quickly as possible. All funds are safe, and we will keep you updated here.

– Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) July 2, 2019

This is the second such incident – on 24 June, Cloudflare had another problem that lasted about two hours. Users in certain regions have been unable to access sites like Discord and exchanges using the company’s services.

Cloudflare operates an extremely popular content distribution network (CDN) that protects sites from spam and Distributed Denial of Service (DdoS) attacks. Worldwide, Cloudflare services have a market share of 34.55%, with over 6 million protected sites. This includes popular platforms such as BuzzFeed, Sling TV, Pinterest and Dropbox.