Derivatives trading platform provider Plus500 posted a 284% increase in revenues in the first quarter of this year compared to the previous year, largely due to high levels of interest in its cryptocurrency CFDs offerings.
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Triple Digit Rise
On Tuesday, contracts for difference (CFDs) market provider Plus500 released its quarterly earnings for the three months ended March 31. “Q1 2018 revenues were $297.3m, an increase of 284% compared to the same period last year,” the company revealed, adding:
The very strong start to the year…resulted from a period of relatively volatile markets and high levels of interest in the company’s cryptocurrency CFDs offering, and in turn encouraged high levels of new customer sign ups and record trading in Q1 2018.
Furthermore, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization were up by 418% to $237.3 million.
Plus500 operates an online trading platform for individual customers to trade CFDs. Customers can trade them in over 50 countries, with more than 2,200 different underlying global financial instruments comprising equities, indices, commodities, options, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), cryptocurrencies, and foreign exchange.
Incorporated in Israel with subsidiaries in the UK, Cyprus, Australia, and Singapore, the company is additionally licensed in New Zealand and South Africa. It offers cryptocurrency trading of up to 1:20 leverage. “You can start with as little as $100.00 to gain the effect of $2,000 capital,” Plus500 advertises on its website. With 0% commission, the company “is mainly compensated for its services through the bid/ask spread.”
Hype Dying Down
While seeing strong growth in January, Plus500 revealed:
We have since seen market conditions return to more normal levels in the last two months. As such we do not expect such an exceptional performance to be repeated in the remainder of the year.
Other companies offering cryptocurrency CFDs include IG, IQ Option, Intertrader, Pepperstone, Cityindex, Gkfx, and Xtb. IG, which claims to be the number one provider of CFDs and spread betting worldwide, offers bitcoin, , bitcoin gold, ether, ripple, and litecoin CDFs.
In November the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued a warning about CFDs for retail investors. CFDs, “including financial spread bets, with cryptocurrencies as the underlying investment, are increasingly being marketed to consumers. These products are extremely high-risk, speculative products,” the authority warned.
What do you think of the popularity of cryptocurrency CFDs? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, IG, and Plus500.
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Today, we are thrilled to announce that Blockchain has gone bicoastal with the opening of our newest office in San Francisco, California. This marks the fourth office across the globe for Blockchain and the second in the United States for the quickly growing company, and follows Blockchain’s recent acquisition of the talented team at Tsukemen.
The new office will be headed by Thianh Lu, formerly the CEO and co-founder of Tsukemen, and Blockchain’s new Head of Design. Thianh previously founded file-sharing product Cloudup, which was ultimately sold to Automattic.
Our new West Coast engineering lead is Fred Cheng, the founder of Simperium and creator of Simplenote, recognized by Apple as a Best App of 2013. Fred will help Blockchain build the software necessary to create a more open, accessible, and fair financial future, and will be assisted in these efforts by Chris Arriola, whose expertise in both Android and iOS development will help advance Blockchain’s mobile applications. Both Fred and Chris join Blockchain as a result of the Tsukemen acquisition.
Also the team from Tsukemen is Min Wei, who holds an MBA from MIT Sloan, and has previously worked at companies including the Wall Street Journal, AOL, and Automattic. At Blockchain, she will serve as part of the Strategy & Partnerships team, and will be crucial in identifying new opportunities for the company to explore.
“It is rare to find such diverse and remarkable talent within a single team, and I feel lucky to have added the creative individuals behind Tsukemen to Blockchain,” said Peter Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of Blockchain. “With such a capable group at its helm, I know that our West Coast office will be instrumental in helping us scale operations and continue building best-in-class products to serve our customers.”
2017 marked a record year of growth for our team, and the company has seen more than 24 million wallets created on its platform. In the last eight months, Blockchain has doubled its headcount, and plans to do so again by the end of 2018.
The opening of a new office is just the latest development we’re proud to share — we’ve also recently brought aboard top tier talent including Marco Santori, formerly of Cooley, as the company’s President; Peter Wilson, formerly of Google and Facebook, as the Vice President of Engineering; and most recently, Breanne Madigan, formerly of Goldman Sachs, as the Head of Institutional Sales and Strategy. With the addition of a San Francisco office, our team is committed to serving our ever-growing user base, and develop new and innovative software that will transform the future of the financial landscape.
Thank you all for applying, and we’re excited to announce the latest Ethereum Foundation grants! We funded 22 recipients for a total of $2.84M.
🦄
Background
The Ethereum project seeks to support useful dapps and smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the goal of the Ethereum Foundation is to empower developers with best-in-class R&D, developer experience, and education. Despite the early promise of the ecosystem, we still have a long way to go, and we are here to work with the community to drive concrete progress.
These grants will fuel the teams working hard at research & development to support the entire ecosystem and help make Ethereum more scalable, useful and secure. These projects have no ICOs, no token sales, and focus simply on building useful products and experiences.
Scalability can be in the form of implementing sharding, plasma or state channels with existing teams or on your own. It can also be in the form of optimizing geth/parity or building alternate clients. Usability is for improving the developer experience (e.g. static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, mobile SDKs) or the user experience. Security can range from auditing existing contracts to providing tools that prevent error-prone programming patterns to contributing to alternative second-layer languages that focus on security. We are also beginning to engage with the product/design community to help solve product and UX design problems, including areas like key management, Ethereum payments UX and onboarding flows.
Lastly, we would like to remind ourselves of how the Ethereum project began: passionate open-source developers contributing to the project on their spare time. In that spirit, we’ve begun a “hackternship” grant for community members that propose an impactful Ethereum side project.
What we provide for grantees
Non-dilutive funding
Technical advisory
Connection to more users
Platform to share your work
We hope to provide Ethereum teams with more runway, advice and resources to focus simply on building useful products and experiences.
Also, many of these grants may be followed on with additional funding and/or collaboration when milestones are achieved. We believe this will provide tight feedback loops for impact to the ecosystem.
Grantee List: May 2018
Scalability:
– $250K. State channels R&D.
PISA (by et al.) – $250K. State channels R&D.
(by ) – $200K. Payment channels implementation.
General Computation on Plasma (by ) – $50K. Plasma implementation.
(by ) – $50K. Plasma implementation.
Plasma (by ) – $32K. Plasma implementation.
Usability:
DevEx grants*:
(by ) – $150K. Interoperability for web dapps and mobile wallets.
iOS Dev Kit (by ) – $50K. iOS + Ethereum starter project ( support).
EtherKit (by ) – $50K. iOS development framework (Swift).
– $35K. Light client incentivization.
– $25K. Typescript library for browsers.
#buidl grants**:
– $1M. To date, the Ethereum Foundation has supported ENS via hiring developers internally, but now ENS is mature enough to become its own independent organization. We’re excited to continue working with this great project/team going forward.
– $100K. Open-source browser wallet.
– $30K. Open-source mobile wallet.
Security:
– $430K. Solidity compiler audit (co-sponsored with Augur)
– $50K. Smart contract formal verification R&D.
– $30K. Smart contract development standards.
– $25K. Bug bounty platform.
Hackternship:
– $10K. Safety-focused smart contract language.
– $10K. Developer onboarding documentation.
– $10K. Developer onboarding documentation.
– $5K. Sharding R&D.
* DevEx Grant – Improves developer experience (“useful” for developers).
** #buidl Grant – Builds for the end user (“useful” for users).
Wishlist for future grants
In future rounds of grants, we would like to see more applications in these areas:
Scalability
More payment and/or state channels implementations 
More plasma implementations
More sharding implementations
Improving efficiency of existing clients such as geth & parity
A tokenless “Lightning Network” for Ethereum
Tokenless Casper staking pool contracts 
WebAssembly R&D
Usability
Improve private key management and transacting in Ethereum
Alternative wallet / client designs
Standards and portability between wallets
Tooling that improves developer experience
Improved documentation & developer/user education videos
Tokenless end user products
Vyper development
More security focused high-level languages
Security
Security audits for Solidity and Vyper
Smart contract audits
Specifically, audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults
Tooling that prevents vulnerable code
Hackternships
You already have a job (or school)? No problem! Suggest a problem you want to solve and we’re happy to fund a 10-week $10K externship for your spare-time working on Ethereum. (Successful projects will be featured at a developer conference. We are also looking to hire and fund from this pool of side projects. If you’re looking for where to start, look at the list above.)
– Funded in March 2018 cohort
– Funded in May 2018 cohort
– New to wishlist
Next steps
This is an ongoing grant program, and we’d like to invite the rest of the community to approach us with your ideas ().
Ethereum is built by the community for the community, and we’re here to support you. Thank you for building!
Best,
Ethereum Foundation Team
5.2.18
(Mostly paraphrased from )
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