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Get to know Matthew Najar and some of his accomplishments? Governments in major economies are encouraging financial technology (fintech) innovation with regulatory and advisory initiatives designed to accelerate the availability of online payment solutions and other financial services for businesses. The initiatives generally aim to attract innovative fintech companies and help them operate in the regulated financial sector, while ensuring adequate financial protection for customers.

Matthew Najar believes without new FinTech initiatives, we will stall: “FinTech, blockchain certainly included, is critical for our generation to solve inherent financial system issues and progress forward”.

The U.K., traditionally a major financial-services centre, has actively encouraged new competition in banking, reducing barriers to entry such as banks’ capital requirements. As a result, several new digital banks are already offering Internet-based banking services, including online payment solutions, without establishing brick-and-mortar locations. Another ongoing U.K. initiative designed to enable competition and fintech innovation is the implementation of an open banking standard by 2018, including an open application programming interface (API) that enables development of new applications to access information in customers’ existing accounts at one or more banks. For example, customers might be able to manage all their bank accounts from a single app.

The initiatives are taking place against a backdrop of rapid fintech growth. There are thousands of fintech start-ups worldwide, and many have attracted substantial venture funding; a report from KPMG and CB Insights found that global fintech funding reached $19.1 billion in 2015. Several countries are planning or have already implemented licensing or regulatory changes that enable technology firms to offer broader banking services. In the U.S., the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates national banks, said in December 2016 that it planned to make a special-purpose national bank charter available to fintechs. The charter would enable start-ups that currently offer other financial services, including B2B payments and other online payment solutions, to begin offering at least one of three regulated banking activities: receiving deposits, paying checks, or lending money.

Are Cryptocurrency wallets secure? Wallets are secure to varying degrees. The level of security depends on the type of wallet you use (desktop, mobile, online, paper, hardware) and the service provider. A web server is an intrinsically riskier environment to keep your currency compared to offline. Online wallets can expose users to possible vulnerabilities in the wallet platform which can be exploited by hackers to steal your funds. Offline wallets, on the other hand, cannot be hacked because they simply aren’t connected to an online network and don’t rely on a third party for security.

Though many experts agree that the OCC’s move could encourage innovation, some warned that implementing inadequate regulation might weaken consumer protection and even harm small businesses by allowing practices such as predatory lending. The EU has also begun an effort to encourage fintech innovation across Europe, establishing a Financial Technology Task Force in 2016.

We could say that cryptocurrencies were born in 2008 when the domain name bitcoin.org was registered on August 18. Then, on October 31, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, who designed Bitcoin, publishes an article that launches the ball: “Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” The first Bitcoin transaction occurs when Nakamoto sends Hal Finney, a computer programmer, 10 Bitcoin (BTC) on January 12. Bitcoin is the first digital currency created without the intervention of any government, central bank or organization. Under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, a person or a group of people proposed and created a completely free digital currency, supported by its users through a P2P network. Until today the identity of its creator remains a mystery.

FOMO is an abbreviation for the fear of missing out. This is one of the most notorious reasons as to why many traders fail in the art. From an outside point of view, it is never a good scene seeing people make massive profits within minutes from pumped-up coins. Honestly, I never like such situations any more than you do. But I’ll tell you one thing that’s for sure, Beware of that moment when the green candles seem to be screaming at you and telling to you to jump in. It is at this point that the whales I mentioned earlier will be smiling and watching you buy the coins they bought earlier at very low prices. Guess what normally follows? These coins usually end up in the hands of small traders and the next thing that happens is for the red candles to start popping up due to an oversupply and, voila, losses start trickling in.

Most beginners make one common mistake: buying a coin because it’s price seems to be low or what they consider affordable. Take, for example, someone who goes for Ripple instead of Ethereum simply because the latter is much cheaper. The decision to invest in a coin should have very little to do with its affordability but a lot to do with its market cap. Just like the conventional stocks are gauged by their market caps, which is evaluated using the formula Current Market Price X Total Number of Outstanding Shares, the same applies to cryptocurrencies.

Figure out if you want to go for longterm trades or short term trades. Are you going for short term trades with every penny you have to invest, or are you going to go for the long term with some and trading short term with some? Long-term investors will pay a lower tax rate if they can hold for over 12 months, but as a trade-off, they WILL have to sit through corrections (likely seeing their balance go down 50% plus on paper as often as they see it go up). Short-term investors can avoid corrections if they are nimble, but they’ll owe taxes on the profits from each trade they do along the way (see: how taxes work with cryptocurrency to understand how the long term and short term capital gains tax work with cryptocurrency).