UBS Employees May Need Permission to Trade Crypto

The largest Swiss financial holding can tighter inner policy

05 February 2018 326

The largest Swiss financial holding company UBS Group AG can make changes to the internal policy, under which all employees of the organization will be required to obtain permission to trade cryptocurrency, reports Bloomberg.

At present the Global Policy on Personal Investment is silent on cryptocurrencies and thus disclosure and pre-clearance is not required.

UBS Employee Memo

The bank is considering implementing “additional rules and requirements," including an obligation for staff to seek permission before trading.

It is worth noting that similar rules for UBS employees have previously acted in relation to trade in traditional currencies and securities, so the innovation simply equates digital assets to all the rest.

In addition, the chairman of UBS Axel Weber last week expressed skepticism regarding the crypto currency, noting a possible "massive drop" in the price of bitcoin in the event of tightening of regulation. The Swiss bank does not intend to trade crypto currency or offer it to its customers.

We fear that in the future, if these investments implode and the market corrects, then investors will be looking at ‘who sold us this?

Axel Weber
Chairman, UBS

In November last year, the investment director of UBS Mark Haefele said that the Swiss financial holding company will not invest in bitcoin because of the lack of state control over circulation of crypto currency.

Blockchain

Electroneum to update its blockchain

Electroneum announced that new code will be released on May 30 as its blockchain reaches Block 307500

26 April 2018 50

Electroneum announced its fork is scheduled to take place at block 307500 on May 30. The fork is special as it will not result in two currencies: this is achieved by allowing all the exchanges and pools to update their software in advance. The update covers the following aspects

anti-ASIC code:

the implementation of such code will ensure security against any network attack

increase of transfer fee:

to ensure Electroneum blockchain withstands blockchain flooding, base fee will be increased to 0.1 ETN

block size increase before penalty:

the increase will allow miners to scale the blocks faster and get more transactions into a block

disabling of RingCT and Mixin:

disabling some privacy features with letting wallets remain private will get a less wait to fit a transaction into a block and a leaner blockchain size

3 days mempool life:

it will ensure a reduction of the possibility of the returned transactions

Readers will be able to find the rest of the remaining details of the update here. As for the market indicators for Electroneum, here is what they look like at the moment of publication:

Average price $0.024453
Market cap $166,770,279
Volume (24H) $1,234,100