Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today: LedgerX wins regulatory approval on physically-settled bitcoin futures, Binance Chain set for major hard fork and NFL players continue to buy up bitcoin.

Bitcoin appears to be leading today's market rally with an impressive 12% gain that briefly took the bitcoin price over $12,800 - a price not seen since January 2018. NEO and QTUM have posted impressive gains and are trading at $19.45 (+9.68%) and $5.47 (+28.17%) respectively. Unusually some altcoins in the top ten are not following suit with EOS and Litecoin (LTC) trading at $7.11 (-0.81%) and $133.58 (-1.66%) respectively.

At the time of writing, bitcoin is currently trading at $12,594.51 (+10.88%) with a daily volume of $7.8bn and ether (ETH) is trading at $329.93 (+5.89%) with a daily volume of $3.24bn. The MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 10 Index is currently tracking at 5,175.14 (+5.13%).

LedgerX Wins Regulatory Approval on Physically-Settled Bitcoin Futures

U.S.-regulated bitcoin derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, LedgerX, had its application for designation as a contract maker approved by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC); meaning it can now offer physically-settled bitcoin futures contracts.

With its application – which was initially filed in November 2018 – now approved by the CTFC, LedgerX will be able to list bitcoin derivatives contracts, including both options and futures, and offer them to investors, regardless of whether they are retail or institutional. According to a blog post by LedgerX's CEO (Paul Chou), these new products will trade on a new platform called "LedgerX Omni":

"With our new license granted today, both retail and institutional customers can interact in the same transparent marketplace, LedgerX Omni, the first and only regulated US institution to offer these capabilities to the retail audience. We can now provide a robust market for a much broader audience, providing access to individuals who want to get exposure to the fast-growing crypto investment sector via derivatives products that they could not access in the past."

Binance Chain Set for ‘Galileo’ Hard Fork

Appearing on the Binance Chain community forum was a post outlining a June 26 Binance Chain testnet hard fork. The upgrade, which has been dubbed ‘Galileo’, will bring with it various changes to Binance Chain nodes, the Binance Chain client, and the fork of Tendermint upon which Binance Chain is built atop.

Some notable features of the upcoming Binance Chain hard fork include token time-locking capabilities and a newfound ability of validators to, in relation to Binance DEX, “create a delist proposal and vote on delisting trading pairs via governance.”

As for when the Binance Chain mainnet will receive the ‘Galileo’ upgrade, Tuesday’s post stated it will be “a few weeks” from now. A separate announcement will come in relation to this.

NFL Players Buy into Bitcoin Bull Run

How many NFL players have purchased bitcoin? At least 32.

That’s according to star NFL player and staunch Bitcoin proponent, Russell Okung, who today upwardly revised a June 17 tweet wherein he declared that there were “at least 30” players in the NFL who had purchased the world’s top cryptocurrency by market cap.

Okung – who serves on the executive committee of the NFL Players Association – first updated his count on Tuesday evening (PT) from 30 to 31. Then, an hour later, he once more updated the tally to 32.

Prompting the second of the two updates was Oren Burks, a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers who responded to Okung’s June 17 tweet with the hashtag ‘HODL’, the popular term used within the crypto community when one intends to keep – rather than sell – their cryptocurrency holdings.

State of the Crypto by Top Tier Exchange Volume

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