Current Bitcoin Price: $6528 (as of 7:40 AM PST)

The market’s been slowly creeping up over the last 24 hours. Bitcoin is up 1.33% and Ethereum is up 3.32%; in fact, IOTA is the only top-10 coin that hasn’t appreciated by more than one percent.

Binance Coin (BNB, #16) has been doing particularly well — up by more than 6% — along with EOS (#5), which is up by more than 5%.

Top Bitcoin & Crypto News Stories for 15th June 2018

SEC clarifies that Ether is not a security

The SEC governs all things security and commodity in the United States, and that’s raised a big question as to whether they should be regulating cryptocurrencies and ICOs.

Yesterday, the lead for SEC’s corporation finance division, Willian Hinman, said that “current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions”. This is a likely sign that the SEC won’t be looking to regulate Ethereum, and perhaps not similar cryptocurrency platforms.

Stellar approved for New York trading

Earlier this week, New York officials gave the ItBit exchange permission to begin trading cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum (in addition to Bitcoin).

They’ve just received approval from New York’s Department of Financial Services that Stellar Lumens (XLM, #7) can also be traded — causing a four percent spike in the coin’s price.

EOS reaches 15% consensus for mainnet launch

We noted in a previous newsletter that EOS had failed to round up at least 15% of its token holders in order to give the project’s mainnet launch a greenlight.

This requirement was met yesterday, and as it stands users have staked more than 200,000,000 EOS tokens, worth over $10 each, exceeding the 150,000,000 needed for launch.