Ethereum Forks Happening This Week

It has been reported that Ethereum will upgrade its network this week.

Dubbed as Constantinople and St. Peterburg both estimated to take place anytime this week or more precisely when the Ethereum block reaches 7,280,000.

Some are estimating this would happen at the end of the month on February 28, 2019, however given the nature of mining, nobody can be sure when it will exactly happen.

The Constantinople upgrade was meant to go live last January but was postponed due to a newly discovered vulnerability that had to be fixed before the upgrade could be implemented.

The upgrade was meant for multiple efficiency improvement as well as to delay the decrease of Ethereum’s block rewards.

The St. Petersburg network update on the other hand is meant to delete a previous update from Ethereum’s test netoworks.

It seeks to delete Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1283 which proposes net gas metering changes enabling new usages for contract storage and reducing excessive gas cost.

Major Bank In Malta Cyber-Attacked Highlights Importance Of Decentralization

One of Malta’s oldest and most established financial institution to the island state has recently fallen victim to a cyber attack.

Individuals and businesses are unable to access their funds even after a week after the attack.

This highlights the need of decentralized and stable alternatives.

The Bank of Valleta shutdown all operations following a security breach that allowed hackers to move as much as 13 million Euros into foreign accounts.

ATMs, bank branches, mobile banking and even its email service were suspended even its website went offline.

The Prime Minister of the country assured its citizens that the fraudulent transaction had been traced and are being reversed.

The bank also reassured its customers that their accounts are not compromised.

10 days after the attack, customers are still waiting for their services to come back.

A customer reveals that the bank have failed to provide any accurate information when all bank services will be restored.

This is not the first time a reputable financial institution has been compromised, highlighting the importance of decentralization.

Bitcoin’s network boast uptime of 99.98% since its inception and has not ever been compromised in anyway.

It is intentionally designed to be energy intensive and it requires more resources to attack it than to defend it.

This makes the bitcoin the most secure blockchain.

Institutions To Invest In Crypto After Next Bull Trend Is Established

The chief executive officer of Pantera Capital, Dan Morehead have stated that the crypto sector of today has more robust fundamentals than it did during the previous bear trend.

He reveals that the industry has developed the necessary infrastructure to attract institutional investors.

He compares the current bear market to the bear market of 2014-2015 which he describes as much more worrisome as there is more concern then if blockchain will really work.

There are also concerns of regulatory risk at the time as it was not yet clear where regulators will move going forwards.

Now more institutions will be comfortable moving into the cryto space with reputable financial institution like Fidelity offering crypto custodial services and Bakkt offering crypto-based financial products backed by Wall Street giant Intercontinental Exchange.

Morehead predicts that in 2019 venture capital will supersede ICOs as the dominant means of fundraising within the cryptocurrency market.

EOS Will Be Used By 300 Million Users On Tapatalk

It has been reported that EOS will be used by Tapatalk, a reddit-like forum application that reportedly have more than 300 million users.

This was announced last February 21, 2019.

Tapatalk will leverage the EOS blockchain to power its Gold Point reward system.

This will be used to incentivize its users via EOS’ on-chain asset of the same name.

The integration may increase the participation of users among Tapatalk’s 300 million users and at the same time increase adoption of cryptocurrencies.

According to Winter Wong CEO of Tapatalk, his firm has been looking to promote microeconomics on forum platforms.

He believes that the integration of blockchain into its platform is a natural step.

By turning Gold Points into an EOS-backed token, Tapatalk could allow forum admins to redeem these points for real money, or other digital assets such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP).

Gold Points will be listed on cypto exchanges to give better liquidity.

Tron To Hard Fork At The End Of February

The TRON network will undergo a network upgrade that will feature several improvements on the blockchain.

These include multi-signature crypto wallet, institutional ready accounts management tools, dynamic energy adjustment to real-time network performance, upgraded virtual machines and optimizations that increase performance and resource usage by 50% .

According to Tron’s founder, Justin Sun, his organization is focused on creating viable use case and educating the market place.

He further states that his development team does not spend a lot of time thinking about overtaking Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization.

He and his team is committed in creating products and services that people want to use which will make the Tron platform become more valuable

Tron has become one of the leading platforms for developing decentralized applications (dApps).

It is a remarkable feat considering that it just launched its mainnet last summer of 2018.

It has already overtaken Ethereum in terms of new dApps released on its platform.

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