A number of blockchain projects are undergoing major changes in the development process, while the price of Bitcoin has the potential to go out of the corridor and drop below $6300.
📌 Cryptocurrency Market Hits 1-Year Lows
The capitalization of the cryptocurrency market has reached year-low values: now it is at a level barely above the "key" $200 billion. The Block was the first to speak on this topic, noting the correlation between the changes in overall capitalization and trading volumes of the first 50 ERC-20 tokens. Thus, the decline in trading in each of the currencies resulted in a systematic fall in the area of digital assets.
The market capitalization as well as volumes of top 50 ERC20 tokens have hit 1-year lows.https://t.co/QWUnxBSciv pic.twitter.com/jGrxylJyRv
— Larry Cermak () October 29, 2018
Considering that the weighted average price of Bitcoin is now at around $ 6.358, for these 7 days the first cryptocurrency has shown a decline in value by more than $ 100 ($108, 1.68%). Annual losses are estimated at $1,187 at the moment. This is contrary to the general year-by-year Bitcoin trend when there was an increase compared with each previous year (looking at the present situation).
📌 Exchanges' Trading Volumes Are Falling Down
General market trends are clearly reflected in the level of trading volumes. On OKEx and Huobi, the decrease estimated at 47%, on the American Poloniex - by 56%. KuCoin and Bibox showed a much smaller decline in the volume of cryptocurrency trading, here the decline is about 3%. The total turnover on the largest exchange, Binance, sank 32%.
In spite of this, Coinbase is going to bring in $1.3 billion in revenue despite crypto's massive slump, according to the recent statement. Bloomberg's experts noticed that the cumulative value of all major cryptocurrencies has tumbled by more than 70%; Earlier, Coinbase raised at about $8 billion, which makes the platform one of the most expensive startups ever.
📌 Ethereum 2.0 Is Coming
During the Devcon4 conference (recently held in Prague), the Ethereum's creator Vitalik Buterin announced the transition of the system to the “Ethereum 2.0” stage. This massive update called Serenity will be released after the implementation of the Casper protocols. Expected phases include the realization of Proof-of-Stake (PoS), sharding, EWASM Virtual Machine updating, and phase 3 (iterations, improvements, add tech).
«“[Serenity is] a realization of all of these different strands of research that we have been spending all of our time on for the last four years. So this includes Casper, and not just hybrid Casper, 100% organic, genuine, pure Casper. Sharding, EWASM, and all of these other protocol research ideas».
It is expected that the complex of all these changes will make the ETH ecosystem feel better, both in terms of the transactions speed (throughput can surpass 1000 transactions per second), and in terms of security. The transition to the Proof-of-Stake will take place already at the stage of Casper activation. which was developed over several years, so that we can say that these changes are generally systematic and planned.
📌 Chinese "Crypto Ranking" Puts EOS At The First Place
Perhaps the only real rating that a cryptocurrency can have is its real value, which can also to some extent reflect the attitude of investors to technology, but, the "rankings" exist, and CCID's one is often referenced. China’s Center for Information and Industry Development (CCID), under the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology presented their version of the 33 ranked currencies list, in which:
- EOS, Bitshares, Ethereum ranked as top 3;
- Bitcoin has lost three points since last time, taking 19th place;
- Ethereum, Neo, Nebulas, Qtum, Dash considered as best in "use";
- Ethereum, EOS, Nuls and Cardano are the leaders among innovate blockchains.
«At present, EOS and Ethereum are undoubtedly the preferred platforms for Dapp development worldwide, and EOS is showing a stronger momentum. The data shows that EOS Dapp is highly active and user increments are large.»
📌 Zcash: Sapling Hard Fork Activation Complete
In the last days of October, Zcash network received significant updates in the form of a new hard fork called Sapling. The improvement has been successfully completed: the network now provides new secure wallet addresses and increased transaction throughput. The transaction construction time has decreased by 90%, and the process itself requires 97% less memory. In addition to improving performance, the team paid attention to such an important aspect of cryptocurrency as confidentiality.
Success! We’re happy to announce that the #Zcash Sapling network upgrade activated today at block height 419200. #Sapling introduces new #shielded addresses with significantly improved performance. Learn more: https://t.co/IGoqNdlz3N pic.twitter.com/6VpKcMteCa
— Zcash Company () October 29, 2018
Sapling is the second, and at the same time, the final Zcash upgrade. The last hardfork Overwinter took place in the summer of 2017, on June 26 at block 347500. The recent update took block 419200. At the moment, ZEC, the native project's coin is trading at $120 and has $ 621,959,503 as a current market capitalization. Zcash has a fixed maximum total supply of 21 million units, just as Bitcoin, which in many ways became an example for developers. ZEC is also often compared to Monero and Dash, due to the attention to such an aspect as the currency's anonymity.
📌 The Sia Network Successfully Hardforked
Another developing currency, Siacoin, upgraded its network with the goal to block ASIC mining devices by Bitmain. Sia, a decentralized storage platform, now has a modified consensus algorithm, which excludes ASIC mining, containing a potential threat to the stability of the currency's network. Everything is cool, however, some developers' expectations regarding the time of the fork haven't been realized: it was planned to activate the update on October 31, but in fact, the code has been implemented on November 1.
The Sia network successfully hardforked at block 179,000! After a short period of no blocks, network activity appears healthy and normal.
— Sia Tech (@SiaTechHQ) November 1, 2018
If you haven’t, be sure to update to Sia v1.3.7. It contains a number of security fixes as well as the fork code. https://t.co/937V5vVnDj
The complexity of the network fell by about 98% so that new blocks can be found at intervals of 10 minutes. And, since this, the number of miners in the network has decreased.
"The reason we had the secret circuit was to activate it in the event of a malicious mining attack. While there was not ever a direct attack on the consensus system, much of the community felt that the secret development of ASICs was an attack, and also felt that one farm owning 45 percent of the hash rate was risky, and justified forcing a [proof of work] change."
📌 The Bitcoin Cash Community Is Waiting For The Upcoming Hard Fork
While investors are waiting for the next Bitcoin Cash hard fork on November 15, the coin`s price has increased by 18% to $560 (at the present moment). Nothing surprising - the fork remains a good opportunity to play on the value of main and just produced assets. At the same time, the community has come to some uncertainty of which special path of development of the network will be the most correct. Even such arguments as "true vision of Satoshi" being used in current discussions.
Craig Wright, nChain, and the mining pool Coingeek are promoting the new Bitcoin SV client. Meanwhile, Jihan Wu probably supports Bitcoin ABC, which does not demonstrate compatibility with nChain. Such large platforms, as Binance, Coinbase and OKEx are going to provide support for Bitcoin ABC only. nChain`s version of the future hard fork contains incompatible changes with the largest client of the full Bitcoin Cash node and it is unlikely that its paths will ever be connected.
📌 The Creator Of ERC20 Tokens Standard Introduced The New Kind Of ICOs
Speaking in Prague on Tuesday at Devcon4, Fabian Vogelsteller proposed the new kind of ICO process that can receive name RICO (reversible ICO). The innovation includes a special smart contract that will allow participants to return investments at any stage of the project's development.
"It brings the balance back between the community and the project and I think this is really important."
Such an initiative has already existed in the form of an idea for a long time. Of course, if investors could return their funds, then the ICO process would be much safer. However, it is worth noting that this does not quite correspond to the traditional logic of investing, closing some opportunities for developing projects. But, cryptocurrency is a special area, so the experiment may take place, probably.
📌 Former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen Now Owns Bitcoin
The former head of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, now has a bit of digital gold. It is not known how easy this decision was made after her criticism of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin in particular. However, Jannet did not buy cryptocurrency: Bitcoins were sent to her as a gift by known email address. Raz Suprovici, the founder of bitcoin gifting service Biterica, according to his words, wanted to help the ex Fed employee to get to know Bitcoin better by sending about $20 of digital currency.
"People are afraid of the unknown. I was hoping that when she logged into her bitcoin wallet with her ID and password, she would see it's just like a typical online bank account. The money she owns is there, in her control, ready to spend … I hope that this sparks her openness to the technology."
As it often happens, Janet Yellen didn't consider Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies a good form of money but noted the importance of the blockchain technology.
📌 Listings
- Bitfinex added DigiByte (DGB) against BTC and USD.
- Coinbase Pro launched trading with Basic Attention Token (BAT).
- Ethfinex enables DAI, Augur, MakerDAO, Basic Attention Token, SpankChain and Autonio AI tradings.
📌 Blockchain in Use
JP Morgan will use Quorum blockchain to tokenize gold. This area now uses paper documents, but it will be replaced by more secure and modern tokenized assets. To note, Quorum is JPMorgan's blockchain that is primarily used for cross-banking payments.
Fujitsu, Mizuho Bank, MUFG Bank and other several Japanese banks are testing blockchain-powered settlement system Zengin. This platform also aimed to provide real-time interbank payments - one of the most popular applications of technology.
The Indian banking and financial services firm HSBC completes joint blockchain transaction with Indian Reliance Industries (RIL). The blockchain-powered letter of credit (LoC) transaction reduces the time and costs of processing documentation.
📌 Industry
- BlackRock won't launch Bitcoin ETF until the cryptocurrency industry gets fully legitimized.
- The Ethereum Foundation is going to create specializing mining hardware in partnership with Filecoin.
- IDEX exchange users will have to pass account verification to comply with AML/KYC requirements.
- Bithumb and seriesOne will launch the new security token exchange in the US.
- Hodl Hodl announces OTC trading desk.
- The Ledger Nano S now supports IOTA.
CryptoKitties has secured $15 million in funding round was joined by Google Ventures, SamsungNEXT and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
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