The cryptocurrency market boom of the past three months seemed to be cooling off somewhat last week, though market capitalizations are still very high compared to historic levels, with the combined value of all cryptocurrencies comfortable over $0.1 trillion, according to data from coinmarketcap.com. Saturday saw a significant drop in prices. One exception is Litecoin, which gained 44 percent on Monday, reaching an all-time high over $52 USD.
After years of warring proposals, there is cause to be cautiously optimistic that the Bitcoin community has reached consensus on how to scale the network. Support for SegWit2x was over 80% at times last week, the first time any scaling proposal has attained such popularity. Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song posted an explanation of SegWit2x on Monday.
The team behind the Basic Attention Token announced on June 22 that they are working with some major publishers, including archive.org
Innovative hackers have adapted NSA malware to infect computers and repurpose them for Monero mining. The attack uses some of the same leaked NSA tools as WannaCry.
Civic, a blockchain-based identity verification technology, held a successful crowdsale last week, raising $33 million.
Status, a mobile client for messaging on Ethereum and interacting with the Ethereum blockchain, held a crowdsale on June 20, raising about $90 million.
Ethereum developer Nick Johnson coded a proof-of-concept for off-chain auctions. This follows concerns that ICOs were congesting the Ethereum network.
On June 24, Vitalik Buterin released the latest implementation of pyethereum, the core Python library of Ethereum.
On June 21, Mozilla announced a $2 million prize for designing software and hardware that can provide internet access after a disaster, and in underserved communities.
The government of Ukraine has approved transferring the land registry to a blockchain-based system, according to Ukrainian media reports from June 22.
The European Union announced a project to research applying blockchain technology to non-financial industrial uses.
In the United States, the FBI’s Budget request for 2018 asks for $21.6 million and 80 employees to improve technology to counter groups including “drug traffickers who use virtual currencies to obscure their transactions”.
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