$15 Million Property Bought With Bitcoin (BTC), Ripple Reports Surge in XRP Transactions, and Ethereum Upgrade Countdown Begins – Crypto Newsflash
Bitcoin
A $15.3 million luxury condo in Manhattan has reportedly been purchased using Bitcoin.
According to the real estate outlet The Real Deal, Magnum Real Estate Group sold the property to a group in Taiwan called the “Affluent Silver International LLC.”
“To complete the transaction the parties used Bitpay and Starr. Eric Hedvat, a broker with Jet Real Estate who represented Magnum, said it was a ‘seamless process.'”
This is the third unit in the building that Magnum has successfully sold using BTC.
Ripple and XRP
Ripple is reporting a surge of transactions on its XRP-based remittance network.
The company says the number of transactions moving through its cross-border payments product called On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) has increased seven-fold since the first quarter of this year.
“In less than a year since the commercialization of ODL, we have seen tremendous growth and customer interest with two dozen customers signed on to use the product.
Some of the notable customers committed to using ODL include MoneyGram, goLance, Viamericas, FlashFX and Interbank Peru. There have been more than 7x the number of transactions using ODL from the end of Q1 to the end of October.”
Ripple launched xRapid, now ODL, in October of 2018 and says 24 companies have signed up to use the product.
Ethereum
The countdown to Ethereum’s Istanbul upgrade is on.
Ethereumnodes.org has created a countdown clock for the event. At time of publishing, the update will be implemented on Friday, December 6th.
The Istanbul hard fork is a system-wide update designed to improve the blockchain’s efficiency and security. It’s the eighth hard fork since Ethereum’s launch in July of 2015.
Ethereum’s core developers are currently searching for any critical errors in the code, and if any are discovered the launch date will be pushed back to January.
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