From a potential seismic shift in the price of Bitcoin to the debate on whether XRP is a security, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.
Bitcoin
A technical gauge is pointing to an imminent and significant shift in the price of Bitcoin.
The GTI VERA Bands Indicator shows Bitcoin may be on the brink of a big move, according to Bloomberg. Whether the move is above or below BTC’s key level of $4,000 remains to be seen.
Travis Kling, the founder of crypto hedge fund Ikigai, says he doubts Bitcoin has found its bottom.
“It’s unlikely that the bottom is in for Bitcoin. I am certainly willing to change my mind, but the preponderance of evidence leads us to believe that we’ll see more lows before we head higher.”
Ethereum
CoinGecko has created a countdown clock for the imminent Ethereum upgrade Constantinople.
The system-wide overhaul, designed to optimize network efficiency and change Ethereum’s miner rewards policy, is set for launch in about six days.
Ripple and XRP
EToro senior market analyst Mati Greenspan says he does not believe XRP should be classified as a security.
“XRP is not a security, in my personal opinion. My best understanding is XRP is logically a utility token. The SEC may see things differently.”
Ripple is facing a few class action lawsuits accusing the company of violating state and federal securities laws by selling XRP as an unregistered security.
As reported by Crypto Briefing, Greenspan says he remains bullish on XRP in the long run.
Stellar
The Stellar-based micropayments startup SatoshiPay says it now has a group of new validator nodes up and running to help power the Stellar network.
“To support further decentralisation and resilience of the Stellar network, SatoshiPay starts operating the network’s first globally distributed cluster of full validator nodes — maintaining a database of all past ledger operations, with publicly accessible history archives and the fastest available API for querying the ledger…
We are thrilled to announce that a few days ago we completed our upgrade by launching a completely redesigned cluster of full Stellar validators that are distributed across the globe: Iowa (US), Frankfurt (Germany) and Singapore.”
Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin
Binance and the team at TrustWallet just announced support for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin on both iOS and Android.
The wallet also supports Ethereum and all Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens, as well as Ethereum Classic, GoChain, POA Network, VeChain, Tron, Wanchain, Callisto, ICON and Tomochain.
Tron
The competitive blockchain-based game TronGoo is already the most popular decentralized gaming app across all three of the major blockchains – Tron, EOS and Ethereum – just days after its debut.
The game was originally developed for Ethereum, and its developers decided to port it over to Tron to make use of the network’s increased transaction speed.
TronGoo has taken the throne in less than 5 days. A huge congratulations for breaking records and becoming the #1 gaming DApp in volume (#2 in users) across all blockchains. It’s been a pleasure for #TRONArcade to work with developers @WorldWarGoo and @FarmTron on this project. pic.twitter.com/6l3evYJA28
— TRON Arcade (@TRONArcade) January 10, 2019
IOTA
A new proof-of-concept video from DXC Technology based on the IOTA Tangle is out. It shows an IOTA-based vehicle charging station prototype.
IOTA is working with a number of companies to create distributed ledger solutions for the car industry.
Back in April, the smart charging company ElaadNL revealed its own IOTA-based charging station prototype, designed to utilize IOTA’s distributed ledger for machine-to-machine communication and payment between a charging station and a vehicle.
QTUM
Decentralized platform Qtum conducted its first atomic swap with Bitcoin. Atomic cross-chain swaps allow two transactions to be executed on two separate blockchains. They can be completed or canceled simultaneously — without a third party.
According to the announcement,
“As the cryptocurrency technologies and markets mature, atomic cross-chain swaps will have more application scenarios. For example, cross-chain exchanges of large amount of cryptocurrencies can be completed on the blockchain using this technology, without the need of centralized exchanges which will charge a large amount of fees.”
[the_ad id="42537"] [the_ad id="42536"]Atomic Cross-Chain Swap on Qtum by QtumX https://t.co/C33AbwtWls
— Qtum (@qtum) January 9, 2019