From the push for a breakthrough Bitcoin ETF to an impending Tron token sale, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin and crypto bull Brian Kelly says there’s absolutely “no shot” for any Bitcoin ETF proposal to pass in 2019. The founder and CEO of crypto investment firm BKCM told CoinTelegraph he believes the Bitcoin futures market is not mature enough, and it will be at least a year before an exchange-traded fund is approved.
As for the crypto market as a whole, Kelly says he believes Bitcoin is at or near a bottom, and he expects the market to turn around this year.
“Probably in 2019 the focus will be on currencies — Bitcoin, Litecoin, some of those — because we have quite a bit of geopolitical tension in the world. We are starting to see some global macro players use Bitcoin as alternative to their gold position, or as a way to hedge against fiat currency fluctuations and volatility.”
Ripple and XRP
Ripple has partnered with Tsinghua University to launch a research scholarship program for graduates in China. According to Crowdfund Insider, the program will focus on how blockchain technology works and the current state of regulations in the country.
Meanwhile, Ripple and XRP supporter Hodor has published an extensive look at the current state of XRP, covering adoption, use case stats, performance stats and more.
Ethereum
The latest ConsenSys-sponsored Week in Ethereum blog post is out.
This week’s edition covers a number of updates relevant to the Ethereum community, and looks at new developments on the Ethereum-based platforms OmiseGo, 0x and Augur.
Stellar
The Stellar-based micropayments startup SatoshiPay just released a multi-signature wallet for XLM.
“We kick off 2019 by releasing Solar, a blazing fast and user-friendly wallet that brings enterprise-grade security features to the Stellar galaxy. Needless to say, it’s open-source for full transparency.”
Tron
Tron founder Justin Sun says the token sale for the Tron-based cryptocurrency BTT starts on January 28th, via Binance Launchpad.
BTT will be used on the file-sharing platform BitTorrent to incentivize users to share files on the network.
IOTA
IOTA just dropped an update on its progress with the new Trinity mobile wallet. Development is still underway, after receiving a lot of support from the community following its beta phase.
“Trinity was released to mobile beta in late May and desktop beta in late August 2018. The codebase was open sourced with the release of desktop beta.
Since then we have had an overwhelming response, with 10,000 active iOS users, 20,000 installs on active Android devices, and over 80,000 total desktop downloads across all versions. Over 740,000 transactions have been sent with Trinity, with a staggering total transaction value of around 2.7 Peta IOTA (i.e. the total supply of tokens). Furthermore, we now have hardware wallet support with the community team’s implementation for Ledger Nano S.”
VeChain
OceanEx is about to release a new version of its crypto exchange and asset management platform, built on the VeChainThor blockchain.
The new features will be released on January 21st, and include an optimized user interface and increased performance.