From a potential Bitcoin bombshell to a controversial report on Ripple and XRP, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.
Bitcoin and Ethereum
A series of images that surfaced on Twitter are creating a burst of speculation in the cryptoverse.
The images allegedly show the unreleased Samsung Galaxy S10 smartphone, equipped with a native cryptocurrency wallet that supports Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH).
— Gregory Blake (@GregiPfister89) January 22, 2019
Crypto analyst Joseph Young says if speculation around the photos is true, it could be bigger than Bakkt and the passage of a Bitcoin ETF combined.
Humble opinion: if Samsung integrates crypto to Galaxy S10, I think it may have a bigger impact than ETF and Bakkt combined.
Partially because no one really knows what kind of exposure ETF / Bakkt will bring meanwhile millions of people use Samsung phones daily.
— Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung) January 24, 2019
Last month, Samsung issued a statement after an initial round of reports claimed the Galaxy S10 will incorporate a wallet for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. “Unfortunately we are unable to provide any information as the below is rumor and speculation,” the tech giant said at the time.
The Galaxy S10 will be officially revealed on February 20th, with its release expected in March.
In December 2018, Samsung first applied for three blockchain-related, European trademarks for smartphones.
Last July, Joel Snyder, a senior IT consultant, published a blog post on Samsung’s Business Insights entitled, “Why Smartphones Have the Best Security for Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.”
Ripple and XRP
Ripple is responding to a new report that claims the market cap of XRP is likely inflated – by billions of coins – on third-party crypto data services such as CoinMarketCap.
According to the crypto data startup Messari, Ripple has not disclosed all of its sales and distributions of XRP to third parties. Messari says 19.2 billion of the 41.0 billion XRP currently listed as “in circulation” on CMC may be illiquid or subject to significant selling restrictions.
“In reality, this estimate may prove to be conservative, as they belie XRP trading volumes which have consistently fallen well below that of EOS and Litecoin, two cryptoassets whose current referenced market caps are a mere 17% and 15% of XRP’s, respectively. In addition, we believe the actual amount of ‘restricted’ XRP in distributions to investors, banking partners, and team members may be significantly higher than our initial estimates reflect.”
According to Ripple, the claims are wildly inaccurate.
“Not only does this report contain several inaccurate assumptions around lockups and selling restrictions, the entire report is based on an incorrect calculation of market cap. While decentralized digital assets like XRP are different from traditional equities, the term ‘market cap’ is always a very simple calculation: current price X total number of the asset = market capitalization. That puts XRP’s current market cap at approximately $31 billion. We believe that any other calculation of market capitalization for XRP is not a clear representation of the truth.”
Tron
A crush of crypto exchanges and wallets are pledging to support the upcoming airdrop for the new Tron-based BitTorrent token (BTT).
So far, the crypto exchanges Upbit, Binance, CoinEx, Huobi, OKEx, Gate.io and Bithumb are on board.
Of course https://t.co/O2C3qIMDZb
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) January 22, 2019
You can find out more about the airdrop here.
Zcash
The trading platform eToro just added the privacy coin Zcash. The new addition brings the total number of coins on the crypto platform to 14.
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— eToro (@eToro) January 24, 2019
