From a new report on Bitcoin and crypto market trends to a bidding war over Ripple partner Earthport, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.
Bitcoin
Fundstrat co-founder and head of research Tom Lee says the firm has a positive outlook for Bitcoin and crypto throughout 2019.
The firm’s latest crypto report tracks macro, technical and fundamental reasons that are mostly positive for the year ahead.
Lee predicted a Bitcoin bull run last year that never materialized. On Wednesday, Fundstrat strategist Robert Sluymer wrote a note to clients saying if Bitcoin were to break below $3,100, that would imply further decline to $2,270 is in store. On the flip side, Bitcoin needs to break past $4,200 to signal a true turnaround.
Ripple and XRP
Visa and Mastercard are locked in a bidding war to purchase Ripple partner Earthport. Visa is the latest to up the ante, offering $319 million for the British cross-border payment company, Reuters reports.
Earthport partnered with Ripple in 2014 and has been rumored to be testing Ripple’s XRP-based xRapid for international payments, although there is no official confirmation.
Ethereum
The latest ConsenSys-sponsored Week in Ethereum blog post is out. This week’s edition covers a long list of developer updates and news from the Ethereum-based platforms Kyber and Basic Attention Token.
Litecoin
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee says developers are doing what they can to boost the overall crypto market. Litecoin recently became the fourth biggest cryptocurrency, after Lee announced the team is working to implement privacy features on the network.
Stellar
The Netherlands-based social trading exchange Blockport has listed Stellar (XLM). The cryptocurrency is the 14th coin available on the platform.
Tron
Bittrex International has officially listed Tron’s BitTorrent Token (BTT). The crypto exchange will also support the first and subsequent BTT airdrops, which begin on February 11th.
IOTA
The team at IOTA has released a new blog post outlining its efforts to improve communications with developers and the crypto community.
“The past weeks our engineering department has been transitioning to a very different, and much more open communication model with our community. Regular updates for Trinity, Entangled, IRI and client libraries are now coming out.
Probably even more visible, at least if you are active on our Discord, is the presence of new channels. The day-to-day development team discussions are now happening in these channels. The channels are visible to anyone.”
Cardano
In a new YouTube video, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson defends the platform’s peer review process. Hoskinson says although peer-review can add months to the development process, it’s well worth the effort to build something right the first time and avoid fixing issues in the future.