From a provocative look at Bitcoin’s strongest allies and critics to the release of Stellar’s 2019 roadmap, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.
Bitcoin
A tweet from one of the most prominent crypto investors on the globe has gone viral.
Barry Silbert pitted six of Bitcoin’s most prominent bulls against six of its most prominent critics. The tweet poses the question: What side are you on?
Collectively, the bulls have called Bitcoin brilliant, resilient, undervalued, mathematical and pure digital gold. Collectively, the bears have called Bitcoin worthless bullshit, fraudulent, rat poison squared, and useless garbage.
Silbert founded Digital Currency Group (DCG), a New York-based venture capital company with investments in early-stage crypto startups such as Coinbase. DCG also owns and operates Grayscale Investments and Genesis Trading.
Ethereum
Ethereum’s big Constantinople hard fork appears to be a complete success. The upgrade, which implements a number of improvements and decreases the mining reward by 33%, has been running smoothly for about 12 hours. Ethereum core developer Lane Rettig told Decrypt the successful launch is a big weight off his shoulders.
“My reaction is relief, actually more than I expected. And excitement, too – this was my first successful mainnet hard fork since joining Ethereum. I think people were feeling kind of exhausted and just relieved to see this one go through.”
Ripple and XRP
Ripple just invested in Kava Labs, which is creating blockchains, wallets and exchanges designed to work with the Interledger Protocol (ILP).
Kava says the investment round was led by Lemniscap and Digital Asset Capital Management, along with Ripple, Coil Technologies, 2020 Ventures, Arrington Capital, Hard Yaka, Robot Ventures, UniValues Associates and a number of private investors.
“We are pleased to announce that Kava Labs has raised $1.2 million in funding to continue the development of our Interledger solutions for blockchain technology. These solutions, we believe, are vital keys to the blockchain industry as a whole, as they solve the scaling, interoperability and liquidity challenges limiting blockchain technology today.”
Stellar
Stellar has released its 2019 roadmap. Developers plan to focus on boosting the platform’s level of decentralization, creating an open-source wallet SDK and developing Lightning-like payment channels called Starlight.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, EOS, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Tron
The crypto payment processor CoinGate has announced a new partnership with SubscribeStar. The platform is similar to Patreon and gives people a direct way to donate to the content creators they enjoy following on the internet.
The partnership with CoinGate enables donations in a long list of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, EOS, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Tron.