From the bullish spending habits of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to a big move at IOTA, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.
Bitcoin
Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey says he’s maxing out the amount of Bitcoin he can buy on Cash App.
Dorsey talked about his Bitcoin buying habits on the latest Tales from the Crypt podcast, saying he just tried to buy more but already hit out the $10,000 weekly limit. At $10,000 worth of BTC a week, Dorsey is buying 107 BTC each year, worth about $520,000 at time of publishing.
Dorsey says the emergence of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency reminds him of the early days of Twitter, offering a new way to cross the divide between countries around the world.
“The internet as a concept, since 1979, continues to break down these barriers and these boundaries that we put upon ourselves in terms of communities or nations or cities. Just how we think about the segmentation of the world. It enables us to think about one humanity. And I think we’ve seen that with networking, we’ve seen that with media, we’ve seen that with communication, and it feels like one of the most critical last pillars of that is currency.
And I guess I just approach this as, what does the internet ultimately want? It will want to have a native currency, a currency that is effectively global and exists on its territory instead of through the territories of the various nation states that we have today. I can’t think of anything more exciting than that, and also I think it speaks to internet ideals and where the world is inherently going. I don’t want to wait around for that to happen to me or to us as a company. I want to make it happen. So that’s why getting more into Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was so interesting for us.”
Maker and Ethereum
More than 2% of the total supply of Ethereum is now locked in MakerDAO smart contracts, according to a leading Github tracker. Maker (MKR) powers a loan system that uses Ethereum (ETH) as collateral, and is a companion to the stablecoin Dai (DAI).
Ripple and XRP
International money transfer company Flash FX is expanding its partnership with Ripple. In a new interview, founders Michael O’Sullivan and Nicolas Steiger tell CryptoTechNews about the benefits of its two-year collaboration.
“FlashFX’s cloud-based infrastructure integrated with blockchain technology (Ripple) provides a number of benefits for the customer, including reduced time (for finding information and verifying transactions), decreased costs (for overhead and intermediaries), transparency (complete records of where each asset has been) and alleviated risk (of collusion, tampering and fraud).”
FlashFX revealed it would utilize XRP for liquidity in cross-border transfers back in 2016.
Litecoin
Litecoin Lightning Network is flashing green. It now exceeds 1,000 channels. According to data compiled by 1ml.com, the network has reached 1,022 active channels among 162 participants. The largest node on the network is ‘freeside’ which accounts for 20% of the network, followed by crypto service Bitrefill, which allows users to buy gift cards and pay bills over Lightning.
Tron
New numbers from DappReview show decentralized apps on the Tron network are pushing record volume, reaching a total of more than one billion TRX.
DappRadar says the volume is increasing at a rapid rate, and hit 22 million TRX in a 24-hour period on March 4th.
Cardano
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson is on a roll, giving a new interview on YouTube’s Crush The Street. Hoskinson talks about Cardano’s path forward and potential regulatory hurdles facing blockchain and cryptocurrency.
IOTA
IOTA’s plan to further decentralize the network by removing the platform’s coordinator node, which plays a major role in securing the network, is underway. The team just announced it has launched a public testnet.
“We are happy to announce the launch of znet, the first iteration of the Coordinator-less testnet. This testnet has in fact been alive for several weeks, but we would like to officially open it up to community participation and contribution. To that end, we invite community members to join the discussion on Discord, to check out the live visualization of the znet Tangle, to contribute issues and code to the CLIRI Github repo, and of course: to run CLIRI nodes and join the network.”