The State of The Market — March 4, 2019BTC: $3,759.67 (-2.65%)ETH: $126.80 (-5.53%)XRP: $0.304842 (-2.96%)
The market remained stable throughout the weekend. However, early today, there was a substantial crash and nearly $5 Billion has been wiped out from the crypto market. Bitcoin has fallen below $3,800, and it could further fall down to $3,400. All of the top 20 cryptocurrencies are flashing red right now, and major cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and EOS suffered bigger losses.
In other news, on Sunday, Verge (XVG) unexpectedly gained 11% after a mining code malfunction occurred and the privacy coin’s developers began to ponder a switch to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). At the moment, the reason for the price increase is unknown and members of the Verge community believe that a tweet from Verge founder and lead developer Sunerok could be behind the price increase. Also, MyCrypto CEO, Taylor Monahan, recently spoke about what she describes as growing toxicity within the Ethereum community after lead developer Afri Schoedon rage quit the project nearly 2 weeks ago. Monahan said that the toxic ‘Ethereum or nothing’ attitude exhibited by some members of the Ethereum community is shameful and damaging to the entire project. According to Monahan, Schoedon was the one person who could simplify Ethereum into digestible tidbits for the wider public and his status as a de facto leader only angered people when they felt he deviated from the ‘Ethereum or nothing’ ideology.
1) Iran’s largest banks have revealed plans for tokenizing a variety of assets on a private blockchain platform based on Stellar protocol. The ‘PayMon’ (PMN) platform is backed by 30 milligrams of 24-karat gold and each PMN token will be worth 156,581 rials or approximately $3.72. According to the banks, PMN’s total supply is capped at 1 billion and 15% of the tokens will be offered to the public, 20% will be on offer to institutional “anchors” looking to purchase a minimum of 300,000 PMN. The remaining 60% will be distributed monthly and 5% will be held by the founding team. Previous reports from Iranian government officials suggested that tokenized assets and cryptocurrency could be used as a method for circumventing U.S. sanctions but the dialogue has now shifted to focus on the technology’s capacity to stimulate economic growth and innovation within Iran’s tech sector. (Read More)
2) Blockstream has released the newest version of c-lightning, version 0.7, the company’s proprietary implementation of the Lightning Network (LN). This is the first major release in the past 8 months and includes several performance improvements, software bug fixes, additional privacy options, and more detailed documentation. The new features were developed by a team of 50 different contributors from throughout the world who published 1,300 commits to c-lightning’s codebase. There are currently 6,963 LN nodes, and an increase of 18.88% in the past 30 days, with a total network capacity of 740 BTC worth approximately $2.835 million. (Read More)
3) Jesse Powell, the CEO of Kraken, recently took a shot at the recent acquisition of Neutrino by Coinbase through the following tweet: “I asked our Compliance team what they thought of Neutrino. Fortunately, they’d just completed an evaluation. Neutrino came in last place on product (out of the 5) but was disqualified anyway due to the risks. However, other factors are important in M&A: cost, culture fit.” This may add further fuel to the current #delete coinbase campaign that was inspired after the exchange announced the controversial acquisition. (Read More)
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