Weekly News

Blockchain and Crypto News

Ethereum has enough staked in the genesis block to launch Eth 2.0 staking on December 1st, pushing Ethereum to highest numbers in a long time

Why is this important? Ethereum is the core of the DeFi network and moving from proof of work to proof of stake is a massive marker in the progress of the technology. Now people who own 32 or more ETH will be able to stake those tokens and earn back while providing service to the network. This massively reduces energy consumption through no longer needing to have all that computational power do the “work” and improves the transactions per second. We’ve been waiting for Ethereum to get to this point for a long time now and the support is phenomenal in getting the needed number of stakers in the genesis block to enable the launch to happen in early December. This will have huge impact on the entire DeFi ecosystem and is a taste of the future of what will be possible with Blockchain and smart contract technologies. The full road to Eth 2.0 will still be long but this is a massive milestone on the journey. Ethereum is ready to move to phase 0 with a single Beacon chain in a few days and we’ll see how the rollout to phase 1 and beyond goes from there.

XRP becomes seriously bullish due to new product patent and excitement around Spark/Flare

Why is this important? Well we’ve all been waiting for XRP do something nice for a very long time right? It’s been in a very bearish pattern now for a couple of years refusing to break $0.50 and mostly hanging around in the sub $0.30 area causing undue mental trauma to anyone who invested in it (like me) in the $0.45 range a while back. It’s managed to hold between $0.60 and $0.75 for a few days now. It actually got to $0.92 briefly on Coinbase before crashing.

This is likely due to the announcement of the airdrop of Spark/Flare tokens which will happen as part of a platform fork enabling smart contracts to run on XRP using the Flare Network. There are 45 Billion Spark tokens to be awarded via airdrop and you can claim them by transferring XRP before December 12th and the airdrop will be calculated based on how much XRP is in your wallet. You can simply send XRP to one of the supported exchanges or if you have an Exodus wallet there’s a setting in there to enable the airdrop in the XRP settings.

Another contributing factor is the newly registered patent they filed for a product called PayString that would have some support for financial services such as monetary services for receiving and disbursing remittances and monetary gifts in fiat currencies and virtual currencies over a computer network. Everything else about this is currently speculation but there is excitement about the potential of a new product.

Ripple also gave the community a confidence boost in announcing the Bank of America as a client.

Are Paypal buying up all of the bitcoin?

What is going on?! Paypal apparently bought up to 70% of all the newly mined Bitcoin since they started offering crypto services a month back. This is all based on estimates by hedge fund manager Pantera Capital. Between Paypal and Square 100% of newly mined Bitcoins are being bought.

Paypal has over 300 million customers globally and is introducing cryptocurrency to a much wider audience. The service is currently rolled out to the US only but they plan to expand later.

Theta expanding to include video on demand

Why is this important? Well we all love Theta right?! Theta up until now has been focused on streaming content only trying to capture the Twitch.tv and eSports markets. Video on Demand sees Theta expand to cover a business model to compete with YouTube, Vimeo and others. If successful, this could really help with our dreams of Theta becoming a great investment. (this is not investment advice!)

Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork

What happened? Bitcoin Cash got in a big battle between two competing ideologies about the future of the token between BCH Node and BCH ABC. Node ran a great campaign and captured the hearts and minds of the community and ultimately won the battle to become the major fork during this split and retain the BCH split. BCH ABC will be listed as BCHA and will coexist as a separate token, go its own way as the minor fork and you’ll need to decide at some point if you have tokens which of these, you’d like them to be. BCH goes through these upgrades every 6 months and hard forks when an agreement can’t be met by the community about the future of these upgrades.

This isn’t the first time this has happened and is actually the route of BSV which was the result of a fork back in 2017.

The Queen is all about Blockchain

In unlikely crypto news this week, Elizabeth II, Queen of England read and responded to a report sent to her by the British Blockchain Association called “Journal of the British Blockchain Association” Very serious, very English. (full disclosure, I am English but I Brexited before it became cool to do so!)

You can read the report here if you have any desires to do so.

So, the surprise is, she read it and had the private secretary’s office respond with an official letter back:

Coinbase to stop Margin Trading in the US

What’s the scoop? As of today Coinbase has ended ALL new margin trading due to new regulations made by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). They plan to address the currently open trades within the next month and then completely shut down all margin trading. Apparently, as things are right now, it’s incredibly difficult for them to comply with these new requirements which effectively say that no entity can have any sort of control over a cryptocurrency once it’s been delivered in accordance with the terms of a margin contract.

They’ve previously argued against this requirement with a letter to the CFTC but it’s been ruled that for them to continue to do margin trading services that they will need to register with the CFTC as a commodities exchange.

It’ll be interesting to see how others like Kraken respond to this…

Significant World Events this week

Mysterious Metal Monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah

In my favorite story of the week, helicopter crew flying in Utah discovered a real life Metal Monolith in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The monolith stands 12 feet tall in the desert in a remote part of Red Rock Country, and is embedded in the ground. Officials right now are claiming that it’s probably “art”. (ok so I have to sidetrack here. Who exactly are “Officials” I mean that sounds really official sure, but who are they? All over the news I keep getting told Officials say this, Officials say that. Seriously, WHO ARE THE OFFICIALS?)
This raises many questions.

• What is it?
• Where did it come from?
• Who done it?!
• Is it real or a hoax?
• Because Aliens?

What we do know is that this was found in a location that’s hard to get to by vehicle or foot and really needs a helicopter to get to easily. Another thing of note, they were actually flying around looking for sheep. Boy did they get something a little different than they were thinking. More on this story as it develops!

World Economic Forum (WEF) launches the dashboard for the new economy
Oh, where would we be without the WEF creating dashboards and thinking up stuff for the new economy. Surely a part of the Great Reset efforts to help everyone with their sustainable future goals. Well lucky for us all, the WEF and the Davos Agenda have provided us with such a dashboard and announced the 5 program themes for 2021:

• Designing cohesive, sustainable, resilient economic systems
• Driving responsible industry transformation and growth
• Enhancing stewardship of our global commons
• Harnessing the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
• Advancing global and regional cooperation

All I can do here is paste what they say, which speaks for itself:

- The world has experienced unimaginable hardship since the outbreak of the global pandemic, reversing gains in the fight against unemployment, climate change and poverty

- Rebuilding trust and increasing global cooperation are crucial to implement the bold and innovative solutions needed to drive a robust recovery

- To mobilize government, business and civil society on these solutions, the World Economic Forum will hold a virtual meeting on 25-29 January 2021 on the Davos Agenda

- Heads of state and government will address the state of the world in 2021 to audiences in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, North America and Latin America

https://www.weforum.org/projects/dashboard-for-the-new-economy

“Steering the economy onto a greener and fairer track will require a set of globally agreed metrics beyond GDP growth. Efforts to identify relevant metrics have proliferated in recent years. Given the multidimensionality of the current crisis, an accelerated convergence on a dashboard of core metrics to steer consistent, forward-looking economic and social policy and business decisions will be critical. This Dahsboard initative will bring together key international organizations, leading expert voices and G20 governments to propose a core set of elements that governments can use to shift to a new common framework for tracking economic progress. It will thereby accelerate a systemic solution to the measurement challenge. The effort will build directly on the extensive and rigorous work that has already been done and work to converge and amplify it.”

Well folks, that’s this week’s news summary. I’ll be back the same bat time, the same bat channel next week with more goings on in the Blockchain environment and the world at large. In the meantime, thanks for reading and I can’t wait to get our community take on some of this stuff.

Phil