The first 10 days of November have been quite eventful in the cryptocurrency space. The market has been bumpy as usual but the crypto community is looking forward to something interesting in the future.
For those who missed the fun though, we have handpicked the best and most interesting stories for you and here they are.
SWIFT
Despite Ripple’s popularity in transboundary payments, The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, SWIFT, has denied rumors that it intended to integrate with Ripple or use its payment protocol. While most payment companies see Ripple as a threat to SWIFT, there have been speculations that the two could collaborate to upgrade SWIFT’s payment system.
Apparently SWIFT is doing a solo upgrade which it has instructed all its users to upgrade to, a new platform known as Swift GPI. Ripple staff is said to have been attending SWIFT functions and there has been some intercompany movement of the same but it doesn’t seem like the relationship will go beyond that as far as SWIFT is concerned.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin has received its fair share of the rough market since October, however, it experienced a significant price surge within the last week. The surge was substantial, taking the price from ~$6200 to over $6,500.
Meanwhile, concerning the price of the asset, Venture Capital investor Tim Draper is still bullish and optimistic that the asset will reach $250,000 by 2022 despite the fact that his prediction of the same price for April 2018 did not come true. In Draper’s view, the huge surge can only happen if bitcoin can be used on a day to day basis to buy Starbucks Coffee etc.
Also, a large transaction volume was recorded coming from South Korea based exchange Bithumb. The exchange recorded a transaction of up to $666,658,444 from Bitcoin to Korean Yon. The large and growing transaction volume if sustained is expected to push Bitcoin’s price to $6,800 soon.
Ripple (XRP)
The cryptocurrency with an unusual success in cross-border payments is taking its efforts to expand its reach to the next level by collaborating with NASDAQ. This collaboration is expected to be concluded by 2019 when NASDAQ is set to launch its cryptocurrency platform. When sealed, the partnership between the two is expected to bring Ripple to the same level with leading crypto exchange Coinbase and possibly beat it.
Stellar XLM
Stellar is another prominent cross-border payment token. The company is moving to list its token on the Blockchain wallet. XLM will be the fourth crypto asset listed on Blockchain after Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.
In view of the listing, Stellar will be doing an airdrop for Blockchain’s 30 million users. This is said the be the biggest airdrop ever, with $125 million worth of XLM to be given out.
Tron (TRX)
The hot cryptocurrency and blockchain company has achieved many great feats in the year, this month with smart contracts. It has only been two weeks since Tron launched its smart contracts and it already hit 12 million smart contract triggers on its network as announced by the founder and CEO Justin Sun.
Sun had announced in October that Tron was going to launch Odyssey 3.1 which would make way for smart contracts on its network. According to Sun, the expected number of smart contracts on the network by the end of the year is 50 million. Will they achieve it? Only time will tell.
Ethereum
In the last week, Ethereum, just like Bitcoin, experienced a significant surge even more than Bitcoin by 5.9% to reach over $221 from $190. Although it has dropped to $211 since the surge, it is still significantly higher than it was at the beginning of the week.
On the contrary, Ethereum’s BAT token, though it experienced a similar surged, has experienced a “counter fall” resulting from a loss of up to $6 billion of its valuation within a 48-hour period in the week. It is said to have received the hardest hit any large or mid-cap token got within the week.
