Segregated witnesses will be activated on Litecoin, and Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex appears to be in serious trouble. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 16:
- The Litecoin miners and developers have reached an agreement to activate segregated witnesses (segwit) and to increase Litecoin’s blocksize of 1MB once its blocks are over 50% of the currency’s capacity. The agreement is signed by Charlie Lee, Litecoin’s founder, F2Pool, BW, Bitmain, LTC1BTC, Huobi, OKCoin and others. The signatories “condemn any illegal aggressive acts like DDoS,” and “do not advocate a flag-day “UASF” that does not go through [sic] any users or community voting process. This type of forced upgrade without community consensus put Litecoin in a risk of split.” As a result, a user-activated soft-fork for Bitcoin is less likely as well, as proponents thought Litecoin would be more suited for such an experiment.
- The situation at Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex appears to be getting worse fast. The platform “continues to experience temporary delays in the processing of outbound fiat wires” as its “confronting challenges presented by correspondent banks”. The latest updates come just days after Bitfinex released a statement that said: “all incoming wires to Bitfinex will be blocked and refused by our Taiwan banks.” The exchange now says it’s “no longer in a position where we can wait for our existing banking partners to provide viable solutions”, making it sound like Bitfinex may soon become insolvent. Bitfinex denied the latter stating: “we want to be absolutely clear here that Bitfinex is solvent”.
- Coinbase is reportedly launching a new subsidiary brand focusing on secure messaging and blockchain-enabled payments, its chief executive said in online statements today. Announced via Twitter by CEO Brian Armstrong, the company is now testing a product called Token, a wallet and a browser for decentralized applications that is now operating on the Ethereum testnet. The unveiling was detailed in a blog post that likened the project to WeChat, the popular social media service that has been cited as the inspiration for other blockchain payment projects of late. In the post, Coinbase framed Token as an extension of its long-held mission to use blockchain-based digital currencies as a means to achieve financial inclusion.
- In April 2016, the Georgian government and the Bitcoin company BitFury initiated a project to record land titles on the Blockchain. Following the project initiation, on Feb. 7th, 2017, in Tbilisi, the government of Georgia signed an agreement to use the Bitcoin Blockchain to verify property transactions. And on 19th of April 2017, Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury during his speech at the Russian Internet Forum in Moscow, said, that since the launch in February 2017, when his company along with the government of the Republic of Georgia implemented the property registration on Blockchain had registered more than 100,000 documents.
- Compared to the previous week the price of Bitcoin has increased by almost three percent, with the exchange rate currently at about $1,221 per BTC. The price of Ethereum increased by almost two percent over the same period, taking Ether up to a rate of $48.39 per ETH. Ethereum Classic gained 20 percent, with the price increasing to $3.21 per ETC. Zcash lost around ten percent. One ZEC is now trading at roughly $67 per coin.
