PayPal (PYPL.Q) has finally made good on their promise to deliver the crypto-goods. Good for them. Good for us. Good for cryptocurrency in general.
It’s time for your Friday coin rundown. Let’s see what happened.
Here are your top ten coins.
Bitcoin
market cap $239,087,562,112
Apparently, Bitcoin is bigger than sex now, at least when it comes to Reddit users.
That’s right. The r/Bitcoin audience has been blowing up for years while the r/Sex audience has been flat for years. The r/Bitcoin subscriber list passed the 1,7 million dollar mark, likely on the back of the PayPal announcement (which we’ll cover below), while the amount of redditors chatting about sex still sits at around 1.69 million.
Now did I transplant this BS bit of news up here so BCH could have the news about the latest development from PayPal, because nobody’s talking about Bitcoin Trash these days? You bet I did.
Ethereum
market cap $46,118,208,854
Ethereum will of course be one of the coins lifted by the PayPal move, but that’s secondary to this week’s news.
Now in adequate uses of blockchain technology, we have a plugin for WordPress that allows uers to timestamp their content on the Ethereum blockchain.
The plugin can help provide a definitive answer for copyright issues because it provides proof around who created the content, and also logs any alterations and changes and edits that may have taken place. Amsterdam-based WordProof announced the plugin at the London BlockDown 2020 3D virtual blockchain conference on October 22.
Tether
market cap $16,125,436,945
Here’s something the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) said recently:
It is “illegal to open casinos and participate in gambling online. Don’t be curious and lucky. Any ‘disguise’ can’t escape high-pressure supervision.”
Any disguise can’t escape high pressure supervision. That’s our future hegemon, folks.
Regardless, the PboC worked with other authorities this week to lay the totalitarian smackdown on online gambling sites involving the Tether stablecoin this week in Huizhou city. Total number of arrests were 77, and three gambling sites were closed down. The arrests were made over alleged money laundering wherein funds were whitewashed through gambling, including using USDT.
Guess someone was a little late with their monthly “payment.”
XRP/Ripple
market cap $11,475,548,936
Ripple is mulling over joining the growing list of artists and entrepreneurs leaving California for greener pastures. They’re presently operating out of San Francisco, but they’re considering picking up stakes and hopping the pond to London.
The reason is because the UK doesn’t consider XRP a security, which means it would theoretically be much more advantageous for Ripple to do business in a country that doesn’t want to slap them with a much wider set of restrictions on what you can and cannot do with your cryptocurrency.
Other options include Switzerland, Singapore, Japan or the United Arab Emirates.
Bitcoin Cash
market cap $5,008,865,857
Probably the biggest news Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has had all year is that PayPal is finally getting onboard with adding crypto-offerings to their platform. PayPal crypto offerings will include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin. We covered this in a story yesterday, so there’s no need to really go any further with this description, now is there?
Chainlink
market cap $4,694,465,058
For blockchain developers, verifiable randomness function is essential for plenty of different applications, like gambling and gaming industries. Chainlink now has a verifiable randomness function, or VRF, which has found its way to Ethereum’s main net to provide a decentralized source of randomnessdecentralized source of randomness for the project’s ecosystem.
Lots of Ethereum’s blockchain is devoted to DeFi, but coming in a close second are gaming applications and online casinos, which require this type of service.
Here’s Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink’s co-founder, explaining how many blockchains beyond ETH are interested in using the VRF:
“I know that we have anywhere between 10 and 20 users announced as already using it from the time it was in testnet only. And I know a number of people have already used it for one or two things on mainnet. And I also know that a number of the chains that we’re integrating into, interestingly enough, whether they’re gaming-focused or not, already have people lined up to use it when we’ve finalized our integration to that chain.”
Binance Coin
market cap $4,495,588,132
Adding onto their news from last week, crypto-derivative platform BitMEX announced earlier this week that they were expanding their product line to include three new futures contracts linked to USDT. These include Binance Coin (BNB), Polkadot (DOT) and yearn.finance (YFI), which will go live on October 30.
BitMEX traders will be able to hedge their exposure to BNB through the new exchange futures contract.
Polkadot
market cap $3,952,811,967
Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex got on board with staking Polkadot this week, offering rewards as high as 14% per year for depositining and holding DOT. They’re quick to point out that the number is their estimated annual staking reward, and actual rewards may differ. Bitfinex states that all the assets used for staking will be stored in their cold wallets:
When Bitfinex stakes a digital token, it is delegated by the exchange, but it remains in the platform’s wallets in the same manner as other digital tokens.”
Litecoin
market cap: $3,650,492,318
PayPal’s news was probably the best news Litecoin holders have heard in a long time as they watched their holdings jump up 15% from $46 to $53 after the announcement.
PayPal has about 340 million active users, and they’re likely to get more as they open up their platform to new assets.
Cardano
market cap $3,339,706,790
There’s a bit of a kerfluffle firing up over at Cardano-headquarters (also known as IOHK) between Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, and the folks behind wikipedia. Apparently, the online encyclopedia refused to list a Cardano page, citing that it lacked credibility.
Here’s the quote from wikipedia:
“For a new Wikipedia page to be allowed to stay, or for edits to an existing page to stick, there have to be verifiable sources for the information, be they directly linkable primary sources already on the internet, or references to printed information in books or magazines.”
Naturally Hoskinson fired back:
“There are over 75 academic papers that are related, more than 50 directly related to Cardano, over 2,500 citations. We were the second most cited collection of scientific papers, in the last five years, in security and cryptography and computer science.”
Not to mention academic journals, having shown up in Bloomberg, Forbes, and the WSJ, all of which have published Cardano’s research.
What does a coin have to do to get a little respect?
—Joseph Morton
