Crypto News: Bison, Western Union, Coinbase Pro, Vechain, IOTA, Nano (17th – 25th of December)

Bison app launch date annouced

On 18th of December Stuttgart Stock Exchange (Börse Stuttgart), Germany’s second largest exchange and the ninth largest in Europe has annouced a release date for their cryptocurrency trading app Bison.

Initially the app will only be available in German appstores but I wouldn’t be surprised if support for other countries was planned. The cryptos supported will be Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin with more incoming in the future.

The app will compete with the likes of Coinbase and Robinhood which is obviously good news since the more competition the better.

Western Union and cryptocurrencies?

On 17th of December Western Union published a video that was looking more into cryptocurriencies. In the video Western Union President Odilon Almeid explained that they are looking cryptocurrency option if and when cryptocurrencies achieve broader acceptance.

The Western Union Company is an American financial services and communications company that nowadays mostly concentrates on money transfers, money orders and wire transfers. The company employs around 11.5k employees and has around 5.5B in revenue.

WU is currently testing payments via blockchain using Ripplenet – which was created by Ripple but can transfer any currency, including Bitcoin or Ethereum.

While the actual adoption of cryptocurency by Western Union is still not this is promising news since it proves that the interest in cryptocurrencies doesn’t fade desipte bear market.

New Coinbase Pro tokens

On 18th of December Coinbase has annouced listings of several assets on their Coinbase Pro platform. The new assets are stablecoin Dai (DAI) and it’s governance coin Maker (MKR), distributed computing platform Golem (GNT), , and high-performance smart contract blockchain Zilliqa (ZIL)

This is following the listings of Civic (CVC), district0x (DNT), Loom Network (LOOM), and Decentraland (MANA) which were launched earlier this month. This means that there are probably more token listings coming.

It is important to note Please also note that these assets are not yet available on Coinbase.com or via mobile apps. If that happens there will be separate annoucement. It is safe to assume that next token on the app will be one of the ones listed on Pro. Coinbase Pro is currently in top 30 exchanges in terms of volume.

VeChain Foundation Financial Executive Report

On 17th of December Vechain has published their fifth VeChain Foundation Financial Executive Report. This financial report covers Aug. 2018 through Oct. 2018. The aim of the report is to provide investors with monitoring the use of funds, and development process of all aspects of the Vechain.

The key highights of the report is:
the ratio of the circulating VET supply is 67%, which is roughly 2% larger than last time
several new enterprise level investors and partnerships on board
eight full-time team members were employed
token swap and mainnet launch success
money expenditure highlights
events overview

The overviews are very useful from the investor point of view and I wish more projects were providing this service.

IOTA and Cybercrypt Partnership

On 20th of December IOTA Foundation, announced a new lightweight trinary cryptographic hash function in collaboration with CYBERCRYPT A/S – a system provider in robust cryptography and cyber security.

CYBERCRYPT has developed a secure hash function named “Troika” for IOTA which will lay a strong cryptographic foundation for the final IOTA protocol with the aim of withstanding all known cryptanalytic attacks

On top of that IOTA Foundation and CYBERCRYPT have annouced a competition for cryptanalysts to evaluate Troika, with a €200,000 prize pool for breaking round-reduced variants of the Troika hash function

Despite the bear market IOTA seems to continute strong with strong partnerships and development going forward.

Nano Boulton release

On 18th of December Nano has released their Boulton update (v17). It was one of the largest releases yet and itprovides foundational support for future software enhancements alongside the major feature of Lazy Bootstrapping.

The flagship feature of Boulton is the ability to intelligently download the ledger, and thus reduce the time it takes to start participating on the network using the Nano node which should allow for more network participants.

There are also several other improvements including command stability, better traffic handling and smaller but also important changes.

Nano is currently around 40th place on CMC with total mcap of around 142M. It has been struggling this year in terms of price but in terms of development it’s one of the most active projects.

Crypto News: Bison, Western Union, Coinbase Pro, Vechain, IOTA, Nano (17th – 25th of December)

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Kane Dane