XRP Could Soon Fall Against Bitcoin, Analyst Warns as Pressure Builds

Over the past few days, Bitcoin has strongly outperformed altcoins, especially Ethereum and XRP. On Wednesday, when BTC was trading 8% down on the week, both ETH and XRP — the second and third-largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, respectively — were down nearly 15% since the weekly open, crushed under the pressure of BTC volatility. Related Reading: Crypto Market’s Long-Term Trend is Positive: Binance CEO Explain Why Despite the fact that the cryptocurrency market’s capitalization has since recovered, the two aforementioned altcoins are still rather down on the week against Bitcoin.…

Where to Buy With Crypto This Festive Season

Christmas is just around the corner, which means it’s time to get your holiday shopping out of the way for good. And while online retail giants such as Amazon and eBay have made online purchasing wonderfully simple for the average person, they do not really cater to a growing population of individuals who are looking to use their crypto for digital payment purposes. While a number of startups have entered this space over the last three to four years due to issues relating to market volatility, certain remaining setbacks need…

Bitcoin Still Overtook Trump, VISA, PayPal, and Libra on Google Search in 2019

2019 has been a slow year for bitcoin. It is up almost two-fold since January but it is at risk of ending the year with a 50 percent drop from its yearly high. Still, it has managed to overtake Donald Trump, VISA, PayPal, and Libra on Google Trends at the year’s peak. Cryptocurrency researcher Eric Wall pointed out that the Google Trends popularity for the keyword “bitcoin” hit its 1-year high from June 23 to 29. At the time, the bitcoin price started to demonstrate a parabolic rally to over…

For Quick Wins, Focus on Decentralization Within Existing Businesses

This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Tal Kol is the co-founder of Orbs, a public blockchain bringing enterprise solutions and transparency to businesses. 2019 pushed the reset button on our industry. While hundreds of blockchain startups launched during the 2017-2018 peak, many of their use-cases for decentralization were not strong enough to survive the ensuing crypto winter. The startup world took a beating this year but there was steady interest…

3 Under-the-Radar Product Trends for 2020

This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Richard Chen is a partner at 1confirmation, a seed-stage venture fund supporting crypto-native founders fueling the decentralization of the web and society. Bitcoin dominance. The rise of DeFi. Libra. QuadrigaCX. Crypto always has its fair share of news and drama, and 2019 was certainly no exception. But underneath the surface, many teams are heads down building open financial products that the world needs. As…

An Identity Layer for the Web Would Identify Us Everywhere

This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Elizabeth M. Renieris is the Founder of hackylawyER, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and an expert on cross-border data protection and privacy laws (CIPP/E, CIPP/US), digital identity, and technologies like blockchain and AI.  Mere months into in the blockchain ID business, I had lost count of the presentations featuring the 1993 The New Yorker cartoon with…

2019 Set the Stage for DeFi to Go Mainstream

This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Lou Kerner is an advisory board member at Blockchain Coinvestors, co-founder of CryptoOracle, and partner at Chameleon as well as Flight Ventures. MakerDAO started minting DAI in December 2017, and saw dramatic growth in 2018, as the daily supply in circulation grew to nearly 100 million: In March, 2019, MolochDAO went live with 22 founding members, each depositing 100 ETH (the equivalent of $330,000…

VC: New 10-Year Phase in Crypto to Begin in 2020: What it Means For Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain

Outlier Ventures, a venture capital firm, said that 2020 will be the start to a new phase in crypto, bitcoin, Ethereum, and blockchain following ten years of development and speculation. The firm’s head of research Lawrence Lundy—which has invested in major cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos, Brave, and Chainlink—said that the next ten years will be about deployment, if the last decade was primarily about installment. S-Curve trend of crypto and bitcoin for the past decade and the next ten years (Source: Outlier Ventures) In an end-of-the-year report entitled “18…

‘Multi-Part’ Payments Could Bring Bigger Bitcoin Sums to Lightning Network

Bitcoin tech startup Blockstream said its c-lightning software team is the first to release a working version of “multi-part payments.”  While the name, c-lightning v0.8.0, is a mouthful, it’s a big improvement for the user experience of the lightning network, a new layer that’s probably bitcoin’s best shot at scaling to support a larger number of payments. The change updates the plumbing of lightning network payments so users can send larger lightning payments, with a much smaller risk of them failing.  “The user experience of lightning clients is a topic…