Correction impulse weakened the bulls
At the beginning of the week, the bitcoin rate showed another round of the upward movement and on Wednesday, February 21, reached the level of $ 11 957. Then, as expected, a gradual correction began, within which the price of the first crypto currency fell to $ 9500, in the area of which it continues to trade and now [according to CoinMarketCap].
It is worth noting that many experts consider the $ 8500- $ 9000 zone to be a strong support, in which the drop in the price of bitcoin may stop.
The aggregate capitalization of the crypto-currency market also decreased by 15.2% and currently stands at $ 420 billion.
At the same time, commissions in the bitcoin network reached an absolute historical minimum, dropping below 10 cents (about 100 satosh). The bitcoin membrane also remains almost empty over the past weeks. The number of unconfirmed transactions as of 18:00 UTC, February 25, does not exceed 2 thousand [according to blockchain.info].
Bitfinex and Coinbase have added Segregated Witness support
This week, just two leading GDAX crypto-exchange exchanges from the digital assets platform Coinbase and Bitfinex have added support for the Segregated Witness (SegWit) protocol, a solution that reduces the amount of commissions in the bitcoin network and increases the block size.
In Coinbase noted that high commissions were one of the most frequent customer complaints, and SegWit, in the opinion of the company's representatives, will solve this problem and provide a higher bandwidth of the bitcoin network. In addition, the company promised to introduce batching transactions, because of the non-use of which on Coinbase was previously blamed for a crowded membrane.
Bitfinex stressed that the use of SegWit-addresses will reduce the commission by 15-20%, as well as speed up the processing of transactions in the network of bitcoins.
Telegram can hold a secret pre-sale of TON tokens
After attracting $ 850 million from 81 investors during a closed presale, according to the publication of The Verge messenger Telegram intends to hold a second secret pre-sale. Accredited investors, including the giants of Silicon Valley Sequoia Capital and Benchmark, have already received e-mails with the appropriate notifications, according to The Verge.
The amount that the company intends to attract in the second presale is also unknown, but the sources of the publication believe that this is a total investment of $ 1.6 billion even before the public ICO.
It is worth noting that the official representatives of Telegram did not comment on this information.
Venezuela held the presale of El Petro for $ 735 million
President of Venezuela Nicholas Maduro announced the successful attraction of $ 735 million in the course of the presale of the national crypto currency El Petro, against which the country's parliament earlier spoke. It should be noted that there is as yet no independent confirmation of this information, and the identity of investors is also unknown.
It is not entirely clear on which platform the El Petro-Ethereum or NEM tokens were issued, since the official documentation of the project contains contradictory data
Nevertheless, it is already known that Maduro ordered the oil company PDVSA, petrochemical Petroquimica de Venezuela (Pequiven) and the corporation CVG to make part of the purchase and sale transactions using El Petro.
ForkLog tried to understand the vicissitudes around the Venezuelan crypto currency and highlighted some entertaining moments about the El Petro project.
The Robinhood application is launched in five US states
A new mobile platform for trading crypto-currencies Robinhood began operations in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire.
In addition to trading with traditional financial assets, application users can trade bitcoin and Ethereum. The rates of other popular crypto currency are currently only available in the viewing mode. It is worth noting that Robinhood will not charge commissions for trade, although the prices will include commissions associated with the application of exchanges.
The company plans to market capitalization of $ 1.3 billion, further expansion in the US, and then in other countries. It is interesting that in the past, investors from Robinhood were Andreessen Horowitz, Index and NEA.
In smart contracts Ethereum revealed more than 34 thousand vulnerabilities
In an experiment conducted by members of the University College of London, 34,200 vulnerabilities were discovered by launching a variety of scenarios on Ethereum's fully-fledged detachment to achieve undesirable consequences.
Researchers tested their assumptions on 3,000 smart contracts and in 89% of cases they achieved undesirable consequences, which in theory could help them to steal $ 6 million.
Attempts to find the creators of vulnerable smart contracts were in vain. But, since researchers do not report which smart contracts vulnerabilities were discovered, they can be considered conditionally safe.
Ripple Introduces New Cobalt Consensus Algorithm
The new technical document from Ripple presents an asynchronous Cobalt consensus algorithm aimed at improving the existing XRP protocol by providing more flexibility in creating a unique list of nodes.
The developers are convinced that the Cobalt algorithm will help the Ripple network beat beatcoin in the context of decentralization. They set this goal back in May last year, when the technical director of the company Stefan Thomas stated that Ripple needed only 16 trusted validators in order to reach the decentralization level of bitcoin.
In another technical document, the developers of the project provided evidence that the previous XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol algorithm will ensure a further process of decentralization, the network's life and the absence of forks.
A source: forklog.com
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