Crypto News: IOTA, Wanchain, Komodo, Stellar, Circle, Coinbase (27th of Aug - 1st of September)

Crypto News: IOTA, Wanchain, Komodo, Stellar, Circle, Coinbase (27th of Aug - 1st of September)

Market situation

The market recorded some nice gains with altcoins doing better than Bitcoin.

Current prices:
BTC = around $7.2k (+7%)
ETH = around $296 (+5%)
XRP = around $0.34 (+5%)
NEO = around $22 (+27%)
IOTA = around $0.74 (+9%)
XLM = around $0.23 (+24%)
BNB = around $11 (+13%)
XMR = around $123 (+32%)
VET = around $0.018 (+23%)

The market has been doing well for 2 weeks now. There are no signs of stopping but bad news could reverse it.

Square Payment Network

Digital payments firm Square has won a patent for a payment network that allows merchants to accept payments in any currency, including Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency.

Square would not be the first payment processor to allow merchants to accept payments in cryptocurrency that are automatically converted into local currency. BitPay, for instance, has been processing bitcoin payments since 2011.

However, Square is very popular ( $2.2 billion revenue in 2017), so adding cryptocurrency payments to its present POS system would allow millions of merchants to accept bitcoin without having to onboard to another payment processor or manually convert cryptocurrency funds into fiat meaning a huge potential.

Coinbase Survey

On 28th of August Coinbase partnered with Qriously to ask students directly about their thoughts on crypto and blockchain . It was a nationwide survey of 675 students and the key findings are:

42 percent of the world’s top 50 universities now offer at least one course on crypto or blockchain

9 percent taken cryptocurrency course

18 percent own cryptocurrency

26 percent want to take in cryptocurrency course

Komodo Updates

Komodo recently annouced some significant news with the first one being the fact that Komodo Platform has recently implemented Crypto-Conditions, a mechanism that allows smart contracts to be developed on top of Bitcoin-protocol-based blockchains.

Those smart contracts will be added to the impressive list of features that already exists on the platform including atomic swaps, on-demand scalability features and cross-chain interoperability syncing.

They have also teamed up with Ideas By Nature: a blockchain-focused design, product strategy, and application development agency based in USA.

The company will help Komodo with the brand identity and marketing - something that Komodo has been struggling for a long time.

Wanchain Updates

On 30th of August Wanchain announced that they have joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the world’s largest open source blockchain initiative.

As a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Wanchain will be able to collaborate with industry leaders in terms technology, open standards, and open-source reference architectures.

On 22nd of August they have also announced a partnership with Kronos a financial platform that allows the average investor to access elite trading strategies employed by traditional fund managers around the world.

On top of that Wanchain recently launched Wanchain 2.0 Cross-Chain Implementation which connets to Ethereum as the first external blockchain.

IOTA Updates

On 25th of August Trinity Desktop beta wallet has been released. This is following the The Trinity Mobile wallet earlier this year. The mobile UX has been optimised for desktop with some neat additions, while maintaining a similar look. The app has been audited to assure its security.

IOTA is busy with expanding their team and recently added 2 team members to the IOTA Foundation Board of Directors. There are around 60 team members according to LinkedIn which is one of the bigger teams in blockchain.

At the beginning of August IOTA introduced IOTA Hub which makes integrating IOTA simple for any kind of service provider. Using Hub, an exchange can be ready to support IOTA in weeks rather than months, just by connecting Hub to their existing trading platform. All of these are proving to be bullish for IOTA

IBM Blockchain World Wire

IBM has released more details about their IBM Blockcha