Crypto Month in Review — April 2018

Previous reviews: Jan, Feb, Mar

Crypto moves way too fast for me to keep up, so I aggregate each day’s biggest headline and publish the list at the end of the month. Below is my list for March. My main news source was reddit. My main holdings are ETH and NANO, but I try to make these lists as unbiased as possible.

Market cap movement throughout April — mostly up!

4/1 — In an April Fools “meta-joke”, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposes an Ether hard cap of 120 million ETH, garnering a fair amount of community support.

4/2 — The ICO for a coin created by Centra, famously endorsed by Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled, is halted by the SEC due to suspected fraudulent activity.

4/3 — Vitalik Buterin questions the mathematics of Bitcoin Cash supporter Craig Wright and calls him a “fraud” during the Deconomy conference. Wright claims to be the person behind the Bitcoin creator alias Satoshi Nakamoto

4/4 — A Verge user discovers that a malicious mining pool exploited a bug in Verge’s mining algorithm to mine 1 block per second for 13 hours, for a total of $4.3 million.

4/ 5 — The Reserve Bank of India bans RBI-regulated banks from processing cryptocurrency transactions.

4/6 — After calling cryptocurrency a “bubble” in January, George Soros gives his hedge fund SorosFund the green light to invest in cryptocurrency.

4/7 — VenRock, a $3 billion venture capital firm run by the family of John D. Rockefeller, partners with CoinFund to invest in blockchain technology.

4/8 — Twitter suspends the @bitcoin account, which was controlled by a Bitcoin Cash supporter.

4/9 — In response to a class-action lawsuit filed against them, the Nano Foundation announces an official legal fund for victims of the BitGrail theft and maintains their view that a vulnerability in BitGrail’s code was responsible for the theft.

4/10 — Golem’s Brass mainnet is released on Github.

4/11 — Request Network partners with Digix to support invoicing in gold.

4/12 — Islamic scholar Mufti Muhammad Abu Bakar publishes a paper concluding that Bitcoin is halal and permissible under Sharia law.

4/13 — ZCash completes its “Powers of Tau” ceremony to make its privacy blockchain more secure and to prepare for an upcoming hard fork.

4/14 — Po.et releases an official WordPress plugin that uses their blockchain to timestamp content and defend against plagiarism.

4/15 — Genetic blockchain company DNAtix transfers the complete genome of a virus over blockchain, the first instance of DNA being transmitted using this method.

4/16 — Popular crypto YouTuber and ICO investor Ian Balina is hacked live on stream, resulting in the theft of $2 million of his cryptoassets.

4/17 — [Link is NSFW] After weeks of hype and speculation, PornHub announces that they will accept Verge’s XVG as payment.

4/18 — Dow Jones Media Group announces a partnership with Basic Attention Token to serve premium content to Brave browser users.

4/19 — Fujitsu reveals that it is running a full IOTA node to support its tangle-based use cases.

4/20 — IBM head of blockchain Jesse Lund states that Stellar is the foundation of their entire cross-border payments strategy and a key part of their overall blockchain platform strategy.

4/21 — VeChain announces the addition of a multi-party payment protocol that will facilitate behind-the-scenes blockchain transactions between two users who do not have to be token holders.

4/22 — LinkedIn co-founder Eric Ly states that the website’s ban on ICO advertisements is only temporary.

4/23 — Modum announces its cooperation with the Swiss postal service to deliver a temperature-monitoring solution that enables regulatory compliance for shipments containing medicinal and other temperature-sensitive products.

4/24 — A Google DNS hack results in the hijacking of MyEtherWallet’s domain name, leading to the theft of over $150k worth of ETH.

4/25 — Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman states that the Nasdaq will consider becoming a crypto exchange over time. She also grants their “exchange surveillance technology” to the Winklevoss-backed Gemini exchange to ensure a “rules-based” marketplace for users.

4/26 — Vitalik Buterin announces he is boycotting CoinDesk’s Consensus conference due, in part, to “sensationalist” headlines regarding EIP 999, which proposed a means of recovery of lost funds on Ethereum. The OmiseGo team also joins in the boycott.

4/27 — France lowers its capital gains tax rate on cryptocurrency from 45% to 19%.

4/28 — Despite a ban on cryptocurrency trading, Iran pushes forward with an experimental local cryptocurrency for its banking system.

4/29 -Newly crowned #5 cryptocurrency EOS breaks the $20 barrier as investors anticipate its main net launch.

4/30 — Vitalik Buterin releases a proof-of-concept for a method of implementing sharding on the Ethereum main net, which will dramatically increase the scalability of the chain if successful.