Crypto Month in Review — January 2018
Crypto moves way too fast for me to keep up, so I started making a list of each day’s biggest headline. Below is my list for last month. My main news source was reddit. My main holdings are ETH and NANO, but I tried to make the list as unbiased as possible. Hope you like this, and let me know if you have any feedback!
1/1 — Ethereum releases the Casper proof of stake protocol to its test network.
1/2 — Despite Verge’s claims of concealing users’ IP address info in their Wraith release, a website is discovered which publishes the IP addresses of all Verge transaction participants.
1/3 — Bitcoin celebrates the 9th anniversary of the genesis block.
1/4 — NEO breaks the $100 barrier.
1/5 — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces plan to integrate cryptocurrencies into Facebook services.
1/6 — TRON breaks the $10 billion market cap barrier and becomes a top 10 crypto amid accusations of whitepaper plagiarism and fears of the project’s legitimacy.
1/7 — After a 2-week swap, Ethereum retakes the #2 crypto spot from Ripple.
1/8 — Cryptos on South Korea and Chinese exchanges are being traded at over a 50% premium compared to their western counterparts. This causes Coinmarketcap to classify those prices as outliers, and subsequently flash crashes the market.
1/9 — RaiBlocks is officially named the winner of January’s Binance community vote.
1/10 — South Korea proposes legislation to ban crypto trading, flash crashing the market. They roll back the announcement 4 hours later.
1/11 — Moneygram announces a partnership with Ripple in a pilot program for crypto payments.
1/12 — Twitch begins accepting Bitcoin and transfers from Coinbase accounts as means of payment.
1/13 — Walton announces plans to work with China Mobile IoT Alliance on integration.
1/14 — VeChain announces partnership with China’s National Tobacco Corporation and State Tobacco Monopoly Administration.
1/15 — Mark Cuban says that his basketball team the Dallas Mavericks will accept Bitcoin and Ether as payment for tickets next season.
1/16 — Increased concerns over tightened cryptocurrency trading regulations in South Korea, China, and France, as well as calls from Germany for international cooperation to regulate the market, cause prices of top coins to fall 30%.
1/17 — Long suspected of running a Ponzi scheme, BitConnect shuts down both its trading and lending platforms and releases all locked BCC tokens. This causes its price to fall 95%.
1/18 — The South Korean Financial Supervisory Service reports that several government officials were caught insider trading immediately prior to the January 10th crypto exchange ban announcement.
1/19 — ICON partners with Kyber Network with plans to use Kyber’s crypto-exchange services to connect ICON with other blockchains.
1/20 — The National Research Council of Canada says that it is using the Ethereum blockchain to proactively publish research grants.
1/21 — Johann Jungwirth, the chief digital officer of Volkswagen, joins the IOTA Foundation as an advisor. 1/22 — South Korean government officials announce that they plan to collect up to 24.8% in corporate and income taxes from cryptocurrency exchanges based in the country.
1/23 — Online payment toolkit developer Stripe announce in a blog post that they are dropping support for Bitcoin, citing increased transaction times, fees, and price volatility. They also express interest in supporting other cryptocurrencies, including OmiseGo, Ethereum, and Stellar.
1/24 — Rating agency Weiss releases the first ever cryptocurrency ratings for the top 74 coins. Ethereum and EOS receive a B, the highest grade in the first round, with Cardano, NEO, and Steem the next highest with a B-.
1/25 — Popular stock-trading app Robinhood adds support for 16 cryptocurrencies in 5 US states, with Bitcoin and Ethereum the first to be tradeable.
1/26 — Popular Japanese exchange Coincheck gets hacked, resulting in the theft of 526 million XEM ($400 million) and 101 milion XRP ($130 million), the largest crypto theft from an exchange in history.
1/27 — Amid accusations of insolvency, Tether announces that its partnership with auditing firm Friedman LLP has been dissolved.
1/28 — Online South Korean mall 위메프 begins accepting 12 different cryptocurrencies as payment, including Bitcoin, Ether, and Ripple.
1/29 — Walton affiliate Xiamen Citylink signs a research sharing and IoT ecosystem services deal with the Zhangzouh branch of China Telecom Corporation.
1/30 — A Bloomberg article states that Tether was issued a subpoena by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commision in December. This was due to a lack of conclusive evidence that the USD holdings that back the cryptocurrency exist. Bitfinex, the world’s 4th largest exchange by volume and supporter of Tether, was also subpoenaed.
1/31 — RaiBlocks announces that it is rebranding to Nano.
