Crypto Month in Review — October 2018
Previous reviews: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep
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 October. My main holdings are ETH and NANO, but I try to make these lists as unbiased as possible.
Market cap movement throughout October — pretty flat and stable with a slight downward tilt.
10/1 — A study by BitMex shows that ICOs have already sold as much USD worth of ETH as they raised during their fundraising periods.
10/2 — Crypto mining company Bitmain acquires open-source, browser based, Bitcoin Cash wallet Telescope.
10/3 — An analysis of Venezuelan cryptocurrency Petro’s codebase reveals that a large portion of the code was plagiarized from Dash.
10/4 — In a survey of 25 institutional investors conducted by CNBC analyst Tom Lee, 54% believe that Bitcoin has already seen its price floor for 2018.
10/5 — Yale endowment manager David Swenton invests part of the $29.4 billion endowment into two cryptocurrency-focused hedge funds.
10/6 — Bitcoin researcher Mark Freidenbach proposes “forward blocks” as a solution to Bitcoin’s scaling problem. Some Bitcoin supporters claim it as a breakthrough, while others claim it is a network attack due to the proposal’s reliance on “private validators”.
10/7 — Bitfinex dispels rumors of its insolvency in a blog post, linking trackers to its cold storage wallets and claiming deposits and withdrawals are operating normally.
10/8 — Coinfloor, the UK’s oldest cryptocurrency exchange, lays off most of its 40 employees.
10/9 — Forbes partners with Civil to become the first major media organization to publish content to a blockchain.
10/10 — Bitcoin’s Liquid sidechain is released. It plans to handle large transactions and heavy volumes for financial institutions.
10/11 — Asset bubble researcher Nouriel Roubini calls cryptocurrency “the mother of all scams” in a testimony to the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Community Affairs.
10/12 — Coinbase executive Adam White becomes the COO of ICE’s new Bakkt platform.
10/13 — Ethereum discovers a consensus issue on its Ropsten testnet while testing the Constantinople hard fork, which could delay the release until 2019.
10/14 — A fake tweet claiming that Binance is delisting USDT pairs causes the crypto market to jump 10%.
10/15 — Fidelity launches a new company, Fidelity Digital Services, that will handle custody and trading for various cryptocurrencies for institutional investors.
10/16 — Coinbase opens trading for 0x, the first ERC-20 token supported by the exchange.
10/17 — The Gates Foundation partners with Ripple Labs and digital payments firm Coil to explore pro-poor payment options. This is an apparent turn from Bill Gates’ controversial, negative comments on cryptocurrency in a Reddit AMA last year.
10/18 — Basic Attention Token releases a new version of their Brave browser, which runs 22% faster and supports all Chrome extensions
10/19 — Former Bitcoin hedge fund manager Nicholas Gelfman is issued a 2.5 million dollar fine in the CFTC’s first ever ruling on a cryptocurrency related anti-fraud case.
10/20 — Ether shorts hit a record-high following news that Ethereum’s planned Constantinople hard fork will be delayed until January 2019.
10/21 — Monero’s median trasaction fee falls to 2 cents following the “Bulletproofs” scalability update.
10/22 — Global Tech Exchange has their $50 million ICO shut down by Australian regulators, the 6th crypto crowdfunding effort halted by ASIC in 2018.
10/23 — A New York judge dismisses a class-action lawsuit again the Nano development team that claimed they misrepresented the reliability of scam exchange BitGrail.
10/24 — Tether redeems and destroys 500 million USDT, over half of its circulating supply.
10/25 — AMD’s stock price plummets after a weak Q3 earnings report, where sales due to blockchain were described as “negligible”.
10/26 — BitGo announces it’s Wrapped Bitcoin project, an Ethereum based coin backed 1:1 by Bitcoin.
10/27 — For the first time in over a year, Bitcoin becomes less volatile than tech stocks, mainly the NYSE FAANG+ Index, over a 10-day period.
10/28 — ZCash completes its “Sapling” upgrade, leading to a 90% reduction in transaction construction and a 97% decrease in required memory.
10/29 — Japan’s Financial Services Agency explains that it does not regulate stablecoins as cryptocurrencies.
10/30 — Oyster Protocol founder Bruno Block exit scams the project, absconding with $300,000 from the ICO smart contract.
10/31 — London based non-profit group Global Digital Finance, which aims to adhere to a universal code of conduct, announces its founding members, including Coinbase, Circle, and ConsenSys.
