Crypto Month in Review — September 2018

Previous reviews: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug

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 September. My main holdings are ETH and NANO, but I try to make these lists as unbiased as possible.

Market cap movement throughout September — hit a new YTD low in the middle of the month, but has recovered to where it started the month.

9/1 — VeChain partners with People’s Insurance Company of China to bring blockchain technology to the industry.
9/2 — Bittrex announces plans to delist Bitcoin Gold from its exchange after the cryptocurrency’s refusal to pay back $20 million in BTG that was stolen in a series of double-spend attacks.
9/3 — Research by Reuters shows that Alibaba has filed for 10% of the world’s blockchain related patents.
9/4 — Crypto wallet Abra enables the direct purchase and sale of 28 cryptocurrencies from a linked EU bank account.
9/5 — Goldman Sachs suspends its plans to establish a crypto trading desk admid stagnant market conditions, sending the crypto market cap plummetting.
9/6 — Goldman Sachs CFO Martin Chavez calls yesterday’s report “fake news” while discussing the bank’s development of a Bitcoin derivative.
9/7 — With 38,562 BTC and 205,162 ETH being traded short, Bitcoin and Ether shorts hit an all-time high.
9/8 — Vitalik Buterin states that the “days of 1000x growth in cryptocurrency are over” in an interview with Bloomberg as the price of Ether falls below $200.
9/9 — The AltDex exchange token index, an index of the top non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies, falls nearly 50% from its opening value at the beginning of 2018.
9/10 — The Winklevoss led Gemini exchange releases its own stablecoin pegged to the US dollar.
9/11 — A New York judge rules that laws that apply to securities can also be applied to some cryptocurrencies, specifically for prosecuting fraud allegations.
9/12 — FINRA makes its first cryptocurrency related takedown by halting HempCoin’s operations for selling an unregistered security.
9/13 — Morgan Stanley becomes the latest bank to venture into the cryptocurrency space by offering a Bitcoin swap product to their customers.
9/14 — Blockchain researcher Vlad Zamfir programs a proof-of-concept for blockchain sharding at the Ethereum hackathon ethBerlin.
9/15 — Binance CEO Xihan Wu announces plans to launch a fiat to cryptocurrency exchange in Singapore this month.
9/16 — Japan reports a decreased demand for 1 Yen coins that coincides with an increased demand for cryptocurrencies.
9/17 — The Tezos mainnet is launched, and XTZ/USDT and XTZ/BTC trading begins on Bitfinex
9/18 — Coinbase hires Michael Li, former LinkedIn head of data science and analytics, to be their VP of data.
9/19 — Ripple announces that PNC Bank will use Ripple’s xCurrent system to process international payments.
9/20 — The SEC further delays its decision on Van Eyk’s Bitcoin ETF proposal for up to 180 days.
9/21 — Ripple briefly passes Ethereum in market cap amid rumors that its xRapid payment processing solution could be released soon.
9/22 — Vitalik Buterin publishes a blog post explaining how Ethereum can use ZK-SNARKS, the technology behind privacy coin ZCash, to validate up to 500 transactions per second.
9/23 — Coming on the heels of Ripple’s rise, Stellar briefly passes EOS’ market cap to take the #5 spot.
9/24 — Investment fund Andressen Horowitz invests $15 million to buy 6% of stablecoin MakerDAO’s MKR supply.
9/25 — Bakkt reveals that its flagship product will be physically delivered Bitcoin futures contracts, the first of its kind.
9/26 — Bitcoin Cash jumps 20% in response to crypto mining company Bitmain filing for an IPO.
9/27 — Bitcoin based, international payment processing startup Veem raises $25 million from Goldman Sachs and Google Ventures, among others.
9/28 — Zebpay, the largest Indian cryptocurrency exchange, shuts down due to India’s central bank ban on cryptocurrency.
9/29 — A study by the Wall Street Journal estimates that around $88.6 million has been laundered through various cryptocurrency exchanges, with about $8 million of this money passing through Shapeshift.
9/30 — Stellar launches the interface for StellarX, the first free to use P2P digital asset marketplace.