Weekly news roundup: Monday February 4

Here’s a selection of interesting recent news from the crypto-space.

Fidelity Investments is targeting a March launch date for its Bitcoin custody service, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, Bloomberg Markets reports.

In October, Fidelity announced that it would offer a range of crypto products designed for large investors like hedge funds. Bitcoin storage will be the first one available, followed by Ether, according to Bloomberg’s sources.

Gavin Brown, senior lecturer in finance at Manchester Metropolitan University, said that the current BTC price of $3,400 is now below the cost of mining, as reported by Express:

Brown predicts that many miners will stop mining, but the exit of miners globally will not be evenly spread:

“Rather, we are likely to see locations of higher electricity costs see more pronounced rates of withdrawal compared with, say, a low-cost Chinese miner who can often obtain electricity at discounted rates as low as $1,260 per bitcoin.”

An Armenian company called Leviathan is building a decentralized internet, Armenian Weekly reports.

Web3 Foundation is announcing that its first grant has been issued to ChainSafe Systems to implement the Polkadot Runtime Environment (PRE) in the Golang programming language. According to the Foundation, “It is critically important to have multiple implementations of the Polkadot protocol for a number of reasons, including decentralization, knowledge dispersion, and better definitions of the protocol.”

Zilliqa, a project to develop a project next-generation, high-throughput blockchain technology, is announcing that the Zilliqa mainnet has now been launched. In another post, Zilliqa provides more detail on the features available on the Zilliqa mainnet, and mechanisms to secure the nascent network. Xinshu Dong, Zilliqa’s Co-founder and CEO, said in a press release:

Today, we are taking a leap towards our vision of enabling innovative blockchain-powered solutions to real-world problems. With this launch, Zilliqa is now the first public blockchain platform to successfully implement sharding, to address one of the biggest challenges to mainstream blockchain adoption — scalability.

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, has repeated his prediction that bitcoin will “probably” become the internet’s “native currency,” Forbes reports. Speaking to podcaster Joe Rogan in an interview, Dorsey said:

“I believe the internet will have a native currency and I don’t know if it’s bitcoin. I think it will be [bitcoin] given all the tests it has been through and the principles behind it, how it was created. It was something that was born on the internet, was developed on the internet, was tested on the internet, [and] it is of the internet.”

Picture from pxhere.