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PayPal Enters Digital Currency Markets / Ethereum Vs Polkadot / Germany’s Blockchain-Driven Energy Economy

Kyle Ellicott
Published in
7 min readOct 24, 2020

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October 24th, 2020

Here’s your quick Saturday edition summarizing the activity happening this past week throughout the blockchain landscape…Enjoy!

🏦 PayPal Embraces Crypto, Igniting Market as Mainstream Adoption Inches Closer

PayPal officially confirmed Wednesday (October 21st) it is entering the cryptocurrency market. The payments giant, with 346 million active accounts around the world, pledged to make cryptocurrency “a funding source for purchases at its 26 million merchants worldwide.” Beginning in early 2021, PayPal customers will be able to instantly convert their selected cryptocurrency balance to fiat currency, with a certainty of value and no incremental fees, PayPal said. Its merchants will have no additional integrations or fees, as all transactions will be settled with fiat currency at their current PayPal rates…read more

Related: 🏦 Nigeria Protests Show Bitcoin Adoption Is Not Coming: It’s Here

🏦 Around 100 Italian Banks Are Officially on a Blockchain

The Italian Banking Association (ABI) has unveiled that the numbers of Italian banks operating on the country’s banking blockchain network, Spunta, built on R3’s Corda, have reached 100, the latest addition of 42 banks. Since March, 204 Million transactions have been processed on Spunta’s infrastructure, with a prediction of over 350 million to reach by the end of the year. The blockchain project is aimed at improving the interbank data transfer and settlement speeds…read more

Related: ⌚ Luxury watchmaker Breitling issues digital certificates on the Ethereum blockchain

💸 PwC Report Says Blockchain Can Boost Global Economy

PwC outlined that blockchain technology can boost the global economy by $1.76 trillion, which is 1.4% of global GDP in the next decade. At the same time, Asia is expected to have the most economic benefit. The report states that China can gain the highest potential net benefit at $440 billion, with the U.S. following at $407 billion. At the same time, other countries like Germany, Japan, the U.K., India, and France are estimated to benefit by more than $50 billion. The industries which are expected to be helped the most are public administration, education, and health care sectors…read more

Related: 🔋 Germany looks to blockchain to help decentralize their energy economy

📖 Ethereum Blockchain Killer Goes By Unassuming Name of Polkadot

The innocuously named Polkadot platform is likely to overshadow Ethereum as it has seen the most significant jump in active developers of all significant crypto protocols. The report outlines that the developer’s interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum has declined, the number of monthly active developers building on Polkadot increased by 44% in the 12 months ended in May. It is also reported that some 253 projects, ranging from so-called stablecoins to social networks, are being built on the system…read more

Related: 📖 Quantstamp will audit the entire blockchain of a new DeFi project on Polkadot

🚨 📝 State of Blockchain Industry: Q3 2020

Source: Topio Networks

We are transitioning to a completely digitized economy and the activity in the blockchain industry during 2020 proves this more than ever. Now w/ 1,100+ companies building & funding ($30bn+!) the infrastructure layers that will make up this new economy. The full breakdown is now available including an in-depth overview of the landscape, new categories & business models, areas of opportunities, rising categories, use-cases, and view for the remainder of 2020 into 2021.

More For Your Week:

📖 [Report] State of Crypto 1Q 2020: DCG Founders Survey — Digital Currency Group

🏦 JP Morgan Veteran Daniel Masters Explains How Blockchain Will End Commercial Banks

🗳️ First presidential vote cast using blockchain technology

📖 Baselining the End Consumer — Andreas Freund

🎧 What the History of Headphones Says About the Internet’s Future — John Wolpert

🚀 The blockchain industry faces a moment of truth as high-profile projects go live

💰 Lessons From Minecraft: Achieving Alpha with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) — Andrew Steinwold

💰 Unibright Announces New Token Model For UBT, Upgrades Payments System — Unibright.io

💰 We Still Lack a Rational Way to Value Tokens

📖 DLT security standards may turn legacy industries into blockchain innovators

🚢 Nine Chilean cargo shipping companies approved to develop joint blockchain platform

📖 Algorand Asia Accelerator Names 10 Blockchain Startups in Inaugural Batch — Algorand

💰 Lossless Lottery PoolTogether Opens Up to More Coins, More Prizes

👀💸 Capital Update️:

New section alert! With the fourth quarter (Q4) traditionally being a fundraising sprint for many, I decided to create a little sub-section in these posts to highlight venture announcements from investments to new funds to M&A all throughout the landscape. Get ready!

💸 $1.4 trillion asset manager backs crypto startup Curv, bringing total funds raised to $30 million

💸 O(1) Labs Raises $10.9M More for Lightweight Mina Protocol — O(1) Labs

💸 Polymarket Raises Massive $4 Million Round From Polychain, Naval Ravikant, Other Notable Investors — Polymarket

💸 Ethereum Rival CasperLabs Raises $14 Million in Token Sale — CasperLabs Official

💸 Binance Labs Leads $1.25 Million Extension Round for Audius — Audius

DApps (Decentralized Apps) Watch:

⚙️ Ethereum’s Top Dapps Are Increasingly Turning to ‘Rollups’: Here’s Why

A majority of the top 20 Ethereum-based decentralized applications (DApps) have switched or plan to switch to a rollup solution in the coming months. With different approaches, a rollup is an off-chain aggregation of transactions inside an Ethereum smart contract, ensuring users that their transactions won’t be misused. Although rollups are not considered a scaling solution for Ethereum or any blockchain, it is a “throughput solution.”…read more

Related: ⚒️ Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Calls on Power Users to Move to Layer 2 Scaling

👩‍💻 Compute and Connectivity Meets Crypto

Over the last six months, we’ve witnessed a drastic acceleration in the shift to all things digital. Our information, content, and communication is already mostly digital, delivered via wires and device, flowing as 0’s and 1’s over fiber, radio waves, and sat link. Finance has resisted this trend for a long time, but now the digitization of trading, banking, payments, and lending rushes full speed ahead, and governments around the world are contemplating how to digitize the money printer itself, in the form of central bank-issued digital currencies (CBDCs). And all of digitization sits right on top of one highly centralized and highly fragile system — the internet…read more — Meltem Demirors

⚙️ The Decentralized Storage War: Filecoin vs. Arweave

Cloud storage is a market worthy of challenge. Over the last decade, the new cloud paradigm has displaced the legacy on-premise servers, birthing new tech behemoths like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and many others. Today, market research firms estimate that the global market for cloud storage will reach $137.3 billion by 2025 while growing 22.3% per year. This market is enormous. Recognizing this opportunity, many teams began building open source solutions in late 2016 and early 2017 including Filecoin, Storj, Sia, and SAFE. In 2018, Arweave launched a mainnet based on similar ideas around decentralized storage…read more

Related: ⚒️ ConsenSys and Protocol Labs team up to integrate Filecoin into Ethereum’s dev tools

📖 Three Trends Killing Web Privacy and Decentralization

📖 Introducing QT. Connect to real-time blockchain data from 20+ protocols

📖 New WordPress plugin allows content to be timestamped on Ethereum

📖 This blockchain only needs 22 KB of data to be verified

📺 Knowledge Drop on The Baseline & #VCTV:

This week I sat down to host another episode of VCTV to speak with global investors on the current state and latest trends throughout the FinTech and Blockchain industries. Here’s the drop:

Source: YouTube & VCTV

🎙️ Research: State of the Blockchain & DApps 2020:

Source: Topio Networks

Available now, for free is my latest research on Decentralized Applications or DApp “Stack” Landscape Map — the Q2 2020 edition. This map provides a full overview and taxonomy of the emerging DApps industry highlighting over 400 global companies teaching playing a vital role in building next-generation applications. As a bonus, I’ve included some of the ecosystem players and groups you need to be familiar with as you prepare to release your applications. If this is the first version you’ve seen of the landscape, consider it your guiding roadmap to further understanding not only the industry but all the core technology required to build a full or partial Decentralized Application (DApp).

📣 Want to stay up-to-date with all the headlines, investments, in-depth research, and latest landscapes on the Blockchain, DApps, DeFi, and FinTech industries? Subscribe and follow me on Twitter for weekly updates and more!

Also, Read

Blockchain
Dapps
PayPal
Ethereum
Polkadot

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Kyle Ellicott
Coinmonks

Written by Kyle Ellicott

2.2K Followers
Writer for

Writing about #Blockchain, #DApps, #Digitization, and all things #Distributed. Host of Blockchain Today

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