Cryptocurrency News Roundup | September 24 — September 30
Welcome to the PlayChip cryptocurrency news roundup, where you can keep up to date on all of the weeks important cryptocurrency and blockchain related news.
UNICEF Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations
The French arm of UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) has announced that they will begin accepting donations in a number of popular cryptocurrencies.
The decision to further integrate cryptocurrencies follows the success of their ‘Operation Game Chaingers’ program launched earlier this year. The program involved gamers installing mining software which utilises their computer graphics card power to process transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The resulting rewards and fees are then automatically donated to the UNICEF coffers.
The gamers who participated were able to raise a total of 85 ETH (Ether/Ethereum) over 59 days, equivalent to approximately USD$42,500 at the conclusion of the program in April. The money will be used to help children suffering in Syria’s ongoing refugee crisis.
Anyone who is looking to donate can contribute directly by sending cryptocurrencies to the agency here, or alternatively, UNICEF states that a ‘free’ donation can be made by using the UNICEF France electronic wallet to mine your donation.
xRapid and Coil Behind XRPs Return to Prominence
Two big developments for XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) drove some serious price action last weekend. The #3 largest cap cryptocurrency took off Friday, trading at a peak of around US$0.76 before settling down around the $0.55 mark.
The xRapid team announced that they were preparing to launch their interbank payment solution. xRapid is a cross border payments solution aimed at financial institutions. The pilot program launched Q1 2018 involved five initial customers — Western Union, Cambridge Global Payments, MerfuryFX, IDT and MoneyGram.
“Mercury is delighted with the incredible speed and cost-efficiency of the xRapid pilot phase and is excited about a production rollout in the near future,” — Alastair Constance, Founder of Mercury FX
Meanwhile Coil invited users to join their tracking and rewards system which uses XRP as its native currency. Coil is a micropayments platform designed to support content creators. User activity is tracked and rewards are calculated automatically to ensure fairness and incentivise high quality content.
Austria to Auction USD$1.3bn in Tokenized Government Bonds on Ethereum Network
The Oesterreichische Kontrollbank (OeKB) will auction USD $1.3 billion worth of government bonds next week. The auction will consist of a mix of five and ten year bonds.
The bonds are being issued by Austria’s Federal Government Finance Agency (OeBFA) and will be tracked using the Ethereum blockchain. The agency will assign a unique value (or HASH) to the bonds, this value is then ‘notarised’ by securing the information on the Ethereum blockchain.
Once the HASH has been recorded on the blockchain this information can later be recovered and used to verify ownership of the bonds. The ‘trustless’ nature of the blockchain ensures that this information cannot be tampered with, providing additional security for buyers and greater transparency for the process of government issued bonds.
We reported last month about the ‘Bond-i’, the product of a collaboration between World Bank and Commonwealth Bank. The program saw a similar government issued bond, also tracked using a private implementation of the Ethereum network technology.
The adoption of the Ethereum network by financial institutions is another great sign for the future of the blockchains most versatile platform.
For more information regarding the PlayChip ICO click here.
Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
