Hey everyone, it’s Whatever Wednesdays again and it’s time for another Crypto Weekly 6/6/18. Not too much has been happening in terms of price movement when it comes to crypto, however, there are things happening behind the scenes…
Stock Photo from: Pixabay
Ok, so what’s been happening in crypto?
Well, just so we’re clear, I’m not going to be covering all the news that happened in the past week. In general, I try to keep tabs on the two that I am interested in, which are Ripple (XRP) and Cardano (ADA). However, I will try to cover the “bigger news” that affects the crypto space.
Ripple (XRP) – currently at $0.67
Ripple continues to move forward with trying to get banks (and central banks) to adopt xRapid and utilize their XRP token. The major annoucements to recently happen is that SBI Holdings, a consortium of Japanese banks, which has been testing xCurrent and xRapid is opening their own crypto exchange. This was announced a long time ago, but it seems that plans are moving forward, and the center piece for this particular crypto exchange will be the XRP token. The name of this exchange is SBI Virtual Currencies.
For essentially all other exchanges, the easiest gateway from fiat to crypto is via Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH). For example, USD to BTC or USD to ETH. It sounds like this particular exchange wants to make XRP their easiest fiat gateway. The exchange launched on June 4th, but only to a small number of pre-registered accounts, ~ 20000. Once this opens up to more people, I would expect to see an increase in trading volume. If this volume increases, with XRP the native token for exchange, we may see a reasonable price increase in XRP.
Brad Garlinghouse
There is also a quote from Brad Garlinghouse at a recent interview with CNBC:
“I’ve publicly stated that by the end of this year I have every confidence that major banks will use XRapid as a liquidity tool,” Garlinghouse told CNBC in an interview at the Money 20/20 Europe fintech conference in Amsterdam, Netherland, that aired on TV on Tuesday.
He continued on to say:
“You know, by the end of next year, I would certainly hope that we would see you know in the order of… dozens.”
As the CEO of a company, you need to choose your words carefully. I think these particular words were chosen with great care. If what Garlinghouse says is to be believed, then we should see an increase in trading volume for XRP by year’s end, with “dozens” of banks utilizing XRP by the end of 2019. It will be interesting to see exactly what that means and how it effects XRP’s price.
Codius
I’ve mentioned this before, but Ripple has resurrected Codius, its smart contract platform. Ripple’s prior CTO, Stefan Thomas has left Ripple to start Coil, which is in charge of making smart contracts easier to create on the Codius platform:
“[Codius] is an open source hosting platform available for anyone who wants a secure platform to built or host a smart contract,” Thomas told Fortune. “In the same way that cloud computing made web hosting more accessible, Codius will make experimentation on the blockchain more widely available because people won’t need to build from scratch.” – Fortune 6/6/18
It’ll be interesting to see what they can do with this.
Cardano (ADA) – currently at $0.21
Cardano, as I’ve said numerous times before, is kind of boring cryptocurrency. Its movement and forward progress is somewhat slow and deliberate, but it has a great purpose behind it. Its mission statement can be distilled down to a single quote from Charles Hoskinson:
“Don’t trust me. Trust the process.”
The major news going on with Cardano is the launch of two testnets, KEVM and IELE
KEVM stands for K Semantics of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This testnet just launched at the end of May. Basically, the idea is that any smart contract or dApp created on Ethereum’s Virtual Machine can be translated to work on the KEVM of Cardano. More so than that, it allows for the formal verification. Here are some quotes from runtime verification’s blog:
“The objective here is not to replace the EVM, but to complement its already amazing functionality with a means to formally verify the smart contracts that it executes, based on a rigorous mathematical formalization of the EVM”. – Grigorio Rosu, RunTime Verification
“This research has given us a great degree of insight into what one should do to redesign the EVM to make it more secure, faster, and more efficient. It will now be easier to build tooling for the EVM, such as verified compilers” – Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK
Long story short, it wants to be a better version of Ethereum’s own Virtual Machine.
All in all, this is boring stuff for the majority of people. However, try to zoom out. In order to gain mass adoption of cryptocurrency, we need to show the world that “it works”. Right now we have a legacy of hacks and attacks and people losing money because smart contracts aren’t working correctly and have holes in their security. We need some way to tighten up these contracts to provide some degree of confidence. That’s the reason for formal verification. This isn’t just a few dollars and cents and people playing around anymore. There are millions (and billions) of dollars living on this platforms, and potentially one day in smart contracts.
What about IELE?
IELE is the next step in the creation of smart contracts utilizing the K framework. Whereas KEVM is primarily focused on making sure it can duplicate (and be better than) the Ethereum Virtual Machine for smart contracts. However, Ethereum smart contracts are built its own language, Solidity. IELE’s goal it to open up the world of smart contracts to as many other programmers as possible in as many languages as possible. This would include common languages like Java, Javascript, Python, and C++. Eventually, as more languages are translated into the metalanguage of the K framework, it can support whatever new languages come out as well.
The rationale behind this is: “Let people use what they want.” If you’ve coded your whole life in Java, learning Solidity will not be a fun time. So let people code in what they want. However, build in the ability for formal verification. You can’t guarantee that every program written in Java and deployed on your platform will be 100% safe, but it’ll be a higher guarantee then something that can’t be formally verified and is just deployed willy-nilly.
Long story short. Boring stuff for the masses, but interesting stuff for those who actually care about the crypto ecosystem.
Other News
EOS – currently at $13.81
EOS finally launched with $4 billion of ICO money behind it. As I write this multiple different entities are trying to create the main net and vying to become block producers. Just so we’re clear, I don’t own any EOS and probably never will. I have some concerns about the project especially with only 21 block producers. It seems like a very small number of entities and because being a block producer is so lucrative, I worry about the “rich get richer” problem. That said, people have stated that there are “backup” block producers if there were bad actors, but that doesn’t solve necessarily solve the “rich get richer” problem. Additionally, the ability to set their own inflation rate worries me.
Doesn’t this sound similar to what we already have — a small amount of people able to mess with the inflation rate?
My concern is that if EOS does fail, it will be a huge black mark against all of crypto in general. For that reason, I hope it manages to succeed and wish it luck.
Bittrex
Ok, ok, ok, it only launched to “corporate customers”. However, there are plans to launch to non-corporate customers soon. More so than that, this puts pressure on crypto exchange ecosystem in general. The major fiat gateways, like Coinbase, will need to add more coins to their platform. The major crypto only exchange platforms, like Binance, for example, will need to offer fiat pairs. Soon we will see a homogenization of exchanges with exchanges offering both a fiat gateway and good selection of coins.
Once we hit some critical point, then we may see an decoupling of Bitcoin price from the remainder of the altcoins. The King will stand by himself and go up and down by himself, while the other “nobles” (other top ten coins) will go off to find to establish their own countries. It will be interesting to see what this does to price movement (if anything).
TL;DR
Ripple’s CEO says “major banks” will use xRapid by year’s end. “Dozens” by end of 2019.
Ripple resurrects Codius to enable smart contracts. Coil is created to make this easier.
Cardano launches KEVM and IELE testnets.
EOS finishes $4 billion year long ICO and is in the process of launching its mainnet.
I have concerns about the 21 block producer and ability to set inflation in EOS, but I hope EOS has some success.
Bittrex launches fiat pairs — a sign of things to come?
-Sensei
Agree? Disagree? Questions, Comments and Suggestions are welcome.
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