Luke Parker

The Jamaica Information Service (JIS) recently reported that the government is actively “building cryptocurrency awareness.” The statement was provided on Wednesday, by the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) Deputy Governor Livingstone Morrison, at the central bank’s quarterly media briefing.

Morrison says the central bank must create opportunities for the exploitation of certain technologies, including cryptocurrency, while pointing out that such technologies should not pose undue risk to the local financial system.

The Bank has also established an internal group of persons who are working to build awareness of these kinds of technological happenings across the world. The group are also guiding regional efforts.

Decentraland had its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) last week, but sold out so fast that the vast majority of users waiting for the launch never got any of their orders filled.

Roughly 10,000 potential investors lined up to grab some of the native tokens, MANA. “Due to the overwhelming response to the project, almost 7,000 transactions did not go through, which resulted in a lot of disappointment,” the leader developer said on Saturday.

Blockstream has just announced that the Bitcoin blockchain is now being broadcast from space. The new service, Blockstream Satellite, streams data down to much of the planet’s surface for free, in order to boost the connectivity, decentralization, redundancy, affordability, security, privacy, and ultimately adoption of Bitcoin.

“Blockstream Satellite enables further participation in Bitcoin,” states the company, “including the billions of people in the world without internet access and people in places where bandwidth prices make participating cost-prohibitive.”

Leading bitcoin brokerage Coinbase recently raised US$100 million in a Series D funding round, which values the company at US$1.6 Billion. The round was led by IVP, with participation from Spark Capital, Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Section 32 and Draper Associates.

Founded in 2012, Coinbase is one of the world's largest digital currency companies. The company is best known for its hybrid Wallet and Exchange service, but has been focusing on becoming a retail and institutional exchange. According to the company, 9.2 million customers have 30.4 million wallets on the platform so far.

A Russian Government-linked startup named RMC One published a presentation on Tuesday that describes an upcoming Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The organization is looking to raise US$100 million to become a leading cryptocurrency mining hardware manufacturer.

Formally referring to themselves as the ‘Russian Mining Company,’ RMC One was founded by Dmitry Marinichev, better known as Russia’s Internet Ombudsman, the technology advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Wednesday morning around 10:40 UTC, the Bitcoin software upgrade known as SegWit will lock-in. Although a two-week waiting period follows before full activation, the lock-in makes it impossible for miners to change their minds about the upgrade without forfeiting their mining income.

An upgrade process called BIP 9 governs how SegWit and other large, possibly contentious upgrades are made to the Bitcoin network. In this case, BIP 9 calls for 95% of miners to signal agreement for the upgrade within a 2016 block period, or roughly 2 weeks.