Luke Parker
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Bitcoin’s newly-rich have just been offered another temptation as a new development in Dubai is being advertised to the community. The luxury apartments are part of “Aston Plaza Crypto," a complex with two 33-story residential towers and a three-story shopping mall. Under construction now, and costing £250 million, the units are estimated to be complete and ready to hand over to the owners in April 2019. Developer Knox Group is offering the studio, one, and two bedroom units to the cryptocurrency community priced in Bitcoin, although prices are pegged to a US dollar exchange rate. Prices range from 133,000 USD, approximately 30 BTC, to 379,000 USD, approximately 86 BTC, and include “a 15-20% discount for the first tranche of properties,” according to the Knox Group. “Packages for interior design services and furniture will also be offered to purchase in bitcoins.”
After the long-awaited activation of the Bitcoin network’s upgrade SegWit many questions quickly arose about when and how bitcoin users would start to enjoy its benefits. Once wallets and users employ the new SegWit format, blocks can theoretically grow as large as four megabytes each. In practice, however, developers have stated that they’ll be more likely to see 1.7 to 2.1 megabytes blocks. 80 wallet developers, exchanges, pools, and other Bitcoin projects indicated that they were ready for Segwit prior to activation, out of a of 137 entities listed on bitcoincore.org.
The Estonian government is considering an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for a cryptoasset called estcoin. The resulting sale would enable “anyone to invest in a country for the first time,” explains Kaspar Korjus, the Managing Director at e-Residency. Korjus explained that the funds could be managed through a Public Private Partnership (PPP. This would enable Estonia to invest in new technologies and innovations for the public sector, from smart contracts to Artificial Intelligence, as well as make it technically scalable to benefit more people around the world. Estonia would then serve a model for how societies of the future can be served in the digital era.
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.
Bitcoin survived a forking event on Tuesday, with a muted reaction from the market. Anyone who held bitcoin at the time of the fork are automatically holding an equivalent amount of the new alternative, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which they control with their Bitcoin private keys. After a bumpy start and rapid appreciation the price of the new asset has mostly risen, briefly touching 0.485789 BTC, worth US$1,327 at the time, on the Bittrex asset exchange. At press time, one Bitcoin Cash is worth 0.232 BTC (US$629), although other exchanges offer a wide range of prices down to 0.0482 BTC (US$222).
