Crypto News: Ethereum, IOTA, CyberMiles, Brave, BAT, SEC, Fidelity (15th-21st of October)

Fidelity Launches Institutional Platform

This week Fidelity Investments, which administers more than $7.2 trillion in client assets, announced a new and separate company called Fidelity Digital Asset Services.

The firm will handle custody for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and will execute trades on multiple exchanges for investors such as hedge funds and family offices. Fidelity had revenue of over 18B in 2017 with operating income of around 5.3B.

This is another huge news after Bakkt that proves that cryptocurrency is still doing good despite the price decrease.

Ethereum Github activity

Github has released its annual ‘State of the Octoverse’ report which ranks Ethereum’s Geth client as the fifth fastest growing open source projects on Github with a 2x change in 2018.

The report also lists the fastest growing topics in which dApp (Decentralized Application) ranked 4th only after Hacktoberfest, pytorch, and machine. Surprisingly ‘Cryptocurrency’ ranked 6th and ‘smart contracts’ ninth on the list. Meaning there is still a lot of interest in the subject.

The Geth client has had 10,199 commits(which are changes or revisions made to the codebase) so far with 345 contributors. The codebase has had over 21k stars, 7331 forks, and 130 pull requests(proposed change to the repository).

FinHub by SEC created

On 18th of October The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that they are launching the Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology (FinHub).

FinHub will connect and update the public on SEC-related issues and initiatives dealing with distributed ledger technology including blockchain and cryptocurrencies, automated investment advice, digital marketplace financing and artificial intelligence.

The leader of the FinHub stated: “By launching FinHub, we hope to provide a clear path for entrepreneurs, developers, and their advisers to engage with SEC staff, seek input, and test ideas.” meaning this is overall very bullish sign.

IOTA IAMPASS project

On 15th of October IOTA has annouced that Tangle technology will power a new biometric authentication system that uses a person’s palm vein pattern as means of identification. The project is called IAMPASS Proof of Concept (PoC)

Using biometric technology, IAMPASS technology scans the structure of the veins inside a person’s hands to create a unique identity for each user, enabling easy authentication and verification.

The technology offers an advanced solution for generating immutable audit trails for high-security environments, including data centers, airports and stadiums, by employing dedicated MAM (Masked Authenticated Messaging) streams from access points.

It will use the IOTA permissionless distributed ledger to make identity not only portable, but also give users access and ownership over their own data. This does seem like an interesting use case for IOTA and bullish sign.

CyberMiles network is now live

On 15th of October CyberMiles has annouced they have successfully deployed their main network. CyberMiles is a decentralized blockchain protocol specifically designed and optimized for online marketplaces essentially smart contracts for e-commerce created by the company running 5miles marketplaace.

5miles, a popular peer-to-peer marketplace, is planning to become the first decentralized app to use CyberMiles’ mainstream blockchain technology for real-world businesses. The U.S.-based company will migrate its 15 million existing users (along with more than $3 billion in marketplace transactions annually) now that CyberMiles’ MainNet has been released.

With the network being live CyberMiles tries to provide a promising alternative choice for Ethereum application developers mostly concentrating on e-commerce. CyberMiles is ranked around 70th place with around 90M market cap.

Brave browser and BAT

On 18th October Brave Software, announced the general availability of their latest browser- Brave 0.55. This Chromium-based desktop version replaces the previous Muon-based browser which is no longer available for download on the Brave site.

The upgrade comes with significant performance boost as confirmed by a test conducted by Andrius Aucinas, a performance researcher at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist. The biggest deal however is the fact that Brave now works with Google extensions – which was the main reason why for example I didn’t switch personally.

The other important upgrade was to the Bat Attention token (BAT) reward system, making it more intuitive. The team has introduced ‘Brave Rewards (beta)’ that will replace Brave Payments granting more usability, visibility, and new features.

Very bullish update for BAT which IMO is one of the main candidates for Coinbase listing.

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