Onwards and Upwards

The cryptocurrency market started to show some movement this week. And, even better, that movement was upwards. Starting the week with a $206B market cap, the crypto industry steadily rose to a weekly high of around $220B before falling slightly to its current value of $212B. Still, a nearly 3% gain for the week. How about our top three?

Bitcoin posted the smallest numbers with a sliver of gain, 0.65%.

Ethereum gained a hearty 5.27% this week.

XRP came up big, rocketing up 8.88% over the last seven days.

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Cryptocurrency Market Stats (11/9/18)

Domestic News

From Bitcoin to Beurocracy: This week’s election saw two notable wins for the blockchain community. Newly elected California governor Gavin Newsom was one of the first politicians to accept bitcoin in his 2014 campaign. Although he no longer accepts crypto donations due to regulations around donations, his early(ish) adoption shows that he at least knows what Bitcoin is and sees some value in it.

Another crypto-friendly politician, Jared Polis, won the race for Colorado governor. Polis has a multistep plan to integrate blockchain technology into several areas of the Colorado government and economy. The list includes voter protection, government transparency, and energy load balancing.

Texas Stops Certain Crypto ‘Miners’: While California and Colorado appear to be warming up to cryptocurrency, Texas is taking a stance as well. The Securities Commissioner of the State of Texas issued cease and desist orders to two cryptocurrency “miners” this week.

EXY Crypto and AWS Mining advertised mining investments they claimed would bring 10 percent weekly returns, in EXY Crypto’s case, and a guaranteed 200% return for AWS. With those statements clearly being fraudulent claims, the Texas government is putting a stop it. At some point, though, people need to realize that if a deal sounds too good to be true. It probably is.

People Saying Things

Voorhees Predicts Fiat Doomsday: The vocal ShapeShift founder and CEO took to Twitter to make his doomsday prophecy on Thursday. Well, only a doomsday if you want fiat to succeed. With the insurmountable debt that continues to pile up around the world, Voorhees may not be so far off.

When the next global financial crisis occurs, and the world realizes organizations with $20 trillion in debt can't possibly ever pay it back, and thus must print it instead, and thus fiat is doomed... watch what happens to crypto.

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) November 8, 2018

Shatner Knows Crypto?: We’re as surprised by it as you probably are. Captain Kirk dropped some knowledge on his Twitter followers this week regarding criticisms to Ethereum. Emojis aside, it looks like Shatner knows his stuff.

His viewpoints don’t take into account the fact that the code has to be audited by an auditing firm and approved by consortium or it doesn’t get accepted. 🙄 He thinks it exists in a bubble. That’s why we have ERC-20, ERC-721... ERC-1701😏

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) November 7, 2018

Cryptocurrency News from Around the World

Seoul Starts Blockchain Initiatives: In partnership with ICON, The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced at the self-hosted Blockchain Internation Digital Festival three projects for citizens they’ve been working on. The first is a blockchain ID card that Seoul residents can store virtually on their phone. From their digital ID, citizens are able to vote and receive S-Coin rewards, the collaboration’s second project. Finally, the conference team demonstrated S-Coin payments, with which you can purchase items through the scan of a QR code.