Author: David Canellis

Decentralized financial platform and peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, OmiseGo, have released their monthly tech progress update, highlighting some exciting progress.

April saw their development team grow by two: Kasima Tharnpipitchai and Pawel Nowosielski. Kasima will be joining the engineering team working on the Plasma protocol, while Pawel enters as an experienced blockchain developer.

The Plasma protocol is the hotly anticipated framework central to the appeal of the OmiseGo network. It is a blockchain scaling solution first proposed by Lightning Network co-creator Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder.

This quote from the Plasma whitepaper explains its intention:

Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions) enabling the blockchain to be able to represent a significant amount of decentralized financial applications worldwide. These smart contracts are incentivized to continue operation autonomously via network transaction fees, which is ultimately reliant upon the underlying blockchain (e.g. Ethereum) to enforce transactional state transitions.”

In layman’s terms, the Plasma protocol builds extra layers of blockchains for scalability and efficiency, in this case, a series of smart contracts built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Each smart contract would serve a different purpose: managing a decentralized exchange, a social network, a private blockchain and the processing of micropayments.

An essential milestone on their 2018 roadmap is what they call Tesuji Plasma, the codename for a majority of the development related to the Plasma protocol. This month saw an important step ticked off: deposits on the Ethereum blockchain are now officially tracked and recognized, marking the halfway point to completion of their internal testnet.

Plasma aside, the team has conducted their first experiments related to the integration of their eWallet with the Ethereum blockchain by generating accounts and minting new ERC-20 tokens, providing reassuring Proof-of-Concept of their work thus far.

The steady development of the entire OmiseGo network has not gone unnoticed by the markets: prices rose from US$9.92 at the start of April to a high of US$21.37 and it’s market cap grew almost 80% this month.

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Litecoin founder, Charlie Lee, has recently opened up about selling his entire stake of his own cryptocurrency at the end of last year.

In a YouTube interview with Julian Hosp of TenX on Friday, Lee expressed that the decision he made in December does not feel right as the price of LTC has fallen way below the price he sold, which averages out at US$290.

Mr Lee cited that his aim was to remove all conflict of interest in order to guarantee the Litecoin Foundation can continue its development as the main considerations he made when deciding to offload his holdings.

Furthermore, SatoshiLite, as he is known on Twitter, commented that he is confident his move will benefit the Litecoin project “five years down the road when the price is back to the all-time high”.

He even philosophised on what it would take for his cryptocurrency to become truly decentralized.

“As for the future, I think eventually I would have to step away,” Lee posited “For a currency to really be a worldwide, decentralized currency, you can’t have a leader trying to control things. To make it more decentralized eventually I’ll step away.”

Litecoin was founded in 2011 and is one of the first cryptocurrency projects following Bitcoin’s inception and underground adoption. The coin is dubbed as the quicker and cheaper alternative to Bitcoin. Currently, Litecoin has a market cap of US$8 billion and has remained steady at around US$150 for the past two weeks.

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Pantera Capital Management LP, a cryptocurrency hedge fund managing over US$1 billion in digital assets, has confirmed that it’s biggest investment lies in South Korean interoperability-focused blockchain ICON (ICX).

Chief Executive Officer Dan Morehead told Bloomberg Television in an interview this week that he believes that the price of Bitcoin (BTC) will make a strong recovery and even reach new all-time highs within the next year.

Despite this, their overall investment in the market-dominant cryptocurrency accounts for roughly five percent of their total funds in play. The firm takes advantage of macro-style investment plays, using overall sentiment of the market to make calls on buying and selling. Github commits, Twitter, mining fees are all watched via machine learning algorithms to aid Pantera in maximizing profits.

Around fifty percent of their capital lies in the more liquid and live cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, while the rest is invested in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in various stages.

ICON (ICX) has been generating a huge amount of excitement and speculation of late due to the impending launch of their ICO platform, scheduled for the 30th of April, just under three days away.

The platform, for now, will not be open to the general public for token creation such as Ethereum’s. Those seeking to launch ICOs on the ICON blockchain must first apply and be selected for approval and even potential funding via theloop, part of the ICON Foundation.

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TokenPay, an anonymous peer-to-peer transactional ecosystem, has tweeted that their highly anticipated bank deal with a leading German financial institution has been signed several weeks ahead of schedule.

Only once the agreement has been closed can specific information be released, but TokenPay has confirmed that debit cards for use specifically with Verge (XVG) and the platform’s native token, TPAY, will be available for consumers shortly after the deal becomes official.

TokenPay and the Verge recently teamed up in a controversial crowdfunding campaign related to their securing of a Mindgeek partnership, the parent company of pornography mainstays Pornhub and Brazzers. TokenPay contributed 66,500,000 XVG tokens to the campaign. It can only be expected that any good news for TokenPay is good news for the Verge currency as well.

The TokenPay platform is completely decentralized, powered by the staking of TPAY tokens, which increases the efficiency of transactions and lowering its fees as more tokens are staked. They claim to have the only Android Bitcoin wallet available that operates in this manner, called ‘Proof-of-Stake’.

Both the Verge currency and the TokenPay platform give the user the option of having transactions appear on a public or private ledger, the latter utilizing the untraceable TOR network – which boasts the ability to make all transactions completely anonymous.

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Ripple announced earlier today that their xVia API, which provides all benefits of the RippleNet, has successfully attracted 5 new clients from Europe and Asia.

FairFX, RationalFX and Exchange4Free from the United Kingdom, UniPAY from Georgia and Malaysian MoneyMatch will all now have access to Ripple’s proprietary technology.

The xVIA API on the RippleNet is specifically designed to benefit the payment originators — companies who send money on behalf of a customer as opposed to those who pay and process transactions.

By joining the network each company is able to access new markets and provide customers with greater speed and efficiency, a significant advantage in such a competitive sector.

This is the latest partnership in a string of deals announced by the blockchain-based payments solution firm. Most notable of late is Santander’s proposed launch of an international money transfer app powered by Ripple.

While the use of it’s Ripple network has seen widespread adoption by international financial institutions, the blockchain itself has seen much greater interest from banks and other monetary services than the native token, XRP.

The development of the xRapid project aims to increase the use of the XRP token by the traditional banking sector, pitched as a means of decreasing liquidity costs when processing international remittances.

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