Two of the top five virtual coins (by market cap), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC), have encountered eventful weekends, even by cryptocurrency standards.
Starting with Bitcoin Cash, the non-profit organization known as the Bitcoin Cash Fund (BCF) enjoyed a weekend like no other, receiving over 320 BCH in donations. Prompting the generosity was an offer put forward by Redditor @jarenfeser which stated that “over the next 48 hours [they’d] match all donations made to The Bitcoin Cash Fund (up to 300 BCH).” Remarkably, SatoshiDice – the self-described “best Bitcoin game in existence” – contributed 100 BCH to the fund during the 48 hour window.
This heartwarming story comes on a weekend where Bitcoin Cash also caught headlines for the wrong reasons, after reports emerged of a class action lawsuit filed on March 1 against popular crypto asset exchange Coinbase. Indeed the filing alleges that Coinbase staff partook in insider trading of BCH when it controversially listed on the exchange last December.
Over recent days, the news regarding Bitcoin Cash has been more than good than bad, however, considering that on Thursday, BitPay took the first steps toward integrating BCH in with its entire merchant processing platform; adding the cryptocurrency to the BitPay Visa Prepaid Card. Also on the same day, with Deux Point Zero was acknowledged as the first Parisian bar to accept the digital currency as payment.
As for the other major payment-centric project in Litecoin, it too enjoyed a progressive weekend; announcing the release of Litecoin Core v0.15.1, which includes “new features, various bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.”
Notably, the minor version release hinted at future developments. Indeed, Litecoin Core v0.15.1 saw the minimum relay fee per Kilobyte (/kB) lowered from 1 lite/kB (0.001 LTC/kB) to 0.01 lites/kB (0.00001 LTC/kB).
Although distinct from the minimum transaction fee, the team indicated that the reduced relay fee was needed so as “to prepare for dropping the minimum transaction fee to 0.1 lites/kB (0.0001 LTC/kB) in the next release,” ten times less than the current minimum.
The Litecoin Core team advised “all users to upgrade” to v0.15.1, but recommended that wallet.dat files were backed up beforehand, just in case.
Image From Shutterstock
