The State of the Market: On Tuesday Circle announced that individuals and institutions can ‘tokenize’ physical currency for cross border and overseas transactions. The token is called USDC and is built on the Ethereum ERC-20 protocol. Circle currently operates Poloniex and is backed by Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is in the process of recovering ground from yesterday’s bear attack and the cryptocurrency currently trades around $6,500. The recovery from $6,350 has led Peter Brandt, Mike Novogratz, Tim Draper and a handful of investing veterans to conclude that bitcoin has bottomed and will reverse course in the near future. Currently the cryptocurrency market capitalization stands at $215 billion.
Right now, XRP is priced at $0.5605, gaining 23.68% in the last 24 hours. With the price surge, the XRP market cap has gone up to $22.35 Billion, overtaking Ethereum which has a market cap of 22.23 Billion. However, the margin is still small and even a slight drop to XRP’s price can send it back to its 3rd position. Ethereum (ETH) is currently priced at $217.54, gaining only 3.16% in the last 24 hours. This is the second time XRP overtook Ethereum in the last one week. On Friday, XRP was up by 200%, reaching a peak of $0.76. (Read More.)
Sikur company earlier today announced that it would be rolling out a Sony smartphone customised variant, SIKURPhone. SIKURPhone is android enhanced with a secure crypto-oriented SikurOS software which comes with a crypto wallet and several security-oriented features including the ability to remotely wipe the device together with Skur’s Secure App Store which will be rolled out before the end of the year. The App will host vetted and thoroughly checked apps. It comes in SonyXZ1 and XA2. (Read More.)
Coinbase, is one of the world’s largest exchange, but still offers less than 10 cryptocurrencies. The company is hoping to change that in the coming days with a policy change for listing new cryptocurrencies. The company will soon add a mechanism where projects can request the exchange for the listing. However, projects will have to pay an application fee and if approved, they’ll have to pay a listing fee. According to coinbase, the fee will act as a filter and give them enough money to perform due diligence. (Read More.)