Tron platform, a long-time competitor of Ethereum in terms of development and use of decentralized apps became a leader in terms of the total number of users and active dApps users. Justin Sun, the company’s CEO told about it in his Twitter account.
The information was provided by DappReview, one of the leading rating sites who analyze decentralized apps. According to its data, Tron had 267 000 users for two previous months. It is followed by EOS with 197 000 users and Ethereum with 151 000 users. Tron also had the biggest number of active users: 16 236, it is followed by EOS with 13 845 users and Ethereum with 2 133 users.
Last year, Justin Sun claimed that the main goal of Tron was to surpass Ethereum in terms of development of decentralized apps and smart contracts. The team acquitted BitTorrent launched several new projects and came to several new partnership agreements with the largest players of the industry. Consequently, the next stage is competition with Ethereum in terms of smart contract development.
However, Ethereum is not going to roll over. It is highly likely that Constantinople will be activated in the end of February. The current growth of ETH rate may be connected with the upcoming update.

A Japanese company which managed Indeed — the largest recruitment service, Recruit Co. invested in an Israeli blockchain startup Beam Development Limited.
According to the press release published on Recruit Co. site, the company set up a fund called RSP Blockchain Tech Fund Pte. Ltd for investments in blockchain startups. It invested in Beam Development Limited via this fund. Investment amount is not revealed.
Beam Development Limited develops privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Beam (BEAM) based on MimbleWimble protocol. It was launched on January, 3rd. According to the developers, it is impossible to track transactions made via MimbleWimble, the crypto currency users decide what information will be available to other transaction participants.
Recruit Co. noted in the press release that it admitted revolution impact of blockchain technology on innovation industry. Although the company is sure, private data protection that the distributed ledger can provide is important, the technology still needs governmental regulation.
Beam team confirmed getting investments form Recruit Co. fund in its Twitter and highlighted that it was going to use the funds to carry out its mission in Japan – to promote Beam crypto currency among the country’s citizens.
Recently, the startup representatives shared plans for launch of Mimblewimble-compatible Lightning Network (LN) protocol. Thus, the developers were planning to increase Beam transaction procession speed and to increase its commercial attractiveness.
Additionally, Litecoin (LTC) creator told in the end of January that it was negotiating with Beam crypto currency on implementation of MimbleWimble encryption protocol-based anonymous transactions into Litecoin network. According to the latest post of Litecoin on Medium, it will help both to increase transaction privacy and to reduce costs.

The coin hits a new monthly maximum. The analysts are sure that it isn’t the end.
On Tuesday, February, 19th, average Bitcoin rate hit a new monthly maximum of $3970. The crypto currency had the same price last time in January, 10th when its rate reached $4060.
The coin increased by 5% over the last 24 hours, Ethereum rate increased by 7,3%, to $147,7, XRP — by 5,1%, now the token is traded at the level of $0,325. Digital money capitalization increased by 6.4% over the last 24 hours to $133 billion.
Bitcoin rate should maintain above $3800 to keep growing, believes NewsBTC analyst. In his opinion, the coin price shouldn’t drop below $3720 in the near future. The crypto currency should surpass the resistance level of $4000 and maintain above it to reach the goal of $4200.

Digital money industry is constantly developing. According to the analysts of Cambridge Associates consulting firm are sure that it has bright future regardless to the drop. The firm’s clients manage assets worth of more than $300 billion.
Cambridge Associates analysts are sure that institutional investors should pay attention to crypto currencies because this industry has great potential. They advised their clients – the funds which managed assets worth of more than $300 billion – to consider an opportunity of investing in digital money, reports Bloomberg.
They added that it was necessary to study the space, to consider various investment methods, starting with venture capital funds and up to buying tokens on the exchanges. Investing in crypto currencies are risky, but digital money world expects for changes.
Earlier, two large US pension funds invested $40 million in cryptocurrency via Morgan Creek Digital fund. The company’s head Anthony Pompliano claims that institutional investors have already entered the digital money market.

The founder of Ethereum blockchain platform Vitalik Buterin told about his crypto currency assets.
According to the announcement made on Reddit, Buterin holds such assets beyond Ethereum ecosystem as BCH, BTC, DOGE and ZEC, the total cost is less than 1/10 of his ETH. In addition, he holds KNC, MKR, OMG and REP tokens, their cost does not exceed 10% of ETH assets.
It is known that Buterin’s public wallet contains 350 000 ETH or about $50 million according to the current rate.
Allegedly, he got $20 million selling 30 000 ETH Bitstamp exchange in 2017, however, it is not known what happened to the assets next.

Twitter users now can send small Bitcoin transactions as a tip if they like some tweet in this social network.
It is possible to do it via a mobile app called Tippin, released as a Chrome extension and is already available to browser users. It is possible to send Bitcoin via Lightning Network: it’s the fastest and the cheapest way to get crypto currency.
The app allows to send small Bitcoin transactions to the others. No commission is charged.
According to Tippin developers, the program will probably appear in other social networks soon.

Stellar cryptocurrency was traded at the level of $0,09054 on Tuesday, it increased by 10,09% during the day. This is the sharpest increase since December, 28th, 2018.
The price growth pushed Stellar capitalization to $1,69827 billion. Earlier, Stellar capitalization was $12,12000 billion at the peak.
Stellar cryptocurrency rate was $0,08269 – $0,09054 during the last 24 hours.
At the moment, Stellar crytpocurrency price is still 90,16% lower than its peak indicator – $0.92 which was reached on Janaury, 3rd.
Meanwhile, The Other Crypto Currency
Bitcoin crypto currency cost is $3.914,5, it increased by 3,79% over 24 hours.
Ethereum is traded at the level of $147,28, it increased by 2,33% over the last 24 hours.
Bitcoin capitalization is $69,06586 billion or 51,58% of total crypto market capitalization, Ethereum capitalization is $15,52954 billion or 11,60% of the total crypto market.

United States cryptocurrency exchange and wallet Coinbase has acquired blockchain intelligence startup Neutrino, according to a post published in the company’s blog on Tuesday, February 19, Cointelegraph reports.
Blockchain intelligence involves the analysis of data on public blockchains. Neutrino does this by developing solutions for monitoring, analyzing and tracking cryptocurrency flows across multiple blockchain networks. This provides a better understanding and insight into the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem.
According to CoinDesk, Neutrino’s eight employees will move into Coinbase’s London office this week, retaining their distinction as a separate entity in order to continue serving external clients. Srinivasan said this acquisition will help Coinbase research new assets while simultaneously ensuring the cryptocurrency exchange can identify undesirable activity, like theft, without handing over internal information to external companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Coinbase has raised more than $500 million from investors, including its most recent $300 million Series E round in October that gave it a valuation of $8 billion. The purchase of Neutrino is its eleventh acquisition to date, according to Crunchbase. Most of those deals have tended to be talent-led deals as Coinbase seeks to suck up more expertise and engineering skills to support its growing business.

According to analysis made by skew company, Bitcoin perpetual swaps trading on major exchanges grewby 300% within 24 hour.
Such platforms as BitMEX and bitFlyer have the highest trading volume followed by Deribit, OKEx and Crypto Facilities. It is worth noting that Kraken, consistently rated the most secure digital asset exchange and leader in euro volume since 2013, recently announced the acquisition of Crypto Facilities, a world-leading, regulated cryptocurrency trading platform and index provider. The combination creates a global leader in cryptocurrency spot and futures trading.
The analysts report that trading volume exceeded $4 billion in 24 hour and set a new record for the year.
The Bitcoin price follows Ethereum and Litecoin. The leading cryptocurrency has close correlation with EOS and Bitcoin Cash. However, Binance Coin (BNB) stays independent.
It is worth reminding that BitMEX, has been shutting down client trading accounts in the US and the Canadian province of Quebec, as global regulators intensify their crack down on unlicensed cryptocurrency trading platforms.

While efforts are still being made to recover the C$190 million which is inaccessible to QuadrigaCX’s exchange, there may be a ray of hope. A podcast from 2014 which was discovered, reveals that the late Gerald Cotten, QuadrigaCX’s CEO used to store the private keys to cold wallets on a paper, reports Bloomberg.
Virtual currencies work in a different way than traditional financial institutions. Users are the only responsible for their digital assets. Thus, if they lose their private key, they will not be able to recover their funds. This allows the society to have a financial system that does not depend on intermediaries and relies just on individuals.
As it turned out, the effectiveness of this security measures is precisely what QuadrigaCX is bemoaning right now, as CAD $190 million ($145 million) in digital assets, belonging to over 100,000 company investors, is locked away on the exchange’s cold wallets, which Cotton had access to.
As a part of monitoring QuadrigaCX’s proceedings, EY released a report on the exchange’s activities. Titled the “First Report of the Monitor,” the auditing giant revealed that the exchange made inadvertent transfers of 103 Bitcoins (worth about $353,000 at the time) to the same wallets that it was unable to access.
Via the report, EY confirmed that they were “working with Management” on the possibility of retrieving the digital assets from the cold wallets. However, considering their inability to access the wallets since Cotten’s death, it’s highly unlikely.

According to a recent report by CoinDesk, blockchain data platform Streamr has officially released a new open-source ethereum scaling technology called Monoplasma.
Inspired by a pre-existing scaling solution called plasma, Monoplasma is different in that it focuses specifically on “one-to-many payments” in which users would need to “repeatedly distribute value to a large and dynamic set of ethereum addresses,” explained Henri Pihkala, CEO of Streamr.
Streamr plans to use Monoplasma technology to sell user data through the blockchain. After the sale of the data, the payment will go directly to the Ethereum addresses of the users.
Earlier, Vitaly Buterin spoke about a possible merger of sharding and Casper protocol. He believes that this will eliminate the problem of Ethereum scalability.

According to Smartereum, the Ethereum Constantinople upgrade has been on the way for a while now.
However, members of the core Ethereum department team have postponed the upgrade twice due to some vulnerability issues. This is because they intend to make sure that the upgrade goes on successfully and the transition to the proof-of-stake consensus algorithm is smooth. As reported by smartereum.com, the core developers found a solution to the vulnerability that was detected by ChainSecurity. However, new rumors started circulating that the upgrade would come with a smart contract vulnerability that will allow hackers to change codes on the network.
According to developer Jeff Coleman, there is a thing regarding Create2. He mentioned that theoretically, redeployments can change the contract byte code because the address is only a commitment to the init code. He went on saying that those that will be auditing code have to be looking out for potentially “weird phenomena.”
Buterin, for what it’s worth, supported his original position on Create2 as forward thinking, even if it creates a few bumps in the road to be smoothed out in the interim. Speaking on the growth of Ethereum smart contracts in the long term, Buterin told call audiences,
“The one thing we need to keep in mind is more for the future, when thinking about rents and deletion; that’s a way that can lead to contracts being in a state to being not in a state without a self-destruct operation. It’s not something we need to figure out in the next few weeks, but it’s still useful to keep in mind when getting the ETH 2.0 sharding to a VM spec very soon.”
It is worth noting that the Constantinople upgrade is now scheduled for the last week of February. Hopefully, the developers will not have any need to postpone it once again.

Brian Kelly, the eternal Bitcoin optimist, Founder & CEO of BKCM LLC – a digital currency investment firm – and regular on CNBC’s Fast Money, recently spoke to the Cointelegraph about crypto, the impact of a finical crisis, and the potential of a Bitcoin (BTC) ETF.
He said at Switzerland’s Crypto Finance Conference that he is expecting that lower lows for BTC are in the cards. In fact, he remarked that a sub-$3,000 Bitcoin is more than likely, citing historic market cycles to back his point.
However, staying positive – and continuing in the vein of repetitive cycles – Kelly admitted that this was likely to be short-lived:
“I think we’re coming to an end. Here’s the thing, the sellers that we’ve seen recently are almost forced sellers. Some CEOs had to raise cash because they say they “can’t hold it in crypto all the time.” These are signs of the end. I don’t know if it [the end of the cycle] is here or it’s a little bit lower, but those are the signs of the end.”
In Kelly’s estimation the focus this year will be on currency, “bitcoin, litecoin, some of those” because of the “geopolitical tension” around the world hinting towards an economic downturn. He insisted that he didn’t think crypto is going away. In fact, he sees it becoming much more of a mainstream asset. He thinks the next two years could see Bitcoin — and I what I would call the other currencies, probably five or six of kind of “pure currencies” — he believes you could see those play a major role in investors portfolio over the next two years.

Japanese financial conglomerate will support Ripple. The bank’s CEO Yoshitaka Kitao is sure that the token will become the best token in the market.
SBI Holdings CEO is sure that Ripple and XRP can start a revolution in cryptocurrency industry. He claims that the bank is planning to support San-Francisco-based startup to increase altcoin adoption, reports Japanese media outlet Coin Post.
Kitao said that the company was maximizing XRP usage attempts. It will provide the tools to let institutional investors to access crypto currencies.
He added that he did not think that Bitcoin was valuable because it was hard to use it in practice. SBI Holdings CEO is sure that XRP will become the first crypto currency and the conglomerate will make every effort to reach this goal.
Earlier, a major American bank JP Morgan announced plans for JPM Coin launch for immediate trans-boarder transfers. Many experts believe that a new coin can kill Ripple and XRP and influence the situation in the digital money market seriously.

On Wednesday, February, 20th, Bitcoin rate is growing, but its rate is below yesterday’s level of January’s maximum of $4000.
The first crypto currency’s cost is $3942,29 (+0,36%).
XRP (XRP/USD) dropped by 0,23% to $0,324. Ethereum (ETH/USD) cheapened by $143,11 (-3,03%).
According to CoinDesk analyst, Bitcoin will test psychological level of $5000 if it surpasses $4100.
However, the trend reversal is still questionable because the bulls still have to go through powerful resistance levels.