Bitcoin ‘whales’ – a term given to individuals who hold huge amounts of BTC – are also a cause for concern regarding decentralization.

Recent data from BitInfoCharts indicates that the 100 largest non-exchange Bitcoin wallets have accumulated 150,000 BTC (approximately $579 million worth) in the past two months. Although it’s highly unlikely that any individual Bitcoin whale could ever accumulate enough BTC to affect the network itself, they are often implicated in perceived market manipulation tactics.

Data from BitInfoCharts says after the largest five Bitcoin wallets, the next 100 hold 10,000-100,000 BTC and these accumulated over 150,000 BTC in the last two months. They now hold close to 2.29 million BTC. By yesterday, another 2 wallets had gotten into the list of those holding between 10,000-100,000 BTC making it to 102 wallets.

The largest amount of BTC or 4,316,546 BTC is held by 133835 wallet addresses holding between 10 – 100 balances while 1710 wallet addresses holding between 1000 – 10,000 hold a total of 4,316,546 BTC, the second largest amount for categories. However, 48.54% of addresses hold a total of 2,270 BTC according to the data.

Unless the whales had recently sold at the peak, they would have been financially better off buying at $3600 a week earlier than at $3800 after the drop. Nevertheless, whenever there are unexplained price movements, it is perhaps somewhat comforting that we can always blame the whales.

China’s Center for Information and Industry Development has released its latest ranking of 34 crypto projects. This is the first update for 2019, but it is the ninth update overall. Bitcoin has been upgraded from the previous ranking while the top two positions remain unchanged.

The aforementioned study states that EOS is still the “best cryptocurrency in the world”— primarily because it possesses a score that has been able to keep the project in first place across several editions of the CCID ranking standard.

The basic tech, creativity and the applicability of the cryptocurrency are taken into consideration for comparing their use case and ease of use.

Well, first of all, here is the complete list of the rankings for the month of February 2019. The most renowned cryptocurrency digital asset Bitcoin (BTC) takes the 13th position by jumping 2 positions compared to the previous ranking. It comes with a total index score of 104.5. The rankings for Bitcoin is improving with time.

Ethereum Classic fell from the 15th place to the 19th place in the latest ranking. The center explained that “Ethereum Classic suffered a sustained 51% attack, which caused widespread concern, and the security of the public chain will remain an important issue that plagues future development.”

The top five projects for the applicability category are Ethereum, NEO, Nebulas, Tron, and Ontology. This category mainly evaluates the comprehensive level of public chain support for practical applications, including node deployment, wallet applications, development support and application implementations.

In closing, it is worth noting that the ranking criteria also takes into consideration the most popular consensus algorithms used by the tested cryptocurrencies.

The list gets its support from the Chinese Government’s CCID Blockchain Institute with China Software Testing Center and supports from their CCID Think Tanks. The ranking invovles top minds from renowned Chinese Universities such as Peking University.

South Korean crypto-exchange Coinbin declared bankruptcy after it had found a shortage of 29.3 billion won.

The website of the trading platform published a notice that Coinbin is forced to stop operations because of the growing debts and state regulation.

According to CEO of the platform, the possibility of withdrawing funds in cryptocurrency and fiat has been suspended since February 20. Payments to users will be made in accordance with the procedures provided by law.

CEO also noted that one of the employees had removed cryptocurrency keys from hundreds of wallets, containing bitcoins and more than 100 ETH. The fraudster acted intentionally, in order to assign digital assets in the amount equivalent to $26 million.

Mercury FX, an international payment service provider, has announced an expansion of cooperation with Ripple.

As part of the partnership, by the middle of this year, Mercury FX plans to open 10 new payment corridors based on xRapid, which uses XRP. As the head of the company Alastair Constance noted, this approach will provide quick and cheap transfers from the UK to Canada and the middle East. The new solution will cover other countries, including Mexico and the Philippines.

Constance also noted that xRapid would show users the benefits of distributed ledger.

Mercury FX was founded in 2007. Its offices are located in London, Hong Kong and Cape town. Specializing in cross-border payments and foreign exchange transactions, Mercury FX has positioned itself as an alternative to banks.
Recall, the American financial holding JPMorgan has developed its own stablecoin called JPM Coin. Some representatives of the crypto community expressed the opinion that the new “stable coin” was a direct threat to Ripple’s business model.

The head of the largest American cryptocurrency company Coinbase, Brian Armstrong has announced the results of an independent investigation into the canadian bitcoin exchange QuadrigaCX, which presumably no longer have access to users’ cryptocurrency funds worth $137 million.

Thus, the company was able to discover clusters that are more likely to be QuadrigaCX’ cold storages. According to analysts, the funds were transferred manually, and the withdrawal was completed in early 2018.
Nevertheless, Armstrong believes that the probability of an exit-scam is quite low, because QuadrigaCX is one of the world’s oldest exchanges.

He leans to the version that is associated with the events of almost two years ago. In June 2017, a bug in the QuadrigaCX’ smart contract turned into multi-million dollar losses for the exchange. The transfer of user balances to cold storage began just a little later.

Probably, as a result of unforeseen losses, the exchange began to face serious financial difficulties, as well as liquidity problems. The scheme of withdrawal of funds from cold storage indicates that QuadrigaCX may have traded with users’ funds in order to patch the “hole”. At the same time, the situation in the market worsened, which could also hit the exchange quite hard.

Armstrong suggested that at some point the negligence of employees played a role, which then was tried to be covered.

The head of Coinbase stressed that users of QuadrigaCX had begun to complain about the problems with the withdrawal of money long before the death of Gerald Cotten. Thus, the management could come up with a story about private keys on the CEO’s laptop to hide insolvency, one of the reasons for which could be the inefficient management.

Senior scientific officer of nChain Craig Wright sent an input on crypto asset mechanics and markets in response to the request of to the commodity futures trading commission. However, even in the official document, he did not miss the opportunity to remind everyone that he was the alleged creator of bitcoin – Satoshi Nakamoto.

He explained that the false information surrounding bitcoin and derivative blockchain systems had forced him to come out of the shadows.

Wright also stressed that Ethereum was nothing more than a poorly designed copy of bitcoin.

Recall, earlier in February, self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto said that he has a patent, allegedly able to limit the right to issue JPM Coin.

The prolonged decline of the crypto-currency market allows the industry to clear itself of speculators, freeing up space for real crypto-enthusiasts. This was stated by the founder of the social network Reddit Alexis Ohanian in an interview with Yahoo Finance.

He notes that such mass shake up is useful for the long-term health of the industry.

The founder of Reddit denied the claim of some skeptics about the “Bitcoin’s death”.

We shall add that in February, Reddit attracted $300 million from the Chinese holding Tencent ($150 million), investment firms Sequoia and Fidelity, and Snoop Dogg, reaching the $3 billion mark.

Earlier, the head of Pantera Capital Dan Morhad said that market participants should not worry about the crypto winter, as the current situation opened up good prospects for the future development of the bitcoin and blockchain industry.

In November 2018, a similar point of view was expressed by the founder of Morgan Creek Anthony Pompliano. He said that the bear market made “tourists” leave the game.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government intends to invest 1.2 trillion Korean won ($1.07 billion) in fintech startups working with the blockchain technology by 2022.

Funds from the innovation development fund, established last year by local authorities, will be allocated for the development of new technologies.

In the first half of this year, the fund will allocate 13.25 billion won ($11.75 million) for this purpose, and 8.4 billion won ($7.45 million) in the second half. According to the Korean authorities, blockchain is a revolutionary technology and an integral component of the Fourth industrial revolution.

Officials also noted that the average amount of investment per a startup in South Korea is almost seven times lower than, for example, in the Silicon valley.

Recall that last autumn, the Seoul authorities presented a five-year plan of the blockchain industry development.

Most of capitalization rating leaders, including bitcoin, show growth.

Thursday starts with positive trend for crypto market. Most of rating leaders stated growing. Daily capitalization remains at the level of $130 billion, improving environment’s indicators.

Bitcoin increased 0,07%. EOS is the leader in terms of growth – the crypto currency increased 3,36%, it seems to be a great result against the background of yesterday’s volume drop by 2.86%.

Tether stablecoin price sees negative trend, it maintains at the level of $1.1 now.

According to Coin Dance resources, bitcoin popularity keeps growing in a range of countries. As for February, 28th, Indonesia and Venezuela are the leaders, its citizens are fighting against hyperinflation with the help of crypto currencies.

Bitcoin gained popularity in Indonesia recently, but it hits the demand records in Venezuela regularly. This week, its trading volume is 24,423,410,921 bolivars, while previous all-time-high was 24,355,772,006 bolivars.
Meanwhile, China Electronic Information Industry Development (CCID) presented a new crypto currency rating where BTC made several steps up.

Coinhive, a famous legal crypto currency mining service beloved by many scammers will be disabled soon.

The service owners reported that it will be disabled on March, 8th, 2019. The announcement was published in Coinhive blog, it says that the owners decided that Coinhive will be shut down on March, 8th, 2019. They told that they liked working on it, but the service is not profitable yet.

Hashrate decreased more than 50% after the latest hardfork, and it damaged the service. The market drop influenced it as well.

Thus, the service will be unavailable since March, 8th, 219, but the control panel will be available until April, 30th, so that the users will be able to withdraw their funds.

TRON is ranked 2nd in a Chinese crypto rating. China Electronic Information Industry Development center noted that EOS is a leader. It is noteworthy that Bitcoin is ranked 12th in China on the list of the most popular crypto currencies.

The Rules Of Chinese Crypto Market
CCID representative highlight that TRON has high capacity, it is very important for mining farm operation. Additionally, the coin is compatible with Ethereum-base smart contracts. TRON is implemented in more than 200 decentralized apps, it will have an opportunity to become the leader.

Thus, the analysts estimated the basic network technology and highlighted EOS, Tron, Bitshares, Gxchain and Nano blockchains. Ethereum, NEO, Nebulas and Ontology are leaders in terms of usability. According to the specialists, TRON has chances to get support from institutional companies due to universalism and provided opportunities.
TRON CEO Justin Sun told that it is planned to create a fund to save EOS and Ethereum developers: they can switch their apps to TRON network and get a reward.

CoinMetrics startup specialized in analytical data for blockchain investors and traders raised $1.9 million, reports CoinDesk. Startup is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, got support from Fidelity Investments, Highland Capital Partners and Dragonfly Capital.

At the same time CoinMetrics, presented the first set of commercial products for institutions interested in customized research reports. According to the company’s co-founder, institutional investors are not satisfied by existing services who do not distinguish different data massive. He says the company wants to create a white list of exchanges to base the market rates on the data provided by reliable exchanges, not the ones who practice laundry trading and everything like that.

According to him, CoinMetrics also analyzes blockchain data in addition to exchange and price activities using methods designed to help traders to get rid of unneeded noise. Meanwhile, company’s CEO noted that CoinMetrics is planning to use traditional securities metrics for crypto currency market.

CoinMetrics was launched in 2017 as a hobby project with open source code and its founders have been working on its development all this time. Up to date, the startup has 12,500 followers in Twitter and offers several free tools. Note that there’re several other analytical blockchain startups in the market, however, unlike CoinMetrics which are focused on traders and investors, CoinMetrics is more focused on reveal of suspicious transactions in Bitcoin network. For example, Chainalysis, which raised $30 million recently.

The most popular crypto currency in the world – Bitcoin – maintains at the same level. As for February, 28th, Bitcoin rate maintains below $4000, according to Coinmarketcap.com data.

Thus, Bitcoin decreased by 0,03% and is traded at the level of $3857.

The other crypto currencies see variety of trends.

Ethereum rate increased 0,16% and now it is at the level of $137.

XRP decreased by 1,13% and is traded at the level of $0,31.

EOS increased 2,82%. The token costs $3,59.

Litecoin increased by 1,16%. The token is traded at the level of $45,98.

Crypto market capitalization is $13 billion now. Bitcoin’s share is 52.1% now.

Tron project founder Justin Sun says that the crypto currency market drop is over, but the community shouldn’t expect for rapid growth. According to him, Bitcoin won’t see powerful price strikes for three or even five years. Instead of that, the first crypto currency will strengthen its positions and maintain at $3000-$5000 during 2019.

Tron founder believes that 2019 will be a make-of-break year for crypto currencies. Gradual development of Lightning Network, increase of quality and quantity of decentralized apps will lead to crypto currency and blockchain adoption.

Sun also highlights that he believes that it’s very important for blockchain companies to participate in various events, including charity ones. According to him, this will help to demonstrate technology usefulness beyond financial area.

EOS uses a special “black list rule” which prevents compromised accounts from transferring money. However, this time, the hacker managed to deceive EOS community.

Huobi crypto currency exchange posted a statement in Telegram, saying that the blacklisted account was revealed, reports Cointelegraph.

According to the statement, this account was connected with an anonymous hacker who managed to steal money from a previously hacked account. Then the hacker transferred 2,09 million EOS ($7,7 million) to the exchange. As revealed, security system was surpassed due to failure update of “black list” of EOS block producers.