Coinbase Valued At $8 Billion And Ripple’s XRapid Goes Into Commercial Production

The State Of The Market — October 7, 2018

: $6,562.60 (-0.41%): $223.33 (-0.67%): $0.475 (-3.68%)

The Cryptocurrency market has been very slow this week, with Bitcoin still moving between $6,400 and $6,600. Most cryptocurrencies moved by less than 1% on a daily basis. Ethereum is still stable at $223, going down by just $1 this week. However, XRP posted significant losses after it failed to meet the hype for its Swell event. XRP went from $0.6 to $0.47, losing more than 21% of its value.

In other news, the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) has with Hyperledger to accelerate blockchain adoption and cryptocurrency exchange to US clients due to regulations.

1) Tiger Global hedge fund is planning to invest in US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Tiger Global, which recently invested $245 million in payments service provider Stripe, plans to invest $500 million in the exchange valued at $8 billion. Although Coinbase has not commented on the proposal, the capital would be used to buy out shareholders. The exchange is backed by several organizations including Battery Ventures, Draper Associates, Spark Capital and Ribbit Capital. Tiger Global is an investor in other large companies like Flipkart, Ola and Spotify. ()

2) Ripple announced on Twitter that its xRapid product is going into commercial production. A trio of firms, Mercury FX, Cuallix and Catalyst Corporate Federal Credit Union, will be the maiden Ripple customers “to make on-demand cross-border payments” on the RippleNet platform with the XRP cryptocurrency, according to a tweet by the blockchain startup. Ripple executives alluded to this development in recent weeks, and the company tied in its Swell conference with the announcement. ()

3) SIA has decided to block big mining companies by enacting a software update that will prevent certain types of mining hardware from mining on the platform. David Vorick of Nebulous recently announced that hardware manufactured by Nebulous will now serve as the primary method of mining SIA. According to Vorick, the hard fork is “better than resisting ASICs altogether” but he added that “we don’t believe that a cryptocurrency needs to embrace a parasitic or abusive ASIC monopoly.” Vorick also mentioned that a vote was held in a Reddit thread and the decision to fork received nearly 100% agreement. ()