Raúl Marcos' Crypto News #2: Metropolis, EEA, NEO, Bitcoin Cash, market manipulation

Ethereum’s roadmap has four major releases in mind, and Metropolis is the third. This update will bring the necessary infrastructure to support anonymous transactions using zk-snarks and improvements in smart contracts and programming.

This release will put Ethereum in the news again, and probably the block reward (so every day fewer ethers will be found), so I expect the ETH price will rise.

The EEA keeps growing! Lawyers are a key part of cryptocurrencies, and they are especially important in Ethereum due to smart contracts. Having big law firms working in Ethereum probably will bring great things in the future.

After the fork, it appeared that BTC was the big winner, but since a few days ago it’s more profitable to mine BCH than BTC, and the price is reflecting that. Right now, 20% of the hashrate is in BCH, and rising! With another possible fork in November and Bitcoin Cash improving, I think BTC future is not so bright as the price increment shows.

NEO is a Chinese crypto platform similar to Ethereum that has been in the news lately because they did a total rebranding (before this it was called Antshares), they released a lot of much-needed material in English, and they announced the first ICOs in their platform. It’s still difficult to find information in English about them, so I liked this article because it’s a great summary.

If you have used an exchange, you probably have used Tethers (USDT). A Tether is backed by a real dollar, but it has its own blockchain and it’s tradeable, so it’s very convenient. But it’s also a bit shady: it’s very difficult to track, they had liquidity problems in the past, and it’s not really decentralized. This article theorizes that fraudulent Tethers are being created to manipulate the markets, and what it says makes sense. After reading other shady practices in markets, I’d say that it’s probably true.

Etherdelta is a decentralized exchange run by smart contracts. You can deposit or withdraw coins interacting with a smart contract, and you can create or fill an order interacting with another smart contract. This week I have been using it and even though the UX is awful and has some problems, it works!

One of the told improvements of activating SegWit was to make transaction malleability attacks impossible, but I never really understood what that mean until this article.