Raúl Marcos' Crypto News #5: China banning exchanges, Microsoft & Ethereum, Metropolis, Casper.

As you surely know, China banned ICOs and this affected Chinese exchanges because besides offering trading they also host ICOs (and some exchanges, like Binance, even did their own ICO). Well, supposedly this week Chinese regulators ordered these exchanges to halt their operations, but the terms of this order still remain unknown.

Following the news, the markets are in the red, and BTC and ETH prices are 10-15% lower in China.

It’s always great to read what Fred Wilson writes. This time he analyzes China ICO Ban, and in his opinion regulation is very much needed, but a total ban like this one is not the solution. I really like his idea of a “cooling off period”.

The 2017 Blockstack Summit hosted talks by some of the most influential people in CryptoWorld, and this article does a great job summarizing those talks. Instead of summing up, this time I recommend reading it: a ton of great ideas, links, and explanations of core parts of blockchain. Really, it’s a must read, trust me.

While we are focused in ICO madness and price swings, real innovation is happening in blockchain. In the case of Ethereum, a lot of big companies joined the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance to join forces and explore the platform. It’s very interesting how these companies face innovation and changes, so I really enjoyed the story of how one of them, Microsoft, started to work with Ethereum.

Apart from a lot of technical improvements, this upgrade brings a lower block reward, so miners will earn less ETH per block. Less ETH will be discovered each day, but demand will be unaffected, so my guess is that ETH price will rise (as it happened with Bitcoin a few months ago).

This time I’m going to share the reddit thread instead of the article because I really like the discussion created, with some of the core developers of Ethereum answering questions about Casper (the protocol that will change Ethereum to Proof of Stake, where the network will work without mining).