PRICE CHANGE WTD/YTD

- BTC ($3,518): 0% / -6%
- ETH ($118): +1% / -12%
- LTC ($31): +3% / +2%
- XRP ($0.32): 0% / -9%
- Crypto Market Cap ($120B): +1% / -5%
- BTC dominance: 53%

THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO

- Coinstar machines will allow consumers to buy up to $2,500 in bitcoin at select grocery stores. The company, which operates 20,000 change-counting kiosks around the world, has partnered with crypto ATM operator Coinme to allow customers to easily purchase bitcoin with cash. Customers put their money into a Coinstar machine, which then dispenses a voucher for a bitcoin redemption code that points to Coinme. Link. 

- Crypto payments processor BitPay says it processed over $1 billion worth of transactions last year, marking the second consecutive time its reached the billion-dollar mark. The company said its b2b platform experienced 255 percent year-over-year growth as new clients including law firms, data center providers, and IT vendors signed up to accept crypto payments. The firm also added settlement support for bitcoin cash and stablecoins including USDC, but it remains focused on bitcoin. BitPay raised a $40 million Series B round last year. Link. 

- Independent analysts have ranked Kraken, Cobinhood, and Poloniex the most secure exchanges in the world. The report ranked the security of 135 platforms trading above $100,000 in crypt per day. Only 16% of the world's largest crypto exchanges received A or A- security ratings. Coinbase Pro was ranked ninth and received an A- and Binance, the world's largest exchange by volume, was ranked 34th. Link. 

- Blockchain startup Spring Labs is partnering with 16 lenders and fintech firms to test a system that would take on credit bureaus like Equifax. Currently, banks give credit bureaus their customer information for free and then buy it back, as they cannot do credit checks themselves under current regulatory and competition frameworks. Thus, banks need a third-party to grant loans. Spring Labs' system would enable banks to cut out the middleman by verifying clients identities for themselves through an anonymous, decentralized ledger. Spring Labs believes this system will reduce fraud and replace outdated underwriting models like the credit score. Link. 

- Distributed Technology Research, a non-profit foundation formed by academics with backing from Pantera Capital, is creating a new digital currency that can process thousands of transactions a second. The currency, called Unit-e coin, hopes to address the transaction speed and scalability issues of bitcoin. The researches believe the coin will be able to process up to 10,000 transactions per second, which is significantly faster than bitcoin (7 transactions per second) and even Visa (1,700 transactions per second). Link. 

- Activation of Constantinople, the upcoming Ethereum system upgrade, has been pushed back to late February due to security vulnerabilities found by smart contract audit firm ChainSecurity. The Constantinople hard fork is an upgrade to the ETH network, which also has separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) in order to soften the eventual transition of the currency from the current PoW to the more energy efficient PoS consensus algorithm. Link. 

- Crypto custodian BitGo and OTC specialist Genesis Global Trading have teamed up to make it easier for institutional investors to trade crypto. Institutional investors storing digital assets with BitGo can now use Genesis' platform to execute trades almost instantaneously. Transfers are settled on BitGo's books, without anyone having to take the coins out of storage, which can take 24 hours or more, or recording the transaction on the public ledger. Link. 

- Coinbase acqui-hired Blockspring, a startup making it easy to pull data from various APIs into Excel and Google Sheets. Most recently Blockspring had but an integration for Coinbase into its service. The YC-backed company had raised $3.4 million in 2015 from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel. Link. 

- Crypto finance startup Circle's USDC stablecoin is fully dollar backed according to a recent auditor's report. The report states the company has $251 million held in custody accounts against 251 million of USDC tokens. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer in the space, has come under scrutiny over the past few years for failing to produce a full audit showing its has sufficient fiat reserves to back up its USDT tokens. Link. 

- ConsensSys Ventures announced a $1 million investment in the crypto wallet and trading platform Coinhouse and an undisclosed amount in the encryption-centric browser Tenta. Coinhouse has over 150,000 user accounts and the Tenta browser currently has been downloaded over 900,000 times. ConsenSys Ventures was launched in 2017 with $50 million to invest in startups with a mission to help build the ethereum ecosystem. The fund has invested $14.5 million across 14 projects to date. Link. 

- Overstock.com's tZERO security token trading platform will go live by the end of next week. At launch the platform will allow trading of its native tZERO token, but it is also talking to about 60 different companies about issuing tokens to be traded on the platform. Link. 

- Chip-making giant TSMC released Q4 financial results which included a double digit slump in its high-performance computing business line, driven largely by a decline in crypto mining. Bitmain is one of TSMC's largest crypto mining customers. Nearly 60 percent of Bitmain's total chip supply came from TSMC in 2017 and the first half of 2018. Link.  

- Palo Alto Networks released a report identifying malware that is being used to mine monero on cloud servers by disabling and bypassing cloud security software. Monero is the most popular cryptocurrency among hackers. Over 4 percent of total monero in circulation was mined by hackers. Link. 

- The Russian government shot down rumors that it planned to buy billions of dollars worth of bitcoin to offset economic sanctions from the US, citing the lack of sufficient infrastructure to support cryptocurrencies. Link.