PRICE CHANGE WTD/YTD

- BTC ($6,692): +3%/ -50%

- ETH ($244): +10%/ -68%

- LTC ($61): +7%/ -72%

- XRP ($0.57): +104%/ -70%

- Crypto Market Cap ($226B): +11%/ -62%

- BTC dominance: 51%

THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO

- XRP surged in price this week, temporarily surpassing Ether as the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. XRP surged on rumors that Ripple Labs is launching a service called XRapid, which would allow its financial partners to speed up money transfers into emerging markets using XRP. Link.

- 0.7 percent of all Bitcoin addresses hold 55 percent of circulating Bitcoins, a total worth more than $100 billion. Despite the bear market, 42 percent of these 'whales' made no outgoing movement during the Bitcoin peak in December, and 27 percent have continued to add more coins to their wallets. Diar, the research firm that reported these numbers, estimates that some of these wallets are accidentally locked due to owners losing private keys. Link.

- Fidelity, the world's 4th largest asset manager, says crypto products are still 'underway' despite the bear market, though it appears as though many of their pursuits have been scaled back or put on hold. Market volatility has been tough for the organization which temporarily shut down an experimental blockchain fund set up in 2017 as multiple senior executives left Fidelity to pursue other projects. Link.

- New York's Attorney General referred three cryptocurrency exchanges to the New York Department of Financial Services for possible violations of digital-currency regulations. The exchanges included Binance (world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume), Kraken, and Gate.io. In April the attorney general asked 13 major crypto marketplaces for details on their operations, internal controls, and safeguards against market manipulation and fraud, and all but four responded to the inquiry. Link.

- Eidoo becomes the latest 'stablecoin' to come to market, though it's the first tied to the price of gold. The ERC-20 compatible token will be redeemable for one gram of 99.9 percent fine gold, which Eidoo says will be stored in its vaults and audited every 90 days. Eidoo raised $28 million in a token sale last October and has become a popular platform for launching ICOs. Most recently it has added exchange services to its offering. Link.

- Coinbase has hired LinkedIn's head of analytics and data science, Michael Li, as Vice President of Data. Li's career to date has revolved around incorporation data into financial services, e-commerce and social networks. Li is the latest hire to join Coinbase's executive team. In the last 10 months Coinbase has hired Vice Presidents for finance, communications and engineering, along with chief financial, compliance, and technology officers. Link.

- Coinbase adds Brian Brooks, former executive vice president and general counsel of Fannie Mae, as its Chief Legal Officer. Mike Lempres, who held the chief legal and risk officer title, will transition into the role of Chief Policy Officer. Link.

- Coinbase responded to reports that 20 percent of executed volume on its platform was attributable to its own trading. Coinbase called the report misleading, and that the trading volume in fact "represents customer-driven volume via Coinbase Consumer." The company said that it does not operate a proprietary trading desk or take market making actions. Link.

- Cloudflare introduces IPFS Gateway, an easy way to access content from IPFS, the filing system protocol developed by Protocol Labs. IPFS is a peer-to-peer file system composed of thousands of computers around the world, each of which stores files on behalf of the network. With IPFS anyone can cache and serve content for free. Over 5 billion files have been uploaded to IPFS already. Link.

- California bans cryptocurrency donations in political campaigns. Link.

- Bitcoin Cash, which infamously split from Bitcoin a year ago, is now at the center of its own contentious fork. At opposite sides are Bitmain, one of the largest miners of Bitcoin Cash that holds nearly $600 million of the coin, and CoinGeek, its primary mining rival. Both groups hope to list their coin as Bitcoin Cash on exchanges, adding even more ambiguity to the process. Link.

- Privacy-focused internet browser Brave will begin using blockchain identity startup Civic's verification services to ensure publishers are paid for their content with Brave's Basic Attention Token (BAT). Content producers can use Civic's identity verification and KYC services to confirm their identities and earn BAT tokens.

- Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro announced the adoption of the Petro Token in international trade beginning in October. The news comes after Maduro announced the country's new fiat currency, the bolivar, would be pegged to the oil-backed petro and ordered domestic banks to use the petro as a unit of account. So far it is unclear what global trading partners, if any, will use the token. Link.

- Former Point72 hedge fund manager is launching October 1st with roughly $15 million of outside capital. Travis Kling quit Point72 in December, at the peak of the crypto boom, to start his own crypto-focused hedge fund based in Los Angeles. The fund will invest in both tokens and equity of blockchain companies. Link.

- John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe, said that while the company was no longer processing Bitcoin payments, it still sees a future with crypto. Collison sited pricing volatility as a reason for no longer processing Bitcoin payments, but indicated that Stripe is open to processing payments in other types of crypto, including in countries where payment infrastructures are not well established. Link.

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