Wyoming Bill Defines Cryptocurrencies As Money

It has been recently revealed that the U.S. State of Wyoming has released a bill that seeks to clarify the classification of the new and burgeoning asset class.

The bill proposes placing crypto-related assets into three categories: Digital consumer assets, digital securities and virtual currencies.

According to the bill any of these categories defines the asset as intangible personal property and treats cryptos similar to cash.

The bill also authorizes banks to provide custodial services for digital assets.

This means banks are to be qualified custodians in accordance with regulations put in place by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Wyoming has seen a surge of blockchain-related and cryptocurrency –friendly legislations for the past months.

Bills such as allowing corporations to issue blockchain-based tokens that represent stocks and more recently bills that will foster a regulatory environment conducive to blockchain innovation as well as cryptocurrency development.

ICON Decentralizing Its Nodes

News reports across the internet have revealed that there is a significant push for the decentralization of the ICON blockchain.

ICON was primarily designed to be an engineering solution to connect independent blockchain without the use of third party intermediaries.

The plan will elect twenty-two node operators that will produce blocks, verify transactions and participate in consensus.

These twenty-two elected node operators are called Public Representatives (P-Rep).

The application process for elected P-Rep concludes in September of this year 2019 which will be followed by an election where all ICON community members can vote for their candidate of choice.

After the on-chain election and onboarding of the 22 P-Reps the community plans to establish Ecosystem Expansion Projects and dAPP Booster Programs where a portion of the block rewards will be allocated to specific dApps.

Aside from the P-Reps another election will be help to elect Community Representatives (C-Reps) to act as liaisons for external blockchains that wish to connect to the ICON blockchain conglomerate.

After the network decentralization ICON plan to establish a governance structure that mirrors representative democracy where ICON holders can delegate votes to candidates of their choice.

New Scaling Solution Utreexo

For years Bitcoin developers have been looking at different ways on scaling blockchain transactions.

While there are already some promising technologies that has the potential of solving this problem, it has not stop developers from researching new ways to scale blockchain.

One these efforts is the work of Tadge Dryja’s Ultreexo which promises at least in theory to allow network participants to verify the state of the chain’s consensus with a smaller sets of cryptographic proofs.

Basically the new protocol brings the million of UTXOs recorded onchain down to under a kilobyte.

There is no lost of security instead the burden of keeping track of the funds is shifted to the owner of the funds.

The approach could minimize storage requirements to the extent that it might be possible to run full nodes on mobile phones.

While this technology may sound promising, such an innovative piece of technology might not even reach bitcoin at all due to other stubborn bitcoin developers who they themselves are looking for their own ways to scale bitcoin.

Accumulator technology like Ultreexo might see the light of day on other blockchain projects who has far less stubborn developerns such as Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum.

Lack Of Retail Products Hindering Bitcoin’s Growth

It has been recently revealed that the lack of trading products geared towards retail investors have hindered the growth of the number one cryptocurrency in the crypto ecosystem, Bitcoin.

This was the conclusion of Ed Tilly, the chief executive and president of CBOE Global Markets, the largest Options exchange in the United States of America.

The executive noted that lack of Exchange-Traded Note (ETN), or a product that follows the price of the flagship crypto that retail investors could trade.

He believes that ETNs and futures are critical to each other as they are both accessible to retail and institutional investors.

ETNs are more accessible to average investor as they have lower entry barriers.

Despite the remarks of Tilly it does not mean that there had been no other efforts in bringing in more products to regulated exchanges like Cboe and CME.

In fact there has been several efforts to bring in a SEC approved Exchange Traded Fund (ETF).

Unfortunately the SEC has rejected the majority of these applications and delayed decision on a Bitcoin ETF application that most pundits believe would be approved.

Ethereum Constantinople Upgrade Delayed

Reports are circulating the internet that the much-anticipated Constantinople upgrade of Ethereum might be delayed for more than a month from the time it was originally planned to be launched.

The news comes after several new proposals were submitted relating to the code changes in EIP-1283.

This would mean that the fork of Ethereum will happen no earlier than February 27, 2019.

The developers and the community seem to be afraid of the damage done by initial security vulnerability.

It seems that growing consensus is moving towards a two fork strategy in order to make sure that the whole network is ready for the next planned hard fork.

Developers are also discussing ways how to deal with miners who continue to mine the falsified Ethereum Constantinople chain.

However, the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, believes that it is better to launch the new upgrade as soon as possible.

This is due to an upcoming difficulty bomb, which he says will affect the block times.

He believes that a six-week time table is more than adequate time to iron out the issues in code in time for the upgrade.

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