Newsflash: Bytecoin suffers another delisting, Waltonchain reveals new hardware while Tron VM goes live
As the market licked its wounds from another shock-wave that Bitcoin sent through it, the news cycle had no time to rest. From new-old delistings to major crypto projects releasing new features, there were some interesting updates today. Let’s take a quick gander at them:
- Roubini hits hard but a crypto “moderate” strikes back
The Senate hearing we wrote about yesterday happened and the mentioned economist Nouriel Roubini did his best to present cryptocurrency in the darkest light possible. Roubini testified about the blockchain and crypto ecosystems before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and took a harsh stance against the blockchain technology and its adopters/promoters:
“Crypto is the mother and father of all scams … [and] blockchain is the most overhyped technology ever and is no better than a glorified database,” said Roubini in his address to the Senate committee.
His testimony was juxtaposed against a more moderate crypto analyst, Coin Center’s director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh. Van Valkenburgh pointed out that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are currently flawed but they do represent an important step in the evolution of economy as we know it. Among other things, Van Valkenburgh pointed out the many weaknesses of current centralized infrastructure, mentioning the fact that 143 million American citizens recently lost their social security numbers. Roubini didn’t accept this defeat but rather went on a rampage on his social media, tweeting out the following:
“Crypto twitter is a cesspool of bots, trolls, shills, scammers, crypto zealots and lunatics. Barking dogs that attack me after losing 90 [percent] in last year. None read my paper & none have any substantial critique. This motley crew is a bunch of pathetic lunatics & HODLing losers”
Roubini’s anger is understandable though as he famously said that people shouldn’t invest in Bitcoin and had the same select choice of words for it back when the currency was valued at $58.
- Waltonchain reveals new hardware
Waltonchains tech subsidiary IOT Technology CO., Ltd released the UHF Android Smart RFID Reader-Writer IOT-RU20, in-house developed IOT device that can automatically recognize RFID tags at a rate of 450 tags/s and distance of up to 15 meters.
“IOT-RU20 has all functions of traditional reader-writers and also integrates computer functions. It provides powerful data processing, various communication modes, including wireless, and has multiple interfaces,” said the project’s official announcement. This piece of hardware will be an important piece of the blockchain-based supply chain management system that is Waltonchain, if it turns out to be as functional as the project pitches it to be.
- Bytecoin suffers another delisting
Just days after Binance announced that they are planning to delist Bytecoin from their platform in the near future, another major crypto exchange did the same. OKEx, an exchange that originates from China and is focused on providing crypto-to-crypto and fiat-to-crypto trading for professional traders, has decided to delist all BCN trading pairs on October 12th, 19:00 hours. In order to “protect their users” from a “critical technical issue” that has been left unhandled by the Bytecoin developers, depositing and trading services of BCN will be terminated after the before-mentioned date. BCN holders are given until November 1st to withdraw their tokens from the platform.
- TRON VM goes live
After a long wait, it finally happened: TRON is finally a smart-contract capable project. TRON upgraded to Odyssey 3.1 at 9pm SGT and the TRON Committee and TVM went live, marking the beginning of the project’s smart contract era. The activation went live three days after schedule due to some issues with network blocks. With the TVM in action, developers will be able to test-run their smart contracts and iron out any potential bugs and issues before deploying their dApps on the TRON mainnet.
TVM is live now! Please enjoy it! One small step for #TRON, one giant leap for #blockchain industry! #TRX $TRX
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) October 12, 2018
- Blockchain entrepreneurs among the richest people in China
In its annual China rich list publication which is currently seeing its 20th edition, Hurun Research institute confirmed that the list contains several blockchain entrepreneurs. This is the first time that cryptocurrency-related individuals have shown up on this list. Among the 14 laureats, Micree Zhan Ketuan (95th place) and Jihan Wu (204th place) lead the pack with respective earnings of $2.4 and $2.3 billion. Changpeng Zhao of Binance swooped in at 230th place with estimated earnings of $2.1 billion. Founder of OKCoin, Star Xu and founder of Huobi, Li Lin, were also featured on this exclusive list.
