Crypto News: Samsung, Coinstar, Apollo, Ethereum, Bitcoin ETF, Dash (middle of January)

Crypto News: Samsung, Coinstar, Apollo, Ethereum, Bitcoin ETF, Dash (middle of January)

Crypto wallet in the Samsung phones?

BGR, a U.S.-based technology publication, reported last week that a Samsung insider leaked images of the new Galaxy S10 model equipped with a native cryptocurrency wallet.

Samsung’s cold wallet app will enable users to import their existing wallets from third-party services like Metamask or TrustWallet. They will also be able to create a new one in the app itself. The cryptocurrencies and tokens supported initially may include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum-derived token ERC20 and Bitcoin Cash.

Accounts created using the app are stored on the blockchain network with complete anonymity. Samsung won’t have access to the data. The only way for users to access it would be through the recovery phrase

Coinstar machines will start selling Bitcoin

On 17th of January Coinstar has reported a partnership with CoinMe. Coinme was the first state-licensed Bitcoin ATM company in the U.S. and now handles millions of dollars (USD) in transactions each month while deploying a global crypto ATM network

Coinstar on the other hand owns and operates over 20,000 fully automated self-service coin-counting kiosks in nine countries, with thousands in the U.S. market that can be enabled to accept Bitcoin transactions.

Either way it sounds like a great solution if people want to easily buy their first Bitcoin while making grocery shopping.

Apollo Currency Controversies

The Apollo Currency (APL) has been involved in some controversies this week with some crazy price movements. Apollo is an NXT fork that lowered the block time down to 2 seconds and claims to have several improvements like smart contracts, sharding, privacy features and more.

A Reddit user u/RozzyPoffle did an extensive research into Apollo and highlighted that absolutely none of the promises has been fulfilled and all they did was changing few lines of the NXT code.

On top of that he highlighted how the team is conducting a pump and dump scam where it even involved John Mcafee who was heavily involved with the team. As a result APL drastically increased and then deacreased in price meaning people lost a lot of money. After my research from my perspective it does appear that APL is a simple cash grab.

Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork

Core developers at the Ethereum network have proposed rolling out Constantinople, the much awaited system-wide upgrade, which was postponed last week, in late February.

The upgrade which is also known as a hard fork is set to go live between February 26th and Feb 28th and a block number will be decided at a later stage. The proposed date was made during a core develop phone call which took place on Friday the 18th of February

This decision comes in light of a security breach which smart contract firm ChainSecurity has flagged. Due to the discovery of this vulnerability, Constantinople is now scheduled to go live next month and the buggy EIP has been removed from this hard fork date but will be tested and fixed for a later hard fork.

Surprisingly Ethereum wasn't affected that and price was mostly affected by Bitcoin movement.

ETF not happening?

On 23rd of January The Chicago Board Options Exchange’s (CBOE) BZX Equity Exchange has withdrawn its request for a rule change by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

ETFs are securities that track a basket of assets proportionately represented in the fund’s shares. They are seen by some as a potential step forward for the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies as a regulated and passive investment instrument.

The ETF under consideration was backed by investment firm VanEck and financial services company SolidX. However a CBOE spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the decision to withdraw its request was a result of the U.S. government shutdown as the end of the review period approaches.

While this is a bad news for Bitcoin it didn't really affect the price in any significant manner which just proves that most people don't care about ETF anymore.

Dash Re