The Daily: Binance Adds Stablecoin Pairs, Tzero Patents Integration Platform

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance is opening trading for three stablecoin pairs. Also in Tuesday’s Daily, Overstock’s Tzero has patented a solution to integrate traditional and cryptocurrency trading systems, Morgan Creek founder Jason Williams offers his Lamborghini for bitcoin $BTC BTC [BTC], and in Brazil, crypto investors are looking to buy vaults to safely store their digital assets.

Also read: Epic Founder Addresses Fortnite Crypto Rumors, Robinhood Recruiting in London

Binance Launches Trading for Three Stablecoin Pairs

Binance, currently the largest crypto exchange by daily trading volume, has announced it’s adding new trading pairs that will allow users to trade stablecoins against one other. Starting from Tuesday, Jan. 8, the following pairs will be available to traders: PAX/TUSD, USDC/TUSD and USDC/PAX.

In November, the digital asset trading platform rebranded its USDT market as a combined stablecoin market, introducing the symbol USDⓈ. The exchange explained this was done to support more trading pairs with different stablecoins offered as a base pair. Later Binance added to the new market pairs with the stablecoins paxos standard (PAX) and USD coin (USDC).

Last year saw the arrival of several stablecoins that are now competing with the dollar-pegged tether (USDT). These include the two tokens that were approved by the New York State Department of Financial Services in September, gemini dollar (GUSD), and paxos standard (PAX), also backed one-to-one with U.S. fiat currency.

Tzero to Integrate Traditional Trading Systems and Crypto Exchanges

Security token trading platform Tzero, a subsidiary of Overstock, has secured a patent for a platform that allows integration between traditional trading systems and digital asset exchanges. Tzero’s Crypto Integration Platform is designed to serve as an interface between the two types of systems.

According to the filing, the platform can host initial public offerings (IPOs) and offerings of securities registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It is also intended to be used to trade these securities in secondary market transactions.

The “digital transactional items” mentioned in the patent represent tokens, securities, digital assets, digital shares, and cash equivalents. When receiving an order, the platform is expected to verify the availability and determine the best market price of the digital asset before a transaction is made.

Online retail giant Overstock is a crypto-friendly company. Recently it announced it will cover part of its tax obligations to the U.S. state of Ohio using bitcoin $BTC BTC [BTC]. Ohio’s new payment portal, which was launched a couple of months ago, allows businesses to pay their taxes with bitcoin $BTC BTC [BTC] core (BTC) and bitcoin $BTC BTC [BTC] cash (BCH) via Bitpay.

Morgan Creek Founder Wants Crypto for His Lambo

Jason Williams, co-founder of Morgan Creek Digital Assets, recently tweeted that he is about “to do something that has never been done in crypto.” According to the post, Williams’s Lamborghini is up for sale and the owner wants to buy cryptocurrency with the money he gets for the car. “Offers in BTC accepted,” the entrepreneur noted as well.

Williams has received a lot of comments and even offers for the Lambo. According to Monero’s lead developer Riccardo Spagni, the sale is a good move. “Huracans are awful investments. Unless it’s a Performante, then there’s a limited audience in the future. But seriously, better to get rid of it,” Spagni wrote. “Too many cars. Not enough BTC honestly,” Jason Williams said in response.

Brazilians on the Lookout for Vaults to Store BTC [BTC] $BTC

Safe storage should be a priority for any investor in possession of large amounts of digital cash. According to the local press, many Brazilians don’t feel that hard wallets and secure passwords provide enough protection. Local companies manufacturing and building physical vaults have registered a growing demand for their services from cryptocurrency owners, which has actually revived the industry.

The Folha de São Paulo news outlet recently reported that some of the safes are part of quite sophisticated security systems. They are often installed behind reinforced armored doors and come with advanced features for biometric authorization such as palm scanners that can identify up to 5 million points on the hand of a person who’s trying to open the vault.

What are your thoughts on today’s news tidbits? Tell us in the comments section.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Jason Williams (Twitter).

At BTC [BTC] $BTC.com there’s a bunch of free helpful services. For instance, have you seen our Tools page? You can even lookup the exchange rate for a transaction in the past. Or calculate the value of your current holdings. Or create a paper wallet. And much more.

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Published at Tue, 08 Jan 2019 12:45:30 +0000

November 17, 2017

Now the SegWit2x Hard Fork Has Really Failed to Activate

In case there were any remaining doubts, it now seems clear that the SegWit2x hard fork will not happen.

The SegWit2x project, a product of the New York Agreement signed onto by a long list of companies and miners in May, had scheduled a hard fork to double bitcoin’s block weight limit today. And while the controversial effort was suspended by leaders of the project last week, this would not have stopped anyone else from proceeding with it. Companies like Coinbase were indeed taking into account that the SegWit2x hard fork could still happen.

The Fork That Wasn’t

SegWit2x nodes — most notably btc1 — were programmed to fork away from the bitcoin blockchain this afternoon (UTC) to create the SegWit2x blockchain and a new currency, often referred to as B2X. However, not a single SegWit2x block has been mined since fork point, nor is there any indication that this is likely to happen. For all intents and purposes, there is no SegWit2x — nor a B2X.

Further, software bugs in the btc1 codebase made all btc1 implementations grind to a halt even before it reached the expected fork point. While bitcoin and SegWit2x nodes were widely expected to share a single blockchain up until block 494783 and then to go their own ways at block 494784, btc1 nodes never made it past block 494782.

This is mainly because the first block on the SegWit2x chain was required to have a “base block” larger than one megabyte. This is how the chain would diverge from the original bitcoin protocol. But due to what is referred to as an “off-by-one error,” SegWit2x blocks started to reject smaller-than-one-megabyte blocks one block too soon — at block 494,783 instead of 494,784.

Moreover, another btc1 bug prevented miners from mining a big enough block when it was needed. So even if some miners did want to proceed with the fork, they accidentally wouldn’t have done so — at least not automatically. Miners would instead have had to manually configure their block weight settings, but it’s unlikely they knew about this step. Btc1 maintainer Jeff Garzik (while also denying there was a problem) has since released a patch to resolve this issue.

But judging by the absence of any SegWit2x blocks, the patch hasn’t made a difference, most likely because few, if any, miners were interested in mining on the SegWit2x chain in the first place.

NO2X?

Despite the seeming failure of SegWit2x to take off in any way, it should be noted that there is technically no way to declare a fork like SegWit2x officially “dead” or “failed.”

While unlikely, it’s always possible that the SegWit2x hard fork could proceed at some point in the future. In fact, there is no way to tell whether the SegWit2x chain is currently being mined with a little bit of hash power right now, and it is strictly impossible to foresee whether it will be mined later on. Perhaps a SegWit2x block will be found a day from now, a week from now or even ten years from now, at which point SegWit2x and B2X will technically come into existence.

However, since the SegWit2x chain did not include a mining difficulty reset, it will be as hard to mine a B2X block as it currently is to mine a BTC block. Meanwhile, market support for B2X appears to be extremely low, with B2X futures trading below 2 percent of BTC. So even if miners decide to mine B2X blocks, they’d almost certainly be earning far less than they would by mining BTC. Or, more accurately, they’d spend more on electricity bills than they’d be able to earn by mining B2X. The financial incentive to mine the SegWit2x chain just isn’t there.

Alternatively, SegWit2x could see a bit of a rebirth in the form of “BitcoinX” (BTX). This project, supposedly started by disappointed SegWit2x supporters, will take a snapshot of bitcoin balances at block height 494,783 and start a SegWit2x-like altcoin that offers all BTC holders the equivalent amount in BTX. Though, while this coin is arguably more viable than B2X thanks to a mining difficulty reset and more, it really is a new coin — arguably even more so than B2X would have been.

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