The State of the Market: With some notable exceptions, the cryptocurrency market continued to bleed out today, with yet another $10 billion decrease in its overall market capitalization. Despite Bitcoin’s (BTC) relative stability — with a loss of just 0.7% over the last 24 hours — other major tokens like Ethereum (ETH) — which saw an almost 10% decrease — have fallen precipitously. As a result, Bitcoin dominance has continued to rise and is now well on its way to 53%.

1) China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has included a dedicated Blockchain lab to the list of key labs for 2018. Overseen by the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, the lab will be responsible for applying Blockchain in security and IT industry. Though cryptocurrencies are completely banned in the country, the Chinese government is making a huge bet on Blockchain. The government and other Chinese VCs have already funded Billions towards Chinese blockchain startups. MIIT has also proposed a number of measures to accelerate blockchain adoption (read more).

2) Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin (LTC), took to Twitter to praise Lightning Network. Still in its early stages, Charlie Lee believes Lightning Network makes Litecoin Bitcoin’s sidechain with better security and PoW Mining. In addition, Lee contented that Bitcoin could take advantage of Litecoin’s faster and cheaper on-chain transactions, referring to atomic swaps through which Litecoin and Bitcoin can be converted instantly on Lightning Network (read more).

3) Stellar (XLM) is now the №5 cryptocurrency on CoinMarketCap. The XLM coin boasts a market cap of $4.29 billion compared to EOS, whose market cap hovers at $4.24 billion. Stellar appears to have overtaken EOS for the №5 spot today and has added nearly 3% to its value in the last 24 hours while the broader cryptocurrency market remains under pressure. Stellar is in the midst of an overhaul of its order book via an “upgrade to the Stellar core protocol 10.0.0.” Stellar’s XLM coin has been taking new territory aggressively of late, having also recently overtaken Litecoin based on market capitalization(read more).

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