The State of the Market: Over the past 24 hours, the cryptocurrency market has continued to bleed, with 2–10% losses in 9 of the top 10 coins by market capitalization. Bitcoin (BTC) has fallen 2.2% to just under $6,400 while Ethereum (ETH) has lost 3% on the day and is currently sitting at just over $350. The only exception to the sea of red is Stellar Lumens (XLM) which gained 5.7% today following news that their development team had a meeting with executives at Facebook.

1) Today, Business Insider reported that Facebook’s blockchain research division recently had a meeting with Stellar Lumens (XLM) to brainstorm ways the company could use blockchain technology to bolster their payment network. Rumor has it that Facebook even discussed ways to fork the Stellar public blockchain as a way to build out their payments network. To date, Facebook remains very interested in creating it’s own digital token and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he is challenging himself by attempting to learn more about “encryption and cryptocurrency” (read more).

2) Bitmain, the leading cryptocurrency mining hardware manufacturer, has applied for an $18 billion initial public offering (IPO) — placing their total market capitalization at between $40 and $50 billion. As a publicly traded company, Bitmain would be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange by Q4 of 2018 at earliest or Q1 of 2019. If it were listed at $18 billion, Bitmain would surpass Facebook as the previous record holder of the largest public offering ever. Last year Bitmain’s hardware made up 66.6% of all cryptocurrency mining volume and their mining pools accounted for 40% of the total mining hash power (read more).

3) Just two days ago, the IOTA Foundation released a statement to calm apprehensive investors and supporters after a detailed transcript highlighting a major row between senior management and IOTA founders surfaced on the internet. According to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), IOTA founders Serguei Popov and Sergey Ivancheglo were restricted from access to the Foundation’s Board of Directors. IOTA acknowledged that “circumstances lead to a situation, where two of the IOTA founders have been waiting for board seats for more than four months,” a situation which led the founders to feel as though they were being cut out of the foundation (read more).

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