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From the launch of a new exchange blending cryptocurrency and the US stock market to a contentious new poll from Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.

DX.Exchange Launches

The new and groundbreaking crypto platform DX.Exchange is officially up and running.

The Estonia-based exchange is the first to tokenize US stocks, offering digital shares of 10 of the biggest companies on the Nasdaq. The platform offers tokenized shares of Apple, Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia and Tesla backed by actual shares held by MPS MarketPlace Securities.

The exchange is also listing Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin, Cardano, OmiseGo, Enigma, ShareToken and Digibyte. All coins are paired with the US dollar. Additionally, XRP and Cardano are paired with the Japanese yen, and XRP and Digibyte are paired with the euro.

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So far, the platform is available to customers in the EU, with plans to expand to the US later this year.

All my fellow Americans, yes you will get access to https://t.co/gYCudXeoCt in 2019. Let us get it launched over here in the EU then we are coming for you. #patience — Daniel Skowronski (@danskowronski) January 7, 2019

Ripple and XRP

Ripple CTO David Schwartz is clarifying his recent statement that the XRP Ledger’s distributed agreement protocol eliminates the risk of the kind of blockchain attack that is now hitting Ethereum Classic.

In a series of tweets, Schwartz says the XRP Ledger’s consensys mechanism does require “a certain amount of trust overlap to avoid an unintentional fork.”

The same way you ensure everyone transacting on bitcoin or ethereum agree on which txns are valid or what PoW is valid. Every blockchain requires agreement on any number of things or participants will fork intentionally or unintentionally. For example: https://t.co/pram3QMbum — David Schwartz (@JoelKatz) January 7, 2019

Tron

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Tron’s latest weekly report is out. The report highlights the platform’s latest progress, including an update on the growing number of Tron’s decentralized apps.

Litecoin

Litecoin creator Charlie Lee says he plans to talk about the difference between what he calls Bitcoin extremists and Bitcoin maximalists in an upcoming episode of the Magical Crypto Podcast.

Lee says extremists believe Bitcoin will be the only cryptocurrency that remains in the long run, while maximalists allow for the possibility that some altcoins will also thrive.

To find out how many people identify as extremists, Lee posted a poll on Twitter. After 28,000 votes, the results of the unscientific poll show 9% of respondents identify themselves as extremist. Self-proclaimed Bitcoin Maximalists accounted for 48% of the respondents.

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Some self-proclaimed Bitcoin Maximalists are actually Bitcoin Extremists. They think all other coins are scams and will go to zero. Maximalists think Bitcoin is and will remain the dominant cryptocurrency but there is room for altcoins to exist and even do well. What are you? — Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) January 6, 2019

Cardano

Full support for Cardano is coming to the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet.

According to Ledger, a firmware update set to be released this month will include the necessary building blocks for Cardano to be fully supported. Ledger support for Cardano is a work in progress on GitHub, with no official launch date at this time.

PIVX

The privacy coin PIVX says it is now one of the few cryptocurrency products that has managed to get approved on the App Store. The PIVX iOS wallet is now live.

“Ever since Apple tightened its guidelines on cryptocurrency apps, it’s been increasingly difficult for developers to get new wallets and other related apps onto the Apple App Store. Users of a number of crypto projects have had to rely on multi-currency apps (such as Coinomi) in order to store and trade assets on an iOS devices – if they were lucky enough to have an app that supports their coin of choice at all, that is.

But that all changed for the world’s first fully anonymous proof-of-stake coin, PIVX. The popular privacy coin now finds itself nestled amongst a select few projects that have managed to get a dedicated wallet app onto the App Store. So far just 7 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap have managed to pull this off.”