This column will be moving to Thursday starting next week. With that out of the way, these are some of the most interesting Altcoin stories that didn't quite make it onto Cointelegraph's front page. As always, no coin, community or anyone else paid to be featured in this article.

I should clarify, for those wishing to be featured in the article. I am only interested in NEW news. This is about stories that have “fallen through the cracks” so leads don't have to be breaking, but they have to still be news. Sending me a link to your coin's website without telling me what new features or merchants have been recently added, won't get you featured. This isn't “Pump Your Coin Weekly” if you want to be included, you need to come with something my readers will find interesting.

I don't have any minimum qualifications for coins. So long as its Blockchain works, it isn't premined (or its premine is transparent, properly explained and is reasonably fair) and you are bringing something unique to the cryptoworld.

A prime example of how a coin doesn't need to be a big name to get into this article, Sterlingcoin is making its second appearance here, despite just launching last month. If you are wondering how that happened, it is because their developers keep me updated and they keep making news. News is news is news, if you feel like your coin is just as active but isn't getting into this column, my email is always open. We can talk on Skype, it'll be fun. I don't bite.

Sterlingcoin Adds More Features, Merchants

What has Sterlingcoin been doing to justify two inclusions in three weeks? For starters, a massive update to their wallet. It now allows for price tracking, buying and selling Sterlingcoin through Bittrex, right in the wallet. It also tracks trading volume, market history, denominates the coin's value in BTC and allows for quick switching between BTC and SLG.

They have also added a few more merchants, a precious metals seller BitGild, and an electronics dealer Cointronics. Sterlingcoin is also crowdfunding physical, credit card sized wallets pre-loaded with 50 SLG. If you want your own, you can find the project on StartJoin.

More than that (like I said, they keep bringing the news) Sterlingcoin has also launched an IRC tip bot [already mentioned last week] and are now included in Whitepuma's twitter tip bot. A new transaction explorer launched and a web wallet is now live, complete with two factor authentication and Bittrex price tracking. These may be features that a lot of coins have, but it is interesting to see a coin that launched just last month quickly catch up to the rest of the pack and release the features that should be included in every coin. It's getting to the point that they are surpassing a lot of established coins in features and merchant adoption. Sterlingcoin is an example of how quickly a coin can advance with a dedicated developer team, even without big funding.

Oh, and a faucet is launching on Monday, since the Spacedrop was completed early.

Ghostcoin Haunts Bittrex

Another currency on Bittrex had a coin destroying bug. Bittrex is very open about how they add coins. They leave the decisions, and the research, up to the individual investors. Just because a coin has been added to Bittrex, doesn't mean they endorse the coin in anyway.

In the case of Ghostcoin, a bug in the code allowed any number of coins to be instantly minted. Bittrex's internal security software shutdown the Ghost market and wallets after the number of coins in their exchange exceeded the total number of real Ghostcoins in existence. Bittrex explained that, after attempting to work with the developer on a hardfork, they decided to close the market permanently.

“[O]ur systems automatically shut down the GHOST market due to some of our enhanced security checks. Twenty minutes later, we confirmed the problem and it turns out there was a "bug" in the code that allowed you to mint any number of coins. We started working with the dev immediately to try to hardfork and save the coin, but given the nature of the vulnerability and the fact we are not convinced the developer is not malicious, we have decided the best course of action is to close down the market/wallet.”

But, as it turned out, the declaration that the markets were closed permanently was a bit premature. The developer was able to roll back the coin and fix the bug. Ghostcoin is back up for sale on both Bittrex and Bter and managed to maintain some of its value. The developer has released a road map for the coin's progress, but some are wary considering the coin's recent history.

Bittrex Updates Coin Qualifications

Speaking of Bittrex, they have announced updates to the minimum qualifications required for coins to stay on their market. As mentioned, they do not endorse coins when they add them to a market, Bittrex is the wild west of cryptotrading, and that is exactly how their founders want it.

But, for a coin to survive on their exchange, they do need require a certain level of volume. Coins are now required to have an average of 0.2BTC trading volume per four week period. Coins without developer support or working blockchains are also candidates for removal.

Coins are removed on Friday and are tagged for removal on the weekend. So developers and communities will have six to seven days to increase their volume and convince Bittrex to leave them on the site. After a coin's market is shut down, users will have fourteen days to move their coins to another exchange or wallet.

Reddcoin Launches Reddsight, A New Block Explorer

Reddcoin is making its first appearance with a news story that truly fell through the cracks. Their new block explorer launched a few weeks ago and went mostly unnoticed (outside of The Altcoin Hearld). According to the site, in addition to working like your run-of-the-mill blockexplorer, Reddsight is open source and has open websocket APIs. That allows it to be used in wallets wanting to grab more information than what is visibly available on the site.

Besides that, it is nice to finally have an official block explorer for Reddcoin, one of the more established coins on the market.

As always, you can contact me at [email protected] if you feel like your news fell through The Alt-Cracks. No gifts, bribes or contributions will be accepted for inclusion into The Alt-Cracks. Instead, spend that money on developing a new feature.