The cryptocurrency market had a crash on June 14-15, losing about $20 billion in value in a day, with most major coins experiencing double-digit falls. It picked back up the next day, and is now back to $110 billion total market cap.

Litecoin gained 40 percent in a day on June 17. This seemed to be driven by Chinese investors, and followed an announcement by Bitmain, a major mining hardware manufacturer that has been a supporter of Litecoin, that they would accept Litecoin payments for their wares.

HR Technologist reports that the number of LinkedIn listings for blockchain-related jobs has tripled.

Code for the SegWit2x scaling proposal was released last week. The new code “should reduce the chance of a conflict with BIP148“.

In the Bitcoin scaling debate, multiple versions of SegWit are competing. The latest signaling shows the most support for Emergent Consensus, a proposal from the Bitcoin Unlimited team, with the second most popular proposal being BIP141, the original SegWit. However, no proposal is close to the 95% needed for activation. Others expect BIP148 to activate on August 1, implementing SegWit and 2MB blocks, which miners agreed to in principle in May.

A man in Brooklyn was robbed of $1100 worth of Bitcoin at gunpoint, having arranged to meet someone on Craigslist to sell the bitcoins for cash.

Reuters reports that Circle is releasing an Ethereum-based app for transferring money without fees.

InsureX, the first blockchain-based insurance marketplace, announced that they will be holding an ICO in July. InsureX technology is a marketplace hosted on Ethereum enabling insurers to offer and re-sell their services without a middleman.

In what has become a routine occurrence, the record for an Initial Coin Offering was broken yet again, with Bancor raising $153 million in three hours. Bancor is a protocol allowing users to easily create tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief technologist and leading singularitarian, spoke favorably of blockchain technology at the Exponential Finance Summit, but expressed doubts about Bitcoin because of its price volatility.

Bitcoin belonging to the campaign to free Ross Ulbricht were frozen by Coinbase on June 15, and unfrozen on June 16. The amount in question was about 16.5 bitcoins.

Iota, a non-blockchain cryptocurrency aimed at machine-to-machine payments, launched their token on Bitfinex on June 13. This is the first time the token is available on an exchange; it was previously necessary to set up a wallet and buy from a broker. Upon the launch, the token immediately soared to a $1.8 billion market cap, becoming the sixth-biggest cryptocurrency.

Picture from Pixabay.