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From the current state of crypto innovation to Ripple’s plan to revolutionize cross-border payments, here’s a look at some of the stories breaking in the world of crypto.

Bitcoin and Crypto Markets

The president of leading US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase says he’s not surprised by the December crypto rally.

On CNBC’s Fast Money, Asiff Hirji talked about how far crypto has come in recent years, and where he thinks the space is headed in 2019.

“Things are never as good as they seem. Neither are they ever as bad as they seem. And to quote Buffet, ‘Be greedy when others are fearful, and be fearful when others are greedy.’ So I think it’s not surprising to me that we’ve had a bit of a bounce back. I think the amount of innovation that’s happened in cryptocurrency in the last year has exceeded everything in all the years before it. And if you just look at the number of engineers that are going into cryptocurrencies and the number of actual products that are being launched, we’ve never had as much innovation as we have today.

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Three or four years ago, Bitcoin was the only thing that mattered in cryptocurrency. Then, Ethereum came along. And now, we’re at a point where there’s probably 3,000 to 4,000 cryptocurrencies out there. There are probably 200 or so that matter. And you should assume that we will, over the course of time, add all the cryptocurrencies that matter in as many geographies as we’re allowed to add them. This is the start, I think, of the next great wave of innovation in technology, and you should expect to see more and more cryptocurrencies over time.

I think institutions need a valid venue to trade on. They need a qualified custodian to store with. And they want to make sure that there’s actual liquidity. So, we’ve built a lot of liquidity. We have the best, most regulated, most compliant venue on the planet… And we have the only qualified custodian solution in the space. And so we think we’ve laid a lot of the infrastructure to allow institutions to start to invest in cryptcurrencies.

We’ve actually had hundreds of institutions on board onto our custodian – you know, we’ve blown by the internal goals we’ve set for that business… So we feel very good about where we are with that business, and we think 2019 will continue to be a good year for the institutions who are going into crypto.”

Ethereum

The latest ConsenSys-sponsored Week in Ethereum blog post is out.

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This week’s edition covers new protocol updates and news on a number of Ethereum-based platforms including Raiden, Status and Augur.

Ripple

A new speech from Ripple’s chief market strategist Cory Johnson is now online.

At the Slush conference in Singapore, Johnson talks about the current “fragmented” infrastructure of cross-border payments, and how Ripple could help revolutionize the global financial system.

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Tron

Tron founder and CEO Justin Sun says he welcomes increasing regulation for blockchain and cryptocurrency.

In a new interview with Inc., Sun says in the long run, the process will help legitimize the industry.

“We are operating under the assumption that regulation will come to the industry in many places. In many ways, it will be necessary to legitimize the market and separate good practices from bad. We recently hired a chief compliance officer to make sure we’re always a good partner with our community and with governments.”

NEO

The schedule and lineup of speakers is set for NEO’s 2019 DevCon in Seattle.

At the annual developer conference, the team behind NEO plans to release its new roadmap and platform innovations, as well as “showcase how the global NEO blockchain community is bringing the Smart Economy vision to life.”

XRP, Stellar, Binance Coin, Monero, and More

Crypto payments app Metal Pay says all USD funds held on the platform are now FDIC insured.

This means for the first time, users in the US can buy a long list of cryptocurrencies by sending cash to a bank account that’s protected by the federal government, in case the bank holding that account fails.

Metal Pay currently supports Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Binance Coin, Basic Attention Token, Monero, Zcash, Litecoin, 0x, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Stellar, Dash, Dogecoin, Waves and Metal.