Price Action

The market continues a slow downtrend this week, with the overall market cap losing 1.7%. HOT saw the biggest increase within the top 100 with a 65.7% increase, while WAX saw the biggest drop while maintaining a top 100 spot with a 19.5% drop.

Major ETH News

Binance announced that they are now opening OTC trading for crypto-to-crypto transactions. Being the largest crypto exchange, this opens up many opportunities for various institutions and large investors to make significant purchases.

In other news, Wyoming has passed legislation that classifies cryptocurrencies into various asset classes. This bill hopes to attract new businesses to establish themselves within Wyoming and is a major step towards taking cryptocurrencies out of their current grey area in the financial world.

Events

The Aragon Conference will be held from January 29th to 30th in Berlin. This event focuses on building organizations and governance of the future. Feel free to check out more information on this event here.

Development News

New Date Set for Constantinople: In a core developer meeting held on January 18, it was announced that the new date for Constantinople will be February 27. While some developers thought that this could be done sooner, the final decision was to set a more conservative time frame.

A few people have said that this will occur at block 7.28 million, but this has not yet been confirmed. If you’re interested in learning what devs discussed at the meeting, here’s a link to the full livestream replay.

ETC Adds New Dev Team: The recent 51% attack on Ethereum Classic (ETC) once again showed the security vulnerabilities of major blockchain projects. Last week ETC announced it has added at least 6 new developers. This includes Constantine Kryvomaz, Michael Collison, Mike Lubinets, Shane Jonas, Stevan Lohja, and Zachary Belford.

ETC Labs Core will tackle a number of projects in 2019. Protocol development will include ETH Compatibility ECIP-1045 (Byz + Const HF) in Q1 2019 will propose a subset of Byzantine and Constantinople upgrades. Other protocol goals are Classic Geth (Q1-Q2 2019) and Multi-Geth (Q1-Q4 2019). There will also be work done on EVM, data analytics, dapp creation, a docs site, and dev tutorials and guides.