The cryptocurrency market continued its astronomical rise last week, more than recovering from the fall of the previous weekend. At the time of writing, the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies is over $94 billion, an all-time high. Bitcoin is over $2500, and Ethereum is at an all-time high around $246.

The market’s enthusiasm continues in spite of Bitcoin’s scaling problems, which have become more acute. trustnodes.com reports that some transactions have been stuck in the network for weeks, with one user being asked for a $26 fee to clear a transaction.

There is continued ambiguity around the scaling debate. Some sources had been saying that an agreement was reached at the Consensus conference and SegWit with 2MB blocks would soon be implemented, but criticism and debate carried on anyway. A pull request for code implementing 2MB blocks and SegWit drew many skeptical comments from Bitcoin Core supporters.

Status.im announced the Status Network, and the Status Network Token, with a call for contributions and a technical whitepaper.

Gavin Andresen, best known as a Bitcoin Core developer, has launched a new project, designed to ensure the reliability of random number generators. This is an important step in making sure encryption on the web works, as attacks compromising the integrity of random number generators have been used to break encryption.

The team behind Brave browser launched their Basic Attention Token sale with a sale on May 31. This broke the frequently-broken record for the most successful ICO ever, raising an astonishing $36 million in less than 30 seconds. The token now has a market cap over a quarter-billion.

After the Prism launch drew widespread criticism for 1 percent per month fee, the Shapeshift team listened to that feedback and announced on Thursday that they are abolishing the fee.

Flashpoint, a forensics company, issued a report that the attacker behind the Wannacry ransomware attack was likely a speaker of Chinese. The ransom note was in multiple languages, and most languages seemed to have been produced by Google Translate, but the Chinese version was not.

Ross Ulbricht, imprisoned for life for his role in the darkweb market Silk Road, lost his appeal to the US federal appeals court. The judge ruled that investigators had not illegally violated Ulbricht’s privacy.

Vladimir Putin had a meeting with Vitalik Buterin, the 23-year-old founder of Ethereum. This marks another step in the mainstreaming of cryptocurrencies in Russia, where Bitcoin was illegal until December 2016.

OpenBazaar, the decentralized marketplace, announced that they have raised $4.2 million to support their development efforts.

The European Union is launching “Tools for the Investigation of Transactions in Underground Markets”, or TITANIUM, a three-year, €5 million project to research methods for surveillance of darkweb markets.

Chinese news source cnLedger tweeted that the central bank of China will introduce ICO regulations.

Picture from Pixabay.