Robinhood, the popular zero fees stock trading platform, launched cryptocurrency trading on Thursday. Robinhood targets entry level traders and is thus in direct competition with Coinbase. The new trading service will launch in 5 states initially: California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, and New Hampshire. Tradeable cryptos will initially be limited to BTC and ETH.
Starbucks Chairman Howard Shultz announces that the company plans to accept digital currencies. Shultz does not, however, believe that Bitcoin will play a role in this strategy, remarking that he didn't believe the original cryptocurrency would "be a currency today or in the future."
South Korean banks announce that they will allow cryptocurrency trading but will ban anonymous trading. New cryptocurrency account registrations open next week.
PonziCoin, which was originally created as a joke, was forced to shut down due to unexpected interest. PonziCoin advertised itself as a transparent and decentralized Ponzi Scheme. Every time someone bought 100 PonziCoins from the smart contract, the price of the coins double. Users can sell coins back to the smart contract at a quarter of the current price. 8 hours after release, the PonziCoin smart contract collected around 250 Ether coins (valued at more than $250,000). source
Mr Yang Dong, vice president of China’s People’s University Law School, said during an interview that China's cryptocurrency trading and ICO ban would not continue indefinitely. source
Weiss Ratings, a medium-sized financial grading agency, released their much-anticipated cryptocurrency ratings. Bitcoin was graded a C+ while Ethereum was graded a B. Check out the ratings here: http://moonnocoin.com/weissratings-sokuhou/Weiss-Cryptocurrency-Ratings.pdf. Some users have raised alarm bells on Weiss's credibility due to its history of being prosecuted for fraudulent, misleading statements and engaging in pump and dumps. source
4chan and Reddit users decided to start a #PayWithCrypto campaign where users tweet to large retailers to allow them to #PayWithCrypto. The hashtag campaign was met with significant support from the cryptocurrrency community.
Bitcoin.org updates their website and removed the copies, "fast peer-to-peer transactions" and "low processing fees", replacing them with "peer-to-peer transactions" and "fraud protection". source Cobra, the manager of the website, states that "I've lost a piece of my soul after merging this pull request. At some point we all forgot that Bitcoin was supposed to be decentralized money, and we became OK with outrageous fees and centralized mining".
Stripe's product manager, Tom Karlo, announced in a blog post that the popular payment processor is dropping support for Bitcoin citing fees and transaction times. Karlo affirms that Stripe is still interested in other cryptocurrencies including Ethereum, OmiseGo, Stellar, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. source
Popular Twitch streamer Athene who has been promoting his ICO called Purpose was exposed as a scam artist. Check out this video defending himself: https://clips.twitch.tv/AgileInquisitivePenguinBatChest. In the video, Athene exclaims that it was a joke and "nobody is telling you this is real". He continues to say, "Okay let's say you get scammed, okay whatever. You got scammed, OK. I fucking told you that. It's all a scam". Read more about it here.
One of Japan's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coincheck, was hacked on Thursday. $123 million worth of Ripple and 500 million NEM were withdrawn from the exchange's wallets. Coincheck has since shut down many of the exchanges operations to investigate. This hack was on a larger scale than Mt.Gox. source
