Another week, another round of Crypto Tidbits. The first week of January was a quiet one for the Bitcoin and broader digital asset market, with BTC gaining a mere 0.7% over the past seven days, according to Coin360.com. Altcoins have posted similar slight gains, though assets like Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Litecoin, and VeChain have managed to outperform, seeing approximately 7% gains on the week.
While the market was quiet, the underlying industry was as busy as ever, with there being a number of stories published over the past seven days that could have a larger impact on the cryptocurrency space. They are as follows.
Related Reading: Crypto Tidbits: Youtube’s Bitcoin Ban, Ethereum Co-Founder Sells Stash, China’s Digital Currency Nears
Bitcoin & Crypto Tidbits
- Ethereum Completes Muir Glacier Upgrade: This week, a small Ethereum blockchain upgrade named Muir Glacier took place, resulting in a non-contentious hard fork less than a month after the Istanbul upgrade. This blockchain hard fork activated at block number 9,200,000 on January the 2nd, implementing a proposal that delays a so-called difficulty bomb, which is a protocol increasing mining difficulty on the network, thus slowing down ETH transactions. It appears that all Bitcoin and crypto exchanges and other industry service providers have successfully upgraded to Muir Glacier.
- Bitcoin Hash Rate Surges to Fresh High: As noted by digital asset manager Charles Edwards, Blockchain.com, a crypto information and wallet service, found that Bitcoin’s hash rate — the measure of computational power processing BTC transactions — hit a new all-time high on the 1st day of 2020. The all-time high, 119 exahashes per second, or 119 with 18 zeroes after it. This comes shortly after TradeBlock, a cryptocurrency research firm, remarked that Bitcoin has seen a record year in terms of transactions sent and transaction volume denominated in USD.
Bitcoin starting 2020 with a BANG.
Hash Rate hit a new all time high on 1/1/2020: 119M TH/s.
Finally broke above the last ATH set more than 2 months ago in October.
Bitcoin Network stronger than ever before 💪
Happy New Year! 🍾 pic.twitter.com/c0dfvewXfy
— Charles Edwards (@caprioleio) January 2, 2020
- Google Restores Ethereum Interface MetaMask’s App: Late last month, MetaMask, an Ethereum interface application for browsers and smartphones, revealed that its Android iteration was taken down by Google, which cited its financial services policy disallowing apps that facilitated crypto asset mining. The thing is, MetaMask doesn’t offer mining, so it shot back at Google, appealing the odd ban. Now, over a week after the debacle began, MetaMask has revealed that it’s app has been restored to Google’s Play Store, making the company purportedly “more resilient” and “stronger.”
- Bitmain Ready to Purge More Staff: According to a report from Chinese media company Wushuo Blockchain, Bitmain at the end of 2019 commenced a “staff optimization plan.” This news, which came from “several people familiar with the matter,” said that the optimization will affect up to 50% of Bitmain’s current staffers. It currently isn’t clear how many staff Bitmain has, though the report suggested that the