The most impactful news from the start of the year came when Ethereum (ETH) underwent its second hard fork in less than a month. On Thursday the Muir Glacier upgrade was implemented on the blockchain through the mining of block #9,200,000. First proposed in November by EthHub's Eric Conner as Ethereum Improvement Proposal 2384, Muir Glacier delays the protocol's "difficulty bomb" by four million blocks. A feature since Ethereum's 2015 launch, the difficulty bomb slowly increases block time settlement in order to push the network toward a proof-of-stake (POS) consensus. The cost of transactions on the Ethereum network would have skyrocketed, as block settlement times were projected to rise to 20 to 30 seconds per block if Muir Glacier had not implemented. Ethereum's transition from proof-of-work to POS has been a slow effort, but developers suggest optimistic timelines will see it complete after the Serenity update in 2021.
Here is the rest of the week in review:
Telegram was ordered by a U.S. judge to explain why it should not have to turn over financial documents to the government concerning its $1.7 billion initial coin offering (ICO). The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) argued the investment information is necessary ahead of next week's deposition of 3 Telegram employees, including founder and CEO Pavel Durov. Telegram has refused to hand over ICO allocation records relevant to the "efforts of others," part of the Howey Test the SEC uses to determine if a financial product is legally a security. The SEC requested the financial records, but Telegram only offered credits but not debits of its ICO investments to date, pointing to issues with its banks. The U.S. regulator has been fighting communications app firm Telegram for months over its alleged unregistered securities offering.
The IOTA Foundation revealed on Sunday it resolved a software bug that prevented transactions from confirming on the IOTA network for 15 hours. An IOTA developer wrote that a bug in the node software created a "corrupt ledger state." IOTA founder David Sønstebø said called the bug minor and noted: "It's really no different from periods where the network has been spammed and thus real tx slowed down significantly." IOTA asked users running certain nodes to update to a new software version to patch the bug. IOTA cofounder Dominik Schiener wrote the issue originated with the "current primary mainnet node software" and was unrelated to the Coordinator, a special Foundation-operated responsible for the final confirmation of transactions. IOTA markets itself as a next-gen protocol with nearly instant transaction speeds, so a 15-hour delay is anathema to the project.
Crypto prices jumped to $200 billion this week, mostly due to geopolitical fears around the U.S. and Iran. For the majors, Monero (XMR), Bitcoin SV (BSV), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) made outsized gains, but all 10 were green. In the top 100, the biggest losers were EDUCare (EKT), down 37%, Centrality (CENNZ), down 22%, and LUNA (LUNA), down 22%. The biggest gainers were BlockStamp (BST), up a whopping 1,512%, Swipe (SXP), up 35%, and MadiSafeCoin (MAID), up 29%. Next week traders will see if Bitcoin (BTC) can retake $8,000 and crypto keeps the $200 billion level.
The author owns a small amount of BTC.