Daily Archives: April 14, 2022

Ripio, an Argentinian cryptocurrency exchange, has announced concrete actions regarding its expansion to Colombia. The company will offer a new option for cryptocurrency users and traders in Colombia, and will also offer a financial education proposal that is yet to be revealed. This launch will crystallize in the following two months with the opening of an office in the country.

Ripio to Officially Launch in Colombia

The Argentinian exchange Ripio has offered more details when it comes to its expansion in Colombia. The company has declared it will offer a new proposal for Colombian traders and cryptocurrency users focused on other services like its digital wallet. The exchange, which raised $50 million last year in its Series B funding round led by DCG, told Criptonoticias it is planning to open an office in Bogota in less than two months, with the objective of offering a yet unannounced financial education proposal.

On this new expansion plan, and what they offer Colombians, Ripio’s team stated:

Our product offering goes far beyond an exchange, which is often the only service offered by other companies. In fact, our main product – with more than 3 million users to date – is a digital cryptocurrency wallet for first-time users.

Customer-Geared Operation

Ripio explained that it wants to focus on its customer support, given that users in Colombia have experienced problems with other exchanges in the area in this regard. While the company has grown immensely during the last two years, going from a userbase of 400K to three million customers, and with a presence in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Colombia, Ripio is gearing its operation to be able to answer to any customer requirement in a matter of hours.

Some Colombians have experienced problems with Binance before. The exchange blocked their funds due to an investigation from a Netherlands-based money laundering office without informing customers clearly on the subject. Ripio aims to avoid a situation like that, setting up a digital help center manned by real agents who could address users’ concerns.

Colombia has become a center of interest for cryptocurrency exchanges and startups recently. In February, Bitso, another Latam-based exchange, announced it was expanding to operate in the country. At that time, Emili Pardo, President of the exchange for the country, stated:

We are witnessing one of the most important moments in the adoption of cryptocurrencies in Colombia and the region of Latin America as a whole.

What do you think about the expansion that Ripio is making to Colombia? Tell us in the comment section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Today, the Hyperledger community announced that version 1.0 of Hyperledger FireFly is now available. Hyperledger FireFly 1.0 combines a number of technical and market milestones.

At its core, it offers a composable Web3 stack to help speed up decentralized application (dApp) development by a factor of 10x-100x, making it the first open-source (GitHub) SuperNode for enterprises to build and scale secure Web3 applications.

It is already in production deployments with a number of leading blockchain consortia today, including RiskStream Collaborative in the insurance industry, Synaptic Health Alliance in healthcare, and TradeGo in commodity trade finance.

A Composable Web3 Stack To Support Decentralized Apps

Over the last decade of enterprise blockchain projects, architects and developers have realized that they need much more than a blockchain node for their projects to be successful. Early custom-built blockchain engagements often were multi-million dollar, multi-year projects that struggled to get into production.

As the $3T market for Web3 has materialized around areas such as decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the metaverse, companies are looking to embrace these disruptive technologies and the potential for new business opportunities. Writing decentralized applications, however, requires a large set of composable Web3 and traditional IT technologies that interact with each other as enterprise building blocks that anyone can use.

The Hyperledger FireFly SuperNode provides this new type of decentralized orchestration layer between companies’ existing systems and Web3. It enables the shift of value in open network systems and reduces the reliance on proprietary tech or custom-built code. It solves the layers of complexity sitting between the low-level blockchain and high-level business processes and user interfaces, letting developers focus on building business logic instead of infrastructure.

By enabling companies to avoid “reinventing the wheel” just to connect to Web3, Hyperledger FireFly increases developer efficiency and fills a void of previously missing functionality to help companies create secure and auditable connections to Web3’s open ecosystems.

The Best of Public and Private Blockchain Technologies

Companies can quickly bootstrap projects on FireFly by tapping into Web3 innovations such as smart contracts and NFTs without having to build everything from scratch, while also satisfying enterprise requirements for simple APIs, reliable delivery, and robust connections. FireFly also helps to ‘future-proof’ these applications by providing a blockchain-neutral platform to build on.

Hyperledger FireFly has built-in integrations and support for popular communities such as Ethereum (Quorum, Hyperledger Besu, Geth, public mainnet), Hyperledger Fabric, and Corda, and for standard digital assets such as ERC20, ERC721, and ERC 1155. The FireFly code base comprises more than 200,000 lines of enterprise-ready code and is extensible and pluggable for token bridges, L2s such as Polygon, and standards-led approaches such as the Baseline protocol.

“…FireFly has come a long way in a short time. We are excited about how quickly we’ve been able to grow the project and the community and how quickly enterprises and consortia are adopting the technology. We would like to invite you to come be part of our community.”
– The Hyperledger Team

Several popular cryptocurrency analysts believe the future looks green for Bitcoin (BTC) as it reclaimed the $40,000 mark in a 3.5% swing following a week-long dip.

Popular Bitcoin technical analyst on Twitter TechDev issued a prediction to his 381,000 followers that the general direction for the largest cryptocurrency by market cap will be up for the foreseeable future.

His April 14 chart drew a comparison between the tremendous rise of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the ’80s and ’90s to Bitcoin’s price over the past six years. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns but there are some similarities to the historic price action that if repeated, would suggest the Bitcoin price will rise from here. The analyst said “Times change. Assets chain. Macro aggregate human behavior usually doesn’t. #BTC”

Times change.

Assets change.

Macro aggregate human behavior usually doesn’t.#BTC pic.twitter.com/NFhUA2hcYH

— TechDev (@TechDev_52) April 13, 2022

Lead Insights Analysts at Bitcoin mining firm Blockware Solutions Will Clemente pointed out that BTC is in a “zone of heavy opportunity” based on data compiled by his firm and blockchain analytics firm Glassnode.

He tweeted on April 14 that “This is also the longest time Bitcoin has ever spent in the zone.”

Only a few other times has Bitcoin reached the zone of heavy opportunity. (green)

This is also the longest time Bitcoin has ever spent in the zone. pic.twitter.com/bvQr4FZqFC

— Will Clemente (@WClementeIII) April 13, 2022

Popular Bitcoin analysts Dave the Wave with 36,000 followers tweeted his strong conviction  that Bitcoin is ready to make a dramatic move based on the Gaussian and Guppy metrics. However, he is not sure which way it will go. All he could say about it was that it is “Bound to be explosive soon…”

But his long-term target for Bitcoin by the middle of next year is $135,000 which he called “One for the bulls” in an April 13 tweet.

#BTC

One for the bulls.

The ‘BBT’s project a 135K target mid next year~ pic.twitter.com/JfTf0bI01g

— dave the wave (@davthewave) April 13, 2022

Real Vision founder and crypto investor Raoul Pal appeared on the Layah Heilpern Show on YouTube to discuss macroeconomic effects and cryptocurrency on April 13. He said that despite all of the things that the crypto market has endured over the past two years including the COVID pandemic, rising inflation, and the war in Ukraine, crypto still hasn’t made a new low.

He added that “usually that’s a signal that the market has found its bottom.”

Pal is also very supportive of Terra’s (LUNA) hefty purchases of BTC to use as collateral for its algorithmic TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin. He said: “This is the start of people using Bitcoin as the collateral layer,” continuing:

“We’ll definitely see sovereign wealth funds owning Bitcoin because it’s a long duration savings asset.”

Terra founder Do Kwon is on a mission to collateralize UST with about $3 billion in BTC and the Luna Foundation Guard bought 2,500 BTC worth about $100 million on April 13. This puts its current holdings just 800 coins behind Elon Musk’s Tesla with 42,200 BTC.

Despite the optimism, investors may also remember that Santiment analysts stated on April 7 that Bitcoin would need to settle at or above $50,000 around the mid-halving on April 11 to “give more credit to the thesis that says: this cycle is different than the others.’”

Related: Brazilian Senate announces incoming approval of the ‘Bitcoin law’

April 11 has come and gone, and $50,000 remains a long way off. However, Cointelegraph data shows BTC recently reclaimed the $40k mark during a pump that lasted about an hour from 1pm to 2pm UTC on April 13, and is currently trading at $41,385.