Here's what happened in the world of bitcoins and blockchains for the week ending January 8, a week that saw bitcoin go from $433 to approximately $451:
Writing for Nasdaq's blog,Martin Tillier argued that bitcoin’s recent price increase is “both logical and sustainable." The author, argues that bitcoin’s increase from about $250 for most of 2015 to $450 isn’t speculative, but driven by long-term instability in China, which accounts for a large amount of the cyrptocurrency’s trade volume.
Gemini co-founder and president Cameron Winklevoss made the case for bitcoin speculation. He told Finance Magnates that his company is on-boarding “institutional” investors “every day.” Gemini is now the 12th largest trader in bitcoin based on volume and has a pending application with the SEC for an exchange traded fund.Wired was out with a report about a project organized by executives at the cryptocurrency firm Ripple to create an intersection of cyrptocurrency ledgers called the “interledger protocol.” While bitcoin and other alternative currencies such as Ripple and Stellar are often portrayed as competitors, such a unifying protocol, while increasing the chance for internal competition, could also emphasize the bigger competition of alt-currencies generally speaking against some traditional economic models.
On the blockchain front, Prableen Bajpai took to Nasdaq's blog to offer a nice synopsis of Microsoft’s blockchain-as-a-service offerings on the Azure platform. What started as a partnership between Microsoft and Brooklyn-based Consensys to make it easier for third parties to build applications using various blockchains has quickly exploded, and now includes partners such as Ripple, BitPay, and New York City-based LibraTax.
Speaking of Consensys, communications directorAndrew Keys took to CoinDesk to write about Ethereum, the blockchain that underlies Consensys’s work. Keys provides interesting comparisons between the Ethereum network, which is intended to have far more wide-spread applications than just exchanges of value, with bitcoin’s side-chains and Lightning Network, and Digital Asset Holding’s decentralized ledger efforts. Though to be fair, the article should be read keeping in mind its author's own interests in Ethereum.
Funding news: Venice, California-based Gem raised $7.1 million from three different New York City-based investors and others. The company, which formerly billed itself as a “bitcoin API” firm helping people build on bitcoin’s blockchain infrastructure, raised this round as a “blockchain API,” expanding its mission to cover other decentralized ledgers. Read more about this change here.
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