After more than a month of some very low lows, bitcoin’s price has finally spiked and crossed the $7,000 mark. Generally speaking, this week has been a great one for both bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency market as it has been highlighted by some pretty significant developments that will certainly have a lasting impact on the industry.

Bitcoin’s price yesterday rose by nearly 10 percent in just one hour – this came in the wake of a raft of positive news for the industry. Several reports have suggested that some of the biggest venture capitalists and investors are beginning to gain more interest in digital currencies. As expected, bitcoin would benefit the most as it is still, without a doubt, the reference point for all other cryptocurrencies. With the news, bitcoin’s value increased by nearly $600 yesterday and thus added about $9 billion to its market cap in just a few minutes. Other digital currencies have also begun to take a positive a trend thanks to the great news.

As far as the developments go, one of the most talked about is the move by billionaire investor Steven Cohen to have a hedge fund established for the sake of nurturing cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based companies. Elsewhere in Europe, Switzerland’s securities exchange has also announced plans to create a trading platform specifically meant for digital currencies and assets.

BlackRock’s Interest

BlackRock, which is considered to be one of the world’s biggest asset manager has also been eyeing the crypto space but they are taking everything slow and steady. The company has since set up a working group that has been tasked with investigating the best ways that it can make the most of the available opportunities in the rapidly growing bitcoin and crypto market.

BlackRock’s CEO and chairman, Larry Fink, has seemingly had a change of heart since he has previously rallied against bitcoin citing concerns that the digital asset is an “index of money laundering.” However, according to Bloomberg, Fink and company will be venturing into the crypto space as it is certainly an opportunity they cannot afford to miss. However, BlackRock will be leaning more towards the blockchain technology instead of actual cryptocurrencies.

“We are looking at it and as I have said in the past, we are very excited about blockchain technology. That is where we are looking at it even in the Aladdin universe with what we are trying to do there so we are looking at blockchain technologies. We are studying it and we are looking at how they perform and we are looking at that type of data as we understand it as we think about other products but right now, worldwide I have not heard from one client that needs to be in it right now,” Fink commented. “When it becomes more legitimatized, when it has a true open nature of it that you can identify who the players are on both sides, that’s when we’ll probably look at it.”

Cryptocurrency payment service provider CoinGate has just launched a trial program that will allow 100 merchants to test transactions on their service’s variant of the Bitcoin Lightning Network. According to the July 10 blog post that announced the news, some of the merchants who will be participating in CoinGate’s trial program will include online stores with crypto-based merchandise, adult entertainment websites, and sports betting websites as well as server and hosting services. In fact, according to the post, the bitcoin Lightning Network payments service has been available since July 1.

For the 100 lucky merchants who will be enjoying all the benefits of the Lightning Network through CoinGate’s service, this is not only a chance to try out the new technology risk free but it also represents  move forward in the right direction as they have one less obstacle to accepting payments in bitcoin or any other digital currencies.

What The Pilot Entails

Similar to what the company’s standard service offers, CoinGate’s Lightning Network service will handle all the finer details of the crypto-to-fiat exchange. As mentioned earlier, the initiative will be risk-free and this means that the company will be covering all the costs in case any of the merchants lose funds due to the relatively young nature of the software. Still, this is a great advancement considering the fact that many of the lightning network applications are yet to reach the beta stage.

Many experts argue that the Lightning Network has not yet reached its full potential and is therefore not ready to support significant or large-scale commercial transactions. Rytis Bieliauskas, the CoinGate CTO is of a different opinion though.

“It’s a very new technology. Inevitably there will be some bugs, either in our implementation or in the Lightning Network. It will help, not just us, but the whole community because the bugs we find might help the whole protocol,” he said in an interview with CoinDesk. “…so it will take 1-2 years for consumer applications to develop and probably more for merchants to start adopting this more actively.”

Bieliauskas believes that CoinGate is headed to a great place by being one of the first payment platforms to test the waters of payments using the Lightning Network.

Support Is Mounting

Most of the merchants who applied for the trial were businesses like collectible maker Bitgild which offers gold coins and silver engraved with QR codes for real digital currencies – they, therefore, cater to customers who are already familiar with and fascinated by the Lightning Network’s potential.

Also in the mix are a number of adult entertainment providers including the Romania-based LiveJasmin which boasts of up to 40 million daily visitors and is arguably the biggest mainstream merchant to experiment with the Lightning Network.

“Instant payments are the most important from our point of view,” Tamás Szerencse, head of payments at LiveJasmin, said about the platforms decision to join CoinGate’s trial.

A number of cryptocurrency projects have popped up in the past 18 months and for the first time since then, the cryptocurrency markets are in a rally mode but it is sort of bittersweet. In what many critics have labeled as the beginning of the crypto bubble burst, a downtrend in the crypto space has been causing quite the stir while at the same time leaving a significantly huge number of casualties in its wake.

According to an analysis of market data by Dead Coins, there are now more than 800 digital coins that are essentially dead. Even bitcoin which is without a doubt the bearer of the digital currency market has seen a 70 percent fall from its $20,000 record high in December 2017.

As it turns, this shake-up of the crypto market was expected after all. Blockchain veterans such as Joseph Lubin have been advocating for the consolidation of the industry for months – the Ethereum co-founder even once told CNBC that having many ICOs is worthless, a sentiment that was echoed by Ripple Chief Brad Garlinghouse, who pointed out the existence of a “gray area” that would allow ICOs to operate until regulation finally “catches up.” Apparently, this is exactly what is going on.

There will certainly be no love lost between the crypto community and the numerous failed projects that range from software that has been previously abandoned to the fraudulent schemes that have been rife on the internet of late. CoinSchedule reports that there has been an explosion in the number of ICOs in the recent past with some companies having raised up to $3.8 billion in ICOs last year alone. The number went on to shoot up this year and the total amount of money collected now hangs around the $11.9 billion.

Hundreds of these crypto projects are now either officially dead or at the brink of taking the same routed because they were either scams or the product has not materialized in the way the people behind them envisioned. Deadcoin, the website that lists all the digital currencies that are either in the gutters or are headed there confirms the number mentioned above – the majority of the 800 coins are worthless and trade at less than 1 cent.

This Might Be a Good Thing

Considering how turbulent the crypto market has been, teams behind most of the digital coins have just given up, used the money to raise funds or cash out during peak market movements. Even so, there is a still a lot of optimism as the proponents of cryptocurrencies believe that the regulations are certainly going to get better in the future as regulators such as SEC begin to keep a watchful eye on crypto. This will eventually boost market participation among many other benefits.

By now it is quite clear that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are here to stay. Already, they have both contributed to a number of great developments in the world of finance, a trend that is catching on with more and more businesses embracing the rapidly evolving technology.

Slovenia’s largest shopping mall has caught the attention of the world owing to its unique strategies that are now being implemented and will see it become the world’s first genuine “Bitcoin City.” Aptly named BTC City, the shopping complex stretches 475,000 square meters and boasts of 500 retail stores.

BTC Company was founded in 1954 as a warehouse and logistics enterprise before it gradually added many more warehouses. The complex was repurposed as a commercial shopping destination in 1990 and renamed BTC City. Since then, more commercial ventures including a sports complex, a hotel, a casino, a multiplex cinema and even a water park have been added to the mall. In addition to this, it also happens to host Slovenia’s tallest building.

Introducing Eligma

Powering the new crypto-focused initiative is Elipay, an AI-driven and blockchain-based cognitive commerce platform that is used by the shopping complex’s retailers. Elipay is a crypto-based point-of-sale system that was created by a Fintech startup known as Eligma.

BTC City has proven to be the best testing ground for the startup, particularly because the complex provides a controlled environment in which they can slowly introduce Elipay into each and every business operating in the shopping center.

“The shopping center presents a micro snapshot of global commerce because it encompasses a large number of very different establishments that present an array of challenges for Eligma on a scale, manageable in our first development phase,” commented the Eligma team.

More and more retailers in BTC City are embracing the platform and are implementing Elipay into their stores. With Elipay, the customers who visit the shopping destination now have the option of paying for their purchases with Bitcoin as well as Eligma’s own token.

The Eligma team, of course, has very big plans for their platform – it would be very exciting to see that the transformation of BTC City into a unified online platform is replicated in many other parts of the world so that they too can enjoy the simplified payment systems and business processes that were only previously possible in central warehouses. This will greatly reduce the retailer’s ownership costs by ensuring that they only have the essential items in stock.

Recently, Miro Cerar, the Prime Minister of Slovenia made a visit to BTC City during which he was treated to a cup of “crypto coffee” that was bought by Slovenian State Secretary Tadej Slapnik using the Elipay transaction system.

“The purpose of his visit was to open the Beyond 4.0 international conference, dedicated to digital society and blockchain, as well as to get acquainted with BTC City’s strategy to become Bitcoin City,” explained Eligma.

Way to go!

The biggest challenge for bitcoin this far has been becoming more mainstream in the financial world which in many ways stems from the fact that it has always had issues with scalability. Before bitcoin can reach the heights of mainstream adoption and use, it will certainly need to deal with the very pressing issue of scalability which has always been a core concern of enthusiasts.

This is where the Lightning Network comes in – this new technology, though fairly young, has facilitated thousands of new payment channels which signals a bright future for bitcoin as well as many other digital currencies.

The Lightning Network allows bitcoin users to open direct payment channels for transactions between one another on a global scale. As of January 19 this year, the Lightning Network only had 89 channels but this has since grown immensely – by May 24, the network had grown to over 6,600 direct connections which might seem small in comparison to the mainstream financial sector but represents a huge leap forward.

While there is a significant level of genuine interest in the technology, the fact that the Lightning Network is yet to be fully developed makes the adoption of the revolutionary technology relatively low. Among the issues that need to be addressed by the developers are double-sided funding and no watching for offline transfers. However, a more pressing one lies within the Lightning Network itself and the developers are quite keen on this one.

A Major Upgrade

The platform has just begun its journey towards global adoption but the developers are already considering a significant upgrade that will involve major architectural changes to the technology.

The key issue is that the Lightning Network requires the users to store a significant amount of data which, in turn, makes it very difficult to download and run it. In an effort to provide a viable solution to this problem, the developers have recently published a new proposal that presents an alternative and simplified way of making the off-chain transactions. The proposed alternative, called “eltoo”, was co-authored by several lightning developers including Lightning Labs co-founder ‘Laolu’ Osuntokun and Blockstream’s Christian Decker and Rusty Russell.

Eltoo not only aims to condense the amount of data the users are required to provide but also ensures that their bitcoin is safe. A major setback for the existing Lightning Network is that it depends on “toxic information” which means that in the case that a user broadcasts older data, there is a possibility that they will lose money.

“This actually happened to me,” Decker said. “I had an old lightning node on my laptop. I restored it. I didn’t know I didn’t have the newest state. The guy closed the connection because they knew it was an old state! Because he could steal it. Which he did, by the way.”

With eltoo, only the most recent off-chain transaction data is stored thus solving the “data symmetry” problem. Eltoo is a phonetic spelling of “L2” which stands for layer-two and is used to describe technologies like the Lightning Network which offer off-chain transactions.

Amidst a heated backlash and legal threats, Roger Ver’s Bitcoin.com, a proponent of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), recently updated its block explorer page in an effort to remove any language that suggests that Bitcoin Cash is the real bitcoin (BTC). Roger Ver, a renowned cryptocurrency enthusiast who made millions from investments in bitcoin has been an avid supporter of the BCH, which is a fork of bitcoin.

The Bitcoin.com CEO believes that BCH is the digital currency that remains trues to the original Bitcoin Whitepaper idea of being a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. He also adopted an approach to marketing the digital currency in a way that the entire crypto ecosystem with the exception of other BCH holders would consider to be unethical. For instance, he has worked on renaming some of the cryptocurrencies like BTC to “Bitcoin Core” and BCH to “Bitcoin” on websites, wallets, and apps as well as well as on social media platforms.

The reason why this is such a big deal is that it has seen a number of crypto users to incur monetary losses when they send money from their bitcoin wallets to some BCH wallets believing that it is the original currency they are dealing in. For newbies, this is further aggravated by the fact that Roger Ver’s website is among Google’s top search results for “Bitcoin” – the websites BCH wallet also happens to be the first search results for “how to buy bitcoin.”

Before the company listed BCH as “Bitcoin” on its explorer page, it rolled out a “Bitcoin Wallet” for iOS that misleadingly defaulted to Bitcoin Cash addresses. This marketing approach has been deemed as a fraudulent move that will certainly result in the loss of funds. The backlash has since spawned a website that seeks to gather as much evidence as possible from as many people as possible so as to file a lawsuit against Roger Ver and Bitcoin.com.

As mentioned earlier, Bitcoin Cash forked off the original Bitcoin blockchain but owing to changes that were recently introduced to BTC, proponents of BCH have argued that the fork has more resemblance to Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin. BCH supporters have been using this argument to justify their claim of the “Bitcoin” label for BCH while dubbing BTC “Bitcoin Core.”

Politics aside, it is quite obvious that the concerns raised are relevant and by agreeing to drop the misleading language from its website, Bitcoin.com will definitely help to solve the confusion that cryptocurrencies have to deal with. Better yet, the fight over labels is petty and supporters of both coins need to work towards ways of co-existing.