American payment services giant Visa Inc. is paying £198 million ($250.6 million) to buy Ripple's partner Earthport Plc, a British firm that facilitates international transactions for banks and businesses.

Visa International Service Association, a unit of Visa, has offered 30 pence for each Earthport share, a price that is four times the stock’s Monday closing price of 7.45 pence.

Earthport Plc has been partners with Ripple, the blockchain-based payment network, since 2015.

“The Earthport board believes the offer by Bidco represents an opportunity for shareholders to realize an immediate and attractive cash value in Earthport today,” said Earthpot’s chairman,  Sunil Sabharwal.

“Visa shares our vision of growth and expansion for Earthport and, as such, we believe it is a suitable and appropriate partner for our employees, partners, customers, and other stakeholders.”

The company’s increasing expenses and losses have become a reason why the shares lost more than 28% of their value.

Given these factors, the firm had nothing more to do than to announce last month that now they...

Read More: https://bitzamp.com/visa-to-buy-uk-based-earthport-for-250-million/

It was expected that the cryptocurrency market would have a calmer end to the year, after what’s been a bonfire of a November and December.

The highest profile cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has seen its price plummet to just north of $3500 over the past month or two, a long way down from it's near $20,000 peak of last December.

Bitcoin has had quite a journey in the last 45 days. On November 13th, its value was over $6,300. Only one day later, and a day before BCH hard fork, the entire market crashed, and Bitcoin started dropping. Before long, the coin was at its new bottom, with its value being only $3,200. The coin basically lost half of its value, and it struggled to grow ever since.

Mark Dow, a trader who shorted Bitcoin (BTC) from its all-time high at $19,500 to $3,500, said that the dominant cryptocurrency could be in trouble if it does not escape the $5,000 to $6,000 range in the short-term.

In a tweet seemingly poking fun at crypto’s zealous bulls, Dow wrote that he would be saying goodbye...

Read More: https://bitzamp.com/bearish-trader-bitcoin-could-be-in-trouble-if-it-falls-under-3200-hodlers-should-gtfo/

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has just made an announcement about adding XRP as a base currency, thus putting an end to months of speculation. So far, only a couple of trading pairs will be available.

The announcement follows a steadfast campaign from the Ripple and XRP community, which lobbied for months, asking Zhao to pair a wide range of coins with XRP.

Supporters of Ripple (XRP) have been pushing to convince Binance that adding XRP as a base pair is a great fit for cryptocurrency trading, due to the speed of the digital asset.

They also say XRP’s widespread adoption as a base pair could lower the market’s overall dependence on the price of Bitcoin.

Zhao, likely feeling the holiday season hit his nerves, revealed that Binance will be adding the aforementioned asset as a “quote (base) shortly.”

It wasn’t explained which pairs would support the new base pair, but it can be assumed that leading...

Read More: https://bitzamp.com/xrp-to-finally-be-added-as-a-base-pair-on-binance/

In a series of tweets issued on Friday morning, Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH) and founder of ConsenSys, has come out to officially call a bottom for the cryptocurrency market.

Joseph Lubin said that ConsenSys had been on the receiving end of an epic amount of conjecture and preemptive paranoia. According to him,  ConsenSys isn’t poised to fold.

Despite the restructuring, ConsenSys continues to invest in external projects and hire for internal projects at the firm’s core, added Lubin.

While it’s unclear whether the health of ConsenSys really has any barrings on the direction of the crypto market, Lubin is adamant that the underlying fundamentals indicate a bottom has been made.

He further draws attention to the fact that he remains to be bullish on the core Ethereum...

Read More: https://bitzamp.com/eth-co-founder-joseph-lubin-calls-a-crypto-market-bottom/

Ethereum‘s Vitalik Buterin has given about 1,000 ETH tokens each as a sponsor to three separate startups, that are working on the Ethereum ecosystem.

The three lucky startups are Prysmatic Labs, Sigma Prime, and ChainSafe Systems.

The first project to receive a donation from the co-founder of Ethereum was Prysmatic Labs, one of the teams working towards scaling Ethereum.

Buterin donated over 1,000 ETH to the project after co-founder Preston Van Loon stated that they were unable to completely focus on scaling towards Ethereum as the team members were still working full-time at other jobs.

According to Preston Van Loon, the employees cannot devote as much time to Ethereum scalability as they would like because they have to be employed full-time elsewhere. Vitalik Buterin responded by donating 1,000 ETH (about $109,000 at the moment) to the startup through a tweet.

Prysmatic Labs, Sigma Prime, and ChainSafe Systems were gifted the tokens by Buterin as a “contribution to the push the development of Ethereum 2.0”.


Ironically enough, Buterin’s Twitter handle is “Non-Giver of Ether” which he implemented to help...

Read More: https://bitzamp.com/vitalik-buterin-donates-300k-in-crypto-to-three-ethereum-2-0-startups/

The world’s leading global remittance provider, Western Union has signaled its intention through a video that it’s evaluating the use of cryptocurrencies and is “ready” to add them to its platform when necessary.

President Odilon Almeida doesn’t think the industry has made it yet. Almeida explains that if there is any firm that is well placed to make the most out of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, then it would have to be Western Union due to the business actively moving payments across different countries and have “deep knowledge” of its nature.

“Cryptocurrency might become one more option for a way for assets to be exchanged between people and countries. If that happens we would be ready to launch,” he said.

Western Union’s has the unique ability to operate as an “on-ramp and...

Read More: https://bitzamp.com/western-union-ceo-western-union-is-uniquely-ready-to-adopt-cryptocurrency/

In a recent report published Dec. 17, research firm Diar has found that institutional investors have shifted towards higher liquidity over-the-counter (OTC) physical Bitcoin (BTC) markets.

The findings show that digital exchange Coinbase has more bitcoin trading volume than Grayscale's bitcoin investment trust on the OTC markets. Also to be considered is that the OTC markets are only open for trading 31% of the yearly tradeable hours.

In the first three quarters of 2018, Grayscale reportedly registered $216 million in net inflows into its Bitcoin Investment Trust. The platform gained over 1% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply, now holding over 203,000 BTC.

Coinbase reportedly saw a 20 % increase in BTC trading volume during OTC markets hours in 2018. Whereas, GBTC saw a 35 % drop in volumes compared with the same period in 2017. The report further elaborates:

“With no time stop on trading, institutions and big money would require access around the clock from fears...

Read More: https://bitzamp.com/diar-report-traditional-investors-are-shifting-to-over-the-counter-bitcoin-markets/