Translated from DeTelegraaf, the largest daily morning newspaper in the Netherlands. (Note: Some of the content has been changed in translation from the original Dutch)

Rotterdam — You can now invest in an apartment complex or a renovation project from just one hundred euros.

Previously excluded from these opportunities, because developers often imposed high entry levels, private individuals now have access to the real estate market through crowdfunding platforms- where their investment can be monitored continuously by way of a digital network.
Crowdfunding, the raising of money by groups of people (for an apartment, for example) is more than twenty years old. Platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Gofundme and Sellaband, became the best known global crowdfunding resources. In the Netherlands, Collin Crowdfund made a name for itself by collecting and providing loans to SMEs.

Rotterdam’s Max Crowdfund is now the first Dutch online platform that works via the blockchain and has received approval from the financial regulator AFM. It is authorised to offer loans from companies in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, secured by real estate assets.

...

https://medium.com/maxpropertygroup/max-crowdfund-is-allowing-people-to-create-a-digital-piggybank-3123393c30d4

According to new research from OKEx Insights and Catallact, when the Covid-19 pandemic started, retail and institutional investors adopted very different BTC buying strategies.

The study looked at on-chain BTC transaction data from January to the beginning of August 2020 and found that retail investors decided to hang back and take a ‘wait and see’ approach. By contrast, the larger investors, who are largely institutional, started accumulating BTC.

The report noted that retail transactions, which are mostly for less than one-tenth of a Bitcoin, made up the majority of transactions, and that these buyers track the price fluctuations closely. However, as the report says, “these investors tend to be more easily “‘shaken out’ of the market in times of high volatility and dramatic price declines.”
Cointelegraph says, “Based on the data, retail transactions “decreased and deviated away from the price’s trend — suggesting that retail investors took a wait-and-see approach as BTC a season-long, post-crash accumulation period” around May. “

Interestingly, medium-sized transactions, usually attributed to miners and larger retail investors were cautious at the beginning of the pandemic, but this behavior ended in June, and they started buying more aggressively again.

The big transactions of over 1,000 BTC tell an even more interesting story: “As BTC approach $10,000, the number of transactions between 1,000 and 5,000 BTC continued to go up since the end of June even as the price began to consolidate. “

The report commented on this saying: “This upward trend suggests the possibility that institutions and/or large players got busy accumulating BTC as economic stimulus measures from central banks spurred on the purchase of hard assets. However, because we cannot cleanly differentiate what actual activity took place from the number of transactions alone, this only remains a speculative possibility.”

Basically, the report shows that the first few months of the pandemic impacted how people moved within the market, particularly as retail investors pulled back to await prices going back to normal again. Large investors, on the other hand, “bought the dip” and began accumulating BTC.

...

https://medium.com/@lendoplatformltd/bitcoin-buying-strategies-during-covid-19-e2cc013e508e

Ripple (XRP) is the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency by market size, and it is showing some advantages over the crypto leader Bitcoin (BTC).

According to one crypto analyst going by the name Crypto Whale, there are four clear advantages:

XRP is x1000 faster than $BTC (3–4 seconds)
XRP is x1000 cheaper than $BTC (more than $0.01)
XRP is better for the environment (no mining)
XRP is more scalable.

At the time this report was written, XRP traded at $0.249510 with a daily trading volume of $1,859,495,081. Furthermore, the XRP price has gone up 2.4% in the last 24 hours.

Of course XRP is a curious thing: it has dual roles as a payment platform and a currency, plus it is an open-source platform that was created to allow quick and cheap transactions.

Banks using XRP

It has certainly gained some traction with banks. In 2018, Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, with assets of more than USD 2.8 trillion, announced that, in cooperation with Ripple, it would provide an international money transfer service on the payment corridor from Japan to Brazil. In Europe, HSBC Holdings Plc, with assets of about $2.5 trillion, disclosed in 2019 that it would use the XRP payment solution. Others having a relationship with Ripple include Banco Santander, Barclays PLC, Royal Bank of Canada, and Toronto-Dominion Bank.

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https://medium.com/@lendoplatformltd/why-xrp-may-be-a-better-buy-than-bitcoin-ba2b59aa3e0e

Drife is a decentralized ride-hailing platform which will connect drivers and riders through a mobile application. The platform deals with a whole new economic model that can incentivize all the value creators fairly and curb the existent intermediaries.

Ride-hailing platform works on a very broke business model of monetizing and prioritizing profit over its drivers, riders and people at large. Some major issues they face include sky-rocketing commissions that lead to unsustainable driver incomes, price manipulation and unjustified price surges, lack of loyalty and sustained incentivisation, and other centralization centric problems.

The nature of the problem we’re trying to solve requires the underlying blockchain infrastructure to be extremely scalable and fast. A ride-hailing platform is required to clock a high transaction throughput and bandwidth so as to ensure that the platform users are not faced with any latency while availing services. The platform also requires geo-location and geospatial distance data from the external world within the walled garden of a blockchain for the allocation of rides and computation of ride fare prices.

The Æternity blockchain is an Erlang-based scalable smart contract platform that has been redesigned at the protocol level to address some of the most fundamental challenges native to preceding blockchains.

The following are some major technical advantages provided by æternity that stand out for us at Drife as against the other blockchain protocols existing currently in the market.

- Oracles are fundamental to any fully functional decentralized platform that wants to fetch data from the external world. Æternity acknowledges this requirement and integrates oracle services as a part of æternity’s core blockchain protocol. Drife piggybacks on this oracle service integrated at layer 1 to save on efforts and cost of integrating a third-party oracle like Oraclize or ChainLink.

- Æternity runs on the super cool Bitcoin-NG Consensus Algorithm which is the evolved version of the Bitcoin protocol. It still uses Nakamoto consensus but separates leader election and block production by introducing two kinds of blocks called key and micro blocks. Splitting up leader election and block production allows a leader to produce micro blocks in rapid succession, increasing the transaction throughput significantly.

- Unlimited scaling is possible with lightweight and trustless off-chain state channels that are built into æternity’s first layer itself. The state-channels provide support for smart contracts and enable inexpensive private transactions through them.

....

https://medium.com/@drife_official/drife-on-%C3%A6ternity-aa26ed2aaf13

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On 2nd October, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that it is seriously considering the idea of a digital Euro and that its study of the idea should start by mid-2021.

The ECB report looks at how that might affect payments to retailers now and in the future, as well as look at the ways in which virtual currencies would fit into the whole Euro system. However, the report does not suggest what digital currency model the ECB might use.

The report also suggests that the ECB may start a virtual currency programme in the middle of 2021 “to ensure meaningful answers are obtained to the open questions raised.” It is likely to begin with an investigative phase where numerous experiments are conducted, and there will also need to be a stage in which the ECB consults with all the stakeholders in the Eurozone.

The ECB report also pointed to the idea that digital currencies promote better financial inclusivity, stating: “The possible advantages of a digital euro and the rapid changes in the retail payment landscape imply that the Eurosystem needs to be equipped to issue it in the future. A digital euro could support the Eurosystem’s objectives by providing citizens with access to a safe form of money in the fast-changing digital world. This would support Europe’s drive towards continued innovation. It would also contribute to its strategic autonomy by providing an alternative to foreign payment providers for fast and efficient payments in Europe and beyond.”

There will be several hurdles to jump before a digital euro is created. It must “keep pace with technology” and be available “through standard interoperable front-end solutions throughout the entire euro area and be interoperable with private payment solutions.” It must also match the features of cash in that it must be “easy for everyone to use, be free of charge, and protect privacy.”

The ECB said the digital euro must also be available outside the Eurozone, save costs and be environmentally friendly, signaling that it should be based on technology that minimizes ecological footprints.

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https://medium.com/@lendoplatformltd/prepare-for-a-digital-euro-aa2e3b4e26f6