Crypto roundup: Bitcoin Cash hard fork, MUFG backs RippleNet, EtherDelta gets charged and William Shatner on Team Ethereum

A roundup of interesting news items from across the crypto space.

Bitcoin Cash hard fork looms

Later this week, Bitcoin Cash is set to undergo one of its scheduled bi-annual upgrades. Bitcoin Cash developers usually use this day to implement major upgrades to the protocol, but things are a little different this time around.

On November 15, Bitcoin Cash will hard fork to two different cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin SV. Bitcoin Cash ABC, backed by Roger Ver, is the current leading implementation of the Bitcoin Cash network, recently putting forth a proposal to introduce smart contract and oracle services to the network.

Bitcoin SV, short for “Satoshi’s Vision” is Craig Wright’s attempt to restore the original Bitcoin protocol outlined in Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper and increase the maximum blocksize to 128MB for scalability. Here are a few important points to keep in mind if you’re a Bitcoin Cash holder.

• This is a contentious hard fork, and will most likely result in two new coins. If you want both tokens post-fork, you’ll have to either move your BCH to a wallet which you hold the private key to or move your BCH to an exchange that has announced support for either withdrawals or trading for both coins. Please note that Liquid is supporting both sides of the hard fork. 
• This hard fork has no protection against replay attacks. A replay attack occurs when transaction data from one blockchain is used to execute transactions on another blockchain. If you’re concerned about replay attacks, consider halting Bitcoin Cash transactions post-fork until the resulting networks stabilize. After that, move one of the forked coins to a new wallet address. By doing so, your Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV coins will be assigned to different wallet addresses on the both blockchains.

If you’re a trader, it’s worth keeping an eye on Bitcoin Cash over the next week or so. Historically, hard forks result in periods of high volatility for the coin involved, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen with Bitcoin Cash over the last two weeks with its 50% increase.

MUFG to use RippleNet for Japan-Brazil transfers

Since the formation of SBI Ripple Asia, a joint venture between Ripple and SBI Group, Ripple has continued to make large strides in Japan. Most recently, In a press release dated November 9, MUFG announced its intention to use Ripple’s cross-border settlement technology to target the Japan-Brazil payment corridor together with Brazil-based Bradesco.

So, why Japan and Brazil? Well, first of all, MUFG is Japan’s largest bank, and Brazil happens to be home to over 1.6 million people of Japanese descent. Thus, there is likely a need for a lower-cost method of money transfer between these two countries.

In September, an MUFG representative made the following statement while talking about the current state of bank transfers with SWIFT: “Using technology such as Ripple, we can get that done to something like 30 seconds, which is significantly different and at a cheaper cost as well in terms of moving money between our branches, between our different countries within our network. That’s really important to us.”

It’s important to note the press release makes no mention of Ripple’s xRapid product which utilizes XRP for liquidity. With that said, it’s clear that MUFG is looking to minimize costs.

Keep in mind that RippleNet can be used to find the fastest and cheapest settlement route between two assets. As XRP continues to build liquidity against an increasing selection of currencies, we could very well see a JPY-XRP-BRL implementation in the future if it makes sense economically for the parties involved.

EtherDelta gets charged by the SEC

Last week, the SEC released an official statement revealing that Zachary Coburn, the founder of EtherDelta, has been charged with operating an unregulated securities exchange. EtherDelta was a popular exchange during 2017’s bull run because it allowed users to freely list, trade and accumulate ERC-20 tokens before they were listed on larger exchanges.

According to the SEC, “over an 18-month period, EtherDelta's users executed more than 3.6 million orders for ERC20 tokens, including tokens that are securities under the federal securities laws.”

While Coburn had to pay nearly USD400,000 in various fines, this particular case didn’t really shed any clarity on the situation surrounding the SEC’s views on crypto tokens. Specifically, the SEC’s report does not highlight which ERC-20 tokens on EtherDelta were considered as securities.

With this in mind, it’s very possible that the fall of EtherDelta is just a case of the SEC setting a legal precedent before moving on to bigger fish.

William Shatner on Team Ethereum?

A few days ago, Star Trek’s William Shatner tweeted a simple “thumbs up” at Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum. Later on in Shatner’s Twitter thread, he can be seen defending Vitalik and Ethereum against Internet trolls by talking about decentralization, code audits and even ERC token standards.

Shatner isn’t exactly a newbie in the crypto industry, but it’s been fun to see a famous actor interacting with crypto trolls on Twitter while demonstrating knowledge of Ethereum.