In a recent tweet, TD Ameritrade Network informed that they are exploring XRP. The team behind this company is working in order to make things happen as soon as possible. The tweet came in response to a question made by another Twitter user regarding the XRP asset.

Since the emergence of Bitcoin Cash on August 1st 2017, there has been an ongoing rivalry between the big block version of Bitcoin and the already-established digital silver, Litecoin. In many ways, the two coins are very similar: they feature larger blocks than Bitcoin, they have a Keynesian perspective of purpose and utility, and they allow instant confirmations for the convenience of commerce use.

Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to see the two projects compete for their merchant-friendly market segment. Though BCH has had a significant head start in terms of market capital and branding thanks to considerable resources from Bitmain, Bitcom.com, and advocates of big blocks, Litecoin supporters have been calling for “The Flappening” for a long time.

Since Charlie Lee is often nicknamed “Chikun”, chicken flap, and a major market cap overtake is called “the flippening” (such as the expectation that Ethereum would become more valuable than Bitcoin), it makes a lot of sense to refer to Litecoin’s victory over Bitcoin Cash as “the flappening”. The term has become so popular that Satoshi Lite himself has tweeted it on February 25th 2018 to make a bold prediction: the ETH flippening won’t happen, but LTC will become more valuable by the end of the year.

Charlie Lee is known for making many accurate predictions when it comes to the cryptocurrency market, and he famously called the end of the 2017 phenomenal bull run with a strikingly-precise price estimation for Litecoin (he foresaw the drop to $20). Well, this time it’s about the flappening and how it actually took place two weeks before the year end. So on December 15th 2018, Mr. Lee tweeted his victory with the kind of swagger we haven’t seen in a while.

Litecoin fans have taken their winged leader’s prediction very seriously and they went as far as creating Flappening.watch: a website which analyzes all the metrics by which LTC must overtake BTC. The criteria are market capital, price, number of active addresses, number of daily transactions, daily trading value, daily mining reward, and average block time.

By some metrics, Litecoin had always been ahead of Bitcoin Cash: it handled more transactions and higher volumes, while constantly discovering new blocks 4 times faster (which is a feature by design). In this respect, LTC never lost its supremacy for the more liquid and convenient coin for transactions and payments (though the repeated block increases BCH has undergone did lower the fees in favor of Roger Ver’s version of Bitcoin).

3. Bitcoin Update:

Mick Mulvaney, who’s currently the director of the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has been named Acting White House Chief of Staff and will reportedly assume the position at the end of the year.  He will be succeeding the post from John F. Kelly

Despite the falling prices and major capitulation happening in the cryptocurrency space, there are projects in the industry who continue to push forward with new developments. These projects do not care about the price, they stay laser focused on their goals and get stuff done.

One such project that has caught people off by surprise with their substantial growth and recent developments is Cardano. The project has been on fire as of late with the release of two new smart contract tools that are a potential boon for the fintech industry.

These tools named Plutus and Marlowe have the potential to put Cardano on the map as a leader in the development of smart contracts for the fintech industry. Also, Cardano’s major update ‘version 1.4’ is on the testnet and things are going well.

So well in fact that Charles Hoskinson, the CEO and co-founder of the blockchain research and development firm IOHK, has announced the release date for Cardano v1.4:

Cardano has undergone a lot of scrutiny in the past regarding their slow peer-review process and lack of development. The consensus for the argument is that other projects are moving faster and could gain a competitive advantage.

However, this argument does not hold well for the current state of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. There are very few people using decentralized applications and the blockchains who rushed to launch these dapps have already proven to be too slow and difficult to scale.

The tech is still in its early days and therefore Cardano seems to be taking the right approach in taking things slow and getting it right. It doesn’t matter which project does what first, what matters is getting things right.

Cardano’s has resolved its internal struggles with the now resigned Chairman of the foundation, Michael Parsons, and this hasn’t had a negative effect on the development side of the project.

Overall, Cardano’s future is looking bright. While they may not be the first blockchain to tackle smart contracts and dapps, their blockchain has some of the strongest fundamentals. Now with some serious development and updates underway, we can expect to see a lot more from IOHK and the Cardano blockchain.

Justin Sun – the CEO of the team behind the 10th largest coin by market capitalization TRON [TRX], has highlighted via twitter the latest milestones that the platform has reached.