With less than two weeks remaining before we call time on the decade, the year has proven to be another one of underperformance for altcoins. Amongst the top 12 altcoin projects (other than stablecoins) by market cap, only Bitcoin Cash and Binance token (thanks to IEOs) have managed to outperform BTC this year, while the rest have lost significant value relative to Bitcoin. Marketcaps of some of the major projects such as XRP and XLM are hovering frustratingly close to their low levels last seen during the prolonged crypto winter of 2018. 

As we inch closer to the widely anticipated BTC reward halving event scheduled for May’19, the valuation gulf between bitcoin and altcoins could widen further, and bitcoin dominance could increase even further.

Developer activity in building new decentralized applications (DApps) has taken a plunge in 2019 as new DApps created on a monthly basis dropped by more than 60% since the beginning of this year. In terms of DAUs (daily active users), the number stayed relatively flat throughout 2019 at roughly 300k DAUs. 

In other news, Deutsche Bank, or at least their chief strategist, has come out and admitted that the global fiat system could be under some strain by the end of the decade, as bitcoin and other sovereign and corporate currencies take centre stage in a world searching for yield. This comes close on the heels of trading major Saxo Bank’s rather aggressive prediction of an ‘Asian’ digital currency, backed by the major Asian economies, that could counter the dominance of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. 

Love it or hate it, bitcoin is not going away anytime soon.

Coinfloor, the U.K.’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange, plans to delist ethereum next month, citing an unclear future of hard forks and the need for onerous technical support for the second-biggest coin by market capitalization. The company will also delist bitcoin cash, the splinter currency founded two years ago in the aftermath of bitcoin’s heated scaling debate. Starting Jan. 3, Coinfloor will support only bitcoin, whose eleventh anniversary happens to fall on that day. The plan comes ahead of the launch of ethereum 2.0, tentatively planned for early 2020, which will begin the process of shifting the network away from the energy-consuming proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS).

State Street Corporation has announced a new joint project in collaboration with cryptocurrency exchange and custodian Gemini Trust Company that aims to combine digital asset holdings with State Street’s back-office reporting. Per the press release, this pilot performs reporting scenarios on a user’s holdings within Gemini Custody. Initially, the project will support two cryptocurrencies “chosen for liquidity reasons,” and will consolidate the reporting of digital assets in Gemini’s custody with their traditional counterparts serviced by State Street.

One of the world’s largest fund managers has formed a new UK entity to sell cryptocurrency services to European clients. Fidelity Digital Assets, the cryptocurrency arm of Fidelity Investments, has offered custody and trading tools to financial institutions in the US since 2018. State regulators in New York gave it a green light on November 20 this year, paving the way for sales to Wall Street investors. Fidelity’s UK entity, incorporated on December 16, will give the fund manager a platform from which to sell digital asset services to European businesses, including hedge funds and family offices. It does not currently hold any regulatory permissions.

R3 has closed what it’s calling the largest open-account trade finance trial ever conducted on its Corda platform. This trial included more than 70 organizations from more than 25 countries. Upwards of 340 participants from those organizations were involved and came out from sectors like financial services, information technology, telecommunications, logistics, the maritime industry, real estate, hospitality and the automotive industry. The trial tested working capital applications developed by TradeIX and focused on the receivables finance product on Marco Polo’s platform, TradeIX announced Thursday. Accounts receivables financing, also called factoring, is where a business sells account receivables to a third party at a discount in return for immediate cash payment.

Crypto Theses For 2020 by Ryan Selkis

How MakerDAO Now Features a Risk-Free Rate with Steven Becker

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