Top Social Gainers for February 9th, 2019

Here are today's biggest emerging stories in crypto, based on Santiment's data:

• Fargo

#4 on today's list

85+ new mentions in the past 48 hours

Wells Fargo has suffered a systems outage for several days in a row this week, and the crypto community is loving it.

The outage started on Thursday, preventing some customers from using the bank’s ATMs and mobile and online banking services.

Apparently, there was a widespread power shutdown at one of their facilities, which was initiated after "smoke was detected" during maintenance.

Wells Fargo users voiced their frustrations on social media, as some weren’t able to even view their account balances, or make sure that they’ve received their paychecks.

As expected, the crypto community has had a field day with the news. Bitcoin pundits were quick to point out that ‘smoke’ would never be able to halt the entire bitcoin network, and reminded about the resilient nature of decentralized payment systems.

Others felt the outage was another in a long line of long-term bearish signals for legacy financial systems:

• LTC/Litecoin

#1 and #8 on today's list, respectively

1500+ new mentions in the last 24 hours

Litecoin has had quite an eventful couple of days. First, the news broke about the LTC Foundation partnering with the sofware development firm Beam to integrate the mimblewible protocol to the network, in an effort to improve the coin's privacy and scalability.

Beam is actually the first cryptocurrency project to be built on the MimbleWimble protocol, and is actively trying to bolster the adoption of the nascent infrastructure.

The Litecoin devs have begun exploring the implementation of confidential transactions (CT) by doing a bulletproof MimbleWimble with extension blocks. According to their devs, the mimblewimble integration is far simpler than implementing confidential transactions via a soft fork, and will offer more benefits long term.

Not long after the Beam partnership announcement, CoinGate tweeted that it has finally enabled the Litecoin Lightning Network payments, making the currency available to all of its 4500+ merchants.

Propelled by the two announcements, Litecoin surged by as much as 30% yesterday, adding over $1.5 Billion in market volume. The coin has also managed to improve THREE spots on the list of top 10 biggest cryptoassets, and is currently sitting comfortably at #4 by market cap. Litecoin's 1-week price action says it all:

• Uber/Drivers

#5 and #9 on today's list, respectively

100+ new mentions over the last 24 hours

A cryptocurrency brokerage startup Voyager - founded by the cofounder of Uber Oscar Salazar and E*Trade alumni Stephen Ehrlich - is reportedly going public on the Canadian TSX Venture Exchange.

Rather than via an IPO, Voyager will be going through a reverse merge with an inactive mineral exploration firm, valued at $60 million.

Voyager plans to allow retail and institutional investors to buy/sell cryptoassets across multiple exchanges via a single account, with a smart order routing system which attempts to get them the best price available.

Instead of charging commision, Voyager will make a spread, and only when it executes orders at levels that are better than quoted at the of order submission. According to the startup's spokesperson: “Price improvement is not a customer guarantee, but zero-commission is.”

Voyager has already raised about $7 million last summer in a series of private rounds. To help get the ball rolling, the company is offering $25 worth of bitcoin to early sign-ups. Voyager will start trading on February 11.

Uber’s appearance on our list (especially when paired with ‘drivers’) seems to also be prompted by CNBC’s recent article on how cybercriminals use fake Uber drivers as well as bitcoin mixing schemes to launder money.

In one scam, launderers recruit Uber drivers to pretend to take them on a ride, but never show up. Following the 'ride', the driver wires a portion of the trip payment back to the launderer.

• Asics/Asic

#3 and #10 on our list, respectively

285 new mentions over the last 24 hours

According to a recent analysis, 85.2% of Monero network is currently mined through ASICs.

Posted to Medium by an anonymous, aptly-named user 'MoneroCrusher', the analysis draws its conclusions based on the distribution of nonces.

According to MoneroCrusher, nonce distribution should be a random number between 0 and 2^32, but different mining equipment tends to produce trackable patterns in the selection of nonces.

This pattern has become more obvious over the observed time period, which might indicatea proliferation of ASICs on the network.

MoneroCrusher also said that ASICs tried hiding their tracks by obfuscating the nonces after the April 2018 hardfork. Unfortunately for them, their artificial randomness just produced another method of detecting their use.

The majority of Monero's community has a strong anti-ASIC stance. The inflation of ASICs on Monero increases the network's centralization, making it more vulnerable to 51% attacks in the process.

As a reminder, Ethereum developers also recently gave a green light to implementing ProgPow, which is essentially an ASIC-blocking code.

As always, visit SANbase to explore these and other trends in more detail!