NEW BUSINESS: Binance.US, the American arm of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, hired its first lobbying firms last month, newly filed disclosures show, as policymakers in Washington face calls to rein in the rapidly growing and mostly unregulated industry. Hogan Lovells’ Ivan Zapien, a Democratic lobbyist who previously was chief of staff to now-Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), and former House GOP aides Aaron Cutler and Chase Kroll will lobby for the exchange.
Released in 2012, Ripple (XRP) is noted for a “consensus ledger” system that dramatically speeds up transaction confirmation and blockchain creation times — there’s no formal target time, but the average is every few seconds.

The strengthening of coherence in bubble regimes is much less prominent in the short and long term. In the short term, the effect of bubbles may be hidden by the effects of daily news items and intraday trading activity. It is also seen that in the short term the relationship between online factors and cryptocurrency prices are erratic and generally weak; there is little consistency as to whether the price or factors are leading, though slightly more negative relationships exist in this period band. The erratic relationships over the short term suggest online factors may not be best predictor in the shorter term.
Transactions are internet-based and are recorded in a blockchain. The blockchain shows the transaction history for each unit and is used to prove ownership. The digital assets are best visualized as virtual tokens. These tokens mean something to the internal system and can be programmed to record financial transactions and other valuable information.