Messengers and social

Japan’s Line social network, the largest in the country, has announced the launch of its digital currency ‘Link’ in the Japanese market from April. The token has previously been available in all countries except Japan and the US.

YouTube has restored videos of almost all crypto-related channels after removing them earlier this week.

YouTube erroneously purged cryptocurrency education videos from its video-sharing platform this week but claims to have reinstated them, according to a spokesperson. Content creators, however, are telling a different story.

r/Bitcoin on Reddit remains one of the most popular forums for Bitcoin fans. Recently, the subreddit reached a milestone of 1,200,000 subscribers.

While the social media monetary situation is not this clear cut, both Dorsey and Zuckerberg have emerged as champions of two similar but opposing ideas; the internet needs its own currency, one sees it as centralised, through Facebook, the other sees it as decentralised, through bitcoin.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Kik’s August defense of its $100 million initial coin offering (ICO) was “untenable” and is asking judges to toss it.

Following a recent red flag from the United States regulators, a private Telegram channel for Telegram Open Network (TON) investors is taking a break.

RSK parent company IOV Labs has acquired social platform Taringa to solicit feedback on its offerings and incentivize content creators.

A security researcher has discovered databases containing more than 419 million records tied to Facebook accounts. It appears the data -- which includes phone numbers and Facebook IDs and in some cases users' names, genders and countries -- was scraped from the platform. However, it's not clear who pulled that information from Facebook or why.

“The cheating on the number of subscribers in social networks was invented long before the introduction of cryptocurrencies,” says the co-founder of the Bitcoin Foundation Ukraine - Maxim Krupyshev.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company will spend “however long it takes” to get regulators and others on board before launching the Libra cryptocurrency project.

Over 600,000 Russians used the Tor browser on July 11, 2019, which is the all-time record for the country. The fact is confirmed by data on the official website of the project.

Latin American social networking giant Taringa! has partnered with MakerDAO and e-wallet provider Airtm to launch a stablecoin-powered points system for its 27 million strong user base.

Blockchain advisory firm AmaZix is opening up access to its “moderation bot” to help stamp out cryptocurrency scams on popular messaging app Telegram.

Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin said that Facebook’s Libra token is like “a centralized wolf in a decentralized sheep’s clothing” in an article published on tech news outlet Quartz on June 21.

Now that the Libra white paper has been published, The Block has outlined how to become a Founding Member and the requirements it entails. Libra will be administered by a non-profit Libra Association based in Geneva, Switzerland, which will ultimately have 100 geographically diverse founding members. No member will be able to represent more than 1% of the vote.

Libra, the cryptocurrency to be unveiled by Facebooknext year, will not be available in India, according to a person directly in the know, as current regulations do not permit use of the banking network for blockchain currency transactions.

The news was announced Tuesday by enterprise analytics and mobility software provider MicroStrategy, saying that it sold the domain name voice.com in a transaction facilitated by Internet domain registrar GoDaddy and that it has subsequently been used by Block.one.

A leading U.S. House lawmaker on Tuesday called on Facebook Inc to halt development on its new cryptocurrency and for company executives to testify before Congress, adding to global concerns about what the digital currency could mean for data privacy and security.

Facebook has been quietly building out its cryptocurrency for over a year, and it looks like that time has been well spent, enlisting the support of some of the most prominent companies across payments, retail, and technology.