Current Bitcoin Price: $3602 (as of 9:00 AM PST)

Most cryptocurrencies are trading upwards today, albeit by small fractions of a percent. Bitcoin is leading the movement, having grown by almost 1% over the last 24 hours, while Ethereum is performing similarly. XRP, for a change, has hardly moved today.

Only a few major coins are dipping into the red today, including both Bitcoin SV and Dogecoin, as well as stablecoins Tether, USDCoin, and TrueUSD. As you’d expect, the movements here are equally insignificant.

Top Bitcoin & Crypto News Stories for 22nd January 2018

Apollo undergoes pump-and-dump

Apollo, with the ticker APL, was launched in 2017 as an “all-in-one” solution to cryptocurrency. With the team having proclaimed John McAfee as a role model, Apollo was quick to get accepted onto McAfee’s Bitfi hardware wallet.

What’s drawn much attention to the coin over recent weeks is it’s 400% increase in price, which has been met with a huge 30% dump today. Reddit user /u/RozzyPoffle claims this was a pump-and-dump scheme administrated by the Apollo Team.

BitGrail declared bankrupt

Anyone who had invested in NANO back in 2017 will have heard of BitGrail, one of the leading exchanges for the coin — which at the time was still called RaiBlocks (hence its deprecated ticker, XRB).

After the exchange was revealed to have been hacked, accusations of foul play were thrown towards the exchange’s founder, nicknamed “Bomber.” With most users having already believed their coins were long gone, the Italian BitGrail company was officially declared bankrupt today.

Ethereum upgrade delayed till February

In a recent newsletter, we commented on how the much awaited Ethereum upgrade — known as Constantinople — had been delayed just hours before its roll-out due to security concerns.

A new release date is now planned for the upgrade, and it happens to fall in the last week of February. Developers hope this will allow for plenty of time to bugtest the newly upgraded protocol before its release.