Current Bitcoin Price: $6349 (as of 10:00 AM PST)

The Bitcoin charts shot up to over $6500 for a brief period today, but they’ve since settled around the $6350 mark. This represents just under a single percent increase in the currency’s price, which most other digital assets have followed.

Top Bitcoin & Crypto News Stories for 1st November 2018

Bitcoin closes 3rd red monthly candle

The monthly chart for Bitcoin is somewhat reminiscent of a rollercoaster, shooting up in early 2015 after a small downtrend, and falling back down with the beginning of 2018.

In those ups and downs, the last time Bitcoin saw three months close in the red was back in May 2015. However, with yesterday night, we’ve seen this same pattern repeat over the last 90 days.

Ethereum’s next upgrade pushes for scalability

A big concern with cryptocurrencies is their ability to scale. Naturally, decentralized processes take a lot more computing power to deliver the same performance as their centralized counterparts, which is a concern when pitting, say, Bitcoin against Visa.

Ethereum’s the most popular protocol coin there is, and scalability is definitely an important factor. Thankfully, their next planned update — dubbed “Serenity” — is designed to facilitate scalability by a factor of over one thousand.

Morgan Stanley: Crypto is “new asset class”

Morgan Stanley is an American banking giant, and as you might expect, they’ve been devoting serious resources to learning more about cryptocurrency both as a technology for themselves and a competitor to at least some of their services.

A new report published by Morgan Stanley’s research division calls cryptocurrency a “new institutional asset class”, which seems remarkably true and could act as a stance for governments to adopt in their regulation of the space.