Current Bitcoin Price: $4030 (as of 8:00 AM PST)

Bitcoin is trending upwards on the 24 hour chart, along with a good majority of altcoins. The coin is up 4% to Ethereum’s 2.6% and XRP’s 3.8%. Among the top-10 coins, only Bitcoin Cash and EOS are underperforming — down 3% and 2% on cumulative weekly retracements of over 10%.

Further afield, big upwards movers are Binance Coin and NEM. Those two have shot up by 12.6% and 10.4% respectively — the only coins in the top-50 to have seen such significant gains.

Top Bitcoin & Crypto News Stories for 4th December 2018

ETC dev group to shut down

ETCDEV is one of the leading development groups for Ethereum Classic, one of Ethereum’s long standing hard forks. The team maintains the Classic network’s leading client, while also making contributions to the development of the blockchain itself.

Quoting a lack of funding, the development team has decided to shut down their operations. This isn’t to say that Ethereum Classic will seize to exist, but other development teams will have to pick up the slack to keep the project going strong.

ARK Core V2 goes live

ARK is a blockchain ecosystem built around their lightweight blockchain, which supposedly takes just 8 seconds to carry out transactions. A long-awaited update to their protocol has long been in the works.

That update — ARK Core V2 — has just been released. In addition tripling transaction throughput, developers hope the new platform will be even more stable and secure.

Factom announces new partnership

Factom is another blockchain protocol that’s aiming to integrate blockchain with the real world. They’ve got an ever-growing number of partnerships with no signs of slowing down.

The team has just announced a new partnership with Yooya, which is China’s biggest video advertising platform. The collaboration was signed through Wancloud, Factom’s China branch, and hopes to store valuable advertising data on an immutable ledger.