SPRING FORWARD: Members of the crypto community have taken to the Crypto Springs conference in Palm Springs, CA, this week, with attendees tackling a major subject in the space: decentralization.
"Decentralization is not a myth," Meltem Demirors, founder of Athena Capital and a co-organizer for the event, told the audience. "It just hasn't been implemented properly yet."
The event also honed in on other issues, including the broader question of adoption and the different forces shaping the crypto-ecosystem.
Crypto Springs co-organizer Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs, a startup that focuses on the scaling solution called the Lightning Network, said corporate incumbents are the biggest threat to the crypto ecosystem.
But Lightning developer Jack Mallers, maker of the crypto wallet Zap, took a more enterprise-friendly approach.
"This market is really volatile. It's really immature," Mallers told CoinDesk, going on to say Lightning-enabled institutional trading could improve price discovery and overall liquidity. Full Story
SURPRISE, SURPRISE: EOS became embroiled in a community scandal this past weekend following allegations that crypto exchange Huobi is accepting money for its support of certain entities reponsible for supporting the network's distributed decision-making. The allegation is notable as EOS has only 21 "block producers," trusted entities periodically elected to maintain the history of the blockchain and that receive rewards in the form of cryptocurrency for doing so.
The major point of contention from those who have analyzed the situation is that there are no clear rules and the network's 'constitution' hasn't yet been validated. As it stands, the EOS block producer governance system mimics the nepotistic nature of governments around the world. Full Story
BAD GUYS UNMASKED?: An official for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said this week that criminals who exchange their cryptocurrency for government-issued currencies wind up exposing sensitive information.
In a hearing before the U.S. Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control on Wednesday, ICE director of domestic operations Matthew Allen remarked: "On dark net marketplaces and other 'unindexed' websites, purchases are often paid for with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and monero, among many others."
He added on that these transactions are not completely untraceable as a 'vulnerability' is created every time criminals need to convert crypto to fiat, and vice versa. Full Story | 
