Another hectic week in the Cryptocurrency World, between big projects, announcement and decisions a lot of things happened. Let me drive through the 4 news for this week you should know.

1. First let's head to China, indeed a digital currency should be tested in May.

Today a lot of national medias are talking about it, China is about to test what could become the first digital currency issued by a Central Bank. According to some informations the tests will officially start in May. The digital Yuan also known as DCEP (Digital Currency Electronic Payment) will be launched as part of pilot project to subsidize the transport of workers in the city of Suzhou, in which Alipay (subsidiary of Alibaba, specialized in electronic payments) and the Agricultural Bank of China will take part.

Under this pilot project, half of the subsidies for transport costs will be financed by payments in digital currency, the rest of it will be paid by conventional financing methods. Moreover according to some sources 4 cities : Shenzhen, Xiongan, Chengdu and Suzhou were designated for test concerning an Application of a Portfolio link to the Digital Currency. We will see how the test will conclude and if China can implement a full digital currency system in the entire country. 

2. Next news, let's talk about HTC who project to mine cryptocurrency on your phone.

Indeed this week HTC announced their partnership with Midas Labs, a society that conceptualize electronic chips, in order to allow users to directly mine Monero (XMR) on their phone. It concerns users of a HTC Exodus 1s smartphone, it will be permitted through an Application called DeMiner and develop by Midas Labs, according to HTC the Application will be available in late June 2020.

Partners to the project also announced that the Application DeMiner will only run when the phone is charging and will automatically disable the mining process when the users is using his phone without charging it. The Application is supposed to allow the smartphone to have an hashrate similar to an office computer (with basic performances) but without consuming a ton of energy. Some leaders of the project stated that the best way to avoid giant mining pool in cryptocurrency is to make the mining accessible to everyone, for them smartphone are the solution because almost everyone has one. 

However the project has given rise to a lot of critics especially concerning the mining rate (only 0.0038 USD in XMR per day) and also the fact that the smartphone needs to be charging, for example I've talked to you in this article about another project (Pi Network) which so far manage to fix those issues on a phone. We will see in the future if the project turns out to be successful.

3. Let's move on with Facebook announcement about Libra, their cryptocurrency project.

Thursday, Facebook decided to reposition on their project Libra, when the project was announced in 2019 it had generated a lot of critics so they have decided to answer them. From now Facebook aims to launch StableCoins link with one currency like LibraEUR or LibraUSD, which they have abandon the initial project of multi-currency Libra Coin and also abandon their permissionless system.

Libra Association announced that : "This will allow to people and businesses in regions whose local currencies have StableCoins on the Libra Network to have direct access to a StableCoin in their own currency." They also stated : "Libra will simply be a digital composite of some single currency StableCoins available on the Libra Network". 

Only time will tell how the project will end up but apparently Facebook is planning to launch Libra in late 2020, if you want more details I have talked about it in a recent article. 

4. Final News, let's end this with a quick and nice information concerning security for cryptocurrency 

This week Google manage to delete 49 extensions on Chrome which was hacking cryptocurrency. Those bad extensions were pretending to be legal portfolio for cryptocurrency and those extensions were directly stealing the cryptocurrencies that was filed in the portfolio. So 49 of those were removed by Google from its online stores because they realized that people with wrong intentions were stealing security keys from those illegal crypto-wallet. According to a report from the IT Security and Network Company, PhishFort and MyCrypto specialized in anti-phishing, those kind of scam are becoming too regular, but Google with a new system manage now to detect it way quicker than before.

Always pay attention on the internet when you use your money or your cryptocurrencies, take your precautions, and make some research in terms of security, we can't be too careful !