Following last weeks news from Lightning Labs about the first beta release of the “Lightning” protocol for Bitcoin, Stellar announced that they will be integrating Lightning. In other announcements, the rise of decentralized exchanges continues with news from Kyber and Binance launching their decentralized exchanges.

Google and Twitter appear to be following Facebook’s lead in announcing they will impose a blanket ban on all cryptocurrency-related advertising across all of their properties, including Adwords and YouTube. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, however, is predicting that Bitcoin will be the single currency of the internet.

Featured stories by Colin Harper, David Hollerith, Erik Kuebler, Nick Marinoff and Aaron van Wirdum

Stellar Gears Up to Implement Lightning Network

Hot on the heels of last week’s announcement from Lightning Labs, the Stellar network team has announced that they will be integrating said product. That makes Stellar among the first projects to formally announce integration of the Lightning Network since the beta release

Founder Jed McCaleb said, “There’s three main benefits: There’s the scalability benefit, obviously — Stellar can scale pretty well right now but Lightning takes that much, much further; there’s privacy benefits, as Lightning allows transactions to be kept off the public ledger; and then there’s also interoperability,” referring to the prospect of Atomic Swaps.

Decentralized Exchanges on the Rise With Kyber and Binance Developments

Decentralized exchanges promise a world in which cryptocurrency can be traded without a centralized middlemen. Most exchanges currently work in a centralized fashion, but recently, both Binance and Kyber Network released news of progress toward the future of decentralized exchanges: Binance announced the launch of a decentralized exchange, and Kyber Network made their decentralized exchange beta available to the general public.

Decentralized exchanges  don’t rely on a third party to conduct trades or store cryptocurrency. Instead, they use blockchain technology to enable peer-peer trading without an additional third party. Because decentralized exchanges don’t have to be for-profit entities, they can provide fee-less or close-to-free trading, but that usually comes at the cost of usability.

What Big Tech’s Ban Might Mean for Cryptocurrency Advertising

Following Facebook’s lead, Google announced it will ban all cryptocurrency advertising on its platforms starting June 2018; that includes YouTube and any site that accepts Google ads. Just days later, Sky News reported that Twitter will ban a range of cryptocurrency advertising by April 2018, Twitter has not confirmed or denied the report. Matthew Frankel with the Motley Fool suggests, the main purpose of Google’s ban could be to protect investors without harming those already currently involved in the industry for the sake of positive development of the blockchain technology business ecosystem as a whole.

With Facebook and Google controlling about 65 percent of the ad market in the U.S., this ban will severely limit the available channels for crypto advertising. However, digital strategist with BTC Inc Rick Hanna, suggests that other social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Medium and Reddit will be used more often unless they follow suit with similar bans.

Twitter and Square’s Jack Dorsey: Bitcoin Will Be World’s Single Currency

Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey had some remarkably positive remarks about bitcoin. Predicting the future of finance, he suggested that the “father of cryptocurrencies” is likely to become the world’s only currency within the next 10 years, namely Bitcoin. Dorsey’s optimism comes at a time when cryptocurrencies have been deemed “not that significant” by varying regulators.

“Real Users”: Bitcoin Donations Helped These Earthquake Survivors Recover

This is the second in a series by Aaron van Wirdum focusing on real people who use cryptocurrencies. In this installment, he visits the town of Norcia, Italy, after it was devastated by an earthquake. Meet Ilaria, Lorenzo and Alessia, who, thanks to the efforts of Guido Baroncini Turricchia and Helperbit, were given their first bitcoins to help rebuild their lives.