Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Ethereum’s Istanbul Upgrade Is Now Live on Its Mainnet
• EOS-Based Social Media Platform Voice Set to Launch Beta in February 2020
• South Korea Plans to Tax Cryptocurrency-Related Profits

At the time of writing, bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $7,492.36 (0.26 %) with a daily Top Tier volume of $1.21 billion. As for ether (ETH), it is trading at $149.44 (1.16%) with a daily Top Tier volume of $287.60 mn. The MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 10 Index is currently tracking at 2,500.49 (0.89%).

Ethereum’s Istanbul Upgrade Is Now Live on Its Mainnet

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has undergone a hard fork dubbed “Istanbul” that added six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to the network. These include an upgrade to the interoperability between Ethereum and Zcash, enabling trustless atomic swaps between these chains, as well as several other improvements to reduce human errors, improve denial-of-service attack resilience, and reduce transaction data gas costs.

The upgrade went live on block 9,069,000. Most top cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Poloniex, Kraken, Coinbase, and others have announced support for the Istanbul hard fork, which means users who have Ether or ERC-20 tokens on these platforms likely won’t have to do anything.

Users who hold Ethereum on mobile wallets like MetaMask or Coinbase Wallet shouldn’t need to do anything as well. Miners and node operators will have to upgrade their Ethereum clients to the latest version in order to remain compatible with the ETH chain.

EOS-Based Social Media Platform Voice Set to Launch Beta in February 2020

The beta version of Voice, an EOS-based social media platform announced by Block.one CTO Dan Larimer six months ago, is set to launch on February 14, 2020. On a blog post the firm stated it’ll be powered by blockchain technology as it’s required to have “the formula in users’ favor.”

It claims that since the original announcement “tens of thousands” have signed up for the beta version of Voice. Using the platform users will be rewarded with Voice Tokens. which will presumably be EOS-based tokens.

“Tokens are earned by being you, and expressing your voice; they possess the utility of attention, and can be used to elevate content in different ways throughout the ecosystem.”

Per Larimer, social media is currently broken as it’s “designed to use us, our data and attention is harvested into trillion dollar profits, while we struggle to protect ourselves against the consequences of having our attention auctioned to anonymous parties.”

South Korea Plans to Tax Cryptocurrency-Related Profits.

The South Korean government is reportedly planning on taxing cryptocurrency-related profits, as the country’s Ministry of Economy and Finance is pushing for the measure to be implemented next year.

According to local news outlets, discussions on a bill to tax crypto gains have been taking place. Regardless of the bill’s passage, however, the government is reportedly planning to enforce capital gains tax on cryptocurrencies, which means South Korea may soon have a precise definition of cryptocurrencies to tax them.

To levy taxes, the government will also need to get trading records from cryptocurrency exchanges, if it’s looking to tax gains from cryptocurrencies as it taxes gains from stocks and real estate transactions.

State of the Crypto by Top Tier Exchange Volume

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