This year, Russian projects attracted $ 293 million through ICO, which is more than double the amount of venture capital investment in 2016. Nevertheless, ICO will not be able to replace venture investments, experts believe. The volume of the ICO market (Initial Coin Offering) in Russia since early 2017 was about $ 293 million, the general director of Skolkovo-Venture Investments, Vasily Belov, said at the Open Innovations forum. Thus, the volume of funds attracted by Russian companies with the help of ICO more than doubled the volume of venture investments in the country by the end of 2016, the size of which was $ 128 million, Belov said. "For an incomplete year, the volume of investments attracted in ICO exceeded the volumes of the classical venture market," he said.

The deputy director of the Philippines Central Bank has highlighted the advantages of using cryptocurrencies like bitcoin after releasing regulations for the industry earlier this year. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the Philippine central bank, published regulations for bitcoin exchanges earlier this year. In a statement at the time, the central bank said it “recognizes that virtual currency systems have the potential to revolutionize delivery of financial services particularly for payments and remittance, in view of their ability to provide faster and more economical transfer of funds, both domestic and international, and may further support financial inclusion.”

According to analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, brokerage companies that offer products in the field of crypto currency can have a big impact on the global market. In the report of the bank entitled "Implementation of Crypto-Currency - what are they good for?", Analysts are considering the potential of Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP, as well as the main aspects of the market and open functioning network of detachment. It is noteworthy that the report touches on possible factors that could affect the future progress of the crypto-currency market, including financial products based on this technology.

The central bank of Singapore said that consulting giant Accenture will develop a prototype solution for inter-bank settlements based on distributed registry technology (DLT). Earlier this month, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which acts as the central bank of the country and is the main financial regulator, demonstrated the successful development of three different models of blockchains for decentralized interbank payments and settlements. Prototypes were developed using three separate platforms, in particular R3 Corda, Hyperledger Fabric, which are open-source projects and private blockchain Quorum from JP Morgan Chase based on Etherium. This was the second stage of the Ubin project, the central bank's initiative to develop and release digital tokens of the Singapore dollar on the private blockchain of the Etherium. The consortium, which is working on the Ubin project, includes participants from 11 financial institutions and 5 technology companies.

The largest bank consortium in the US, , is launching a new platform for interbank payments, built on the basis of a blockchain. The Interbank Information Network (IIN) will be launched with the participation of two other banks - the Royal Bank of Canada and the Australian and New Zealand banking group and is built on Quorum, the corporate blockchain network JPMorgan based on the Etherium, which was first introduced last fall. It is expected that during the coming months other participating banks will join this initiative.

St. Julian’s will host the event for all those interested in blockchain and cryptocurrencies in terms of business - Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference Malta. (December 7, 2017). Its participants include entrepreneurs, investors, consultants and IT specialists working with blockchain and digital currencies. The event will be attended by representatives of the Government of Malta. At the beginning of the event, they will make a welcoming speech. Speakers of the conference are analysts of the cryptocurrency markets; financial and legal experts; blockchain developers; representatives of startups and large companies that use blockchain technology; cryptocurrency and venture investors.

Crypto Affiliate Conference 2017 will be a crucial stepping stone for the whole digital marketing community in the presently changing environment. The participants will have a chance to introduce their Crypto products to a wide array of affiliates and advertisers in order to work out the best marketing strategies on the spot and engage in long-lasting beneficial partnerships. There will also be a plethora of speakers raising important crypto related questions to listen to.

Bitcoin and crypto-currency researcher Willy Woo, who is highly respected in the community, announced that the number of Bitcoin users is about doubled every 12 months. Using as one of the main indicators of the increase in the number of Bitcoin users of the Google Trends app, Wu formed an infographic showing the exponential growth rate of the bitcoin user base. You stressed that against the backdrop of a stable growth rate and periodic surges, which usually depend on the movement of the price of the crypto currency, in the long term the bitcoin network will continue to demonstrate a steady increase in the user base.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, "thanked" in his Twitter for the US government and financial institutions for the persecution of Wikileaks, which forced the organization to switch to bitcoin in 2010. In his publication Assange notes that the accumulation of Wikileaks in the crypto currency grew by more than 50 000%. On October 14, Julian Assange expressed his "deepest gratitude to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for forcing Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, AmEx, Moneybookers and other payment systems to organize the illegal banking blockade of Wikileaks in 2010." Assange said that the financial embargo "forced Wikileaks to invest in bitcoin, due to which the organization increased its investments by more than 50 000%."

Business consultant, member of the board of directors of the block-startup CopPay Itzhak Adizes, shared his thoughts about the future of the crypt. According to Adizes, the crypto-currencies transform the financial market in the same way that Amazon transformed retail trade. Despite the fact that nowadays crypto-currencies are mostly a speculative instrument and they have not yet become a part of the world economy, this line will gradually fade away.
Like Amazon, which allowed to make purchases without leaving home, bitcoin and other crypto-currencies will allow it to do without the participation of fiat money. For the crypto currency, the future and very many people understand this.