The DigixDao crypto community members voted to approve the return the funds that were raised in the 2016 ICO to the DGD holders as we are reading further in the blockchain latest news.The investors will be sent 0.19 Ether per DGD despite the project had its initial coin offering in 2016 raising 450,000 ETH and the treasury now has about 380,000 ETH and all of it will be transferred to the DigiXDao Refund contract. The developers decided after the community feedback to create a ‘’ mechanism for dissatisfied DGD token holders to make a clear break from DigixDAO.’’Known as the Ragnarok project, this vote will happen every DigiXDao quarter. The members that were not satisfied with the project’s progress will be free to leave. Everyone that wants to remain can also do that. The vote was conducted once the developers of the project responded to the requests of the community and ended up forming the Ragnarok Project which allows the users to get a refund. Everyone that wants to keep on investing in the DAO can do that without a problem. Digix was not in favor of the proposal at first and abstained from voting and doesn’t plan on shutting down either. The platform issued two tokens, the DGX token which is backed by one gram of gold and the DGD token which is used to govern the DigixDAO.The ICO was one of the few that raised millions during 2016 and 2017 and saw many of the investors taking advantage of the tokens which had the potential to skyrocket. One ICO scammer was even sentenced to 18 months in prison for his actions in the meantime. With a vote of 56 PRO change, the result ended up in a 95 percent approval rate which also triggered the first return of the funds for the DGD dissatisfied holders. The token is now trading up over 8 percent over the past day.DigixDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization and its token is backed by one gram of gold. The network, however, plans to add other precious metals over time. the platform was launched in 2019 and had its voting mechanism proposed in 2018, facing a lot of governance hurdles before.

The team that created Synthetix Network, has just unraveled the new protocol improvements for this year since the current infrastructure is ready for an upgrade and a range of new products are scheduled so let’s find out more in today’s cryptocurrency news.The Synthetix Network is one of the very few discussed projects in the DeFi industry and it had already situated itself as a top-performing investment in 2019. With the rise of the platform, the crypto community is reassured that the authentic token utility is still viable despite the initial coin offering crash. As an emergent protocol, this platform is trying to create a new process through a smart contract upgrade since the last upgrade Procyon, made a few changes by re-enabling iXTZ which is the opposite of the Tezos synthetic asset. The upgrade also integrated Chainlink’s oracles for the forex part of the platform and for the commodity pairs.His Achernar release which was scheduled for January 30, 2020, will bring three new upgrades to improve the economic incentives and users' growth metrics. The Achernar release will introduce the ‘’skinny ETH Collateral’’ and this upgrade will happen in a three month trial period where the participants can use ETH as collateral on the Synthetix network. This upgrade is a very critical experiment that will show us how the SNX reacts to ETH being added to the platform. With the mining tool of the platform, the participants can take SNX and mint sUSD while with ETH users can only mint sETH. The trial version of this upgrade will include a 5 percent interest rate for the SNX minters and a 0.5 percent minting fee.When the three trial months will end, the entire ETH market on Synthetix will be settled so the new version will be integrated into the protocol. The Achernar release focuses on improving the liquidity pools on SNX/ETH on Uniswap. The co-founder Kain Warwick commented:

 “This SIP (liquidations; SIP-15) evolved since before Haven (previous name for Synthetix) launched. The intent is for this to be a partial liquidation mechanism, unlike CDPs. That’s why the idea is to start liquidation at a higher rate and wait for a week or two (before it can be done). It becomes more expensive to game by crashing the price (of SNX) and liquidating users. You can only do it to bring a stake back to their c-ratio.’’

Wanchain, launched its 4.0 version of its interoperability-focused blockchain and the latest project was announced via a blog post on January 20 as we are reading in today’s altcoin news.According to the blog post, Wanchain will expand its interoperability objectives in order to provide support for the private blockchains or consortium blockchains. This version of the blockchain will tackle some of the obstacles facing private blockchains including the possibilities that a blockchain can feature a permissioned account and offer different levels of privacy. Every company that uses a private blockchain may configure it differently which is a huge challenge for standardization.One of the best features of Wanchain 4.0 is the T-Bridge a framework that allows data and digital assets to be transferred across different blockchains. This will also make possible for the companies and organizations that already use this blockchain to create their cross-chain applications and smart contracts. T-Bridge will offer APIs and CLIs for easier access. The platform has already a number of potential applications. For example, airlines could use this solution to issue frequent flier points with e-commerce sites and a local government or a company could also use this system to issue property credits. Any business plan that requires a lot more than only one blockchain will benefit.T-Bridge will promote the growth of the Wanchain itself and will make it simpler to connect new blockchains to the platform so that each chain will be added and this way the size of the storeman node system will be increased. T-Bridge also supports cross-chain smart contracts that allow Wanchaint o handle data beyond simple transactions.The platform added support for a few other blockchains and cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2018 as well as EOS in 2019. It will also integrate a few more Ethereum and EOS-based tokens which means a further extension of the list of compatible assets. however, there are other projects of this kind. Chainlink, Cosmos, and Polkadot are all focusing on the interoperability as well. These projects seem to have chosen their main focus at the right time. Bitfinex’s Paolo Ardoino predicted that the cross-chain value transfers will be critical once the number of digital assets increases in 2020.

A new report shows that Chinese blockchain startups received around $3.5 billion in 2019, which is half as much as in 2018. As we can see from the blockchain news recently, a report from Rhino Data (investment platform) clearly illustrates the investments and financing in the blockchain industry in China.Made in collaboration with Xinhua Finance, the report showcases that Chinese startups have had a great year. As we can see and summarize from the details in it:

1. Even 245 investment and financing deals went underway in China with around $3.5 billion being invested overall. Both of these numbers are roughly 50% lower than 2018 but significantly higher than 2017.
2. The early stage investments (pre-seed, seed and series-A) dwindled as the year went by and amounted to around 43% of the total investments. In the second half of 2019, Chinese blockchain startups got strategic investments and acquisition.
3. The popular investment areas included blockchain news/market intel, exchanges and DeFi.
4. Traditional VCs took a back seat in 2019 and most of the investments came from newly formed crypto funds.
5. Canaan IPO'd and became one of the first Chinese blockchain startups to see a public market exit.
6. Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou tended to attract more blockchain startups but second-tier cities were also catching up.

Among the top 10 companies which got the most funding, we can see traditional industries including exchanges such as Bitfinex, mining firms such as Canaan and blockchain-based financing platforms. Also, there are some old-school companies which made appearances, too.The cryptocurrency news show that apart from exchanges and mining, most of these Chinese blockchain startups are still trying to find an actual value proposition. For instance, Changyou which received $50 million in Series A funding, is the first “cross-industry, reliable, points-oriented, digital-assets-financing and settlement platform.”The sudden approval of Chinese regulators is having a huge impact on China's blockchain funding scene. Before the endorsement of Xi, a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs preferred to launch their startups abroad. However, all of this changed and Chinese blockchain startups are starting to see their domestic country as a prosperous one for full adoption of the technology.Now that xi has sanctified blockchain technology, we are seeing companies such as Huobi setting up shops in mainland China - and giants such as Tencent and Alibaba making moves in the crypto and blockchain space.