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 WirdumStellar Gears Up to Implement Lightning NetworkHot 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 releaseFounder 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 DevelopmentsDecentralized 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 AdvertisingFollowing 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
