Congratulations to all the holders! $ETH.X has crossed into the mid 1400s for the first time since its peak in early 2018. Ether is up a massive 750% in the last year and continues to lead all other cryptos in the number of active developers. This gain comes after suffering a drawdown to $109 in March last year.

**What's new

**Last fall the move to Ethereum 2.0 was initiated, which will implement a more scalable proof-of-stake system in place of the current proof-of-work system. This will be a multi-year change ultimately finishing sometime in 2022. In short, this will allow for additional chains to be run in parallel, meaning faster, cheaper transactions. Transaction prices have been quite expensive over the last year, so this change is desperately needed if Ethereum wants to anchor its claim as digital money in contrast to Bitcoin's digital gold. If nothing else, the reduction of mining activities will be much better for the planet.

While I expect there to be significant volatility ahead, I have held Ether since 2017 and don't plan to sell any time soon. :)

Join the new Crypto chat if you want to get into the weeds of blockchain.

$TWLO buying Segment, the widely-used customer data startup, sounds like a great pairing. It is hard to imagine this being a bad deal as the data sharing and cross-selling opportunities seem obvious.

(h/t https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/10/09/twilio-to-acquire-cloud-startup-segment-for-3-billion/ )

This is yet another API-first company that is in the news. This area of the market is very hot right now and so far shows no sign of slowing down. I keep waiting for a way to invest in connection companies like Zapier. What other API companies should we be looking at?