Welcome to another Flagship Friday, where we discuss the most important happenings in the crypto community weekly!

Today we're talking a lot about what the big ol' giants have been up to, with Google's quantum computer running big ol' data pretty quickly, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg doing a big ol' testimony for like, what, the billionth time? Also, we're taking a look at a... questionable feature of the Lightning Network and talking about something very unfortunate that happened to the CryptoBasic community last week - we got attacked by scammers. 

Dive into the cryptoverse with us on this week's Flagship Friday.

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• Rapid Fire
  • [Ripple Adds Four Members to Regulatory Team, Joins Blockchain Association](Ripple Adds Four Members to Regulatory Team, Joins Blockchain Association)
    • Including Treasury Department experience, and CFTC Senior Advisors
• Bakkt Follows Up Record Volume With Another Forecasted All-Time High
  • Yes, maybe in the short term a lot of the volume is shorting BTC but that doesn't really matter. What matters is the institutional money is starting to flow in.
  • Wednesday 640 traded contracts (new ATH). Day before was 85 lol. Previous record was 224.
  • Institutional investors made long positions of over 1k BTC in October, up from 500 BTC the previous month.
• Bakkt To Launch Options Trading in December
  • Dec 9th launch and fully regulated and approved by its backer, The Intercontinental Exchange and the CFTC, the governing agency on derivatives.
  • Hopes to bring trust and utility to digital assets
• Boris Johnson has pledged to deliver Brexit by October 31st. $10k has been put on Brexit not happening by the end of the month on the Augur platform. Only 5% on it actually happening.
  • Augur is a decentralized prediction market that depends on "wisdow of crowds" and has been pretty on point thus far.. Predicted Dems taking the house, price of BTC above 4k October 22nd, Justin Trudeau winning Canada reelection, etc.
• What's an atomic swap?
  • Binance Academy posted an article explaining what an atomic swap is. Basically it allows two different cryptocurrencies to be exchanged quickly. You can trade them directly from your personal wallets.
  • Essentially peer to peer trades across different blockchains.
  • This allows for users more security by not having to put it on a third party exchange and also cuts one step out for most alt coins by not having to convert it into one of the bigger coins like BTC or Eth to then convert it to the coin you wanted initially.

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• (Zuckerberg Testifies) -K

  • House Financial services committee
  • Now positioning Libra as a reaction to China's plan to release a similar cryptocurrency
    • Before it was about it being international, here playing to US lawmakers
    • "Libra will be backed mostly by dollars and I believe it will extend America’s financial leadership,”
  • Apparently 4 lawmakers had sent letters to members asking not to participate (maybe why we saw mass exodus)
  • FB also distinguished LIbra from their wallet, and clarified "Facebook’s intention not to sell data about Calibra wallet users to third parties"
    • "if america doesnt lead on this others will"
  • Friday, October 19, three new bills were i