Perhaps the biggest news in cryptocurrencies and blockchains for the third week of February is the Swedish central bank will soon trial a blockchain-based digital currency, but the project is still in its very early stages. On Thursday, the Riksbank announced its e-krona pilot as the latest attempt at a central bank digital currency from a storied institution. The digital currency pilot project will be built by Accenture (ACN  ) and based on R3 Corda, and it will run as a simulation trial through February 2021, when the central bank could extend the project for an extra 6 years. The simulated system will also carry some of the permissioned features integral to central banks' organized governance as Riksbank will retain control over its private network and hold the sole power to add new nodes to the system.

Here is the rest of the week in review:

Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales said crypto would not add anything useful to the website and incentivizing content on the platform would "seriously harm" its ecosystem. Wales said Friday at the CoinGeek Conference in London he has not seen a single practical use-case to convince him to integrate cryptocurrencies or blockchain into the platform, like an idea for users to reward content creators and editors with digital assets. Wales added Wikipedia relies on volunteer experts and enthusiasts to add and edit new content, as well as to check facts and remove inaccurate or irrelevant information. He said: "it's an idea that doesn't actually work. To say to them, you're going to have to pay or put money at risk in order to edit Wikipedia is completely insane." Wikipedia is a charity that has accepted Bitcoin (BTC) donations since 2014, and it is completely free to use.

Coinbase became the first ever pure-play cryptocurrency company to receive Visa (V  ) membership. On Wednesday Coinbase and Visa announced Visa approved the exchange as a Visa principal member. Coinbase's partnership with Visa began in 2019 with the launch of Coinbase Card in the U.K., a Visa debit card that lets customers spend their crypto as easily as money in their bank account. Now Coinbase Card is available to customers in 29 markets able to spend 10 cryptocurrencies in millions of merchant locations. Coinbase said the Visa membership will allow it to debut more features and services for Coinbase Card customers and help boost adoption of cryptocurrency as an interactive global payment option.

Crypto prices rose slightly to $287 billion this week. For the majors, Tezos (XTZ), Litecoin (LTC), and Ethereum (ETH) made decent single-digit gains, while Ripple (XRP), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Binance Coin (BNB) posted modest losses. In the top 100, the biggest losers were WAX (WAXP), down 21%, Lisk (LSK), down 14%, and Swipe (SXP), down 14%. The biggest gainers were DxChain Token (DX), up 48%, Algorand (ALGO), up 43%, and Aion (AION), up 41%. Next week traders will see if crypto can touch the $300 billion level.

The author owns a small amount of BTC and LTC.