This week, Monday saw the bitcoin market value experience an odd dip known as a “flash crash” when market price fell almost 12 percent.

Coinbase has acquired the talent behind blockchain explorer Blockr.io; and, entirely separately, Block.io just launched a new developer-centric wallet service with dev tools and an API—offering 0 percent transaction fees for developers who use their service to develop Bitcoin-focused applications. Finishing up Bitcoin blockchain API news, San Francisco-based Chain just finished a $9.5 million funding round making it the best-funded blockchain explorer API on the market.

Finally, Venezuela will get its first bitcoin exchange this month with the launch of SurBitcoin.

Look forward to this and more in this Bitcoin Weekly.

BTC-e Bitcoin market price “flash crash” on Monday

The market price index of bitcoin has been falling steadily over the past few weeks. Enough to catch the attention of Sydney Ember at The New York Times Dealbook blog. Bitcoin price fell nearly 12 percent on Monday, August 18th, from $492.95 to $435.60.

This represents the lowest bitcoin market value has fallen since May of this year.

According to market charts, BTC-e also saw bitcoin hit a notable low of $309. Although since this “flash crash” the currency value has recovered somewhat to around $481 on Tuesday afternoon.

What’s driving this decline and wobble in the market values is still under speculation. One thing is certain, bitcoin market value has been on a somewhat steady decline since a $650 peak in early July, but still remains in the same $200 band since February.

Coinbase acquires talent from Blockr.io

This week, Coinbase, Inc. completed an acquisition of the team behind the sleek-looking blockchain explorer Blockr.io and of the website itself.

Two engineers from Blockr, software engineer Sašo Matejina and designer Samo Drole, will be joining the Coinbase team. The Bitcoin wallet company plans to put them to work on improving the Coinbase API and work on building out Coinbase’s own Bitcoin node.

Coinbase said that there are no plans to do anything with Blockr.io and it will remain available for the foreseeable future. Although it may be rebranded under Coinbase.

Block.io 0% fee developer wallet service and API

Not to be confused with the previous announcement of Coinbase and Blockr.io, Block.io just released an API suite and developer tools for producing Bitcoin-focused applications. The API is designed around providing Bitcoin wallet-service to developers.

Amid the perks of going with Block.io for a Bitcoin-focused project is included a lot of developer-centric services and practices.

First and foremost, Block.io does not charge service fees and the service does not control access to the bitcoin passing through it (private keys and access gets decided by the developer or end-user.) Every transaction via Block.io is done on the Bitcoin blockchain, this means that every transaction that occurs through Block.io’s dev tools can be audited by any third-party block explorer.

The official developer libraries for Block.io have been released for  Ruby, NodeJS, PHP, and Python. Developers interested in getting started right now can also visit the interactive API documentation (with examples) or dive into the detailed API documentation.

To provide the best experience for developers, Block.io also delivers a Bitcoin Testnet for debugging applications without needing to make transactions on the blockchain.

Chain Bitcoin blockchain API company raises $9.5 million

Rounding out API news: Blockchain explorer API service, Chain, just raised $9.5 million in a funding round, according to Coinsetter Bitcoin News. This round brings Chain total funding up to $13.7 million.

The current funding round is led by Khosla Ventures and raising money from the most prominent VC names in the Bitcoin industry, including Barry Silbert of Bitcoin Opportunity Corp (and Second Market), 500 Startups and Pantera Capital.

Chain aims to take the lead in the Bitcoin blockchain explorer API space with easy to use APIs in several languages including Ruby, Node.JS and jQuery for the web and iOS for iOS apps.

Also, Coinsetter now publishes Bitcoin-related news now? Coinsetter is best known as a New York bitcoin exchange that launched initially in an attempt to woo high-volume traders.

Venezuela gets its first BTC exchange with SurBitcoin

Announced on August 15, SurBitcoin represents the first Bitcoin exchange platform in Venezuela. The exchange is designed to allow Venezuelans to exchange bitcoins for the nation’s fiat currency, the bolívar.

According to PanAm Post, the founders are a pair of brothers based in New York City, US named Kevin and Víctor Charles. The siblings launched the company after meeting Rodrigo Souza, the Brazilian head of BlinkTrade—an open-source software platform for decentralized bitcoin exchange.

The exchange will offer a 0.6 percent transaction fee for traders.

The brothers hope that the exchange will provide a resource for Venezuelans whose economy is currently suffering and the national currency is inflating. Kevin argues that while bitcoin’s volatility as a currency is problematic, the ever-decreasing purchasing power of the bolívar is even worse.

It has been long argued that bitcoin—as a born-digital currency separate from local economies—might have provide a solution for people who live in regions with poor economies or weak central banking systems. One example that has been discussed at length is Bitcoin as market solution in Africa and Venezuela could be a very similar market.

Although these ideas have been shopped around since 2012, good data on Bitcoin use in third-world economies has still to be collected and vetted.

SurBitcoin success or failure will give some insight into those questions.