Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January 3, 2021

MLB Team Washington Nationals Partners With Terra Blockchain Community, Ballpark Plans to Accept UST

On February 9, the American professional baseball team based in Washington, D.C., the Washington Nationals, announced the team has partnered with Terra, the open-source blockchain platform and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The Washington Nationals detail that the team is a “leading innovator” and is “consistently introducing new technologies to enhance the fan experience.” Washington Nationals Ink Long-Term Deal With Terra Major League Baseball (MLB) team the Washington Nationals has partnered with the blockchain platform and DAO Terra, according to an announcement published by the team on Wednesday. The deal with Terra follows a slew of sports-related deals with crypto firms, but the MLB team will be the first to partner with an open-source blockchain project. In addition to the partnership, the algorithmic stablecoin UST that’s issued on the Terra blockchain will be “accepted as a payment method at Nationals Park as early as next season.” “The Nationals continue t...

Cannabis Dealer Forfeits $3 Million in Bitcoin — 6,000 More BTC Still Missing

A cannabis dealer has forfeited bitcoins worth about $3 million after they were seized by the Irish Criminal Assets Bureau. However, a bigger stash of 6,000 bitcoins belonging to him, worth about $200 million at the current price, are still inaccessible to the bureau. Irish Authority Sold Seized Bitcoin Cannabis dealer Clifton Collins has forfeited bitcoins worth about $3 million that were previously seized by Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), the Sunday World reported last week. Collins reportedly has two bitcoin stashes. He consented to the confiscation of the first, smaller stash in Bray Circuit Court at the end of December when the bureau told a judge it had sold the cryptocurrency. Collins began cultivating cannabis full-time around 2005. He rented properties around Ireland, including a house in Galway, to grow his marijuana crops. He harvested, packaged, and sold them in Dublin. He then used the proceeds to buy bitcoin in late 2011 and early 2012. The police arrested h...

Kim Dotcom’s Next-Generation Content-Monetization Service K.IM Announces Bitcoin Cash Integration

PRESS RELEASE. Megaupload creator Kim Dotcom announced this month to use Bitcoin Cash for his newest innovation, K.IM, a suite of tools to enable anyone around the world to manage, protect and sell digital content at ultra-low fees and without intermediaries. Dotcom, who’s website Megaupload was once the 13th most popular site on the Internet and responsible for 4% of all Internet traffic, said K.IM turns “digital files into file shops. Users can use our service to package a file that they want to sell into an encrypted container file and then they can place it anywhere on the Internet. Customers who want to access the content inside the encrypted container can make a payment using cryptocurrency like Bitcoin Cash.” Asked why he was excited about K.IM and Bitcoin Cash in particular, Dotcom said that while Bitcoin ( BTC ) has been a great tool for asset storage, Bitcoin Cash is “great for payments” for services like K.IM and offers new financial opportunities for consumers, vendors ...

From Uniswap to Axies, these 6 DApps blew us away in 2020

With the decentralized application space evolving rapidly, let’s take a look at some of the best examples that caught our attention in 2020. With the crypto market making a crazy comeback this year , an increasing number of casual investors all over the world are beginning to understand the potential that blockchain technology possesses. For example, over the course of 2020, decentralized applications gained a remarkable amount of traction, with the total locked volume across all decentralized exchanges rising from under $40 million back in December 2019 to a whopping more than $26 billion within a span of just nine months. However, it’s important to understand the core concepts underlying decentralized finance, or DeFi, and decentralized applications, or DApps, as many routinely use the two terms interchangeably. For starters, while both innovations share many similarities — such as using blockchain technology, eliminating third-party intermediaries, and providing users with compl...

Miami’s Mayor Considers Putting Some of City’s Treasury Reserves in Bitcoin

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is exploring putting a percentage of his city’s treasury reserves in bitcoin. Miami is currently working on accepting the cryptocurrency as a means of payment for city services and taxes. The mayor believes that “Bitcoin has been a stable investment during an incredibly unstable year.” Miami Could Invest Some of City’s Treasury Reserves in Bitcoin Francis Suarez, the mayor of the U.S. city of Miami, Florida, has been discussing with the crypto community about putting a small percentage of the city’s treasury reserves in bitcoin. The first Miami-born mayor, Suarez previously served as Miami Commissioner for District 4 for eight years. One soon-to-be Miami resident is Morgan Creek Digital partner Anthony Pompliano, who has been discussing what bitcoin can do for Miami and why Suarez should put 1% of the city’s treasury reserves in the cryptocurrency. Pompliano tweeted on Tuesday, “Retweet this if you would move to Miami if Mayor Francis Suarez put 1% of th...

DeFi dynasty? Synthetix co-founder’s siblings reveal blockchain game project

A new game project from the brothers of Synthetix co-founder Kain Warick incorporates DeFi and NFT elements. A fledgling blockchain-based game project called Illuvium has already managed to attract support from major industry backers — a development owed in part to the fact that Illuvium co-founders Kieran and Aaron Warwick are the brothers of Kain Warwick, the co-founder of decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Synthetix. In a tweet on Friday, Kain announced that “after two years of pressure,” his brothers were revealing to the world a blockchain-based game: Extremely excited that after years of pressure two of my brothers are launching a crypto NFT game @illuviumio . Also as promised I just finished that $1m @chainlink market buy into Kain.eth via @1inchExchange . I’m going offline for 2 weeks now enjoy the start of 2021! https://t.co/LMb5YkJbtr — kain.eth (@kaiynne) January 2, 2021 In an interview with Cointelegraph, Kieran Warwick clarified that development work has only b...

Retail investors are largely uninvolved as Bitcoin price chases $40K

Bitcoin looks set to achieve many new all-time highs in 2021 but when will retail investors join the party? There are many investors feeling validated in the cryptocurrency market now that Bitcoin’s price has established a new all-time high of $34,778 .  The last time Bitcoin ( BTC ) traded anywhere near this level was during the bull run of 2017, when it reached a peak of about $19,783. Even the mainstream media took notice, including the New York Times, which observed that the current rally had “a very different feel to it than the last time around.” Many in the cryptocurrency community would agree. Therefore, it’s essential to take a deeper look at the factors that are driving the current rally. The “average Joe” is no longer running the show Bitcoin hits a new all-time high with a very different feeling to it than the last time around. https://t.co/N5M4EzblOW — Nathaniel Popper (@nathanielpopper) November 30, 2020 In 2017, Bitcoin’s bull run was largely believed to h...

Binance US CEO predicts $100K Bitcoin by 2022

Coley said that Bitcoiners could see an "accelerated" version of the 2017 bull run eventually driving the price to $100,000. Catherine Coley, CEO of major crypto exchange Binance’s U.S. arm, sees the current Bitcoin bull run as a sign the crypto asset could reach a price up to $100,000. Speaking to news outlet KLTA yesterday, Coley said the recent rally in the price of Bitcoin ( BTC ) — moving from $19,000 to more than $34,000 in less than a month — may be due to a surge in the number of institutional investors taking an interest in the crypto asset. She added that the crypto space could be seeing an "accelerated" rally based on what happened prior to the 2017 bull run, in which the BTC price surged more than a year after the rewards halving in July 2016. “Where maybe we thought maybe $50,000 made sense, this number is definitely going to be a little bit higher than that in my opinion,” said Coley. “I think we’re going towards $75,000 to $100,000 for Bitcoin b...

Telos’ ‘T-Bond’ NFTs aim to breathe liquidity life into projects young and old

Telos hopes the new fundraising tool will give a jolt to their platform, as well as others On Wednesday the Telos blockchain announced the launch of a new tool designed to help low-liquidity projects fundraise: a NFT product known as a “T-Bond.”  In an interview with Cointelegraph, Douglas Horn — the author of the Telos whitepaper and the CEO of GoodBlock, a development company who assists with Telos core development — said that token-based fundraising is a tricky problem for both established and new projects. “Many crypto projects face challenges similar to our own. Telos never raised any money in a token sale, but many that have done ICOs see their finances running low before their projects are market ready,” he said. “These projects find themselves with token reserves they can't sell without immediately tanking their prices as liquid tokens go on the market.” One possible solution is Telos’ new product: the T-Bond. T-Bonds are bundles of fungible tokens that have been lock...

Mike Novogratz attributes BTC's rise past $30K to institutional adoption

According to the Galaxy Digital CEO, institutions have a greater opportunity to buy Bitcoin currently in circulation, driving up the price. Galaxy Digital founder and CEO Mike Novogratz believes institutional investors are helping drive the current Bitcoin bull run. In an interview with BBC World News today, Novogratz said governments around world printing money and “debasing fiat money” was fueling the ongoing Bitcoin ( BTC ) bull run, but institutional players getting into crypto may be the bigger story. The Galaxy Digital CEO said major firms had changed their tune on crypto in the last three years, potentially affecting the supply of available coins. “Now we’re seeing places like PayPal — at 340 million customers — servicing Bitcoin and selling Bitcoin [along with] big insurance companies in the United States,” said Novogratz. “As the institutions move in, there just is not a lot of supply [...] There are a lot more than 21 million millionaires out there.” Fun on the BBC. pi...

IRS to transition from ‘education to enforcement,’ says former division chief

A former top investigator is warning that the IRS might be shifting crypto tax payment enforcement into high gear A former top investigator is warning that “a high-stakes game of chicken” between the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and cryptocurrency holders who fail to properly report their earnings will be entering a new phase in 2021 as the tax collection agency begins to focus on pursuing “civil and, potentially, criminal penalties.” In an article co-authored by Don Fort today , the former chief of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) criminal investigation division said that while the agency until now has focused its resources on informing the public of proper reporting guidelines, it will now be turning to more stringent “enforcement.” “The IRS has been not-so-quietly positioning itself for a smooth transition from education to enforcement in 2021 and beyond.” The article notes that the trail starts with Coinbase , who answered a “John Doe” summons in 2018 and handed over acc...

Billionaires, Teslas and Satoshi: Fun facts for Genesis Block Day

Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcoin block 12 years ago today. Since Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcon block on Jan. 3, 2009, the crypto asset has led to substantial gains for investors given its meteoric rise in the last week alone. The price of Bitcoin ( BTC ) reached parity with the U.S. dollar almost ten years ago today, a milestone lauded by many as another step towards adoption. With Bitcoin currently fluctuating between $32,000 and $34,000, however, the price of the cryptocurrency is now the same as that of a Model 3 Tesla, which retails for upwards of $30,000. A #bitcoin now buys you a Tesla. So, when will you accept it, @elonmusk ? pic.twitter.com/RONfVvH9i1 — Documenting Bitcoin (@DocumentBitcoin) January 3, 2021 Institutional players with millions to purchase Bitcoin are also gaining billionaire status only a few days into 2021. Business intelligence firm MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin bet from August and September is paying off well, with the original $425 ...

Can’t Keep a Good Dog Down: Meme Token Dogecoin Spiked Over 500% This Year

The leading cryptocurrency bitcoin has crossed new all-time highs (ATH) in 2020 and into 2021 as well. However, many other digital assets have a long way to go to reach the ATH they experienced three years ago in 2017. Although one particular older cryptocurrency, the popular meme token Dogecoin is nearing its 2017 ATH, well before a large slew of older coins. Dogecoin’s yearly gains have even outpaced bitcoin’s gains by rising more than 535% during the course of the year. A great number of cryptocurrencies have yet to cross their all-time high (ATH) from the 2017 bull run three years ago. For instance, ethereum ( ETH ) is still a touch over 33% away from the 2017 ATH and it’s the closest in the top ten to do so, excluding newer crypto assets like LINK, and DOT. During the price highs on Sunday, the popular meme token dogecoin (DOGE) was only 32.29% away from reaching the crypto asset’s ATH achieved in 2017. Unlike many of the other older coins in existence, dogecoin (DOGE) born i...

Top 5 cryptocurrencies to watch this week: BTC, ETH, DOT, BNB, UNI

Bitcoin may be in the last leg of its parabolic run and if the rally sustains, select altcoins may surprise to the upside. Bitcoin ( BTC ) has consistently been hitting new all-time highs over the weekend, but the latest surge has also created a new high against gold, according to MarketWatch data. This suggests that Bitcoin has been gaining acceptance as the new store of value and that may attract more customers away from gold into Bitcoin.  Analysts suggest that the latest rally above $30,000 could have been triggered by aggressive buying from institutional investors on Coinbase, as suggested by the large premium of about $350 compared to the price in Binance. With the latest rally, Bitcoin hit a market capitalization of over $640 billion today, just shy of Alibaba, the ninth-largest company in terms of market cap, at $649.31 billion . Meanwhile, breaking $30,000 could be creating FOMO among institutional investors who have missed buying Bitcoin at lower levels. Crypto ...

Ethereum targets $1K after ETH, altcoins rally versus Bitcoin

ETH is making serious inroads in both BTC and USD terms in what a Cointelegraph analyst says is a classic sign that altcoins are coming back from the dead. Ether ( ETH ) has broken a critical price point against Bitcoin ( BTC ), signalling that altcoins may be about to see huge gains. Cryptocurrency market overview. Source: Coin360 I'd take Ether bet "all day long" — Winklevoss Data from Cointelegraph Markets , Coin360 and TradingView showed ETH/BTC pass the essential 0.026 level in just one daily candle on Jan. 3. After staying weak throughout December, Ether has rebounded in the first few days of 2021, and Sunday's performance could be the start of something much bigger. As Cointelegraph Markets analyst Michaël van de Poppe noted last week, 0.026 BTC is a significant breakout point, and flipping it to support indicates "strength and continuation" of a bullish resurgence. "It’s time for #Ethereum, #Polkadot, #Cardano, #Chainlink and more ...