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Showing posts from January 16, 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...
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Gold Exceeds U.S. Dollars in Russia’s Reserves as Putin Focuses on De-Dollarization

Russia is now holding more gold than U.S. dollars in its reserves for the first time, according to the latest report by Russia’s central bank. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made de-dollarization his country’s key policy to reduce the Russian economy’s exposure to the U.S. dollar amid heavy sanctions. Russia Now Has More Gold in Its Reserves Than US Dollars Gold has reportedly surpassed U.S. dollars in Russia’s reserves of $583 billion for the first time, according to a report published this week by the Bank of Russia. The country has been growing its international reserves in recent years. The report shows that gold made up 23% of the central bank’s reserves as of June 30, 2020, Bloomberg detailed, citing the latest data with a breakdown. The share of the U.S. dollar in the reserves has fallen to 22% from more than 40% in 2018. The euro made up about a third of the total assets, followed by gold which is now the second-largest component. About 12% is in the Chinese yuan. Th...
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Swiss Stock Exchange’s Crypto Trading Volume Soars — Hits Record $1.2 Billion

Switzerland’s principal stock exchange has revealed that its crypto trading volume hit a record high of CHF 1.1 billion ($1.23 billion) in 2020. The exchange now offers 34 exchange-traded products, allowing investors “access to 100 different crypto products trading on our platform,” said the exchange’s head of markets. Crypto Trading Volume on Switzerland’s Stock Exchange Hit Record High SIX Swiss Exchange, Switzerland’s principal stock exchange, announced Wednesday that its crypto trading volume hit a record high last year. The announcement details: The Swiss Stock Exchange, the world’s leading marketplace for regulated crypto products, has registered a break of the billion barrier in trading turnover in crypto products for the first time with CHF 1.1 billion in 2020. It adds that this volume “surpassed the record CHF 525 million from 2017 by 112%.” In addition, “the number of trades reached a new record of 48,024.” New Crypto ETP Listing Concurrently, the Zurich-based stock...
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Algorithmic asset experiments continue to entice traders & developers

On the frontiers of algorithmic assets, trading isn’t the only activity that will raise your heartrate As the team behind Morph.Finance can attest, developing an algorithmic stablecoin project can be every bit as frustrating and thrilling as investing in one.  While algorithmic assets have retreated from mid-December marketcap highs, the space has nonetheless continued to attract intrepid investors and developers aiming to position themselves at the forefront of a new financial vertical — though it remains an open question if such projects will ever achieve stability. Largely formed in the mold of defunct 2018 project Basis , algorithmic assets are designed to automatically adjust the total circulating supply of a token based on preset conditions, such as time or price. While they’re ostensibly intended to hew to a peg, such as the US dollar, containing and mitigating volatility has proven to be a notoriously difficult problem to solve. So far these assets have remained somew...
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Is Digital Currency Money? — IMF Says Only 23% of Central Banks Can Legally Issue Digital Currencies

Researchers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have examined the central bank laws of 174 IMF members to answer the question of whether a digital currency is really money. They found that of all the central banks studied, only about 23%, or 40 central banks, “are legally allowed to issue digital currencies.” IMF Explores if Digital Currency Is Money The IMF published a blog post on Thursday exploring whether digital money is really money in the legal sense. The post is authored by Catalina Margulis, a consulting counsel in the IMF Legal Department’s Financial and Fiscal Law unit, and Arthur Rossi, a research officer in the same unit. Expressing their own views, the authors began by observing that “close to 80 percent of the world’s central banks are either not allowed to issue a digital currency under their existing laws, or the legal framework is not clear.” They continued: To help countries make this assessment, we reviewed the central bank laws of 174 IMF members … and f...
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BTC crash, DOT crushes XRP, man risks losing $262M: Hodler’s Digest, Jan. 10–16

The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — one week on Cointelegraph in one link! Coming every Saturday, Hodlers Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more a week on Cointelegraph in one link. Top Stories This Week Bulls buy Bitcoins $35,000 support retest as altcoins push higher Scream if you want to go faster. The crypto markets have been a rollercoaster ride this week with Bitcoins price falling by more than $10,000 to lows of $30,549.60 on Monday. Analysts maintained that the correction was healthy and necessary , with the sharp sell-offs prompting the total crypto market cap to fall by more than $200 billion . ExoAlpha CIO David Lifchitz said the crash would purge the excessive growth of the past 10 days, allowing Bitcoin to build a new base toward $50,...
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JPMorgan Chase execs weigh in on stablecoin regulation, crypto competition

While the OCC's new stablecoin guidance doesn't have an impact on JPM Coin, it could lead to crypto payments if there's demand During JP Morgan Chase’s Q4 2020 earnings call, CEO Jamie Dimon and CFO Jennifer Piepszak weighed in on the OCC’s recent approval of banks using stablecoins for payments, as well as whether or not the approval will have any impact on the development of JPM Coin.  During the question-and-answers portion of the call, Portales Partners analyst Charles Peabody asked about the approval from the OCC for banks to use public blockchain networks for payments . “That guidance enables an offering of stable going on a public blockchain. So that doesn't impact JPM coin. JPM coin, you should think about as the tokenization of our customer deposits,” responded JPM CFO Jennifer Piepszak, according to a transcript of the call. However, she did not rule out the possibility of a JPM-backed stablecoin if customers showed interest. “So, it's obviously ver...
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Mt Gox Creditors Asked to Approve a Settlement Proposal Drafted by Coinlab

On January 15, the public was made aware of a deal between the firm Coinlab Inc., the Mt Gox bankruptcy trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, alongside MGIFLP, a subsidiary of Fortress Investment Group. According to the proposal, Mt Gox creditors will be able to claim as much as 90% of the bitcoin held by Kobayashi and the Tokyo court. Despite the recent reports, creditors still have to approve the proposal made by the company. Coinlab Offers Mt Gox Creditors a Proposal Last week, Mt Gox creditors were told there was a new online system dedicated to the claims they hold. Essentially, the Mt Gox creditors are a band of former customers of the exchange who want to obtain some of the funds lost during the breach seven years ago. Mt Gox was a bitcoin trading exchange and at the height of 2013, the platform was estimated to handle 70% of all BTC transactions. Mt Gox was hacked for 850,000 BTC and the exchange closed its doors in February 2014 and filed for bankruptcy. 200,000 BTC was found a...
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Ethereum competitor Near Protocol (NEAR) gains 106% as DeFi heats up

In the past month Near Protocol (NEAR) rallied 106% as the DeFi market captured the attention of new investors. Near Protocol (NEAR) is a smart contract platform that uses parallel processing to scale the network. This technique, known as sharding, resembles what Eth2 is aiming to achieve and Near’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism also allows token holders to stake their coins.  In the past month, NEAR has rallied by 107% and this raises questions on whether the project is making significant strides in what has become an ultra-competitive smart contract industry. NEAR/USDT (Binance). Source: TradingView Compared to its competitors, NEAR is a relatively new project as the mainnet only launched in April 2020. Unlike Ethereum, NEAR’s consensus mechanism works towards fee stabilization and according to its website, the protocol aims to accelerate the development of decentralized applications. Interestingly, Near’s ICO took place four months after its mainnet launch. A possib...
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Another court applies the Howey investment contract analysis to crypto

The ruling on the motion to dismiss in the SEC v. NAC case indicates that the SEC still has crypto sales in its crosshairs in 2021. On June 25, 2020, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission brought suit in the Northern District of California against NAC Foundation LLC, also known as the NationalAtenCoin Foundation, and Rowland Marcus Andrade, the company’s CEO, alleging that the company had violated the federal securities laws by selling an unregistered, pre-functional version of an “Anti-Money Laundering BitCoin” token, to be known as AML BitCoin. Unlike some of the other recent high-profile decisions applying the Howey Test, such as SEC vs. Telegram and SEC vs. Kik , the NAC lawsuit involved detailed allegations of fraud in connection with the sale of pre-functional tokens. Andrade was also indicted by the Department of Justice on charges of fraud arising out of the offering, and Jack Abramoff, a federal lobbyist, pled guilty to participating in the fraud . On Ja...
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Stacks announces major partnerships following mainnet launch

Foundry Digital and Blockdaemon are backing the launch of Stacks 2.0. Stacks, an open-source network for building smart-contract and DeFi bridges to Bitcoin ( BTC ), has secured several major partnerships in the wake of its mainnet launch — sending a strong signal that industry players are keen to back new use cases for BTC. The Stacks 2.0 mainnet officially launched on Thursday, bringing the promise of new use cases for Bitcoin based on the Clarity smart contract language. As Cointelegraph reported, Stacks 2.0 is attempting to broaden Bitcoin’s utility beyond the digital-gold narrative to include decentralized finance and smart contracts. That includes putting to work the roughly $700 billion in Bitcoin capital currently on the sidelines. Foundry Digital, a Digital Currency Group company, has since announced that it will provide mining services for STX, the native cryptocurrency of the Stacks ecosystem. Foundry said the move sends a “clear signal to miners about the opportunity t...
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Multiple DeFi mainstays crack top 20 in long-awaited ‘Great Repricing’

For DeFi believers, vindication has been every bit as profitable as it’s been sweet Hardcore decentralized finance (DeFi) adherents woke up today to a long-awaited sight on Coingecko’s top 100 rankings by marketcap: native tokens for popular DeFi platforms Synthetix and Aave have cracked into the top 20, an event DeFi observers have heralded as “The Great Repricing.” DeFi investors, users, and builders have long argued that the sector writ large is wildly undervalued relative to other cryptocurrency projects given DeFi’s growing userbases, cash flows from protocol fees, and soaring levels of activity compared to “zombie chain” layer-1 networks scattered throughout the top of the marketcap rankings. Aave and Synthetix have broken the top 20 and passed Tezos and Tron in marketcap. Remember “The Great DeFi Repricing” I’ve been ranting about for months? Ya, it’s happening. Soon the top 10 will be ETH, BTC and DeFi. — eric.eth (@econoar) January 16, 2021 If the past week is any...
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Polkadot gains 75% in one week — But can DOT price reach $20 next?

The price of DOT is getting close to $20 but a pullback shouldn't be ruled out after such a strong rally. Bitcoin ( BTC ) has made significant moves already this year but altcoins are catching up. Once Bitcoin’s price starts to stabilize, the market environment becomes better for altcoins to begin their run.  One of the strongest performers in 2021 is Polkadot, as this cryptocurrency has been making new all-time highs day in, day out. Polkadot’s price rallied by 85% in 2021 and 75% in the past seven days,  surpassing XRP in market capitalization . DOT price eyes $20 or higher after this rally DOT/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView The daily chart of Polkadot shows a rounded bottom construction throughout the last quarter of 2020. Since then, a beautiful support/resistance flip took place at the $4.55 level, leading to more upside. This upward continuation kicked off with a massive rally to $10, after which demand (grey box) held for support and new levels wer...
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Risk management in crypto: Aka 'the art of not losing all your money'

To attract and retain the interest of institutional traders, we need advanced risk management tools that can maximize gains for investors. Risk management is a vital element of success for any trader in any market. No matter the size of the capital you’re trading with or investing in, losses are going to be inevitable, particularly in highly volatile markets like cryptocurrency. Learning how to manage risk to minimize losses is vital. Yet, it’s also necessary to master risk management in order to ensure maximum gains. After all, the more you’re willing to risk, the greater the potential reward. Risk management to prevent losses Even experienced traders with impressive track records of reading the market can lose it all on one or two bad trades if they fail to employ proper risk management or let their emotions get in the way. The enticement of “hitting the jackpot” or chasing market sentiment can be too strong, allowing traders to become clouded or overconfident. To prevent sweepi...
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Peak fear? Bitcoin futures leverage gets reset by this week's wild price swings

Bitcoin futures leverage is dropping steeply, indicating that traders are fearful or uncertain about the BTC price trend. The leverage used in the Bitcoin ( BTC ) futures market has fallen significantly in the past several days. This indicates that traders are generally uncertain about where BTC is heading in the near term. Estimated leverage on Binance. Source: CryptoQuant What is leverage and why is this metric crucial for Bitcoin market sentiment? In the Bitcoin futures market, traders can borrow up to 125 times of their initial capital to trade Bitcoin. This allows traders to enter into massive Bitcoin positions that are often much larger than the capital that they have. During uptrends, traders tend to overleverage their positions because they anticipate bigger upside price movements. But, when the market becomes choppy and extremely volatile, traders become fearful. If the leverage used in the Bitcoin futures market drops, it simply means that traders are borrowing less...
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