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Showing posts from August 5, 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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New Draft Law in Uruguay Could Legalize Crypto as Payment Method

A new draft law introduced to the Senate in Uruguay could regulate cryptocurrency transactions, and also legalize cryptocurrency as an accepted payment method in the country. If approved, the draft proposed by Senator Juan Sartori would also introduce licenses for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) that would be issued by the government, classifying them into three different groups. Draft Law in Uruguay Seeks to Legalize Crypto Payments A new draft law introduced to the senate of Uruguay on August 3 proposes the legalization of cryptocurrencies as a valid means of payment for goods and services in the country. Proposed by Uruguayan senator Juan Sartori, the draft law establishes permits and licenses for institutions and Virtual Asset Service Providers, and puts cryptocurrency business under the oversight of Senaclaft, the national money-laundering watchdog. In its fifth article, the “Cryptoasset Law” (as it has been called) announces the legality of cryptocurrency for paymen...
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2022 trial date set for Tether’s accused 'shadow banker' Reggie Fowler

Former NFL team owner and alleged “shadow bank” operator Reggie Fowler is not engaged in any plea negotiations and the trial against him is set to begin early next year. A 2022 trial date has been set for former NFL team owner and alleged "shadow banker" Reggie Fowler. Fowler is the accused operator of the shadow bank to the crypto sector, Crypto Capital which was at the center of controversy in the court case against IFinex Inc — the parent company of crypto exchange Bitfinex and stablecoin issuer Tether. According to Aug.4 court documents , U.S. District Judge of the Southern District of New York, Andrew Carter has set a jury selection and trial date for Feb.14 2022, which is subject to change in light of future pandemic related restrictions. U.S. prosecutors allege that Fowler provided unlicensed money-transmitting services to several crypto firms, along with bank fraud, and laundering funds on behalf of Columbian drug cartels. A case against Bitfinex and Tether, i...
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Join The Smart Marketing Token (SMT) and Revolutionize Blockchain Marketing

PRESS RELEASE. The fast-paced nature of the blockchain industry means that new crypto projects face the problems of a highly competitive market. This makes marketing a major aspect for projects to have a chance to gain traction within the crypto community. However, existing marketing services are highly centralized, expensive, and skewed towards large projects with substantial marketing budgets. Smart Marketing Token is seeking to resolve these problems with its innovative platform. What is Smart Marketing Token Smart Marketing Token (SMT) is the first tokenized marketing agency that wants to decentralize the entire blockchain marketing process. Furthermore, it intends to support new projects that enter the cryptocurrency world with a professional and flexible marketing approach. Smart Marketing Token achieves this with its utility token SMT that decentralized marketing and advertising services. SMT serves as a bridge between the agency’s services and clients, leading to an effec...
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Boomer brand changes NYSE ticker from 'ETH', acknowledging crypto’s ascendancy

New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listed company Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. has changed its ticker from “ETH” to “ETD” to avoid confusion with Ethereum. Ethereum has achieved another milestone this week apart from the London hard fork, with a 90-year-old New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listed company changing its ticker to avoid confusion with Ethereum. Home decor and furniture chain Ethan Allen — which has more than 300 stores across the US — announced on Aug. 4 that it had changed its NYSE ticker from “ETH” to “ETD”. The firm said that it has incorporated “D” to reflect design and changed its ticker to avoid investor confusion and solidify its online keyword searches: “We also believe this change will better differentiate Ethan Allen news from Ethereum news in search results, as Ethereum is often abbreviated as ETH.” The home furnishing manufacturer and retail chain was founded in 1932. Investors who want to hodl both versions of ETH will have until Aug.16 to do so before Ethan All...
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Ciphertrace Announces Enhanced Monero Tracing Capabilities for Governments

Crypto compliance firm Ciphertrace has announced enhanced tools for tracing Monero transactions. “Ciphertrace takes Monero tracing capabilities to the next level with the ability to follow the flow of funds backwards from the transaction of interest to its source,” the company claims. Ciphertrace Claims to Have ‘Enhanced’ Tools to Trace Monero Transactions Blockchain analytics and crypto compliance firm Ciphertrace announced Thursday “enhanced Monero tracing capabilities for government agencies and financial institutions.” The announcement details: Based on research funded partially by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Ciphertrace offers next-generation visualization tools for Monero tracing. “Ciphertrace takes Monero tracing capabilities to the next level with the ability to follow the flow of funds backwards from the transaction of interest to its source,” it adds. “The new enhancements offer customers the ability to prepare detailed visual reports to better trace susp...
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Vitalik: ‘More confident about the merge’ following ETH’s successful London upgrade

The London upgrade has been a success, and now eyes are on the even more eagerly awaited merge with Eth 2.0 Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has hailed the London hard fork a success adding that it has given him more confidence over the upcoming merge to the Eth 2.0 chain. Speaking to Bloomberg News from Singapore, Buterin said that EIP-1559 is “definitely the most important part of London.” The upgrade, which went live around 15 hours ago, has tweaked the fee generation mechanism resulting in a portion of the fees being burnt. At the time of writing, more than 3,500 ETH worth around $9.8 million had already been burnt since the upgrade launched . Buterin stated that the successful deployment of the London upgrade is “proof that the Ethereum ecosystem is able to make significant changes.” He added that the upgrade: “Definitely makes me more confident about the merge,” According to the official documentation , the current Ethereum mainnet will “merge” with the proof-of- stak...
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BREAKING: White House reportedly supports only minor changes to crypto tax proposal

The crypto community is rallying against an amendment to the U.S. infrastructure plan that would maintain strict reporting requirements for developers and validators while exempting miners. The crypto community is pushing back against amendments to the crypto provisions of the White House’s infrastructure plan — which seeks to raise $28 billion for infrastructure funding through expanded taxation on crypto transactions and impose new reporting requirements for crypto “brokers.” On August 6, Senators Mark Warner and Rob Portman proposed a “last-minute amendment” to the infrastructure deal to exclude proof-of-mining and sellers of hardware and software wallets from the bill. However, the amendment’s wording suggests crypto developers and proof-of-stake validators would still be subject to expanded reporting and taxation that some have described as "unworkable." Hours later, Washington Post economics reporter Jeff Stein tweeted that the White House is formally supporting t...
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JPMorgan now offers clients access to six crypto funds … but only if they ask

JPMorgan now offers access to six different crypto funds from GrayScale, Osprey Funds and NYDIG. JPMorgan Chase quietly opened up access to six crypto funds over the past three weeks as it looks to offer crypto exposure to a variety of clients. In the latest move, the bank’s private clients will now have access to a new Bitcoin fund created by crypto investment firm New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG). NYDIG is owned by Stone Ridge Asset Management and the “Stone Ridge Bitcoin Strategy Fund” offers exposure to Bitcoin via futures markets. The NYDIG fund is in addition to five crypto funds that the bank opened access to last month: Grayscale Investments’ Grayscale Bitcoin Trust , Bitcoin Cash Trust, Ethereum Trust and Ethereum Classic Trust, as well as the Osprey Bitcoin Trust. While the traditional financial institution has taken a big leap by offering crypto exposure via six different funds, it is reportedly taking a cautious approach to how it offers its new digital-asse...
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Crypto Mom: True decentralization is the only thing that will save DeFi projects

SEC Commissioner Pierce believes that DeFi founders’ only hope to bypass financial regulation is to ensure full decentralization from launch. Hester Pierce of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — colloquially known as 'Crypto Mom,' has warned of rampant “shadow-centralization” within the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. Speaking to outspoken DeFiWatch founder Chris Blec in an August 4 discussion streamed by The Defiant, the SEC commissioner noted that decentralized organizations and DeFi are new concepts for regulators and that: “having a peer-to-peer system that doesn’t have central intermediaries is very different from what we’re normally dealing with.” “If you want to be decentralized, you really need to be decentralized, and that is going to then put you in a different category from the perspective of regulators because that’s just not something that we’ve dealt with before.” “If regulators can find a centralized part or group of people that they can gr...
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Ethereum network burns $395K ETH per hour after London upgrade

At current burn rates, 2.3 ETH per minute, or $6,600 is going up in smoke. Approximately 2.3 ETH is being burnt every minute through the new transaction fee mechanism introduced in Ethereum’s London upgrade on August 5. The highly anticipated London hard fork went live on Wednesday this week, ushering in the EIP-1559 upgrade that adjusted gas fees. Part of that adjustment introduced a mechanism that burns some of the base fees collected. The total amount of ETH burnt since the upgrade went live around 14 hours ago is roughly 3,395 ETH according to the various counters available. Etherchain reports an average burn rate of 2.36 ETH per minute. This equates to $6,596 per minute, or around $395,000 of ETH going up in metaphorical smoke every hour at current prices. An alternative counter called Ultrasound.money reports a total burn of 3,390 ETH worth a whopping $9.5 million at the current ETH price around $2,800. The tracker reports that the popular NFT marketplace OpenSea is the to...
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Analyst Predicts ‘Refreshed Bull Market’ for Bitcoin, Price Heading Toward $100K

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone sees “a refreshed bull market” for bitcoin. Comparing the performance of the cryptocurrency to the start of 2019, he explained, “we see performance parallels that could get the benchmark crypto back on track toward $100,000.” Bitcoin Back on Track Toward $100,000 Bloomberg Intelligence published analyst Mike McGlone’s August cryptocurrency outlook with a price prediction for bitcoin Wednesday. McGlone described that bitcoin is set to turn $40,000 into support, stating that “This year is prime for bitcoin to take the next step in its price-discovery stage and we see a refreshed bull market.” He further explained: Bitcoin appears to have built a base around $30,000 that’s akin to $4,000 at the start of 2019, and we see performance parallels that could get the benchmark crypto back on track toward $100,000. “The longest period below its 20-week moving average since 2018-19 indicates weak longs have been cleansed within an enduring bull m...
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Coinbase Enables Crypto Buys With Apple Pay, Instant $100K Cashouts, Google Pay to Follow

The Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has enabled crypto buys with Apple Pay, and instant cashouts of up to $100,000 per transaction. The company will also soon enable crypto buys with Google Pay. Buy Cryptocurrencies on Coinbase With Apple Pay Crypto exchange Coinbase announced Thursday that users can now buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on its platform with Apple Pay. Prakash Hariramani, senior director of Coinbase’s Payments & Financial Hub, explained: We’re introducing new and seamless ways to enable crypto buys with linked debit cards to Apple Pay and Google Pay, and instant cashouts up to $100,000 per transaction available 24/7. Coinbase detailed: “If you already have a Visa or Mastercard debit card linked in your Apple Wallet, Apple Pay will automatically appear as a payment method when you’re buying crypto with Coinbase on an Apple Pay-supported iOS device or Safari web browser.” The announcement adds that U.S. customers can also buy cryptocurrenc...
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Shanghai Man: Chainlink hackathon, OKExChain nets $2B TVL, and Tencent unveils ‘magic’ NFT platform

This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industrys most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations. Much like last week , Chinas minor COVID flareups dominated the headlines as the country seeks to avoid more serious lockdowns. Cryptocurrency managed to stay out of the news, which considering the regulation recently, can only be viewed as a good thing. Much love for the layer-twos On August 3, IOSG Ventures and Chainlink hosted the Demo Day of the Layer-Two Hackathon in Shanghai. The event aimed to support developers working on scaling solutions for Ethereum and was backed by major projects such as Polygon, Near, The Graph, and Matter Labs. The winning team, which won bounties and mentorship, was a Synthetix-based asset management project. The winners called themselves ObjK and used querying technology from The Graph to pull data from Synthetix, ach...
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Venezuela to launch CBDC in October — and cut six zeros from its currency

The Central Bank of Venezuela is rolling out a CBDC in October and will launch an SMS-based exchange system to facilitate its use. The Central Bank of Venezuela will launch a CBDC in October alongside a monetary redenomination that will cut six zeros from the currency due to raging inflation. As of Oct. 1, the digital bolivar will begin circulation in the economy. Its cash equivalent will get a new 1-bolivar coin, along with banknotes ranging from 5 Bs. to 100 Bs. as part of the six zero readjustment of the currency, The Central Bank of Venezuela made the announcement on Aug. 6.  The CBDC will be accompanied by an SMS-based exchange system to facilitate payments and transfers between its users. The bank claimed that the CBDC and redenomination of the currency will have no effect on the bolivar’s value and that the overhaul is part of a move to simplify the use of the currency. "The bolivar will not be worth any more or any less, in order to facilitate its use, it is being tak...
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Bitcoin bulls overtake the $40K barrier ahead of Friday’s $625M options expiry

Securing a close above $40,000 will give bullish pro traders a sizeable advantage in Friday's $625 million BTC options expiry. Despite the recent breakouts to the $40,000 level, Bitcoin ( BTC ) price could still face downward pressure in August. The 42% rally in late July effectively inspired some optimistic short-term options bets but the initial data largely favors the neutral-to-bullish call options, and failure to sustain $40,000 has significantly reduced this advantage. A good deal of the pressure is probably coming from the infrastructure proposal in the United States Senate. HR 3684 tightens rules on businesses handling cryptocurrencies and expands reporting requirements for brokers and this has had a knock on effect on the market’s bullish momentum. In addition to tightening regulations on crypto-oriented businesses, the backers of the bill believe they can find $28 billion in extra funding by expanding taxation on digital asset transactions. These unexpected measures ...
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Marvel to Launch Spider-Man NFTs This Week — NFT Comic, ‘Super-D Figures’ to Follow

On August 5, Orbis Blockchain Technologies Limited and Marvel Entertainment kicked off the Veve Digital Collectibles’ “Marvel Month” celebration. The two companies plan to issue the first non-fungible token (NFT) assets featuring the Marvel Super Hero, Spider-Man. The Orbis Veve App and Marvel to Launch the First Spider-Man Statue NFTs This week, Spider-Man and non-fungible token (NFT) fans will be able to purchase and interact with a set of five unique digital statues of Marvel’s Spider-Man on August 7 at 8 a.m. (PT). Bitcoin.com News reported on Marvel Entertainment ’s partnership with Orbis at the end of June. “The Spider-Man series drop is the first of many digital statues, digital comic books, and other digital collectibles in Veve’s Marvel Month initiative,” the announcement details. According to the press release Veve’s Marvel Spider-Man statue initiative will include: Common – Spider-Man – The Amazing Spider-Man Price: $40.00 – Quantity: 32,000 Uncommon – Spider-Man – ...
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‘A Lazy Way to Showcase NFTs’ — Mark Cuban’s Lazy.com NFT Platform Integrates With Polygon

On Thursday, the non-fungible token (NFT) platform and digital art gallery backed by Mark Cuban announced the project has integrated with Polygon. The platform allows anyone to showcase NFTs by leveraging a unique lazy URL to social media profiles, and the integration announcement highlights the protocol is now live on Polygon mainnet. Lazy.com Joins Polygon The non-fungible token digital art gallery Lazy.com has announced on Thursday that the protocol is now integrated with the Polygon platform , formally called Matic. The Lazy.com web portal says that the gallery is the “lazy way to show off your NFTs.” The Lazy project is also backed by the Shark Tank co-host and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban . The integration with Polygon coincides with the launch of Polygon Studios . The newly crafted Polygon Studios is basically an NFT-focused gaming realm and metaverse designed to be a “hotbed of digital culture.” Mark Cuban who is also a believer in Polygon, explained during the inte...
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Social Media Platform Torum Announces Strategic Investment by Huobi Ventures HECO Fund

PRESS RELEASE. Torum announces strategic investment by Huobi Ventures, the $100 million venture arm of Huobi Group to foster blockchain adoption and ecosystem expansion. 5th August 2021, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — On the eve of the project’s 1 st year launch anniversary, social media platform Torum has released its H2 strategic ecosystem expansion plan, prioritizing the construction of a one-stop crypto ecosystem. The plan includes core features that aim to solve the industry’s information asymmetry problems and improve the connection between projects and communities through a social-based ecosystem. Torum H2 Strategic Ecosystem Expansion Plan The Torum H2 Strategic Ecosystem Extension plan will include numerous core features, including: Torum NFT Launchpad: The INO platform for projects to issue a set of limited-edition NFTs to the community Torum NFT Marketplace: The first social-infused NFT marketplace with the ability to market NFTs to the users of Torum. Torum Airdrop:...
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Lead Republican behind infrastructure bill negotiations supports crypto amendment

The senator's stance is somewhat surprising given he has previously called the section on brokers in the proposed bill a “common-sense provision.” Senator Rob Portman, one of the lead Republican voices for negotiations over an infrastructure bill in the U.S. Senate, said he supports an amendment clarifying the intent of a cryptocurrency provision. In a Tweet today, Portman encouraged his colleagues in the Senate to vote on an amendment proposed this week by Ron Wyden, Cynthia Lummis, and Pat Toomey which suggests striking the definition of brokers in the infrastructure bill to no longer include developers, miners, or blockchain firms in the crypto space. I agree with Senators Wyden, Toomey, Lummis that we can do more to clarify the intent of the cryptocurrency provision & the Senate should vote on their amendment. — Rob Portman (@senrobportman) August 5, 2021 The senator’s stance is somewhat surprising given he has previously supported the language used in the bill, s...
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London is live and Ethereum bulls control Friday’s $357M ETH options expiry

$357 million in ETH options expire on August 6 and bears don’t stand a chance given that every neutral-to-bearish put is underwater. Ether ( ETH ) price rallied 50% leading in the London hardfork because many investors expect the upgrade to solve the issue of high transaction fees and make the altcoin a deflationary asset .  Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead has predicted that the upcoming upgrade would likely cause Ether to 'flip' Bitcoin ( BTC ) as the leading cryptocurrency but this is a topic under heavy contention. To understand the impact of the recent price movement, traders should analyze the weekly options expiry. Deribit derivatives currently holds 86% market share in this segment and the aggregate open interest for Aug. 6 currently stands at $357 million. ETH Aug. 6 options aggregate open interest. Source: Bybt The neutral-to-bullish call (buy) option provides upside price protection to buyers and the protective put (sell) option holders are safeguarded from ...
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