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Showing posts from November 6, 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...

Bank of America Executive Sees Crypto as Asset Class: ‘I Don’t View It as Competition at All’

Bank of America’s chief operating officer does not see cryptocurrency as competition. Instead, he views it as an asset class, noting that “people like it for all sorts of different reasons.” Bank of America’s COO on Crypto: ‘I Don’t View It as Competition at All’ Bank of America COO Tom Montag talked about cryptocurrency Thursday in an interview with Chainalysis CEO Michael Gronager at a conference hosted by the blockchain analytics firm in New York. Montag is also president of Bank of America’s Global Banking and Markets and a member of the company’s executive management team. He is responsible for all of the businesses that serve companies and institutional investors. He said cryptocurrency reminded him of derivatives in their early days. He also admitted that he does not understand stablecoins. “I don’t understand that as well as everyone in the room … Is there really a dollar behind stablecoin?” The Bank of America COO was also asked whether banks are competing with crypto. ...

Square’s Cash App Generates $1.8 Billion in Bitcoin Revenue, BTC Profit up 29% in Q3

Square Inc. has reported bitcoin revenue of $1.82 billion in the third quarter, an 11% increase from the same period last year. Its bitcoin gross profit was $42 million during the time period, a 29% increase year-over-year. Square’s Bitcoin Profit up 29% in Q3 In the company’s Q3 2021 Shareholder Letter, published Thursday, Square Inc. reported total net revenue of $3.84 billion in the third quarter, up 27% year-over-year. The company’s bitcoin revenue is generated from its mobile payment service, Cash App. The platform generated $2.39 billion in revenue and $512 million in gross profit in Q3, a 16% and 33% increase year-over-year, respectively. Square wrote: Cash App generated $1.82 billion of bitcoin revenue and $42 million of bitcoin gross profit during the third quarter of 2021, up 11% and 29% year over year, respectively. Bitcoin gross profit accounted for approximately 2% of Square’s total bitcoin revenue in Q3. The company explained that bitcoin revenue is the total sale...

Polygon Reveals Details About Its Future Collaboration With LBank During AMA

PRESS RELEASE. Recently, LBank Exchange held an AMA session with the Polygon team, discussing Polygon’s achievements, collaborations, NFT and Gaming markets, Nightfall solution, future plans and so on. Here’s the summary of this AMA. Ethereum is the blockchain development platform of choice, but it has limitations such as low throughput, poor UX, and no sovereignty. As a protocol and a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks, Polygon breaks through these limitations by aggregating scalable solutions on Ethereum and supporting a multi-chain Ethereum ecosystem. Polygon Outperforms Ethereum In-terms Of Active Users As a layer 2 solutions aggregator built on top of Ethereum, Polygon has made some great achievements since its birth, its POS chain has over 2000 DApps live and processes over 7 million transactions daily. In fact, Polygon now has more daily active users than Ethereum. MATIC, the token for the polygon network, is already live on tradin...

Burger King gives away free crypto, bulls predict $98K BTC in November and Australian mega bank offers crypto trading services: Hodler’s Digest, Oct. 31-Nov. 5

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 ‘Uptober’ closes at record high in best month of 2021 5 things to watch in Bitcoin this week After Bitcoins ( BTC ) first-ever monthly close above $60,000 for October and a new all-time high (ATH), the bulls are reading the tea leaves to see what November will bring. Plan B who has been pretty bang on the money in recent months has forecasted a November close of $98,000 per BTC. Something that may suggest the asset is on the up this month is that a strong number of holders werent tempted to sell despite BTC reaching its ATH of $67,100. Kraken Intelligence pointed out as much, noting that mass accumulation has continued over the past two months despite the potential to reap mad gainz. Notably, while lo...

Moscow Confirms Arrest of Russian Crypto Entrepreneur in Amsterdam, Report Mentions FBI

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a Russian national with a cryptocurrency business, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow has confirmed. The man involved in the establishment of two crypto exchange platforms was apprehended earlier this month, reportedly on a request from U.S. law enforcement. Russian Founder of Cryptocurrency Exchangers Detained in Holland Denis Dubnikov, co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange platforms Coyote Crypto and Eggchange, has been arrested in Amsterdam, on Nov. 1. A report by crypto news outlet Forklog quoted the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Maria Zakharova, who confirmed the news which spread on social media. The Russian citizen was initially held and placed in an isolation ward at the airport in Mexico City. He was then boarded on a flight to the Netherlands where he was eventually arrested by Dutch authorities, allegedly on a request submitted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the publication detaile...

DeFi can be 100 times larger than today in 5 years

The decentralized finance sector currently represents only 0.1% of its maximum potential, and its significant growth is inevitable. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a natural product made possible by blockchain technology and has the right and ready infrastructure to propel the technology to a bigger playing field. The space has grown by leaps and bounds since the Ethereum network went live in July 2015, with Ethereum network transactions growing by 33x to 1.2 million per day currently, and blockchain transactions would exceed millions per day if other chains were included. Most of these transactions originated from the DeFi services such as Uniswap, which facilitates over $1 billion swaps each day, as well as lending and borrowing protocols such as Aave, Compound and BondAppetit, with tens of billions in market size. While these are large numbers by any standard, it is only a decimal point of the trillion-dollar traditional finance (TradFi) industry. DeFi is only scratching the s...

Litentry Crowdloan Allocates 20% LIT Total Supply and Partners With Binance With Extra $2.5M Reward Pool

PRESS RELEASE. Litentry, a decentralized identity aggregation protocol, has revealed the launch of its Crowdloan Reward Program scheduled to go live from November 4, 2021. This represents a significant development in its quest to win a slot ahead of the upcoming Polkadot parachain auction. Join the crowdloan on Binance now to enjoy 20% LIT (20,000,000 LIT) total supply with an extra $2.5M reward pool, with approx. 2760% APY as of Nov 4. An Innovative Crowdloan program Crowdloan is a growing trend taken by projects to receive enough funding to participate in Polkadot’s parachain auction. Participants contribute by staking DOT into a crowdloan vault stored on the blockchain for a designated period. Compared to other projects, Litentry has designed an innovative crowdloan system that incentivizes contributors. To this effect, Litentry has allocated 20,000,000 LIT tokens representing 20% of its token supply as basic rewards for the crowdloan campaign. Interested participants have ...

Reddit to reportedly tokenize karma points and onboard 500M new users

Reddit engineer, Rahul, highlights the social media platform's efforts to improve user interaction through various cryptocurrency initiatives. American social media giant, Reddit, may soon convert users’ karma points into Ethereum-based (ERC-20) tokens and onboard 500 million new crypto users in the process, according to a newly hired Reddit engineer. A series of tweets made by Reddit engineer, Rahul, highlights Reddit’s efforts to improve user interaction through various cryptocurrency initiatives. As Cointelegraph reported in July 2021, the platform had launched its own layer-2 rollup using Arbitrum technology for its rewards points , named Community Points. According to the website: “Your Community Points exist on the blockchain, independently of Reddit, where they can only be controlled by you (just like Bitcoin ( BTC ) !).” How will we pull this off? Reddit has partnered with @OffchainLabs ( @arbitrum ) and created our own separate instance. Community points for 2...

Digital Asset Manager Bakkt Reveals Plans to Provide Ethereum Services

On November 5, Bakkt Holdings announced that the firm will soon let customers buy, sell, and store ethereum after offering bitcoin only since the company’s launch. The firm notes that adding ethereum comes at a time when digital currency interest and adoption continue to see significant growth. Bakkt Announces Ethereum Support Bakkt ( NYSE: BKKT ) has announced the company will “soon” offer ethereum (ETH) in addition to offering bitcoin (BTC) . The digital asset manager listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), as a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), started offering its products three years ago in August 2018. Bakkt explained on Friday that customers and the firm’s partners will soon have the ability to buy, sell, and hold ether. Adding ethereum follows the company’s recent partnership with Google “to introduce digital assets to millions of consumers.” Furthermore, the firm went public in mid-October after completing a merger with a firm called VPC Impact Acqui...

Nigerian Experts Insist Africa’s First CBDC Is Presently Not for the Unbanked

While the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) continues to tout the e-naira’s credentials as a tool for fostering financial inclusion, some experts agree that this central bank digital currency (CBDC) is presently not doing this. The CBDC’s Chaotic Start This assertion as well as the e-naira app’s brief removal from Google Play Store appears to lend credence to claims the CBN may have rushed to launch what is in fact Africa’s first CBDC. Although a report by the Punch newspaper suggests that the CBN is now working towards the release of a version of the e-naira app for the unbanked, it still does not state when this is likely to be available. It is this apparent by the CBN that has left players in Nigeria’s blockchain industry questioning the central bank’s ability to manage this CBDC. As one crypto expert quoted by Cryptoassetbuyer explains, this failure by the CBN to roll out a digital currency that is accessible to all Nigerians means the central bank is unlikely to achieve its mai...

An inside look at the moral and technical considerations of crypto social media

Beyond mere decentralization, there are four key themes central to the idea of crypto social development in the new era of Web 3.0. Following Vitalik Buterin’s call for more social application use cases on Ethereum earlier this summer, multiple crypto companies voiced intentions to build decentralized versions of mainstream social networks like Twitter. However, to create and view crypto-centered social platforms as merely decentralized versions of Twitter is shortsighted. The moral and technical implications of creating truly decentralized social networks that abide by Web 3.0 principles extend far beyond what the idea of “decentralized Twitter” currently encompasses.  Beyond mere decentralization, there are four key themes central to the idea of crypto social development: private communication and censorship resistance, moderation, decentralized governance, and secure and decentralized money. Private communication and censorship resistance Privacy is a human right, yet thi...

Mythical Games Raises $150 Million in Series C Funding Round Led by A16z

Mythical Games, a blockchain-based gaming company, has raised $150 million in its series C funding round. The round was led by A16z, who is aggressively investing in these kinds of crypto initiatives. It also had the participation of other companies like D1 Capital, Redbird Capital, The Raine Group, as well as from well known cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and FTX. Mythical Games Gets Unicorn Status in Latest Funding Round Mythical Games, a blockchain gaming company, raised $150 million in its latest funding round, which was led by VC company A16z. Other backers included D1 Capital, Redbird Capital, and The Raine Group. From the cryptocurrency exchange side, the funding round attracted the attention of Binance and FTX as well. This series C put Mythical games over the level of a unicorn company, reaching a valuation of $1.25 billion. The rise of Mythical and other similar gaming initiatives signals the interest and validity that the market has given these new technologies. ...