The crypto bull run of 2017 turned a lot of heads in both the crypto and mainstream financial markets. However, the scale of the bull run also opened the doors for many who sought to take undue advantage of the state of the market. At the peak of the bull run and for months after,...Read More
Prominent U.S-based cryptocurrency exchange, Kraken, revealed on 7 January that it received maximum law enforcement requests in 2019. The exchange reported a rise of 49% since 2018, a figure that accounted for 710 requests in 2019, as compared to 475 over the previous year. Kraken, in a tweet thread, included a snapshot from its 2019...Read More
The International Monetary Fund’s Gita Gopinath has joined the list of financial personalities that have opined on digital currencies, via an article written for the Financial Times. The article titled ‘Digital currencies will not displace the dominant dollar’ expanded on the flurry of activity spurred by social media giant Facebook’s announcement of its plans to...Read More
Blockstream’s Marketing Director, Neil Woodfine, recently took to Twitter to address the question of “What happens when the Internet gets switched off?” Woodfine chose to respond to this question since “a surprising number of great engineers have been thinking about how to keep Bitcoin running in offline environments.” In his Twitter thread, Woodfine also outlined...Read More
Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, recently issued a statement regarding the addition of support for Polish Zloty and Swedish Krona fiat gateways on the platform. According to the announcement, Binance users will now be able to bind their Visa cards to purchase BTC, ETH, BNB, and XRP using Zlote (PLN) and Kronor (SEK). Binance’s announcement clarified...Read More
Just hours after the MATIC token dropped by 70% on 10 December, the cryptocurrency community on Twitter was abuzz with accusations of market manipulation and exit scams. Matic’s most recent attempt to calm down unhappy investors and skeptics came in the form of a blog post titled, “Matic Outreach Program: Clarifying the Recent Situation.” The...Read More
Bitwala, the Berlin-based Bitcoin wallet, has announced its latest step forward in the world of cryptos by adding support for the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum [ETH]. Being the only banking service for cryptocurrencies in Europe, Bitwala will allow users to trade Ethereum in 31 European countries with individual private keys, the wallet revealed in an...Read More
The future of digital assets in India may remain uncertain for a long period of time. However, the implementation of blockchain continues to grow at a rapid pace in the country. According to a report by the Economic Times, Kerala may soon be on its way to becoming the first Indian state to successfully introduce...Read More
Bitcoin began its 2020 journey with a 3.16% pump that pushed its price from $7,233.87 to $7,495, with its market cap at $132.62 billion. With Bitcoin’s halving scheduled for May 2020, there have been many predicting that Bitcoin will avenge its fall as the price rallies. However, irrespective of whether the BTC halving is priced-in...Read More
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has always set a precedent for all the other cryptocurrencies in the market. The king coin recently celebrated its 11-year anniversary, marking a successful eleven years of existence. Over the past decade, the cryptocurrency has recorded several milestones in terms of price, adoption, and technical advancements. The cryptocurrency grabbed the...Read More
From taking over the entire market at the beginning of 2019 with its Lightning Torch to amassing support from various exchanges and wallets, Bitcoin‘s Lightning Network stood out in the market this last year. The latest platform to announce support for the second-layer payment protocol was River Financial, a financial firm based in San Fransico....Read More
Cryptocurrency analyst, Christian Ott, recently published an article on his blog regarding statistics of transactions and assets on Binance Chain, the blockchain developed by cryptocurrency exchange giant, Binance. In his analysis, Ott found that the number of transactions on the chain grew from 3.2 million in Q2 of 2019 to 20.7 million in the following...Read More
Ethereum’s latest hard fork, Muir glacier, has successfully decreased the block time by nearly 25%. The hard fork was mainly scheduled to decrease the mining difficulty or the “difficulty bomb,” enabling the production of more blocks in lesser time, while also helping resolve the scaling problem of Ethereum. As per data provided by Etherscan, the...Read More
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and Liquid Network have been making headlines for quite a while now. The latter being a sidechain-based settlement network and the former being a second-layer payment protocol, both have grabbed the attention of several exchanges in the cryptocurrency market. Both subjects were recently touched upon by Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex and...Read More
The decentralized public blockchain and cryptocurrency project, Cardano’s roadmap for the year 2019 was quite fulfiling. The ecosystem made numerous implementations and upgrades last year, the latest one being the much-talked-about – ‘incentivized testnet.’ Talking about the success of this phase of Cardano’s Shelley era, one which essentially marks the very first steps towards the...Read More
One of China‘s biggest tech giants, Baidu, made headlines a few years ago after it launched the supposedly energy-efficient Baidu Superchain blockchain protocol. It is in the news again after Super Chain officially launched an open network on 6 January 2020. The network has been launched with the intention to empower SMEs and developers. A...Read More
Since 10 December, Bitcoin had been struggling to make gains, mostly moving between $7100 and $7500 and dipping as low as $6400 in the middle. Bitcoiners rejoiced today after the original cryptocurrency managed to break above the $7500 mark, possibly signaling a movement to greener pastures. Bitcoin 1-day chart Source: BTC/USD on TradingView The daily...Read More
Tether, by far, has been the most controversial stablecoin in the market, with the coin consistently in the news for not being 100 percent backed, something that drew the attention of the New York Attorney General’s office. The coin, which was one of the hottest topics in the crypto-ecosystem, was recently discussed by Paolo Ardoino,...Read More
Another country has joined the league of nations actively regulating cryptocurrencies. The Capital Markets Board [CMB], Turkey’s regulatory body, has announced its plans to establish a regulatory framework for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by the end of 2020, reported a Turkish newspaper, Hürriyet. Even though the regulatory body has refrained from divulging any further information...Read More
There has been a lot of deliberation about publicly traded Bitcoin exchange-traded funds [ETF] recently. So far, this investment fund has not received positive feedback from the United States’ Securities & Exchange Commission [SEC], which is why the ETF remains an uncertainty for the future. In fact, the Winklevoss twins’ Bitcoin ETF proposal was one...Read More
What makes Bitcoin, “BITCOIN?” From eye-catching rallies to deep dives, from the infamous Silk Road debacle to mainstream recognition, Bitcoin has been through it all. In fact, what’s attractive about the cryptocurrency and the market it represents is that the price pulls do not always happen as predicted. It is this inherently volatile nature that...Read More
Bitcoin’s performance since the start of 2020 has been positive. With the first week almost coming to an end, the price of the world’s largest crypto-asset is hovering near $7,500. In other news, Bitcoin’s Futures market saw an important development over the last week – BitMEX, the long-standing king in the Bitcoin perpetual and Futures...Read More
Jihan Wu, former CEO and Co-founder of Beijing-based mining chip manufacturing giant, Bitmain Technologies, has reportedly opposed the layoffs of a significant portion of the working staff at the firm. In an open letter to all Bitmain employees, the ousted exec’s Weibo post dated 6 January, read, “To all employees of Bitmain: I am firmly opposed...Read More
On 6 January, Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin led a discussion on the Ethereum Research forum, a discussion where he outlined a model for scalable data chains without committees through fraud-proof-free data availability proofs. According to Buterin, fraud-proof-free data availability checking schemes preserve more of the properties of a traditional non-sharded blockchain. “If a block is...Read More
China will soon be unveiling its state-backed cryptocurrency and it has left no stones unturned in publicizing it. However, looking at the few nations embracing blockchain and cryptocurrencies, the South Korean Presidential Office’s 4th Industrial Revolution Commission has now endorsed pro-crypto sentiment, according to a local media report. The Presidential Commission suggested that the government...Read More
According to a report, Qatar’s financial watchdog, the Qatar Financial Centre [QFC] Regulatory Authority, has prohibited trading in cryptocurrencies, adding that the ban has been imposed on “anything of value that acts as a substitute for currency, that can be digitally traded or transferred and can be used for payment or investment purposes.” The aforementioned...Read More
Bitcoin‘s huge energy costs have been worrying many in the crypto-community, especially in light of the fact that many outside the community have directed hate against the industry with headlines like “Bitcoin is an environmental disaster,” “Bitcoin is killing the planet,” and “Bitcoin mining on track to consume all the world’s energy by 2020.” However,...Read More
One of the main events lined up for Bitcoin this year is the block reward halving which is set to occur in the month of May. Keeping this in mind, several influencers and traders have opined on whether or not there would be an upward push in Bitcoin’s price. Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin, also...Read More
Michael Arrington, partner at Arrington XRP Capital, made waves in the cryptocurrency community after he penned an article titled, “It Will Take Years for Smart People to Understand Cryptocurrencies.” Comparing the current state of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to the early days of the Internet, Arrington addressed how fiat money facilitates war and is used by...Read More
The developer of the privacy-focused Grin coin and MimbleWimble [MW] protocol, under the pseudonym Yeastplume, has announced the release of Grin and Grin Wallet 3.0.0. The official announcement posted on the Grin Forum by the dev revealed that Grin and Grin wallet 3.0.0 are ready for use in advance of the upcoming hard fork which...Read More
