While the United States’ regulations surrounding blockchain technology or cryptocurrencies need clarity, other countries like China, Russia as well as Venezuela seem to be making headway. Recently, the Governor of Russia’s Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina revealed that the country had been exploring the prospects of digital currencies and is even considering launching one that is...Read More
Huobi, one of the major cryptocurrency exchanges in the industry, launched a fiat getaway in Indonesia to enable fiat-to-crypto trading between the Indonesian Rupiah (IDR) and Tether (USDT) on December 27. Being one of the largest economies in Southeast Asia, local investors will now be able to use local fiat currency and trade over 250...Read More
Maker Foundation’s Interim Governance Facilitator, which is responsible for maintaining the ecosystem supporting the governance process, announced placing an “executive vote” for the community to approve a change in the protocol. According to its official blog, the alteration proposed in the Maker protocol in terms of debt ceiling adjustment was: Lower the Sai Debt Ceiling...Read More
Cryptocurrencies introduced a whole new financial industry but a string of debates trailed immediately behind it. A major discussion that is hotly contested across various assets is whether an asset can be categorized as security or not. ICOs created a major issue in 2018 when over $11 billion were raised from crypto projects, as the policymakers...Read More
Facebook‘s Libra has been in a tough spot since its inception. Though conceptualization was way back in July 2018, David Marcus and his team have faced constant pushbacks from policymakers and regulators across the globe. Speaking to Reuters, Patrik Ellis, one of the board members of Libra Association had stated, “At this stage, there is...Read More
Fake volumes became a hot topic in 2019. It all started with the Bitwise Asset Management report that was released earlier this year. The report stated that nearly 95% of Bitcoin trading volume reported by CoinMarketCap, a popular go-to website for crypto data, was fake. According to the report, CoinMarketCap reported roughly $6 billion per...Read More
Recently, on the Bitcoin & Co. podcast, host Anita Posch spoke to the co-founders of Braiins, who operate the world’s first Bitcoin mining pool, Slush Pool. During the interview, Jan Capek and Pavel Moravec spoke about the Bitcoin mining protocol, its flaws and ways to address them. As part of upgrades to their Braiins OS,...Read More
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have become immensely popular and this has cast a spotlight on the underlying decentralized ledger technology – blockchain. Blockchain tech has taken the world by storm and its landscape has been evolving at a rapid pace. This technology has been both attractive and critical for ensuring enhanced security and as well as...Read More
It’s either black or white with Bitcoin: While In India, China, and Russia, the largest digital asset is still identified as an illegal form of currency, the same asset has been recognized as a beacon of hope for certain nations based in South America. Over the past few years, the likes of Venezuela, Columbia, and...Read More
Crypto derivatives exploded in the 2019 market as the cryptocurrency market entered a phase of maturity. In the relatively nascent space, the increasing availability of cryptocurrency derivative products has been one of the main attractions for institutional traders and investors. With platforms entering the crypto-derivatives markets on the rise, Co-founder of CoinGecko, Bobby Ong believes...Read More
The cryptocurrency world that we all love, adore and hate has come a long way from being used by cypherpunks; the regulation and adoption rate has increased exponentially in the last decade and will continue to do so. In addition to the above, we have parried our way from Bitcoin’s boom and bust cycles to...Read More
Ten years on since Bitcoin’s inception great minds have flocked into the space. While a few of the cryptocurrencies happened to be forks of the king coin with negligible market cap, others have survived purely because it addressed unique offerings. Along with market capitalization, investor appetite and institutional coverage for cryptocurrencies have increased exponentially. However,...Read More
On the most recent episode of the Bitcoin & Co. podcast, Jan Capek and Pavel Moravec, CEOs and co-founders Braiins, the company operating the world’s first Bitcoin mining pool, Slush Pool, joined host Anita Posch to talk about Bitcoin mining, what it affects and what affects it. When asked about the energy cost of Bitcoin...Read More
YouTube faced criticism after it took down cryptocurrency and blockchain-related videos from its platform further categorizing it as harmful and dangerous content. While this enraged several Crypto YouTubers, they took to Twitter to express their agony and sought response from YouTube. While everyone thought that crypto YouTubers were the only ones that were affected, co-founder...Read More
With China‘s advancement in the digital currency space and state-backed stablecoin, other countries are not particularly laying low in this matter. Russia is another country that has been prominent in the ‘state-backed’ digital currency space, with the sovereign state considering issuing a digital currency backed by gold. Elvira Nabiullina, Governor of Russia’s Central Bank, once...Read More
2019 for the Ethereum Classic was evidently eventful, with the Atlantis hard fork and the testnets for Agharta hard fork rolling out. While the ETC community is ending the year on a good note, the beginning of 2019 was quite contrary to the current scenario. In the second week of January 2019, the Ethereum Classic...Read More
2019 created many regulatory hurdles for crypto-businesses, mainly exchanges. Binance had to temporarily shut shops in the United States to comply with the regulatory norms, and soon launched its Binane U.S. platform to serve the customers in the country. However, Binance became a trendsetter, as many exchanges followed its lead and launched its own exchange...Read More
Be it South African Reserve Bank’s [SARB] calls for solutions providers for the creation of a digital currency that would allow consumers to transact without a bank account or Bitcoin’s interest spiking in the African nations, as cited by the Google Trends data, Africa’s crypto market is thriving. Talking about the latest OKEx Africa Cryptotour,...Read More
DeFi has been all about decentralizing the financial space and has grown multi-folds in 2019. However, the claims of the protocol being open, permissionless, and censorship-resistant have been put to test lately, and according to Mesari’s recent report, “it’s a bit early to trust those sweeping, aspirational claims.” MakerDAO has been leading the growth in...Read More
Every market has it’s defining entities. In the cryptocurrency market, none are more sought after than Binance. Founded in 2017, the exchange traversed the world before settling in the Mediterranean island of Malta, and while 2018 was a year to forget for the market and the exchange, 2019 was a year to BUIDL. Binance structured...Read More
Decentralized Finance or DeFi has evolved into one of the most active sections of the blockchain industry and Ethereum projects have been at the forefront in establishing an ecosystem with global network effects and interoperability. While offering bank-like features with lending and borrowing, payment, derivatives, and others, DeFi applications are built on Ethereum blockchain and...Read More
The Ethereum Classic community has been awaiting the Agharta hard fork that is scheduled for January 2020. The network has been preparing for the hard fork by releasing several Testnets, with the Kotti testnet being the latest one, activated on 14 December at block 1705549. Other Testnets including Morden and Mordor were activated back in...Read More
China has been exhibiting its interest in blockchain technology and with the digital yuan, the country has surely turned heads. Apart from this, China has been dominating the Bitcoin mining space. However, the latest news from the country shows the ugly side of the same. Recently, Chinese authorities have reportedly seized about 7,000 cryptocurrency mining...Read More
After losing its footing the previous week, most major cryptos tumbled and were trying to recover. While most crypto assets are down over the past week, bitcoin managed to gain 5% of its value back, after Tron which noted a 7% recovery. However, other altcoins like Tezos [XTZ], still have a long way to go...Read More
Bitcoin’s market reflected signs of recovery in the past week, after being worn down most of December. Although the BTC market cap was still down week-over-week, its estimated hash rate grew by over 10%. However, the hash rate of altcoins like Ethereum [ETH], Litecoin [LTC], and Bitcoin Cash [BCH] dropped by almost 2.9%, with ETH...Read More
After touching a low of $0.175 on December 18, XRP’s performance over the rest of 2019 seems much more digestible. For the period between January and April, XRP consolidated between $0.30 and $0.32, only to rise to $0.50 by June. The coin has been on a steady decline since then, with only a couple of...Read More
After spending the first half of December above the $140 mark, Ethereum dropped by 18% over the two days since December 16. While the coin has made efforts to rise up to the $134 level since, rejection at the resistance level has been brutal, pushing ETH down to $125 at the time of writing. Ethereum...Read More
The cryptocurrency market in 2019 underwent a rough journey, with major cryptos riding the tides one moment, and collapsing the other. Bitcoin, that noted triple digits YTD returns until earlier this year, remained profitable with 86% yield, at press time, to the investors. The price of the coin peaked in 2019 at $13,880 on 26...Read More
Despite Litecoin dropping by 16% in a little over a day on December 16, it has made considerable headway in crossing above the $40 mark, valued at nearly $43 just two days ago. At the time of writing, LTC’s $40 price-tag is still better than the December low at $35, which was last seen in February...Read More
Looking back at 2019, it is quite evident how Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance paved its way across various sectors and geographies. With global expansion as one of its major goals this year, the Changpeng Zhao-led exchange focused on other developments as well. Throughout the year, the platform ventured into several other countries in order to...Read More
