Month: December 2020

Alfa-Bank, one of the largest private commercial banks in Russia, is exploring blockchain technology in its services for freelancers. According to a Dec. 1 announcement, Alfa-Bank will use blockchain-based applications to automate services for freelancers and self-employed workers. Based on Waves Enterprise’s blockchain platform, Alfa-Bank’s new service covers the entire process of registration and remuneration for self-employed individuals, including payments settlement, income registration and tax payments. Denis Dodon, director of Alfa-Bank’s research and development center, told Cointelegraph that the new Read more …

After literally years in the making, the genesis block of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain has finally seen the light of day. The repeatedly delayed scalability and security upgrade to the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap confidently took its first breath as planned, at just after 12 pm UTC on Dec. 1. The launch suffered no hiccups and immediately reached the required stake participation rate to finalize the blockchain. Vitalik Buterin joked about how the first block did not include Read more …

The flurry of Yearn.finance (YFI) “mergers” continues with the tightest integration yet with SushiSwap (SUSHI), the decentralized exchange that began its life as a Uniswap fork. Announced by Yearn founder Andre Cronje on Tuesday, the collaboration involves a variety of synergies between the two ecosystems and other projects launched by Cronje. Like with previous integrations, the two teams will merge development resources and integrate their liquidity pools to increase total value locked. Yearn will help in creating an xSushi vault Read more …

The DeFi ecosystem has been growing faster than anyone can keep up with recently. Billions of dollars in digital assets are invested, despite all the problems the current services suffer from. Buggy code, security vulnerabilities and shady anonymous developers are just some of the issues that can make the DeFi space too risky right now. Luckily this is all about to change as xSigma is releasing a new DeFi DEX protocol, in a first entry into the field of a Read more …

SushiSwap’s governance cryptocurrency SUSHI fared better than Bitcoin ahead of the New York opening bell Tuesday. The decentralized finance token surged more than 15 percent during the European session, hitting an intraday high of 1.9471. Traders flocked into the SushiSwap market even as the protocol discovered a serious bug, a vulnerability that eventually led to the draining of about $10,000-15,000 from its fee revenue. Post-Mortem when I wake up, exploiter got around 10-15k so far from the 0.05% fees cut Read more …

Bitcoin (BTC) futures hit $20,000 on Dec. 1 as all-time highs finally began to convert into a new price era for BTC/USD. Data from TradingView showed Chicago Mercantile Exchange Bitcoin futures heading past the historic $20,000 mark during Tuesday trading. BTC price: $20,000 sparks unique volatility At press time, highs of $20,300 had appeared amid characteristic volatility, which saw BTC/USD crash to $19,000 in under ten minutes. BTC/USD 1-minute chart for Dec. 1, 2020. Source: TradingView “Worth noting that a Read more …

Bitcoin (BTC) price has officially reached a new all-time high on Dec. 1 above $19,892 after nearly three years, according to data from Coinbase and Tradingview. BTC/USD weekly chart (Coinbase). Source: Tradingview.com Despite the Thanksgiving crash last week, BTC price has managed to rebound throughout the weekend. BTC then easily passed the $19,000 mark on Monday to reach its all-time high, albeit on a couple of exchanges. There are three key trends that fueled BTC’s rise from sub-$3,600 in March to over Read more …

Crypto asset broker Voyager Digital Ltd reported Monday that revenue for the fiscal first quarter soared 186% to $2 million from $700,000 in the previous quarter, as more users utilized the platform. ● Voyager co-founder and chief executive officer Stephen Ehrlich said the number of people using their brokerage to invest in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) has climbed 20% since September to date. ● According to Voyager’s earnings release, the Canada Stock Exchange (CSE)-listed firm now Read more …

Ethereum is exploding higher as Bitcoin has pushed to new year-to-date highs just shy of $20,000. The price of the leading cryptocurrency currently is $615, slightly below the year-to-date highs but far above where it was just a week ago. Bitcoin and Ethereum’s latest surge higher comes seemingly as a result of institutional buying pressure. Along with many public fund managers on Wall Street announcing their support for cryptocurrencies, analysts have noted a spot bid pushing the market higher. Analysts Read more …

Research outfit Xangle has found that a third of sampled retail investors in the United States felt “deceived” by initial coin offerings, or that the projects had withheld information from them. Notably, Xangle’s survey is small-scale, based on 600 respondents who invested in an ICO sometime between 2017 and October 2020. The majority (44%) of those surveyed were between 25 and 44 years old, with more women represented than men, at 58%.  On this basis, Xangle suggests there is “no Read more …

The South Korean government has officially postponed a new tax regime on cryptocurrency gains until 2022. According to Yonhap on Dec. 1, the planning and finance committee of South Korea’s national assembly passed amendments to the country’s tax laws  wherein a new cryptocurrency tax regime will come into effect in January 2022. On Nov. 25, the legislature suggested delaying the adoption of a cryptocurrency income tax rule to Jan. 1, 2022, instead of October 2021. The decision will provide local crypto Read more …

The current Bitcoin (BTC) bull run could send BTC/USD as high as $590,000, one indicator forecast this week. Curated by on-chain analytics resource Glassnode, the Net Unrealized Profit/Loss (NUPL) index has reached a level that has historically launched the Bitcoin price an order of magnitude higher. Unrealized profit chart hits launchpad level The latest bull signal was noticed and uploaded to social media by the company’s CTO, Rafael Schultze-Kraft, on Nov. 30. At the time, BTC/USD was already making new Read more …