Crypto
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Cynthia Lummis’ crypto bill won’t address NFTs or environmental concerns
Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis has said the bill she’s preparing intends to regulate cryptocurrencies in the same categories as traditional assets She said NFTs are hard to categorise, hence will not be covered in the coming bill Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis has revealed more details about the planned pro-crypto regulatory framework that she is expected to table in collaboration with New York Democrat Senator Kristin Gillibrand. Speaking to Axios in an interview published earlier this week, the US senator explained that the coming bill would regulate from an angle such that digital assets fall under the same categories in which traditional assets are regulated. Lummis explained that the bill would see the regulatory ‘wand’ split and shared between the Commodity Futures Trading Comm...
Ice Cube backs DOGE and an ‘incredible and historical’ transaction
Iconic rapper Ice Cube — also known as O’Shea Jackson Sr. — has jumped on the Dogecoin (DOGE) bandwagon with his endorsement of an “incredible and historical” DOGE transaction. Cube’s entry into the wild world of Dogecoin is related to the BIG3 basketball league that he co-founded. The organization predominantly features former NBA stars in a three-on-three format as opposed to the regular five-on-five basketball games. Last month, the BIG3 launched a new ownership model for the league, which consists of selling tokenized stakes in each of the 12 teams. There are 1000 nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in total allocated to each team, with 25 “Fire” NFTs worth $25,000 a pop and 975 “Gold” NFTs at $5,000 each. On Wednesday, MyDoge wallet co-founder Bill Lee tweeted at Ice Cube saying “if ya dig DOGE...
Argentina’s central bank steps in to block new crypto offerings from banks
The central bank of Argentina (BCRA) has put the kibosh on financial institutions offering crypto trading only days after two of the country’s largest banks signaled they were opening up to digital assets. On Thursday, the BCRA said the move was to mitigate the risks crypto poses to users and “to the financial system as a whole,” citing crypto’s high volatility, use in money laundering and absence of regulatory safeguards. The news came hot on the heels of an announcement on Monday from two of the country’s largest banks, Banco Galicia and Brubank, that they would allow their customers to purchase Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), USD Coin (USDC) and Ripple (XRP). The decision to open crypto trading was decided by a poll conducted by Banco Galicia, where 60% of respondents said they wanted easie...
NFT collectors sent $37B to marketplaces in 2022, nearly equaling 2021 already
Collectors of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have already sent more than $37 billion in value to NFT marketplaces this year as of Sunday, a figure that nearly exceeds the total amount in all of 2021. According to a report from Chainalysis, investors sent $40 billion worth of cryptocurrency to smart contracts associated with NFT collections and marketplaces throughout 2021. Source: Chainalysis Since the beginning of last year, NFT transaction volume has grown considerably, but the overall growth of the industry has been inconsistent. The report outlines that NFT transaction volume occurs sporadically and has been in a downturn since mid-February. The NFT market has since made a brief recovery as of mid-April — most likely due to the recent hype around Moonbirds and the Bored Ape Yacht Club...
‘Someone is blowing up’ — Bitcoin sees 2022 volume record amid hopes capitulation is over
Bitcoin (BTC) dipping below $36,000 “smells like capitulation,” one trader says as suspicion mounts over United States stock markets. In a tweet on May 6, Cointelegraph contributor Michaël van de Poppe suggested that the BTC price was at least giving “serious signals.” Analyst: Stocks saw “forced liquidation” After plunging to 10-week lows in line with equities on the May 5 Wall Street trading session, Bitcoin bounced at levels last seen in February. The downturn in both crypto and stocks, which followed an initial bounce the day prior on the back of expected rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, appeared to be more than traders bargained for. The S&P 500 finished the day down 3.5%, while the Nasdaq 100 ended down 5%. Outside stocks, U.S. 10-year Treasury futures shed 1%, a rare comb...
Tumbleweeds blow through Coinbase NFT on its first day: Just $75K in volume
Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges by volume, opened its beta non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace to the public on May 4 with on-chain data showing a maximum of 150 total transactions on the day and $75,000 in USD volume. The transactions captured by Dune Analytics show the total amount which took place through the 0x Protocol, the infrastructure behind Coinbase’s marketplace. Whilst not all transactions are guaranteed to be from Coinbase, since 0x announced its support for NFTs in January it has yet to announce any other partners apart from Coinbase. Number of market transactions on the 0x Protocol. Dune Analytics. The number pales into insignificance compared to expectations arising from the marketplace’s waitlist. More than 8.4 million email addresses signed up for the...
Court orders BitMEX founders to pay $30M civil penalty
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has ordered a total of $30 million civil monetary penalties from the three co-founders of BitMEX crypto derivatives exchange, including former CEO Arthur Hayes. Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed were each fined $10 million in consent payments according to a statement from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) at the conclusion of a court battle on May 5 in which the CFTC said they violated aspects of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations from November 2014 to October 2020. CFTC: Bitmex Co-Founders Ordered to Pay $10 Million Each — db (@tier10k) May 5, 2022 The CFTC filed suit against the exchange and its three co-founders on Oct. 1, 2020. In a rundown of the conclusion of the case today, the Commission st...
‘Decentralized Twitter’ Bluesky releases code, outlines content moderation
Twitter’s decentralized social media project Bluesky has released its first batch of code, and also committed to content moderation on the network. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey first announced Bluesky back in late 2019, but the project went independent in February after receiving $13 million worth of funding from Twitter. However, Dorsey is still a member of the board. Bluesky released its “Authenticated Data eXperiment” (ADX) protocol code via a May 5 blog post titled “Working in Public.” The team noted that it will be publicly sharing the process of developing the platform by “releasing work before it’s complete, but also giving ourselves time to workshop new directions at early stages.” Today we’re open-sourcing the Authenticated Data eXperiment (ADX) to begin working in public....
Hop Protocol reveals details of Hop DAO and Optimism-style airdrop
Hop Protocol, a cross-chain bridge designed to facilitate the quick transfer of tokens between different Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solutions, has unveiled a new governance model alongside an airdrop that will see early users receive 8% of the total supply of soon-to-be-released HOP tokens. Similar to Optimism, which recently unveiled a new governance structure that will see early users airdropped 5% of the total supply of the OP token — Hop Protocol is aiming to create a community-oriented governance model, called Hop DAO, that seeks to aid Layer-2 scalability. An official date for the airdrop is yet to be announced. repost: There will be an initial supply of 1b $HOP tokens: • 8% airdropped to early users• 60.5% to the Hop treasury• 22.45% to the initial development team (3 yr vesting, 1 ye...
Crypto.com community in uproar over slashed rewards
About time there was a bit of controversy in the cryptocurrency world, huh? Crypto.com, the industry behemoth that boasts over ten million users and four thousand employees, has found itself at the centre of a storm of criticism this week, as it decided to slash the rewards on its popular VISA cards. The blog post dropped Sunday evening and immediately caused uproar. What is Happening? Card rewards were cut down pretty drastically. Lower tiered users (Midnight Blue and Ruby Steel) get 0%, while the next ones up recoup only 0.5%. Even the top tier (Obsidian) were cut to just 2%. There will also be a monthly cap on awards to lower tiers at $25 to $50. Oh, it gets worse. Staking awards were also reigned in. Once the 180-day period for all those who staked before the announcement ...
Here’s why blue-chip NFT prices continue to soar nearly a week after the Otherside mint
In May 2021, OpenSea closed out nearly $140 million in total volume. Fast forward a year and the most dominant nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace closed over $880 million in less than a week partially because of the Yuga Labs’ The Otherside mint. As a result of this mint, a fresh surge of liquidity was injected into the NFT ecosystem and as it stands the current NFT total market capitalization is over $19.4 billion. NFT market capitalization and volume. Source: NFTgo For the past two weeks, most of the market had seen little action, but this changed after the Otherside mint closed over $317 million in just three hours. These widely unique, randomly sorted parcels of land have amassed over 194,000 Ether (ETH) ($536,137,000) and to the surprise of many, Yuga Labs...
Bitcoin price hits 10-week lows as $40K spike becomes ‘nasty bull trap’
Bitcoin (BTC) hit its lowest level in over two months later on May 5 as Wall Street trading saw volatility return with a bang. BTC/USD 1-day candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView DXY celebrates as stocks, crypto tumble Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView painted an unsettling picture for hodlers as BTC/USD fell to $36,520 on Bitstamp. Capping losses, which totaled 8.3% at one point, Bitcoin only bounced at a price last seen on Feb. 24 this year. As Cointelegraph reported, the performance had come in tandem with mayhem in U.S. markets as equities gave up previous gains to flip bearish on the economic outlook. The Federal Reserve’s “priced in” rate hikes thus appeared to have been something of a red herring. “BTC breaks below 37K after a na...
