Crypto

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, is reportedly in talks with Indonesia’s richest family, the Hartonos, to open a crypto exchange.  As per a report published in Bloomberg, Binance Holdings Ltd. is looking to finalize a crypto venture with billionaire siblings Budi and Michael Hartonos-controlled PT Bank Central Asia (BCA), and Indonesia’s largest state-owned telecom firm PT Telkom Indonesia.  The report also claimed that the BCA may enter into the partnership using a separate business entity and the terms of the partnership could vary at the time of finalization. If finalized, it would be the second crypto venture for Binance in Indonesia. The first came in the form of a partnership with crypto trading platform Tokocrypto. A new crypto venture involv...

After the Chinese authorities introduced a complete ban on cryptocurrency transactions in September by equating them to illegal financial activity, local cryptocurrency miners either dropped off the radar or moved to other countries in order to continue with their business. The United States subsequently became the leader in terms of Bitcoin (BTC) mining volumes with a share of 35.4%. Modest Kazakhstan is currently in second place (18.1%), and the bronze spot was secured by Russia (11.23%). It’s not surprising because Russia has several advantages, meaning that conducting crypto business in the country is extremely lucrative for almost any miner. There is cheap electricity and, at least for now, friendly legislative regulation. According to analysts in spring 2021, the price of electricity...

Bitcoin (BTC) recovered above $48,000 on Dec. 10 after another fall took BTC/USD to lows of $47,350 overnight. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView Taper tantrums Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed the pair orbiting $48,300 at the time of writing as markets braced for November’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) readout. As Cointelegraph reported, economists tip this month’s year-on-year inflation data to beat October at 6.7%. While last month’s shock CPI news fuelled an uptick across Bitcoin and crypto assets, caution among analysts prevailed ahead of Friday’s figures. “At this point I think the CPI data is moot. Markets have priced it in unless it’s to the extreme end,” popular trader Pentoshi argued on Twitter. He added that the “real” potent...

An Amazon Web Service (AWS) outage on Dec. 7 forced the decentralized exchange dYdX to halt operations, raising questions over the reliance on centralized services by DeFi protocols.  AWS is one of the most widely used cloud services in the world and a considerable amount of decentralized infrastructure uses it. AWS offers servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security for websites. dYdX issued an update via Twitter on Dec. 8 acknowledging that its reliance on a centralized web service like AWS is problematic. It pledged to improve the true decentralization of its operations, but did not state how. “Unfortunately, there are still some parts of the exchange that rely on centralized services (AWS in this case). We are deeply committed to fully de...

This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations.   Bad news for Evergrande Even after all the regulatory crackdowns, China isn’t letting 2021 slip away without a few more blows to the crypto markets. On December 9, the news revealed that massive real estate developer Evergrande had defaulted on its interest payments, and was thus subject to a credit rating downgrade. Subsequently, crypto markets dipped significantly, which will be worrying to investors who are already mumbling about jobless rates and new COVID variants. On the bright side, if the situation with Evergrande goes from bad to worse, f...

Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Ripple Chris Larsen has unveiled his plan for Bitcoin miners to move away from Proof of Work (PoW), saying they should view it as “a net positive for their longevity.” He argues it could provide a major boost to the share prices of listed mining firms “as any new code proposal would almost certainly have to include lucrative incentives to gain their support.” PoW is the consensus algorithm that secures Bitcoin (BTC) transactions on the blockchain. While the Bitcoin network is the most secure and reliable, the amount of energy BTC mining requires causes endless debate in the crypto space. In a Nov. 10 blog post Larsen wrote: “The emerging solution among climate experts is that Bitcoin’s code needs to be changed to a low energy consensus algorithm like th...

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has released a report examining the extensive ties between the far right and Bitcoin, many of whom built fortunes in the cryptocurrency. In a Dec. 9 Hatewatch report, the SPLC shared its findings on how right wing extremists and white supremacists, discuss and use cryptocurrencies claiming that many have amassed “tens of millions of dollars” from crypto donations. The report How Cryptocurrency Revolutionized the White Supremacist Movement  identified and compiled over 600 cryptocurrency addresses associated with white supremacists and other prominent far-right extremists” to reach its conclusions. One of the main claims it makes is that although less than one quarter of Americans own cryptocurrency: “Hatewatch struggled to find any prominen...

The Stacks ecosystem is a collection of independent entities, developers and community members working to build a user-owned internet on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. Stacks’ STX cryptocurrency was distributed to the general public through the first-ever Securities and Exchange Commission-qualified token offering in the United States. Mitchell Cuevas, head of growth for the Stacks Foundation, held an exclusive ask-me-anything, or AMA, session with Cointelegraph Markets Pro users on Dec. 2. During the session, he discussed the Stacks blockchain’s technological capabilities, future growth and major developments. Cointelegraph Markets Pro User: PoW [proof-of-work] blockchains are known to be the most secure. Does Stacks PoX [proof-of-transfer] match BTC security or are there other v...

Last month, Cointelegraph interviewed Reserve CEO Nevin Freeman and the payment decentralized application’s community manager Yens Michiels about the company’s mission to provide access to stable currencies. More recently, Cointelegraph spoke to a couple of users based out of Venezuela and Colombia who shared their positive experiences with Reserve.  Reserve is a tool to exchange fiat currency like Venezuelan bolivares for U.S. dollars via the Reserve (RSV) stablecoin. From everyday purchases to family remittances, Reserve has said that its use cases are increasingly growing in Latin America. After one year on the market in Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Argentina, there are over 100,000 weekly app visitors and more than 8,000 merchants accepting it as a means of payment. Sasha Antun...

New York-based asset manager WisdomTree has amended its filing for a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund with the Securities and Exchange Commission to name U.S. Bank as its custodian.  In a Wednesday filing, WisdomTree listed U.S. Bank National Association as the custodian for shares of its Bitcoin (BTC) trust. The filing is an amendment to its March 11 registration for a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, or ETF, submitted to the SEC prior to U.S. Bank offering crypto custody services for institutional investors. On Dec. 2, the SEC rejected a proposed rule change from the Cboe BZX Exchange to list and trade shares of WisdomTree’s Bitcoin Trust. It’s unclear if the recent amendment is aimed at resetting the clock on a new spot Bitcoin ETF application, given WisdomTree waited 265 days betwee...

Most traders have noticed that Ether (ETH) price has seriously outperformed Bitcoin (BTC) for months now and the ETH/BTC ratio has rallied more than 230% in 2021 and recently hit a new high at 0.089 BTC on Dec. 9.  ETH/BTC pair at Coinbase. Source: TradingView To put things in perspective, Ether’s $490 billion market capitalization currently represents 54% of Bitcoin’s $903 billion. This ratio finished 2020 at a mere 15%, so it is safe to conclude that some ‘flippening’ has occurred. It might still be far from what Ethereum-maximalists imagined, but it is still quite a respectable run. Instead of analyzing the rationale for the move or, even worse, predicting the outcome based on some loose expectations, analysts should explore the market structure of each coin...