Crypto

Bitcoin (BTC) has suddenly fallen below $47,000 on Dec. 4, losing nearly 20% in the past 24 hours. This makes this the biggest one-day drop since May 15, when Bitcoin price momentarily came down to nearly $33,000. The market price of BTC fell down 26.4% from week-long support of $57,206 to go down to $42,268 before recovering back to the $45k mark. According to ByBit data, the Bitcoin market experienced $1.3B total liquidations in the past hour, with $735M liquidated in BTC longs on this drop. Chart showing total liquidations for BTC. Source: ByB As a result, Bitcoin’s bear market cancels out the 2-month long bull market since Sept. 29, where BTC soared over 63% to attain an all-time high of $67, 602 by Nov. 08. However, numerous Bitcoin analysts including TechDev point out a similar ...

The Republic of El Salvador has procured 150 Bitcoin (BTC) amid the biggest bear market since Bitcoin attained an all-time high of nearly $68,000 back in the first week of November. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele announced the purchase of 150 BTC as the market price momentarily slipped below $50,000 after losing over 15% in market value. El Salvador just bought the dip! 150 coins at an average USD price of ~$48,670 #Bitcoin — Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) December 4, 2021 While Bukele’s government was able to make the purchase at $48,670 per coin, the bear market temporarily brought down the Bitcoin price to almost $42,000 after falling over 37% from its all-time high. BTC/USD market price. Source: TradingView Bukele also acknowledged missing out on purchasing Bitcoin at its bottom as he ...

Bahamian-based cryptocurrency exchange FTX released a list of principles and proposals to help policymakers build the regulatory framework. The policy recommends the market-structure choices made by several leading crypto exchanges and suggests its implementation across all jurisdictions.  FTX shared the “FTX’ s Key Principles for Market Regulation” blog after Maxine Waters, the chair of the House Committee on Financial Services, invited several CEOs of major crypto firms to testify on the topic of digital assets and the future of finance. Out of the 10 key principles, one of the recommendations calls for an alternative regulatory approach that proposes a unified regulatory regime for spot and derivatives marketplaces. According to the blog: “The regulatory label on a given product or...

On Friday, Norwegian Block Exchange (NBX) announced it would become the first cryptocurrency platform among the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland) to list its shares on the pan-European Euronext stock exchange. NBX was created in 2018 by Bjørn Kjos, who also founded Norwegian Air Shuttle and Bank Norwegian. NBX has eight cryptocurrencies listed and about 20 trading pairs available. The exchange is approved and supervised by the Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway. NBX claims it is the only platform in the Nordic countries that insures clients’ crypto via the $150 million Ledger Vault insurance pool that pays out should a covered event occur. Last December, NBX raised $6.6 million via an equity and sale. It would not be raising any further capital in anticipa...

Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, one of the ranking members of the Senate Banking Committee, has suggested Congress step in with legislation should the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) be unable to provide sufficient guidance on cryptocurrencies. In a Friday announcement from the Senate Banking Committee, Toomey said he was dissatisfied with the answers SEC chair Gary Gensler had provided on the differences between securities and commodities in regards to token projects and stablecoins. The senator questioned some of the SEC’s seeming disparities in enforcement actions between crypto firms and advisory services companies, including Glass Lewis for similar allegations of providing “fraudulent and misleading information.” “For investors to benefit from a fair and competitive marketpl...

Nearly every segment of the crypto sector underwent explosive growth in 2021. The steady inflow of institutional funds could possibly be interpreted as a signal that the best is yet to come. For new users, figuring out how to obtain cryptocurrency can be a tedious task, and the challenge of securing the assets off exchanges is another hurdle some investors find difficult to overcome. Here’s a rundown of some of the most used cryptocurrency soft wallets that support a wide swath of tokens and offer users access to decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFTs), staking opportunities and airdrops. MetaMask MetaMask was originally launched to support the Ethereum blockchain and decentralized applications (DApps) that run on top of it. It is now available as a browser extension and sm...

Cosmos (ATOM) has the potential to record major gains in the upcoming weeks primarily because its longer-timeframe chart is showing a bullish continuation pattern.  Dubbed “bull flag,” the structure appears as the asset trends lower while bouncing between two downward sloping trendlines. However, it eventually breaks out of the range, in the direction of its previous trend, with a profit target at length equal to the size of its previous uptrend which is also known as the flagpole. ATOM/USD weekly price chart featuring Bull Flag setup. Source: TradingView Therefore, in a “perfect” world, if ATOM is to break above the flag’s upper trendline (with a rise in trading volume), it may rise by as much as the flagpole’s height around $35. This sets a price ...

Cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius has reportedly lost over $50 million in the exploit of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol BadgerDAO. As reported by Cointelegraph on Thursday, the attack targeted the protocol on the Ethereum network, reaping an unconfirmed $120 million in assets. According to one Redditor, the biggest alleged victim of the hack was an address that lost 896 Wrapped Bitcoin ($51 million). The address is supposed to be owned by Celsius “since it has interacted with other addresses known to be owned by them.” The address regularly transacts with an address that has a $67 million balance, $40 million of which is Celsius’ eponymous native token CEL. The address is also alleged to be owned by Celsius as it is related to at least one address that is tagged as Celsi...

On Friday, WisdomTree, a financial institution with over $76 billion in assets under management, announced it had created four cryptocurrency indices in the United States and Europe to provide diversified portfolio exposure to investors. The move comes in collaboration with Ritholtz Wealth Management, OnRamp, and Gemini. In the U.S., WisdomTree will launch the RWM WisdomTree Crypto Index. And in Europe, WisdomTree is advancing the WisdomTree Crypto Mega Cap Equal Weight (MEGA), WisdomTree Crypto Market (BLOC), and WisdomTree Crypto Altcoins (WALT) indices. The RWM WisdomTree Crypto Index will focus on crypto assets, layer one networks, layer two protocols, oracle networks, and decentralized finance protocols, among others. But it will have a heavy emphasis on layer one networks, with 64% o...

0x protocol and Celo blockchain have announced a joint partnership to allocate $4.5 million — consisting of $3 million CELO and $1.5 million ZRX — towards the growth of 0x’s ecosystem via its community-centric decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The news follows an agreement penned in mid-November between the two firms to integrate a zero-cost 0x API functionality on the Celo blockchain to enhance the experience of DeFi developers seeking to access multi-chain aggregated decentralized exchange (DEX) liquidity services. Celo is an open-source collective of tech, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) unified to promote greater global access to decentralized applications (dApps) and cryptocurrency payments via its mobile-centric model, while 0x is a decentralized web inf...

Back in August, there were some dire warnings about what the Biden Administration’s proposed infrastructure bill might do to the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector by driving crypto miners out of the United States, crippling America’s leadership role, etc. In response, the crypto industry mobilized a full-court-lobbying press on lawmakers. However, it was too late to excise the troubling digital-asset language, and, in November, the infrastructure bill was signed into law.  The good news is that the infrastructure law won’t take effect until January 2024, which allows lots of time to patch up its shortcomings. The downside is that its worrisome aspects — particularly an expanded definition of who or what is a “broker” and some new digital-asset reporting requirements — haven’t...