Crypto

New data suggests that Shiba Inu (SHIB) is the largest ERC-20 token holding amongst the top 1,000 Ethereum (ETH) whales. According to data compiled by WhaleStats looking at the Ethereum-based token holdings of the largest ETH wallets, SHIB represents 21.68% of the combined market share at $2.35 billion. The next highest asset in terms of holdings is Crypto.com’s native token CRO, representing 5.54% at $603.9 million. #ShibArmy Congrats! The King is coming back! #SHIB flipped #BEST, #OKB and #CRO to become biggest ERC-20 hodling (17.44%) among the top 1000 ETH wallets with total value of $2,371,207,191 Source: https://t.co/jGSeQ3uXfo pic.twitter.com/WVGOpmcYjf — WhaleStats – the top 1000 Ethereum richlist (@WhaleStats) November 17, 2021 According to data from Coingecko, SHIB is curren...

The president of the Central Reserve Bank of Peru Julio Velarde announced that his country will be entering the global race to develop a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). At the Annual Conference of Executives (CADE) with business leaders in Lima on Nov. 16 he said: “I think the payment system we are going to have eight years from now in the world is going to be completely different from the current one… Even the financial system will probably be quite different.” Velarde stated that Peru will partner with the central banks of countries more advanced in their development of CBDCs including India, Singapore, and Hong Kong. A CBDC is a digital form of a country’s fiat currency, issued and controlled by the respective nation’s central bank. “We won’t be the first, because we donR...

As reported by The Globe and Mail, Fidelity Clearing Canada received approval from the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada on Wednesday to launch a Bitcoin (BTC) trading and custody platform. It is designed for use by institutional investors — such as pension funds, portfolio managers and mutual funds — and would be a first-of-a-kind service in the country. The firm also plans to cater to retail investors with its regulatory filing for a Bitcoin exchange-traded funded and mutual fund, which was submitted earlier this week. As of September, Fidelity has over $4.2 trillion in assets under management around the world. In addition, exchange-traded cryptocurrency products are rapidly gaining traction, with more than 40 such instruments awaiting approval in the United States al...

Bitcoin (BTC) bulls were euphoric when the price soared to $69,000 on Nov. 10 because the 14.5% gain accumulated over five days meant they were in for a $715 million profit on Nov. 12’s options expiry. However, the 9% negative price move on Nov. 16 caught bulls by surprise, especially since most of the call (buy) options for Nov. 19 have been placed at $66,000 or higher. Curiously, that price level has been the exception rather than the norm. Bitcoin/USD price on FTX. Source: TradingView Bears might have been lucky because the two negative events happened in the past few days. On Nov. 12, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission denied VanEck’s spot Bitcoin ETF request. But more important than the rejection, itself, which was largely expected, was the rationale behind the...

Tim Massad, who served as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission until 2017, said the United States is too slow in developing a plan to modernize its payment systems. In a Wednesday hearing of the Joint Economic Committee on the role of digital assets in government, Massad said a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, could be one solution for the United States to improve its existing payments systems, which he referred to as “slow” and “expensive.” In addition, the former CFTC chair said while stablecoins could be used for this purpose, they also presented some of the most urgent challenges for U.S. regulators and pose significant risks. Massad said that people using stablecoins like Tether (USDT) to move funds between exchanges was a good example of why the U.S. payment syste...

There is potential for the use cases of nonfungible token (NFT) technology to expand far beyond the simple tracking of unique images with varying degrees of rareness and analysts project that one NFTs will touch every facet of our lives. Already, developers, artists and corporations are considering the tokenization of all assets and some have already experimented with NFT-based concert tickets and sports passes.  One NFT project that has been gaining traction since September is Opulous (OPUL), a protocol focused on the tokenization of the music industry. The project claims to be angled toward empowering artists to the extent that music rights can be utilized as value-backed assets in decentralized finance (DeFi). Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hit...

Decentralized mortgage lender Bacon Protocol has minted its first seven mortgages as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, offering investors and borrowers new options for accessing the residential mortgage market.  The interest rate for each NFT mortgage ranges from 1.5% to 3.1% on properties in four U.S. states, the company disclosed Wednesday. That’s the interest rate borrowers pay after minting their mortgage through Bacon Protocol. By comparison, the average mortgage rate in the United States ranged from 2.27% to 2.98% for the week ending Nov. 10, according to Freddie Mac. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage peaked at 3.14% on Oct. 28. Mortgage rates in the United States have ticked up recently but remain well below the historic average. Source: Freddie Mac Bacon’s decentralized mortgage plat...

Blockchain infrastructure provider ConsenSys has reached a lofty valuation of $3.2 billion after closing a $200 million funding round, joining over a dozen other crypto-focused companies to reach coveted unicorn status this year alone. The $200 million financing round saw participation from several new investors, including Marshall Wace, Third Point and Think Investments, who contributed alongside existing investors such as Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Spartan Group, Coinbase Ventures, HSBC, DeFiance Capital and Animoca Brands. ConsenSys also announced that Ethereum wallet and browser extension MetaMask has achieved roughly 21 million monthly active users, having more than doubled over the past four months. [embedded content] MetaMask, which was developed by ConsenSys, was recently...

Miami is quickly becoming the crypto capital of the United States. In August of this year, the Magic City was the first state in the U.S. to launch MiamiCoin (MIA), its very own cryptocurrency used for civic engagement. A few months later, Mayor Francis Suarez announced that every Miami resident with a digital wallet will be eligible to receive a Bitcoin dividend.  While such a proposal would make Miami the first city in America to provide a Bitcoin (BTC) yield to its residents, Mayor Suarez told Cointelegraph that the City of Miami does not actually own or hold MiamiCoin, or any cryptocurrency for that matter. According to Suarez, CityCoins is an independent community acting in its own capacity. “CityCoins launched MiamiCoin as a way for citizens to engage more intimately w...

Decentralized exchange, or DEX, and self-custody wallet platform Portal has announced a strategic partnership agreement with layer-two blockchain network Polygon to advance Bitcoin functionality in the decentralized finance, or DeFi, market. Portal currently offers fully decentralized on-chain spot and options trading, as well as peer-to-peer lending and borrowing. This partnership is expected to expand these user capabilities through the enablement of zero-knowledge swap functionalities for wBTC/BTC as well as POS/WBTC to BTC, in addition to Polygon operating a liquidity-supporting node on Portal DEX. Portal’s primary objective is to cultivate a self-governing, anonymous and uncensored ecosystem for Bitcoin on DeFi. The platform’s utilization of Bitcoin’s hash time-...