Crypto

United Kingdom-based crypto mining company Argo Blockchain’s plans to build an 800-megawatt data center in West Texas could cost anywhere from $1.5 billion to $2 billion. According to a Friday regulatory filing from Argo, the $2 billion cost estimate for the Helios mining facility built on a 320-acre land plot in Texas was based on “the type of mining machines to be installed in the facility, the mix of owned and hosted machines, the cost of raw materials, labor and power required to construct the facility, the timing of build-out and machine purchase, and other factors.” However, the firm added that this was only an estimate and “future results could differ materially.” Argo broke ground on the 200 MW crypto mining facility based in Dickens County in July, reporting the site will give the...

Price action in the crypto market has not been for the faint of heart over the past 48 hours and it’s clear that volatility following Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether’s (ETH) breakouts brought new all-time highs.  While the top two cryptocurrencies fight to hold key support levels, the altcoin market has seen a handful of tokens post double-digit gains on Nov. 5 and Cointelegraph Markets Pro’s altseason indicator suggests the current market conditions line up with previous altseason price moves. Top 7 coins with the highest 24-hour price change. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the biggest gainers over the past 24 hours were XYO Network (XYO), Crypto.com Coin (CRO) and Wrapped NXM (WNXM). XYO lists on Crypto.com The XYO...

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link. Top Stories This Week ‘Uptober’ closes at record high in best month of 2021 — 5 things to watch in Bitcoin this week After Bitcoin’s (BTC) first-ever monthly close above $60,000 for October and a new all-time high (ATH), the bulls are reading the tea leaves to see what November will bring. Plan B — who has been pretty bang on the money in recent months — has forecasted a November close of $98,000 per BTC.  Something that may suggest the asset is on the up this month is that a strong number of holders weren’t tempted to sell de...

Last week, Facebook rebranded to Meta and announced its plans to kickstart the development of the Metaverse — an entirely new way of interacting and navigating the internet. Now, the Metaverse landscape has a multi-billion dollar corporate behemoth vying for the helm, which has made its future all the more uncertain. Whether we like it or not, major corporations will likely play a major role in how the Metaverse develops and evolves. But will it be plagued by the same problems faced by today’s social media giants, or will decentralized platforms and services take center stage? Related: New industry, new rules: Building the Metaverse without bias Building a digital walled garden At last week’s Facebook Connect conference, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to spend $10 bil...

In crypto trading we often see entire sectors move in tandem. DeFi coins may all curve upwards together, while metaverse tokens soared on news that Facebook’s getting a Facelift. But this week’s group of top crypto performers have very little in common… except one trading indicator that lit up in pulsating green neon letters before their prices trended upward. We’re looking today at: Polygon (MATIC) — a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum Aave (imaginatively, AAVE) — a decentralized finance (DeFi) asset Voyager (VGX) — a crypto trading platform Koinos (KOIN) — a feeless foundational blockchain built for scalability Linear (LINA) — a cross-chain asset protocol All have delivered major gains over the last month, and despite their differences they have one thing in common. Each one ac...

Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, have been dominating the crypto market this year. With sales topping over $2.5 billion during the first half of 2021, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that both the crypto community and mainstream creators are launching NFTs in hopes of driving revenue and engagement. The rise of the Metaverse has also pushed the adoption of NFTs, demonstrating the value of nonfungibles for major brands and social media platforms alike.  While NFT sales soar, the Ethereum blockchain continues to rule the space. For instance, a recent report from Cointelegraph Research found that Ethereum represented at least 97% of every NFT market sector, which includes games, collectibles and marketplaces. It’s also interesting to point out that blockchain analytics firm Moonstream found ...

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a natural product made possible by blockchain technology and has the right and ready infrastructure to propel the technology to a bigger playing field. The space has grown by leaps and bounds since the Ethereum network went live in July 2015, with Ethereum network transactions growing by 33x to 1.2 million per day currently, and blockchain transactions would exceed millions per day if other chains were included. Most of these transactions originated from the DeFi services such as Uniswap, which facilitates over $1 billion swaps each day, as well as lending and borrowing protocols such as Aave, Compound and BondAppetit, with tens of billions in market size. While these are large numbers by any standard, it is only a decimal point of the trillion-dollar tradit...

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. For many years, Ethereum and XRP held the second and third-ranking spots in the crypto market. Read on to discover how wXRP will integrate into Ethereum to expand its utility to smart contracts. What you’re about to read is the smaller version of this newsletter. For the full breakdown of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe to our newsletter below. Avalanche launch $200M fund to incentive developers The Avalanche Foundation unveiled a new $200 million fund this week aimed at expanding the liquidity potential of startup projects with its ecosystem building decentralized finance, nonfungible tokens, enterprise and cultural applications. According to the official blog post, the smart contracts pla...

A Shiba Inu token holder who invested thousands of dollars in the memecoin in February has partially cashed out to become a stay-at-home dad. According to a Thursday report from Fortune, a 35-year-old supermarket warehouse manager identified only as Rob invested $8,000 into Shiba Inu (SHIB) when the price was roughly $0.0000001 — giving him an allocation of 800 billion tokens. In May, when the token price surged significantly to reach a then all-time high of more than $0.00035, Rob cashed out part of his holdings to deposit $500,000 into his bank account. The SHIB holder still has more than $1 million worth of crypto following the token’s price surge in October. The funds have allowed him to quit his job, which paid $68,000 annually, stay at home taking care of his son and participate in o...

Following Vitalik Buterin’s call for more social application use cases on Ethereum earlier this summer, multiple crypto companies voiced intentions to build decentralized versions of mainstream social networks like Twitter. However, to create and view crypto-centered social platforms as merely decentralized versions of Twitter is shortsighted. The moral and technical implications of creating truly decentralized social networks that abide by Web 3.0 principles extend far beyond what the idea of “decentralized Twitter” currently encompasses.  Beyond mere decentralization, there are four key themes central to the idea of crypto social development: private communication and censorship resistance, moderation, decentralized governance, and secure and decentralized money. Private communicati...