Crypto

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 Ukraine passes legislation to recognize and regulate crypto The Ukrainian parliament adopted the draft law “On Virtual Assets” Wednesday, which legally recognizes crypto in the country for the first time. Anastasia Bratko of the Ministry of Digital Transformation said the law allows companies to launch digital asset markets in Ukraine and enables banks to “open accounts for crypto companies.” Earlier this week, Panama also introduced a bill that aims to recognize Bitcoin (BTC) as an alternative payment option ...

In the last 24-hours, Terra (LUNA), a blockchain protocol focused on building a global payments system powered by the UST stablecoin, rallied to a new all-time high at $45.  LUNA/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since bottoming at a low of $5.61 on July 20, the price of LUNA has ripped 720% higher to a record high at $45 on Sept. 10. The swift rally also lifted the total value locked (TVL) on the Terra protocol to a new all-time high at $7.83 billion on Sept. 5, making Terra the fourth-ranked blockchain platform by TVL according to Defi Llama. Total value locked on Terra. Source: Defi Llama Related: Altcoin Roundup: Layer-one protocols chip away at Ethereum’s dominance. A new funding initiative boosts LUNA price A scr...

Nonfungible tokens (NFT) have enjoyed quick adoption across the entertainment, media and sports space as the biggest brands, companies and individuals look to gain first-mover advantage in creating their own digital collectibles. These have come in myriad forms, and much like blockchain technology was touted to be pliable to any industry’s needs and problems, the imagination is the only limit when it comes to NFTs that are being created and traded around the world. Social media has made people more connected than ever before, and these various platforms have played a role in the introduction and proliferation of NFTs among distinct audiences. However, industry-leading behemoths like Facebook and Twitter have not quite onboarded blockchain technology into the inner fabric of their underlyin...

Chibi Dinos are a collection of 10,000 unique dinosaur-themed non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. The chibis — a phrase denoting the Japanese slang word for small — have been adopted by a variety of artists to portray short, big-headed caricature figures.  The chibis are unique in design and randomized in their rarity, a typical characteristic in NFT collections of this kind. Each sports the apparel of one of ten fictional basketball teams: Extinct Eaters or Jurassic Jumpers, among others. Chibi Dinos launched on the leading NFT marketplace OpenSea on Aug. 20 with an individual minting price of 0.06 Ether (ETH). In just 18 minutes, the entire collection sold out after garnering attention through the team’s engaging social media campaign. In total, the Chibi Dinos project recorded initial sa...

Trippy Bunny NFT, a new nonfungible token project built on Solana, has announced that it is donating all of its mint sale proceeds to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The announcement was made on Suicide Prevention Day, a global awareness event observed globally on Sept. 10. The annual awareness day was first organized in 2003 by the International Association for Suciide Prevention. Today, it has the support of the World Health Organization and the World Federation for Mental Health. BIG ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE TRIPPY BUNNY TRIBE! Today is National Suicide Prevention Day and we’ve decided, as a team, to donate ALL the mint sales raised to @afspnational thru @TheGivingBlock. THATS $220,886 $GUSD TO HELP PREVENT SUICIDE! FULL ETHERSCAN: https://t.co/n5N69KsadP pic.twitter....

Bitcoin (BTC) miners officially produced their 700,000th block on Sept. 11, marking a major milestone for a network whose detractors claim it has died 428 times since 2009.  It took Bitcoin less than two years to produce 100,000 more blocks after reaching the 600,000 milestone on Oct. 18, 2019. At the time of the last 100,000-block milestone, the BTC price was worth less than $8,000. Today, one Bitcoin is worth over $45,500. Happy 700000th block, #bitcoin! https://t.co/24mpVKXK8e — Pieter Wuille (@pwuille) September 11, 2021 At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s total supply was 18,812,806, or 89.5% of all the coins that will ever be produced. On average, new blocks are generated every ten minutes, though production time is impacted by mining difficulty. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is adj...

Everything is bigger in Texas, which is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Lone Star state is making moves to become America’s next Bitcoin (BTC) hotspot.  Most recently, Texas implemented two laws to ensure that cryptocurrencies are recognized under state commercial law. Texas House Bills 4474 and 1576 both took effect on Sept. 1, after being signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott this past June. While H.B. 1576 established a blockchain working group in Texas, H.B. 4474 provides a complete framework to demonstrate that virtual currency has a place under Texas law. Specifically speaking, H.B. 4474 adopted the proposed language of the Uniform Law Commission’s new Uniform Commercial Code, or UCC. UCC Article 12 is set to be finalized next year, but states are free to adopt th...

According to local sources, the Chinese government has released a series of statements denouncing the value of the nonfungible token, or NFT, market, even though two of the nation’s major tech firms are pursuing the technology. The story was first released locally by the Securities Times — a news publication service acting as a spokesperson for the official Chinese Communist Party outlet People’s Daily — and reported by the South Morning China Post. The remarks claimed that “it is common sense that there is a huge bubble in NFT transactions,” and that most NFT buyers who acquire with a financial motive focus solely on the value of the assets rather than appreciating the visual qualities of the piece. Staff reporter for the SMCP, Wang Junhui writes: “Once market enthusiasm wanes and the hyp...

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, has developed significantly over the past two years. The Algorand Foundation has unveiled a new fund positioned to allocate money toward certain DeFi projects looking to build on its native blockchain.  The pool of capital is called the Viridis DeFi fund and is headed up by the Algorand Foundation — a group that was responsible for the Algorand blockchain and its ecosystem development. “This fund will provide 150 Million Algo to fuel the significant early growth of the DeFi ecosystem on Algorand,” according to a Friday post on the Algorand Foundation’s website. “The fund will fuel the growth of decentralized exchanges, money markets, options markets, synthetic asset applications, and NFT platforms, all running on the best blockchain network for the...

The year 2021 will probably go down the history books as one of Bitcoin’s (BTC) most interesting years, given its recent uptake by billionaires and adoption by mainstream institutions, not to mention El Salvador’s move to make it legal tender.  In El Salvador’s case, it almost seems as if the whole world is watching this experiment to see whether it will be a success or a total failure for the Central American nation. With Sept. 7 marking the official implementation of Bitcoin as a legal tender in El Salvador, a wave of protests in the country against the move has roused suspicions and uncertainty over how the new law will be enforced.  From the arrest of individuals criticizing the Salvadoran government over the new law, to the wave of citizens across the country protesting Bitc...

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, or FINMA, announced their approval for regulated Swiss exchange SIX to launch a digital asset marketplace and central securities depository built on distributed ledger technology on Friday. Initially intent on launching in the latter half of 2019, the Six exchange was slowed from progressing its ambitions by regulatory hurdles. Although no specific date of launch was announced on Friday, it is expected that after this challenge has been negotiated, customers will be able to experience the exchange’s offerings in the near future. In February this year, 21 Shares launched the world’s first Polkadot exchange-traded product, or ETP, on the SIX exchange after recognizing rising demand for the asset within the region. Commonly referred...

Crypto regulation has become an increasingly relevant topic over the past several years. To address these legal ins and outs amid the ever-changing regulatory waters, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz has called upon a previous leader of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s, or CFTC, to join its team. “As part of our larger effort to make sure we have a world-class support system in place when it comes to policy and regulatory matters, I’m thrilled to announce that Brian Quintenz, a former Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is joining as an advisory partner on the crypto team,” Andreessen Horowitz general partner Katie Haun wrote in a Thursday announcement on the a16z website. The past year in particular has seen significant regulatory talk within the U...