Crypto

A fintech firm from Pune, India has launched a blockchain-based registry system named RealX that allows Indian citizens to purchase fractional ownership in properties.  A report from The Economic Times states that RealX has partnered with Tripvillas, a holiday home rental service, to blend ownership of holiday properties in accordance with usage and yield. Tripvillas will also be responsible for managing the basket of holiday properties intended for co-investment. According to RealX COO and co-founder Neera Inamdar, the COVID-19 pandemic was a key driver for the platform’s launch as the real estate market’s instability concerned both property developers and investors. Citing the return of a comparatively stable market, she said: “We offer ‘direct deeded property co-ownership’ and it i...

Real-world adoption is what really matters when it comes to being a successful blockchain project and one project that benefited from a recent uptick in adoption is Algorand (ALGO), a pure proof-of-stake protocol aiming to become the go-to base layer for the global financial industry.  ALGO/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since bottoming out at $0.67 on July 20, the price of ALGO has rocketed 268% to a daily high at $2.47 on Sept. 9 as its 24-hour trading volume surged to a record-high $4.83 billion. El Salvador builds on Algorand The sudden surge in price and trading volume for Algorand came following El Salvador’s announcement that it is now recognized as legal tender. Additionally, El Salvador has also selec...

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.   Victory for the regulators After a tumultuous summer of crackdowns, the Chinese regulators are declaring their victory in eliminating illegal cryptocurrency trading activities in the country. This revelation came in the outlook section of the “China Financial Stability Report 2021” released by the People’s Bank of China on September 3. In the section titled Major Achievements in the Battle to Prevent and Defuse Major Financial Risks, it emphasizes that regulatory work in internet asset management, equity-based crowdfunding, internet insurance, vir...

The auction of Yuga Labs’ 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection has smashed through expectations with a winning bid of $24.39 million. The auction closed on Sept.10 and was hosted by the prestigious auction house Sotheby’s which had earlier estimated the collection would fetch between $12 million and $18 million. The bundle of non-fungibles consists of 101 Bored Apes and three M1 and three M2 “Mutant serum” NFTs. When a Bored Ape token is combined with an M1 or M2 serum, it enables the holder to mint a new Mutant Ape NFT that keeps the same traits of the original Bored Ape but depicts it in a mutant format. Taking the serum NFTs out of the equation as they are usually airdropped for free to holders, each Bored Ape in the collection was valued at an average price of roughly $241,000 or...

El Salvador’s move to embrace Bitcoin has ruffled the feathers of bond investors, with yields spiking as investors signal uncertainty for the emerging economy. A Sept. 8 report published by Bloomberg notes the yield curve on El Salvador’s bonds has recently inverted, meaning bonds with short-term maturities are now yielding more than is due from the instruments. It stated: “That’s generally considered a bad sign as it means investors see shorter-term debt as riskier, and most yield curves will slope upwards given the inherent uncertainty of pricing things over the longer-term.” Ben Emons of Medley Global Advisors emphasized that El Salvador’s bonds lost significant ground “on the first day of its new Bitcoin Law,” describing the market action as “an unwelcome sign that the wide use o...

By his own admission, Lee Cooperman still does not understand Bitcoin (BTC), despite its being up more than 300% since early December 2017. Speaking to CNBC on Thursday, the billionaire investor alluded to people his age having a hard time understanding Bitcoin, adding: “I’d be very careful with Bitcoin; I don’t think it makes a great deal of sense and if you are nervous about the world, gold — to me — would be a better place to store value.” Cooperman’s statements on Thursday are in keeping with previous comments about Bitcoin. Back in December 2017 when BTC was on a bullish price advance, Cooperman expressed his confusion about BTC. Earlier in 2021, Cooperman stated in an interview with Bloomberg surveillance that “On NFTs, bitcoin, stuff like that — I’m too old. I don&#...

Reports have emerged that a bug on OpenSea’s marketplace has deleted user-owned NFTs worth 28.44 Ether (ETH), nearly $100,000 at the time of writing. The information was revealed online by Nick Johnson, lead developer of Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, who reportedly lost an NFT that was linked to the first ENS named rilxxlir.eth. ENS is a naming system that allows users to store text-based content as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. While transferring the NFT from an ENS account to a personal account, Johnson noticed that the token was sent to what appeared to be a burn account: “I went to OpenSea, hit ‘transfer’ and entered ‘nick.eth’. Moments later, transaction complete! rilxxlir.eth transferred to 0x0000…0000edd899b. Wait, what?” According to Johnso...

An information technology operations supervisor at the Suffolk County clerk’s office in New York, Christopher Naples allegedly harnessed his position to place crypto mining equipment in various spots at the Riverhead Center in the New York county in which he worked.  Naples allegedly set up 46 devices for crypto mining, “in locations like an unused electrical wall panel or underneath floorboards,” according to a statement posted on AP News on Wednesday. Crypto mining can be an expensive endeavor, sometimes requiring specific equipment for the task as well as hiking up electrical costs wherever the mining apparatuses are set up. Mining equipment can also give off notable amounts of heat, adding to the equation. According to a quote in the statement from Timothy Sini, a district attorne...

On Thursday, bulls made a strong showing as Algorand (ALGO) and Solana (SOL) each steamrolled to new highs even as Bitcoin (BTC) continues to flounder under the $47,000 mark.  The strong performance from the altcoins gives further credence to the argument that the market is in an ‘altseason’, a phase that is typically characterized by surging altcoin prices when BTC is range-bound. 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 Presearch (PRE), Frontier (FRONT) and Algorand (ALGO). Presearch integrates Wyre into its marketplace Presearch, a blockchain-based decentralized search protocol, registered a 61.3% gain in the past 24-...

Virginia-based enterprise software company MicroStrategy has captured the attention of crypto and financial news outlets alike with its CEO’s atypical strategy of going all-in on Bitcoin, beginning in 2020, with some reporters quipping that the company has since morphed into something closer to a Bitcoin (BTC) investment vehicle than a software firm.  Recent filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission suggest some of the company’s top-level executives are ambivalent about pursuing this strategy long-term. The filings reveal that MicroStrategy chief financial officer Phong Le and chief technology officer Timothy Lang both unloaded stock in August of this year by exercising roughly 30% of the options they received as compensation.  As Bloomberg reports, Lang e...

Two Central American countries, Honduras and Guatemala, are taking a cue from their common neighbor’s adoption of Bitcoin (BTC), but they are taking a very different road.  Instead of embracing an existing cryptocurrency as a legal tender, like what El Salvador did, the central banks of Honduras and Guatemala are currently studying central bank digital currencies (CBDC). Following the approval of the board of directors, the Central Bank of Honduras kicked off a study “to determine the feasibility of conducting a pilot test issuing its own digital money or a central bank digital currency,” according to Honduras central bank president Wilfredo Cerrato’s remarks at a forum event in Tegucigalpa. He said that the Central American Monetary Council, or Consejo Monetario Centroamericano,...

A high-flying Solana (SOL) refused to land even in the face of a brutal sell-off in the cryptocurrency market on Tuesday. Two days later, the price of SOL rebounded to another new all-time high. The SOL/USD exchange rate averted a big pullback over the previous 48 hours and reached $217 for the first time in history. The pair’s ability to sustain bearish pressure underscored investors’ growing interest in Solana’s blockchain as an emerging rival to Ethereum, a public ledger currently leading the decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) sector boom. SOL/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView  “The SOL outperformance in the market recently is more or less the continuation of its growth run in recent times,” said Petr Kozyakov, co-founder and CEO at payment servi...