Crypto

The saying, “Everything in moderation, including moderation,” has taken on new meaning since Facebook outsourced responsibility for content moderation to its Oversight Board following the violent events that occurred at the United States Capitol back on Jan. 6, 2021. First conceived in November 2018 as Facebook’s “Supreme Court” for public appeals, the social media giant’s Oversight Board was officially enacted on Oct. 22, 2020. In its time since, the Oversight Board has overturned many of Facebook’s own decisions on what is and is not free speech. Some of the board’s rulings include overturning decisions meant to limit hate speech and false pandemic claims. While this all sounds quite formal and matter-of-fact, nuance lurks beneath the surface. In 2016, an internal Facebook...

A new cryptocurrency-related bill in Ukraine will allow payments in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) despite not recognizing crypto as legal tender, a government official claimed. Deputy minister of Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation Oleksandr Bornyakov is confident that it would be “quite legal to pay with cryptocurrencies” in Ukraine through payment intermediaries that enable crypto-to-fiat conversions. The official said in a Friday interview with local financial publication Minfin that Ukraine’s draft bill on virtual assets “clearly states” that cryptocurrencies do not constitute legal tender in the country, only allowing crypto purchases. However, the bill stipulates that local payment processors would still be able to provide services for converting crypto to fiat to...

Bitcoin’s (BTC) price rallied to a multi-month high at $43,231 on August 6 and this allowed the digital asset to break free of the trading range it had been stuck in since May.  Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that after trading sideways through the early morning hours on Friday bulls staged a rally that lifted the price of Bitcoin (BTC) to an intraday high at $43,231, its highest level since May 19. BTC/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView Throughout the week, several analysts suggested that a rally higher was in the works because several indicators flashed bullish signals, including a cross-over between two moving averages that last appeared before the 2020 bull market and metrics that showed significant accumulation being driven by whales and r...

With more than one amendment proposed to the United States infrastructure plan that would modify a provision on cryptocurrencies, some figures in the space are going against the one with White House support. Digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future said today it would not support the amendment crafted by Senators Mark Warner, Rob Portman and Kyrsten Sinema to address the issue of clarifying the language used concerning crypto in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. According to the group, the proposed amendment gets “a resounding no” as a possible solution to the bill which “fundamentally misunderstands how cryptocurrency and decentralization works.” “The original provision and the Portman-Warner amendment fundamentally misunderstand that decentralized technology is decentralized,...

The overall feel across the cryptocurrency landscape over the past week has been one of bubbling anticipation, with the Ethereum network finally undergoing its London hard fork, which includes reforms to the transaction fee market, thanks to EIP-1559. London is the latest in a series of upgrades that are part of Ethereum’s measured transition from its original proof-of-work consensus model to a proof-of-stake model dubbed Ethereum 2.0. On Eth2, tokenholders who hold at least 32 Ether (ETH) can operate a validator node and verify transactions on the network. With the current price of Ether trading near $2,700, that puts the entry cost of running an Eth2 validator node at $86,400 — a price too steep for most participants in the market. To help combat this issue, several options — including s...

On Wednesday, several United States senators proposed an amendment to an infrastructure bill that would clarify language concerning crypto. Even though that proposal seemingly has the support of the White House, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has reportedly come out against the measure. According to a Friday report from the Washington Post, Yellen raised objections to the proposed amendment with lawmakers on Thursday. She lobbied Senator Ron Wyden regarding the changes which, if added to the bill, would exclude certain crypto companies from the reporting requirements for brokers. Wyden is one of three senators behind the amendment with Cynthia Lummis and Pat Toomey. The original infrastructure bill currently being considered in the Senate, HR 3684, proposes implementing tighter rules...

Ethereum underwent an upgrade on Thursday, bringing with it a number of alterations to the network’s blockchain. CEO and founder of MyEtherWallet, Kosala Hemchandra, pointed toward two changes of particular importance.  “The London upgrade adds around 5 changes to the current Ethereum network; however, I believe that only 2 of them are crucial to day-to-day users,” Hemchandra said in comments sent to Cointelegraph. Noting “time bomb delay” as the first of the two, he added: “Since the inception of Ethereum there was a hard coded value basically responsible to make sure Ethereum will move to PoS or ETH 2.0 on time. This value is responsible for making the block difficulty exponentially hard after a certain block number thus making it impossible for miners to mine new bl...

Bitcoin (BTC) has staged a smart recovery in the past few days and the interest in the crypto sector seems to be picking up. JPMorgan Chase has added access to a new Bitcoin fund created by New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) for its private banking clients.  The increasing number of traditional financial institutions opening up crypto trading opportunities for their clients shows there is strong demand for the sector. On-chain analyst Willy Woo said recently that strong holders had been scoping up Bitcoin and locking “them away for long-term investment”, resulting in a supply squeeze. Woo added that he had “not seen a supply shock opportunity like this since Q4 2020 when BTC was priced at $10,000 only to be repriced at $60,000 in the months thereafter.” Daily cryptocurrency mar...

A Cayman Islands-based company and two individuals may be the first subjects in decentralized finance, or DeFi, to face enforcement action from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to a Friday announcement, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, said that this is the first case involving securities using DeFi technology which resulted in an enforcement action. The agency said it charged the company Blockchain Credit Partners as well as Florida residents Gregory Keough and Derek Acree, alleging they were involved in offering and selling more than $30 million in unregistered securities from February 2020 to February 2021. DeFi Money Market, according to the project’s whitepaper, was “a permissionless and fully decentralized protocol to earn interest on any Eth...

Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) are due for a “huge” move, but short-term signals suggest a correction, an analyst warned on Friday. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView Buy into resistance? “Not interested” Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed both BTC/USD and ETH/USD acting near critical range resistance as the week drew to a close. A late surge the day before punctuated an overall downtrend after swift upside throughout the previous week, but Friday reinforced the idea that longer-term resistance would remain in place. In his latest video update, Cointelegraph contributor Michaël van de Poppe highlighted an area above $42,500 as necessary to reclaim in order to seek long BTC positions. “I refuse to become bullish on Bitcoin at this stage u...

Since 2017, dozens of projects have created games that use blockchain and nonfungible token (NFT) technology. The overall vision is inspiring and has attracted a solid base of fans and investors in equal measure. However, the industry is still in its infancy, and we have a long way to go until it achieves mainstream adoption. There are various hurdles on the path to this promised land. Some of the primary barriers are that NFT games have relied too heavily on their money-making traits as the selling point and lag behind traditional games when it comes to engaging game mechanics. But it isn’t going to stay this way. Related: How the NFT market leveraged blockchain tech for explosive growth The current state of NFT gaming To understand NFT gaming, we must first understand NFTs. NFTs rep...

A crossover between two Bitcoin (BTC) moving averages that appeared before the 2020 price boom is hinting at making a return in 2021, just as the flagship cryptocurrency eyes a bullish breakout from its current $30,000–$40,000 trading range. The indicators in focus are the MACD Line and Signal Line. MACD is an acronym for Moving Average Convergence Divergence, and a MACD Line represents the difference between the 12- and 26-period moving averages. Meanwhile, a Signal Line is a nine-period moving average. Plotting the MACD Line and Signal Line together forms the so-called MACD Indicator, which allows traders to predict future price trends. For example, when the MACD Line (a faster-moving average) closes below the Signal Line (a slower moving average), it typically reflects a bearish tr...