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Layer-two protocol Polygon will be merging ZK-rollup project Hermez Network into its ecosystem for $250 million worth of MATIC tokens. In a Friday announcement, Polygon said Hermez would become a part of the network’s suite of solutions under the name Polygon Hermez. The 26 people in the Hermez team as well as its tech and solutions — including work on an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible solution — will join the platform. As part of the merger, holders of Hermez’s native HEZ will be able to exchange the tokens at a rate of 3.5:1 to Polygon’s MATIC tokens. Polygon said HEZ tokens would eventually be phased out at an unspecified date. “We believe this is in a way a historical moment since this will be (to the best of our knowledge) the first full-blown merger of two blockchain networks,” ...

Polkadot (DOT) is a blockchain project designed to interconnect sub-chains called parallel chains or parachains. Each application-specific chain built within Polkadot uses the Substrate modular framework, and this is meant to ease the development process. The project has been at the center of developers’ and investors’ attention for most of 2021, but the sharp market-wide correction on May 19 dealt a heavy blow to the DOT price, and the team has been relatively quiet for the past two months. On July 22, Karura Swap, the first decentralized exchange (DEX) in the Polkadot ecosystem, was launched. The project was created by Acala, a decentralized finance (DeFi) project backed by Coinbase Ventures. Polkadot (DOT) performance in USD at Coinbase. Source: TradingView In the past 24 da...

Over the course of 2020 and 2021, the cryptocurrency industry has attracted a notable amount of mainstream attention. In line with the growing awareness of the crypto industry, Intel, a tech company with history dating back to the 1960s, revealed an investment in crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN).  Although a number of specifics remain unknown, such as when the purchase occurred, required Q2 financial disclosure from Intel showed the outfit carrying 3,014 COIN shares at Q2’s conclusion, according to a Friday article from Barron’s. “Intel was obligated to disclose the stake to the Securities and Exchange Commission because it owns more than $100 million in publicly traded investments,” Barron’s noted. The disclosure from Intel went public on Aug. 13, according to the article. Coinbase to...

Bitcoin’s (BTC) rapid recovery above $46,000 has renewed calls for a $100,000 BTC price by the end of 2021, while the effects of China’s crackdown on the mining industry are slowly beginning to fade as the Bitcoin network hash rate shows signs of recovery. Bitcoin mean hash rate vs. price. Source: Glassnode One of the side benefits of China’s crackdown is that it has lowered the barriers of entry into the Bitcoin mining space, which has been shown to provide profits in both bull and bear markets. Bitcoin mining is one of the few ways that investors can acquire BTC without directly purchasing it from the market, and is quickly becoming an industry dominated by big money interests that can afford the electricity costs and upkeep required to run a mining operation. Here are some options avail...

Twitter CEO and self-professed Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist Jack Dorsey is not giving Ether (ETH) fans an inch. In his latest offhand remark about the market’s second-largest cryptocurrency, Dorsey downplayed the platform’s potential to single-handedly shake up the status quo in Big Tech: Disrupting “Big Tech” is exactly what’s needed and what I want. No one technology alone will do that though. — jack⚡️ (@jack) August 12, 2021 Dorsey’s comment followed an online discussion of the usefulness of a full-blown integration of nonfungible tokens (NFT) into Twitter, which Twitter user Seyitaylor argued would be more to the benefit of Ethereum than to the social media site.  Dorsey agreed that such a move would be more consequential for the Ethereum ecosystem than for his own ...

Trading volumes on peer-to-peer nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea have surged by over 12,000% in 2021. DappRadar data shows that the total incoming value to OpenSea’s smart contracts increased to $56.07 million on Wednesday compared to $73,556 on Jan. 1. Meanwhile, the marketplace’s user count increased from 315 to 14,520 in the same period — a 4,423% increase. OpenSea historical activity. Source: DappRadar A major portion of OpenSea’s trading volume spike happened after June. At the start of the month, the capital entering the marketplace’s smart contracts was just $3.6 million. But by Sunday, it had surged above $71.238 million. What’s more, on the previous 30-day average alone, OpenSea processed 1.18 million transactions worth $1.06 billion. The marketplace’s cumulative volume...

It was a topsy turvy week — “staggering,” a crypto veteran called it. One that saw United States Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Ron Wyden collaborate on behalf of the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry — albeit, in a lost cause. These events could eventually pave the way for future regulatory success, though it may not seem that way now. To recap: The Biden Administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill was supposed to be all about roads and bridges but as the Senate vote approached, it also became about cryptocurrency taxation. Thanks to a last-minute provision added to the bill, which some crypto advocates warned could have dire consequences, the changes could drive BTC miners out of the U.S. and thwart future blockchain development. “It will be a stunning loss for America and our ...

United States Senators have cast their votes, and the contentious HR 3684 infrastructure bill cleared in the upper Congress chamber. Now, the gigantic document of over 2,700 pages and amounting to almost $1 trillion is heading to the House of Representatives, including the provisions expanding the definition of a cryptocurrency broker, designed to beef up crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) tax compliance. The $1 trillion can’t come out of thin air, right? While the bill in effect simply follows Financial Action Task Force (FATF) guidelines, doomsayers are already declaring the end is nigh, haunted by visions of the dreaded Internal Revenue Service (IRS) coming for their coins. As usual, they’re wrong. Related: Cryptocurrency mining under proposed US policy changes No, not everybody is...