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Republicans say Biden slashed oil drilling. The facts say otherwise.

The dynamic offers yet another reminder of how little power any president has to shape the gyrations of the energy markets. Democrats have blamed the gasoline price spike on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, production cuts by OPEC, lingering economic supply chain effects of the pandemic and price-gouging by oil companies — some of which reported record quarterly profits last week. On Monday, Biden accused the oil industry of “war profiteering” and threatened to push for stiffer taxes on the companies’ earnings. But Republicans have hammered one consistent message this year: Biden caused motorists’ pain at the pump by shutting down U.S. oil and gas production. “Joe Biden’s anti-energy agenda has destroyed American energy independence,” House Republicans tweeted last week as part of a cascade o...

MetaMask rolls out NFT portfolio value tracker with new partnership

MetaMask users will now have the ability to track the value of their nonfungible token (NFT) portfolio through its latest product. The wallet provider announced a new feature on Nov. 2, which will bring updated pricing information for the over 5,000 NFT collections held by MetaMask users. The new utility comes as a result of a partnership with NFTBank, an NFT portfolio management tool and valuation engine. To create its predictions, NFTBank uses machine learning algorithms which update users with price estimates for individual NFTs within a collection. According to the announcement the algorithm takes into consideration parameters such as floor price, rarity, and bid/ask distribution when calculating a price value. The tool allegedly offers around 90+% accuracy price predictions. Daniel Ki...

Bitcoin price bottom takes shape as ‘old coins’ hit a record 78% of supply

Bitcoin (BTC) and the rest of the crypto market have been in a bear market for almost a year. The top cryptocurrency has seen its market valuation plummet by more than $900 billion in the said period, with macro fundamentals suggesting more pain ahead. Another bear cycle produces more BTC hodlers But the duration of Bitcoin’s bear market has coincided with a substantial rise in the percentage of BTC’s total supply held by investors for at least six months to one year. Notably, the percentage of coins held for at least a year has risen from nearly 54% on Oct. 28, 2021, to a record high of 66% on Oct. 28, 2022, data shows. Bitcoin hodl waves. Source: Glassnode  This evidence suggests that long-term investors are increasingly looking at Bitcoin as a store of value, asserts Charles Edward...

Web Summit Lisbon, Nov. 2: Latest updates from Cointelegraph ground team

Disclaimer: This article is updated all day long. All time codes are in the UTC time zone, and updates are in reverse order (the latest update is placed at the top). Web Summit, one of the premier world tech conferences, is back live in Lisbon. The event brings together the founders and CEOs of technology companies, fast-growing startups, policymakers, and heads of state to discuss the future of the tech industry. In 2022, Web3 is one of the biggest topics of tech discussion, and Web Summit 2022 is no different. Cointelegraph has set up a team for the event to present the latest updates in a real-time fashion. The opening event of Web Summit saw the Mayor of Lisbon, the minister of the economy of Portugal and Binance CEO Changpang Zhao as keynote speakers. Carlos Moedas, mayor of Lisbon, s...

‘DeFi will replace institutions entirely,’ says BitGo CEO Mike Belshe

The global decentralized finance (DeFi) market size was valued at $11.78 billion in 2021. This number is expected to increase as DeFi advances, yet it is still in its infancy. Therefore, a number of banks and traditional financial institutions still tend to be unaware of DeFi’s potential.  While this may be, industry experts within the crypto sector are predicting that decentralized finance will overtake traditional financial institutions in the coming years. For instance, Mike Belshe, CEO and co-founder of BitGo — a digital asset custody provider — told Cointelegraph that he believes DeFi will replace institutions in the next three to four years. Belshe elaborated on this point during an exclusive interview conducted at Activate, which was BitGo’s developer conference that took place...

Riddle&Code ignites the fourth industrial revolution by easily onboarding any machine onto Web3

Vienna, Austria, 2nd November, 2022, Chainwire Riddle&Code, one of Austria’s fastest-growing startups, has established a new path of digitalization for industrial companies with its evolved purpose – onboarding industries to Web3. For many industrial companies it is challenging to transition into the new standards and find their way in the Web3 universe, often delaying entry into new potential business models. With this new technology from Riddle&Code, it is possible to tokenize industrial machines, create new crowdfunding opportunities, and provide trusted data. To meet this ambitious purpose, the company has now launched programs to help enterprises and trailblazing developers alike capitalize on their own innovation. Called HW-03 Enterprise and HW-03 Community, the two programs ...

Voters remain gloomy despite recent economic gains

The third quarter GDP increase followed two quarters of decline. Fifty-eight percent of voters said they hadn’t heard that GDP was up, according to the poll. Democratic men were the most likely to have heard the latest growth statistic, with 58 percent, and Republican women were the least likely, at 28 percent. A plurality of voters — 43 percent — said that economic issues are the top priority they will take into consideration in choosing candidates, ahead of abortion, health care and education. There were partisan differences between voters and their knowledge of recent economic indicators. Fifty-four percent said they hadn’t heard much or anything at all about declining gas prices, including 59 percent of independent voters and 60 percent of Republican voters. A full 70 percent of voters...

BTC miner CleanSpark scoops up thousands of miners amid ‘distressed markets’

Sustainability-focused Bitcoin (BTC) mining company CleanSpark has snapped up another 3,843 cryptocurrency miners amid a backdrop of mining industry consolidation. The $5.9 million purchase of the Antminer S19J Pro Bitcoin miners announced by the company on Nov. 1 came at a price of $15.50 per terahash — far cheaper than the current market price of $22.94 for a machine with the same efficiency according to data from Hashrate Index. The purchase has brought its total number of machines to around 50,000 according to the company. CleanSpark said it’s purchased 26,500 miners since the start of the “bear market conditions” — a time when many mining firms have been forced to sell off mining equipment or even consider filing for bankruptcy. There is a possibility that the miners...

Singapore bank DBS uses DeFi to trade FX and state securities

DBS Bank, a major financial services group in Asia, is applying decentralized finance (DeFi) for a project backed by Singapore’s central bank. DBS has started a trading test of foreign exchange (FX) and government securities using permissioned, or private, DeFi liquidity pools, the firm announced on Nov. 2. The development is part of Project Guardian, a collaborative cross-industry effort pioneered by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Conducted on a public blockchain, the trade included the purchase and sale of tokenized Singapore government securities (SGS), the Singapore dollar (SGD), Japanese government bonds and the Japanese yen (JPY). The project has shown that trading on a private DeFi protocol enables simultaneous operations of instant trading, settlement, clearing and cust...

MicroStrategy CEO reiterates ‘long term’ Bitcoin play in Q3 earnings

The third quarter earnings for business intelligence firm MicroStrategy revealed a narrowed net loss of $27.1 million for the quarter, while it continues to grow its Bitcoin (BTC) portfolio despite poor crypto market conditions. The world’s largest publicly traded corporate Bitcoin owner confirmed it still owns 130,000 BTC at the end of Q3 2022. That amount represents 0.62% of all Bitcoin that will ever be owned, which it says was acquired for a total cost of around $4 billion, or $30,639 per BTC. The company reported on Nov. 1 impairment charges for the quarter of $727,000, far less than the $917.8 million it recorded in the second quarter of 2022 or the $65 million for the same period last year, thanks to stable Bitcoin prices throughout the last quarter. An impairment ch...

Record hash rates may see Big Oil become a major BTC mining player

Surging Bitcoin (BTC) network hash rates are causing problems for mining companies but might be rolling out the red carpet for energy giants. The Bitcoin hash rate, the amount of computing power given to the blockchain through mining, has reached another record peak. According to Blockchain.com, the metric hit an all-time high of 267 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Nov. 1 after increasing almost 60% since the beginning of the year. Commenting on the new peak, Capriole Fund founder Charles Edwards speculated that highly efficient government and oil company enterprises were entering the mining game at scale. New Bitcoin hash rate world record! 9% higher than the prior all time high set just a few days ago. I have no doubt that we have serious, highly efficient government & oil company ent...

Elon Musk Is Officially CEO of Twitter, For Now

Almost immediately after Elon Musk completed his $44 billion USD acquisition of Twitter, the tech CEO took immediate control of the board, firing original board members including, now ex-CEO Parag Agrawal. In the filing, Musk listed, “The following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective time of the merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou.” However, shortly after dissolving the board, he tweeted that the move “is just temporary,” though he did not elaborate any further. The billionaire, who also governs four other companies including electric vehicles company Tesla, rocket company SpaceX, brain-chip startup Neuralink and the...