The Ledger is a weekly newsletter about the economics of the music business sent to Billboard Pro subscribers. An abbreviated version of the newsletter is published online. Apple Music may have opened the floodgates on Monday when it announced that it will raise prices on its Apple Music subscription service, as well as its Apple TV+ streaming video on-demand service and its Apple One bundle of services (which includes Apple Music). Apple wasn’t the first music streaming company to broadly raise prices. Deezer started raising prices in France in January. In May, Amazon hiked prices for Prime members for Amazon Music Unlimited from $7.99 to $8.99 (or $79 to $89 if paid annually) and for the single-device plan (for Amazon’s Echo and Fire TV devices) from $3.99 to $4.99 per month. And ...
The shift of the Ethereum blockchain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol opened new opportunities for developers and investors to explore, including the burning of Ether (ETH). Now, Ethereum transactions are validated through staking rather than mining. Staking impacts the supply and price dynamics of Ether in ways that are different than mining. Staking is expected to create deflationary pressure on Ether, as opposed to mining, which induces inflationary pressure. The increase in the total amount of funds locked in Ethereum contracts could also push ETH’s price up in the long term, as it affects one of the fundamental forces that determine its price: supply. The percentage of newly issued Ether versus burned Ether has increased by 1,164.06 ETH since the Merge. This means that sin...
Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. After the Mango Markets exploit last week, Compound protocol paused the supply of four tokens as lending collateral to protect it against any price manipulation. Crypto staking protocol Freeway said one of its trading strategies “appears to have failed,” forcing the firm to halt services earlier this week. October continues to be dominated by DeFi hacks as another DeFi lockup protocol, Team Finance, lost $14.5 million during contract migration, despite an audit clearance. MakerDAO community voted to approve the custody of $1.6 billion USD Coin (USDC) with the institutional brokerage platform Coinbase Prime. The to...
A former investment banker turned savvy politician, Rishi Sunak has had an incredibly prolific career in just a short period of time. At only 42, he has served as a member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament, chief secretary to the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer — and now, he’s starting his tenure as prime minister. As the youngest PM to take office in the U.K. in more than 200 years, Sunak has something else in common with his millennial peers: He is a crypto enthusiast. In fact, as a recent Bank of America survey found, “Younger investors are choosing to allocate significantly more of their portfolios to crypto” than their older counterparts. Additionally, those in the 21–42 age bracket are “more likely to believe crypto offers the greatest opportunities for growth” and al...
Welcome readers, and thanks for subscribing! The Altcoin Roundup newsletter is now authored by Cointelegraph’s resident newsletter writer Big Smokey. In the next few weeks, this newsletter will be renamed Crypto Market Musings, a weekly newsletter that provides ahead-of-the-curve analysis and tracks emerging trends in the crypto market. The publication date of the newsletter will remain the same, and the content will still place a heavy emphasis on the technical and fundamental analysis of cryptocurrencies from a more macro perspective in order to identify key shifts in investor sentiment and market structure. We hope you enjoy it! Time to go long? This week, Bitcoin’s (BTC) price has perked up, with a surge to $21,000 on Oct. 26. This led a handful of traders to proclaim that the bo...
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck has confirmed plans to pursue a public stock offering in the United States through Nasdaq — a move that would give the company access to the country’s lucrative capital markets. In documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 28, Coincheck’s majority owner, Monex Group, confirmed that it is proceeding with Nasdaq listing procedures through a merger with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Thunder Bridge Capital Partners IV. If all goes according to plan, Coincheck’s Nasdaq listing will take place on July 2, 2023. Coincheck said the SPAC merger would allow the exchange to expand its crypto-asset business and gain direct access to U.S. capital markets. The technology-rich Nasdaq is one of the world’s lar...
Cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network THORChain announced it was once again “fully operational” after an outage of more than 20 hours In an Oct. 28 tweet, the THORChain team said the network was “back online and producing blocks” and had reenabled trading. The network was halted on Oct. 27 after the team said a bug had caused “non-determinism between individual nodes.” “Turns out to be string manipulation: code was pushing a cosmos.Uint (instead of a uint64) into a string, which causes the string to get the point of the big int instead of the actual value, causing the memo string to be different on different nodes,” said the THORChain team following the chain halt. “Didn’t see this in stagenet because the bad memo never gets written to disk/block, because it gets swapped immediate...
Do Kwon, the co-founder of Terraform Labs who may be facing legal actions in South Korea and the United States, is the target of a lawsuit in Singapore along with the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) and Terra founding member Nicholas Platias. In a lawsuit filed in Singapore’s high court on Sept. 23, 359 individuals allege Kwon, Platias, the LFG and Terra made fraudulent claims, including that Terra’s stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST) — now TerraUSD Classic (USTC) — was not “stable by design” and unable to maintain its U.S. dollar peg. The claimants are seeking compensation for roughly $57 million worth of “loss and damage” combined based on the value of UST tokens they purchased and held or sold amid the market downturn in May. They also request an order to pay for “aggravated damages.” According to ...
Universal Music Group on Thursday reported its fifth-straight quarter of revenue gains since its public spinoff from Vivendi last year, increasing revenue 13.3% as its many, varied business divisions helped offset slow-downs in areas sensitive to global economic uncertainty. On a call with analysts, UMG chairman and chief executive Lucian Grainge attributed the company’s strong quarter — coming amid a downturn in the advertising market — to its diversification strategy. Over Grainge’s 17-years at the helm, UMG has built dominant positions in multiple geographic markets and across nearly every major segment in music, making it less susceptible to “the inevitable ebbs and flows in revenue of any particular business,” he said. That helped UMG offset a slowdown in ad-supported streaming revenu...
Ether (ETH) is setting liquidation records this week as a comparatively modest price uptick reveals how bearish the market has become. Data from on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant confirmed that United States dollar-denominated short liquidations hit a new all-time high on Oct. 25. Two days, half a billion dollars of ETH shorts It is not just Bitcoin (BTC) causing the bears severe pain this week — data from exchanges also shows that Ethereum shorters have suffered heavy losses. ETH/USD delivered fairly impressive gains on Oct. 25-26, rising from lows of $1,337 to highs of $1,593 on Bitstamp before retracing, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView. ETH/USD 1-day candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView While nothing unusual for crypto and for altcoins, in ...