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Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. Read on to discover why almost half of the liquidity providers on Uniswap v3 are losing capital due to impermanent loss. What you’re about to read is the smaller version of this newsletter. For the full breakdown of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe below. Acala wins Polkadot’s debut parachain auction Decentralized finance protocol Acala was announced as the winning project in Polkadot’s inaugural parachain auction this week, beating fellow competitor Moonbeam to the finish line with a seismic total of 32.5 million DOT ($1.28 billion) raised from 24,934 contributors. Acala is a multi-functional DeFi platform built on Polkadot that enables developers to build smart contract applications with c...

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link. Top Stories This Week The Bitcoin network welcomes Taproot soft fork upgrade The Bitcoin (BTC) network underwent its first major upgrade since 2017 after the Taproot soft fork went live following a 90% lock-in consensus from miners and mining pools between blocks 709,488 and 709,632.  Taproot will apparently improve the scripting capabilities and privacy of the Bitcoin network by enabling a concept known as Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree, which can enhance the efficiency of smart contracts without revealing private data behin...

El Salvador continues to lead the Bitcoin (BTC) adoption drive as President Nayib Bukele announces the launch of Bitcoin City, which will be funded initially by $1 billion Bitcoin bonds.  The initiative was first announced by Bukele at El Salvador’s Bitcoin Week conference, which sought to celebrate Bitcoin’s mainstream adoption in the country and increase citizen participation. “Pensé que teníamos que dar un anuncio grande en esta #BitcoinWeek. Así que hoy quiero anunciar que vamos a construir la primera #BitcoinCity“, Presidente @nayibukele. pic.twitter.com/7yHQLyIjBx — Casa Presidencial (@PresidenciaSV) November 21, 2021 In Bukele’s words: “In #BitcoinCity we will have digital and technological education. Geothermal energy for the entire city and efficient and sustainab...

A gubernatorial candidate from Venezuela has promised to offer scholarships for citizens interested to join the Technical Training Center for Mining and Administration of Digital Crypto Assets.  José Alejandro Terán, the aspiring governor who represents the country’s ruling party, started the initiative as a part of the La Guaira Digital program, which aims to fast-track growth and induce economic stability in the country. As Cointelegraph Spanish reported, Terán’s training center will provide specialized training to the scholarship holders in nonfungible tokens (NFT), crypto mining and trading. Moreover, the drive will be supported by four entities, namely the National Superintendence of Cryptoassets (SUNACRIP), Axie Infinity Academy, the political group Independientes con ...

English Premier League football club Manchester City has suspended a partnership with a startup crypto firm after seemingly not doing its due diligence prior to signing. According to Daily Mail reporter Jack Gaughan, Manchester City is currently “conducting further enquiries” regarding 3key Technologies, the crypto firm with which the club inked a deal on Nov. 12. At the time, the football club said it would be collaborating with 3key to raise awareness of its reported decentralized finance, or DeFi, trading analysis products as a regional partner. Manchester City suspend partnership with “3Key”, a start-up cryptocurrency firm whose executives do not seem to appear on internet searches. Partnership was announced last week. pic.twitter.com/Hi02Z2IxAR — Jack Gaughan (@Jack_Gaugha...

Bitcoin’s (BTC) recent foray back below $56,000 sparked a wide-ranging sell-off across the cryptocurrency ecosystem and talks of the price hitting $100,000 by the end of the year quickly morphed into concerns about an impending bear market that could thrust prices into the doldrums for a year or longer.  While there appeared to be absolute carnage in the markets judging by peoples’ reaction to the BTC pullback, not all tokens were negatively impacted and gaming tokens focused on the emerging Metaverse have managed to stay in the green. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that while the price of Bitcoin dropped below $57,000, the price of Metaverse tokens climbed higher, including a 160% gain for Gala (GALA), a 78% rally for WAX (WAXP), a 62% breakout f...

As 2021 comes to a close, Bitcoin (BTC) has had a tumultuous ride this year, with wild price swings that have seen the pioneer cryptocurrency hit all-time highs only to retrace to lower prices — including a 50% drop that shook the market. Now, Bitcoin is once again back and stronger than ever, even recently going past its previous all-time high. Bitcoin’s dizzying market price swings aside, it seems some politicians have recognized Bitcoin’s potential, with a wave of mayors across the United States expressing bullish sentiments. From Florida to New York, there is a seemingly growing trend of politicians, particularly city mayors, supporting Bitcoin adoption. Here is a look at some of America’s mayors who have expressed bullish sentiments about the leading cryptocurrency. New York City Mayo...

If the words “derivatives trading” conjures up images of men in suits with disheveled white sleeves rolled up to the elbows and exacerbated expressions on their faces — like something out of The Big Short — then the word decentralized exchanges (DEXs) must conjure up, well, nothing.  There are no offices, no floor traders waving papers and certainly no men in suits. DEXs are managed automatically or semi-automatically with the involvement of platform participants in the process of making mission-critical decisions. DEXs are a bulb of a system that is sprouting groundbreaking opportunities for many, but they are not yet suited for the soil of derivatives trading in this season of the crypto market. The technological gap The technology isn’t available right now to have a proper op...

Zcash (ZEC) surged by nearly 20% in the past 24 hours, helped by the euphoria surrounding its core protocol’s decisive transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The ZEC price logged an intraday high at $188.80 on Binance after rising two days in a row by more than 27%. The cryptocurrency’s move upside also wiped out a big portion of the losses it had faced earlier this week, in the wake of a downside retracement across the crypto market.  ZEC price jumped after the cryptocurrency’s main developer, Electric Coin Company (ECC), announced that it would move Zcash’s protocol from PoW to PoS within the next three years. The nonprofit noted that the upgrade would limit the ZEC price’s downward pressures by removing miners that “imm...

Blockchain tech has come a long way. It wasn’t that long ago that crypto remained at the fringes, evangelized by a vocal minority. The narrative shifted once the COVID-19 pandemic pushed people into their homes with plenty of time to dive into new interests. Crypto benefited from the increased attention, entering everyday conversations among friends, family and colleagues. Even so, it’s still early in crypto. Widespread adoption remains elusive and traditional tech gatekeepers maintain their grip on the digital economy. To loosen that grip, those of us building the decentralized internet, or Web 3.0, have to do a better job at defining the narrative about what’s at stake if we continue along with the status quo. We have an especially compelling opportunity to seize the narrative after this...

We’ve argued many times in the past that the correlation between Bitcoin’s price and the market capitalization of hundreds of altcoins makes very little sense. Whether you buy into the idea that Bitcoin is digital gold, or a payment mechanism, or both, it doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Ethereum, Shiba Inu, or FTX’s native exchange token. Well, whether we like it or not, big moves in the price of Bitcoin define crypto markets. Before Bitcoin slid from the latest all-time high above $68,000 back to the region of $55,000 last week, dragging most altcoins down with it, the crypto market had seen six straight weeks of virtually uninterrupted growth. But as soon as the market turns red, as it did last week, many traders tend to succumb to three old enemies: Fear, uncertainty, and doubt ...

Bitcoin (BTC) has been on an impressive price run since the announcement of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of ProShares’ Bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund (ETF) early in October, hitting a new all-time high of over $69,000 on Nov. 10, as per data from TradingView.  However, the financial watchdogs soured the mood by rejecting VanEck’s proposal for a spot ETF on Nov. 12, which acted as a trigger for the price of the flagship cryptocurrency to drop to a 30-day low of $55,705 on Nov. 19. The token is trading in the $56,000 range at the time of writing. An ETF is a security class that tracks an asset or basket of assets, in this case Bitcoin, and can be traded on a stock exchange like any other stock. Proshares’ BTC ETF was the first ETF to gain approva...