Business

The adoption of nonfungible tokens has served as a practical entry point for users joining the crypto economy, driven primarily by their respective fandoms and the benefit-centric nature of the tokens. For instance, if you’re a Lebron James superfan, you can understand why “The Block” from the 2016 NBA finals is valuable on NBA Top Shot without understanding the blockchain. But when it comes to brands, stablecoins are likely to become the biggest entry point. Reimagining rewards points Selling to existing customers costs brands less than acquiring new ones, which is a leading reason why more than 90% of companies have some type of customer loyalty program. Rewards points are one of the most effective methods for increasing both customer loyalty and revenue. For example, Starbucks Rew...

Bitcoin (BTC) held $49,000 on Aug. 28 after the United States Federal Reserve sparked a run-up toward critical resistance. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView All eyes on $49,300 on the weekly chart Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD cooling at higher levels after cracking the $49,000 mark late Friday. The end of the working week had seen a positive reaction to comments from Fed Chair Jerome Powell on tapering of asset purchases, as well as remarks on inflation. As Cointelegraph reported, stocks surged to all-time highs, while the U.S. dollar weakened — Bitcoin made use of the opportunity and added $1,500 in under an hour. With talk of a new “bullish impulse” move afoot on crypto markets, the mood into the weekend was...

Over the last three or four years, blockchain adoption has expanded tremendously, and each industry is exploring different use cases for the technology. There are multiple aspects of blockchain — from business to technical and more — but with the way the industry is exploding, it’s really hard to get it right. It’s best to divide the blockchain topic into two main buckets in order to understand the development of the ecosystem and the key benefits and innovations it provides. One is cryptocurrency, where we cover industries like financial services, insurance and capital markets, including deals via private equity and venture capital. Then we look into the enterprise world, which is about how we apply blockchain as a technology in different industries. Enterprise blockchain Last year, we pu...

Square CEO Jack Dorsey said that the platform’s latest Bitcoin (BTC) venture would be to develop a decentralized exchange.  In a Friday tweet, Dorsey said that “TBD” — either referring to the fact the business’ name has yet to be determined or simply the name itself — would be focused on building a decentralized exchange for Bitcoin. According to project leader Mike Brock, TBD, a unit of Square, aims to “make it easy to fund a non-custodial wallet anywhere in the world through a platform to build on- and off-ramps into Bitcoin.” The business said it wants the decentralized exchange to be “Bitcoin-native, top to bottom,” as well as completely open-source and permissionless, with “no foundation or governance model that TBD controls.” “Our idea for the fiat DEX is something t...

TGU Consulting Group, a Honduran company based in the capital of Tegucigalpa, has reportedly installed the country’s first Bitcoin ATM. According to a Friday Reuters report, TGU chief executive Juan Mayen led the move to install the Bitcoin (BTC) ATM in one of the capital’s office buildings. The “la bitcoinera” machine allows crypto enthusiasts to purchase BTC and Ether (ETH) using the local fiat currency, lempira, provided they are willing to scan their IDs and disclose certain personal information. Mayen said this was the first automated way to purchase Bitcoin in Honduras, but many software developers had been accepting crypto for payments. According to the TGU exec, many Hondurans have had to exchange cash for crypto in person, an action he described as “very inconvenient and dangerous...

The rise of decentralized finance and nonfungible tokens has transformed the blockchain ecosystem and generated near unimaginable riches for investors, but none of this would be possible without the strong foundation offered by layer-one blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.  Smart contracts and layer-two protocols promise to revolutionize the finance and logistics industry, but they require a robust, secure and distributed network to operate on and to ensure their immutability. Currently, most of the top layer-two projects operate on the Ethereum network, and this has resulted in increased transaction costs and delayed confirmation times due to network congestion. The network’s recent London hard fork attracted a lot of attention due to the implementation of a fee-burning me...

The Ethereum (ETH) network is currently the dominant layer-one protocol in terms of smart contract deployment and active users, but the race to become the ‘world’s computer’ is far from settled because competing protocols are gaining traction by offering solutions to high transaction costs and slow confirmation times, the biggest problems facing the network. One project that has been on the rise over the past month is Tezos, a proof-of-stake blockchain network that is designed to evolve over time without the needing to undergo a hard fork. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $2.09 on July 20, the price of XTZ has rallied 165% to a high of $5.53 on Aug. 27 as its 24-hour trading volume surged abov $1 billion. XTZ/USDT 4-hour char...

As nonfungible token sales appear reanimated after a nearly two-month dry spell from their apex in May, a particular NFT application is gaining popularity more than ever: metaverses. Metaverses have gained their fair share of media attention lately, with big moves coming from companies like Facebook and Epic games. However, not everyone — even those who have been in crypto for a long time — has caught on to what metaverses are, despite the hype. But as more companies, celebrities and artists venture into the space, it has become another domain that deserves some thorough consideration. The Metaverse is a network of virtual environments in which people can interact with each other, digital objectsand the physical world through their avatar. While definitions of the Metaverse vary, they orbi...

Bitcoin has thus far remained the largest crypto asset in terms of market capitalization since its launch in 2009. Given the thousands of other cryptocurrencies that have come into existence over the years, could any of them ever become larger than Bitcoin (BTC) in terms of market cap? “We are in the top half of the second inning of crypto and right now it looks like BTC will remain at the top however, like the Red Sox fell apart this year, we just don’t know,” managing partner of A&C Advisors LLC, Daniel Strachman, told Cointelegraph. Strachman’s experience includes decades of financial work and writing multiple books. “It comes down to market reaction and investor interest,” he added. “There is a lot of talk about Eth surpassing BTC and that is a reality but we need to play a f...

Asset managers and companies currently hold over 6% of Bitcoin’s (BTC) circulating supply, according to Buy Bitcoin Worldwide. A breakdown of the data shows Bitcoin fund issuers and asset managers hold about 4% of Bitcoin’s supply, public companies account for nearly 1% and private companies own roughly 0.83% of the cryptocurrency’s supply.  It’s clear that institutional investors have continued to add crypto to their portfolios and Adam Proctor, the managing director for billionaire Simon Nixon’s investment firm Seek Ventures, said the company plans to increase “allocation to crypto” as they believe it to be an “important area for the future.” Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360 CNBC Mad Money host, Jim Cramer, recently said that he was a “believer in crypt...