Crypto news
Spreading holiday joy through charitable giving with cryptocurrency
The holidays are the perfect time of the year for giving back, and the rise of cryptocurrencies has created even more opportunities for charitable initiatives. This was highlighted during Giving Tuesday 2021, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving which saw over $2.4 million raised in cryptocurrency from the nonprofit fundraising platform The Giving Block. As crypto philanthropy becomes a new subsector of the cryptocurrency economy, some in the industry believe that crypto donations will only continue to increase. Alex Wilson, co-founder of The Giving Block, told Cointelegraph that last year the organization raised about $4 million in crypto donations, noting that this year, over $100 million in crypto donations will likely be received. According to Wilson, this growth is partly due to the fact th...
Bitcoin battles bears ‘on offense’ as Christmas delivers a $50K BTC gift
Bitcoin (BTC) held $50,000 into Dec. 25 as BTC bulls avoided an unwelcome Christmas Day surprise. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView “Bears become bulls” short term? Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD maintaining $50,000 support into the weekend, having ranged after local highs above $51,500. The pair was calm as the holiday season got underway, with thinner liquidity yet to show itself in the form of volatile price moves. With most taking a break from trading and analysis, the nearest target to the upside remained the $1 trillion market cap valuation level at $53,000. For popular trader Pentoshi, a point of friction could come in the form of sellers actively driving down BTC/USD to liquidity at $46,000, only to then...
Child prodigy with 162 IQ wants cryptocurrency for Christmas and gets it
The wish of owning cryptocurrencies this Christmas came true for a 12-year-old schoolkid with an intelligence quotient (IQ) higher than Albert Einstein. Barnaby Swinburn, a resident of Bristol, England had asked for two Christmas presents, a Mensa test for testing his IQ and a cryptocurrency portfolio. According to BristolLive, Swinburn scored the highest possible score of 162 on the test, beating Einstien’s IQ of 160. As a result, the schoolboy became a member of the high-IQ society, which intakes the top 2% of the highest Mensa scorers. Speaking about cryptocurrencies, Swinburn’s mother Ghislaine said: “He’s been watching the markets. He’ll be getting an envelope with money in it for Christmas which he’ll turn into cryptocurrency.” However, the Swinburn family is yet to reveal the ...
10 women who used crypto to make a difference in 2021
This year, new research showed that there’s still a long way to go before there is gender parity in the crypto and blockchain space. WEF’s April Global Gender Gap Report 2021 found that it will take close to 135.6 years to close the gender gap due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, that hasn’t stopped these women who used blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to tackle a whole range of social issues ranging from girls’ education in developing countries to the wealth gap in black communities in the United States. In no particular order, these 10 women are changing the world using crypto one block at a time. Tavonia Evans Tavonia Evans is the founder and lead engineer of GUAP Coin, which she created to help close the wealth gap and support black-owned businesses in the United States. Desp...
From DeFi year to decade: Is mass adoption here? Experts Answer, Part 3
Tristan is the core contributor to Zeta Markets, an under-collateralized DeFi derivatives platform, providing liquid derivatives trading to individuals and institutions alike. “We’ve seen a Cambrian explosion in the DeFi ecosystem in 2021, with peak TVL approaching $300 billion vs the 2020 peak of $21 billion. This sounds like the growth surely has to slow. Yet, DeFi still represents just a fraction of CeFi trading volumes. At Zeta, we see a clear opportunity for more and more CeFi infrastructure to be built on-chain in a permissionless manner. This will unlock innovative products that have previously been impossible to implement. The following has already started to happen: Composability trumps the siloed products of CeFi, which has created really powerful network effe...
Dogecoin Foundation works with Ethereum co-founder on DOGE staking
The Dogecoin Foundation, a non-profit organization behind the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE), is working on a staking mechanism in collaboration with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The Foundation on Thursday released its Dogecoin Trailmap or a “dog-walk” that the Dogecoin Foundation is committed to exploring and which it believes would contribute to Dogecoin’s success. As part of the trailmap, the Dogecoin Foundation is working with Buterin on building a “uniquely Doge proposal” for a “community staking” version of proof-of-stake (PoS). Such a version would allow all Dogecoin users to stake their DOGE and get extra tokens for supporting the network, the Dogecoin Foundation said: “[The PoS version] will allow everyone, not just the big players to participate in a way t...
Make a wish: New Year’s resolutions from crypto industry insiders
As the new year rapidly approaches, people are thinking about what they can do to make 2022 even better than 2021. With so much anticipation for cryptocurrency in the coming year from government policymakers and market action, it’s no wonder that some in the crypto industry have ambitious resolutions for the new year with how they will help to shape the industry for the better. National governments have taken steps to increase the global adoption of blockchain technology right up to the end of 2021. Late in the year, governments from Australia, Kazakhstan, Brazil and the Eastern Caribbean launched, or made public, their plans regarding central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The United States Senate heard testimonies from crypto company executives in December, and Thailand’s governme...
Turkey’s crypto law is ready for parliament, President Erdoğan confirms
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has reportedly confirmed the completion of a crypto law draft that will soon be shared with the Parliament for mainstream implementation in the country. In an effort to counter the falling value of the Turkish lira, President Erdoğan shared plans to implement a new economic model while speaking at a press conference in Istanbul. As reported by local media NTV, Erdoğan said that the cryptocurrency bill is ready, adding: “We will take steps on this issue by sending it to Parliament without delay.” Acknowledging the country’s recent inflationary episode, Erdoğan said that the currency event is not related to mathematics but a matter of process — implying a possibility and potential of lira’s value growth: “With this understanding, we intend to cha...
Terra’s Mirror protocol warns community against governance attack
Public blockchain network Terra has confirmed an ongoing scam attack via an official governance poll on Mirror, an in-house synthetic assets protocol. According to Mirror, the attacker launched a public poll on Mirror’s official website, which proposes a freeze on the community pool in case of a scam. NEW MIRROR POLL! ALERT: Poll 211 is SCAM — sending 25,000,000 MIR to itself … #vote on 212: https://t.co/FH6RqTbJ2j $MIR $LUNA #terra — Mirror Polls (@mirror_polls) December 25, 2021 According to Poll ID: 211, named “Freeze the community pool in case of scam”, the scammer proposes an upgrade of safer community governance rules in case of a hack. If the hacker manages to get a positive majority on the poll, 25 million MIR tokens (worth $24.1 million at the time of writing) wi...
On heritage and NFT: Challenging the meaning of legacy itself
In his monthly crypto tech column, Israeli serial entrepreneur Ariel Shapira covers emerging technologies within the crypto, decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain space, as well as their roles in shaping the economy of the 21st century. When trying to examine the nonfungible token (NFT) economy as it has been shaping in recent months, two main trends can be discerned. On the one hand, a completely new market that allows various artists to join a new creator economy — the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, various types of pixel art creators and creative flickers such as the creator of long-necked women’s paintings, the sale of which brought the artist, only 12 years old, close to 1,394 Ether (ETH), equal at the time of writing $6 million. But the truth is that an NFT is much mor...
Here’s how Polygon is challenging the limitations of Ethereum, as told by co-founder Sandeep Nailwal
Polygon (MATIC), a layer-two network designed for scaling and application infrastructure development on Ethereum (ETH), has been making the rounds among blockchain enthusiasts as of late. From its $1 billion investment into zero-knowledge technology to co-launching a $200 million Web 3.0 social media initiative up to integrating with Opera’s web browser to make its decentralized apps accessible to 80 million Android mobile users, the network’s momentum is going strong. But partnerships and business aside, the technological capacities of the network, especially when compared to Ethereum, are also attracting the attention of many blockchain developers. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal talked about the extent of the n...
‘Twas the Night before Christmas: A Cointelegraph Story
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the Twittersphere Not a troll was stirring, not even a financier; The crypto was HODLed in cold storage with care, In hopes that Satoshi would soon reappear; The newbies avoided FUD and slept in their beds, While visions of lambos danc’d in their heads. And Pomp being occupied, and Schiff spewing crap, Weren’t calling attention to traders stacking sats. When in the trends came mentions of Nakamoto, I had to be sure it wasn’t just FOMO. Away to my portfolio my fingers did fly, And checked on the prices — man, were they high! Then, for a moment, I thought I was wrong. But no — a huge bull run, and eight altcoins going along. Who could have done this? Who answered my prayer? I knew in an instant the answer: Michael Saylo...
