Every week we make a digest about the most significant news in crypto with bloggers and crypto community members, but this week we decided to find out what companies’ representatives and media think about all things crypto.
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Projects And Updates
?? One Step Closer to ETH 2.0: Ethereum Activates Berlin Fork
The Berlin fork is activated on Ethereum mainnet on April, 15 on block 12’244’000 after launching on Ropsten on April, 10 following Istanbul and Muir Glacier updates. The name comes from the place where Devcon 0 happened. New update makes the transformation to Ethereum 2.0 one step closer. The upgrade includes four new Ethereum Improvement proposals, EIP-2565 decreases the gas cost, though EIP-2929 increases the gas cost for some “opcodes'' to prevent network spam. The other proposals provide support for multiple transaction types, allowing mitigating some of the gas costs. To participate in the update and avoid getting stuck on the incompatible chain Ethereum node operators and miners needed to download the latest version of the Ethereum client by April, 7. As for the token holders they don’t need to take any actions unless they will be asked for it.
?? Coinbase Launches On NASDAQ At $380 Initial Price
Coinbase got finally listed on NASDAQ and went public on April, 14 after months of preparation and delivering its best quarter in terms of earnings, achieving almost $2 billion of revenue in only 3 first months of 2021. The initial price of the COINBASE stock under ticker “Coin” was set by NASDAQ at $250, but it began trading for $380 per share, which gave Coinbase initial evaluation of around $100 billion making it one of the world’s greatest cryptocurrency companies. And the price rose up to $429 in a few minutes after being listed. Even though Coinbase went public not through the traditional initial public offering (IPO), but via direct listing, this still shows that the crypto market is gradually going mainstream.
?? Binance Launches Tradable Stock Tokens In Tesla
Cryptocurrency exchange BINANCE is launching tradable stock tokens, enabling a wider choice of the public to pocket capital returns on equities, including the dividends without the necessity to buy the full share. The first publicity tradable equity in the form of Binance is Tesla, the price for which hovers around $700 mark. The users can buy a minimum of one hundredth of a Tesla share as a digital token. The product was developed by licensed German investment firm CM-Equity Stock, prices will be settled in Binance USD (BUSD) and the stock tokens aren’t redeemable for shares. Trading of the stock will be commission-free but requires completing the Know-Your-Customer process and not allowed in the jurisdictions of China, Turkey and The United States.
?? Polkadot’s Privacy Layer Raze Network is Launching Triple DEX Offering Today
Polkadot’s Raze Network was launched on April, 12 on Pools, DuckStarter, Bounce, and the liquidity bootstrapping pool was launched on the Balancer Platform on April, 13. Raze Network with cross-chain capability is aiming to grant the users of Polkadot network some of the privacy they were lacking, as Polkadot so far was completely naked providing all the information to any user simply by consulting a block explorer. Raze Network operates as a privacy layer and can be deployed across the network of parachains, main relay chain, and decentralized Web3 applications. It is constructed upon zkSNARKs that allows verifying the data integrity without revealing its contests. Raze Network using r-tokens that replace the original asset providing privacy and can be easily redeemed to the original asset and also can be minted from the base token with the 1:1 rate.
?? Polkamon Collectible NFTs Are Coming To Elrond
Polkamon animated gaming characters as unique digital collectibles will become available exclusively on Elrond directly in mainnet protocol that makes them available faster and for a lower cost. Moreover, their value will start increasing as soon as they have been purchased. The NFT’s will be available in a limited quantity for 7 days after realization and according to Elrond, the chances of getting one is 1 to 5000. Highly specialized Elrond collectibles will be available from the third quarter of 2021.
“Their uniqueness makes it a source of additional income for you, just like those rare trading cards you so loved to own.” — Creptonewsz
Regulations
?? Kraken’s CEO Warns of Potential Crypto Regulations in the United States
Kraken’s CEO, Jesse Powell speaking to CNBC warned that significant growth of the crypto market with its market capitalization expanding by 600% in just a year, attracted the attention of global regulators and that the crackdowns can follow this interest, especially taking into consideration the threats from the US government. In particular, The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) proposed to make people holding cryptos and making transactions worth $3000 or more to identify their personalities. Powell thinks that this type of regulations “will kill the original use case”. At the same time, he concerns that it is too late for the ban of cryptocurrencies.
“I hope that the US and international regulators don’t take too much of a narrow view on this. Some other countries, China especially, are taking crypto very seriously and taking a very long-term view.” — Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken
?? Russian Crypto Investors Are Complying With The Tax Bill
Russian cryptocurrency investors started to comply with the authorities after Russia’s State Duma approved the bill recognizing cryptocurrencies as properties. That means both: the legal protection for the crypto owners and the possibility to impose 13% of the gains from crypto investments. Russian residents will have to mandatorily declare transactions exceeding 600,000 rubles ($8,184) a year, otherwise, their crypto investments will be slammed with a 10% fine on the undeclared amount. If the investors fail to pay the tax, a 40% penalty will be issued.
Mass Adoption
?? TIME Partners Up With Grayscale, Agrees To Be Paid In BTC
The partnership between Fund manager Grayscale and New York-based magazine happened to present an educational video series explaining the crypto world. This is an outstanding occasion as two giants from pop culture and the crypto world partner. Time magazine is agreed to be paid in Bitcoin and furthermore, doesn’t plan to convert the assets in fiat and will keep them on its balance sheet, becoming the 33rd publicly traded company to hold Bitcoins. Lately, Time was noticed in joining NFT-mania as it dropped a set of tokenized covers in March.
Hacking
?? 2016 Bitfinex hackers move BTC worth over $623M to an unknown wallet
According to the tweets from the popular blockchain tracker Whale Alert, the bitcoins stolen in 2016 from Bitfinex were transferred to an unknown wallet. The transaction was held in batches and took 63 separate operations to move all 10,057 Bitcoins worth around $623 million. The whole transfer took less than an hour. And the timing interestingly matches with the day when Coinbase went on NASDAQ The last transfer of those funds happened in November 2020 when about 5000 Bitcoins were moved. According to Adam Cochran, a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, that’s made to create some panic and to cash in short, though Cochram admits that as those assets are the most tracked by the community there is no single change for those assets to be cashed out.
“Some experts have asserted the fact that no near-term risk would be created with respect to Bitcoin’s price because of the movement.” — AMBcrypto
?? Story of a hack on Instagram and ransom in Bitcoin
On April 3rd, the CMO and social media manager of The Cryptonomist, Ilaria Stirpe received the message in Direct from Instagram itself, saying she had to open the external link to prove that her posts are not violating the publication policy. That was a phishing attempt; which though looked exactly the same as the Instagram actions when they contact users about violations. As Ilaria opened the link and started to put her login data, she started receiving notifications from Instagram about suspicious activities and despite all her attempts to prevent the hack, she got kicked off the profile and got the notification that the email connected to the profile was changed. In a few minutes, she received a What’s app message with the ransom demand (150 euro in Bitcoins) to return the access. Ilaria though decided not to follow up, called the postal police and contacted Instagram for help. Within a few hours, facebook’s support contacted her and helped to regain possession of her account.
“I decided to disclose my experience because many people are pressured into paying these ransoms. I wanted to inform the community that it is possible to use customer service and quickly regain possession of your profile. We would therefore urge you not to be tempted by this, even if you have a business account. Because you can get your profile back within a few days without paying.” — Ilaria Stirpe
People
?? Elon Musk Tweets ‘Doge Barking at the Moon’
Elon Musk once again drew attention to his beloved crypto coin Dogecoin in his latest tweet, posting a picture with the moon, a long ladder, and a barking dog, saying in the latest tweet that DOGE is barking at the Moon. The tweet gained thousands of reactions and reposts and is still gaining. Also as expected this skyrocketed DOGE’s price within hours. The price moved to over $0.13 bringing Dogecoin to the Top-10 cryptocurrencies in terms of a market cap.
“Elon’s latest tweet currently sent many DOGE investors on an active trading spree with the crypto.” — Coinquora
?? VeChain And Salesforce Partnership Could Be The Most Important In Crypto, Says Ben Armstrong
As VeChain Foundation is partnering with Salesforce for testing, trying and making applications on the VeChainThor Blockchain, popular Youtuber Ben “BitBoy'' Armstrong calls this collaboration one of the most important for the entire crypto industry. Being one of the world largest CRM software companies and working with a lot of major firms in the traditional market, Salesforce cooperating with the VeChain will link multiple business sectors. VeChain provides multiple features and allows the development of multiple use cases and, according to the Youtuber, integration with the tracking data system is just logical. He also expects that the VeChain’s token price will get positively impacted and he definitely wasn’t mistaken as at the moment of publication VET was traded at $0.17, seeing a 49% increase in a week and a 24% increase just in one day.
“It’s going to be massive. They are official partners. This is one of the biggest partnerships in crypto and I can tell you that VeChain has already got a lot and it’s going to keep going for sure, I believe so.” — Ben “BitBoy” Armstrong
?? Binance CEO Shades Exchanges for Not Listing BSC Projects
In his Twitter Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao commented on the exchanges that didn’t list BSC projects, saying that such a choice only limits their development. Though he didn’t specifically address any exchange, Coinbase can be easily seen as one of the main addressees, as it surprisingly doesn’t support BNB yet even with it being ranked as the third crypto by a market cap. In another tweet, Changpeng Zhao noted that ETH is just 3.3 times bigger and currently facing multiple scaling challenges, while BSC develops increasingly supporting multiple leading projects. CZ concerned that by not adding BSC the exchanges defrauded its customers.
Prices
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