Every week we make a digest about the most significant news in crypto, and we thought it would be fun to ask what the community members and bloggers think about all things crypto.
Please, welcome Tony Vlachakis! Tony curates content on Publish0x and Twitter. He is a student of finance, investing, crypto, NFTs and blockchain. He likes to learn in public on The Weekly Summary.
Projects And Updates
?? OKEx Introduces A Single Account to Trade Anything on the Platform
Portfolio Margin is a unique product which until recently was only available for a few brokerages and banks working with the clients with impressive capitals and trading experience. From March, 25 it is available for all the OKEx’s user base in 3 different variations: Simple mode — for spot traders and options buyers, Single currency margin mode — for derivative traders using multiple trading instruments, Multi-currency margin and Portfolio Margin Mode — for professional traders, so they can use all the instruments as collateral and trade using all the supported instruments.
Unified account management is being offered to traders on OKEx, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges. What was once only available to accredited investors with a net worth north of seven figures, OKEx now enables its customers the leverage to perform advanced portfolio management.
?? Tezos (XTZ) Highly-Anticipated NFT Platform, Kalamint, Launches
Kalamint, standing apart by creating the community of devoted minting artists and fighting the plagiarism went live on March, 24 and the first NFT is to be for sale soon. Experts expect it’s high popularity due to the rapid growth of Tezos NFT community and their NFT platform Hicetnunk, which is lately attracting lots of the digital artists. Kalamint is more of an exclusive gallery with DAO-governed group of experts which is formed by the majority of community engaging chosen artists and protecting the copyrights. New platform will allow users to create native Tezos NFTs using the FA2 token standard, place the collectibles on the marketplace and also to buy others tokens. Developers are also working on collections creation, auctions and price discovery curves options. One more advantage of Tezos that attracts more users on its NFTs platforms is extremely low transaction fees, that don’t go higher than $0,4 and high TPS (amount of transactions per second) – 121.
The NFT universe just got better thanks to Tezos. Digital artists and pixel painters can now create, sell, and collect non-fungible tokens on Tezos with Kalamint. Quality content and plagiarism will be top priorities for this NFT platform. Governance from the community will determine if an artist can post their nifties. And because of the Tezos blockchain’s Proof of Stake (PoS), less electricity will be used to mint NFTs.
?? IOTA Releases Public Beta Of Brand-New Firefly Wallet
Fierly wallet, designed as a starting portal for IOTA’a machine economy was realized on March 22 and replaced Trinity wallet. It is based on 2 open-source Rust libraries — one for developing the wallet app, and the other one, Stronghold for separating cryptographic apps from the other ones to prevent unwanted data leaking. From the launch time several features are available on Fierly wallet such as the option of performing sensitive transactions in the outlying storage, encrypted backups, reusable addresses, a 24-h recovery, possibility to move the wallet to the other devices using Stronghold backup. In the nearest future contact management, chat, digital identities, exchange integration and NFTs are to be added. It’s also planned that after April 28 when Chrysalis phase 2 will be launched, a new wallet will allow moving IOTA tokens to Chrysalis.
?? Coinbase Gets $6.5 Million Penalty From CFTC Over In-House Trading Issues
The charges filed in February 2021 by U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) applied to the action that took place between January 2015 and September 2018. According to the CFTC claim COINBASE created two automated trading algorithms — “Hedger'' and “Replicator” which often matched each other’s deals and, as it was investigated, effectively traded with each other meaning Coinbase was trading with itself. Coinbase former employee used deceptive device to wash trade BTC/LTC pair and CFTC stands that the company is vicariously liable for his actions. It may also be that the charges are somehow connected to the story when Coinbase listed BHC in December, 2017 and suspended the trading just after a few hours. Also it can be related to XRP listing as Ripple is also being accused in counting as unlisted security. Though this penalty is not to strongly affect Coinbase’s profit as it’s not accused in any criminal activity and the blame is on the already former employee of the company.
?? Ethereum Mining Pool Launches MEV Beta Program With An Eye On EIP-1559
Miner Extracted Value Strategy will compensate the decreased miners’ reward caused by the activation of the disputed EIP-1559 that could possibly have security issues which could be softened with EIP-3368 adoption. EIP-1559 along with EIP-3368 will also be able to mitigate high gas fees on Ethereum and other aligning issues. With MEV integration 80% of the revenue will be shared among the miners, and will allow them to choose the packaging of blokes to make better profit. Also 5% of the Gitcoin grant will go for the support of the industry.
?? Cardano to Support NFT Marketplaces
Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder recently said that while preparing the hard fork for Alonzo his team was negotiating with several top NFT marketplaces to move to Cardano blockchain. Hoskinson believes that it is very likely to happen in the nearest future and meanwhile his team is scaling up the necessary capacity for the shift so the system works smoothly. According to Charles Hoskinson, we are to expect several announcements about new partnerships in this field in the coming weeks.
Not to be outdone, Charles Hoskinson is in talks with various NFT platforms. Hoskinson wants a piece of the exploding popularity of NFTs. What’s also helping these negotiations is Cardano’s Project Catalyst, currently the “world’s largest decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)”. Six NFT marketplaces are requesting funds on Catalyst, Cardano’s business experiment promoting innovation and collaboration.
Regulations
?? Indian Corporates Will Now Have To Disclose Their Crypto Holdings To the Government
According to India’s blockchain lawyer Varun, the companies will reveal if they hold any crypto assets while reporting with the MCA and moreover, those data will be public. In his twitter he posted the draft of the document the access to which is still missing. Until now Indian corporates were not very open about their relationship with crypto, probably fearing Indian government taking any prohibitive action, especially against the background of gossips about full crypto ban in the country. RBI Governor, Shaktikant Das, confirmed that Indian government has concerns about crypto usage, though the final decision according to it had not been taken yet. He also said that RSI is now working on implementing the digital Rupee.
Similar to Tesla’s recent disclosure to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission of their Bitcoin investment, public companies in India may have to report crypto holdings to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. India’s central bank is still debating if they will ban crypto as we all wait for these important decisions from its government.
?? Russia's Money Laundering Watchdog Monitoring Bitcoin To Ruble Transactions
The Federal executive responsible for AML oversight in his speech during the parliament session on Tuesday, March 23 said that Rosfinmonitoring — Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service is monitoring the operations made after the crypto exchange to fiat. And from the coming October those operations will be classified as a specific class of “suspicious transactions”.
?? OKEx to Close Its Doors in South Korea Amid New Crypto Law
OKEx, South Korean based exchange, is going to permanently stop operating in the country after April, 7. This is caused by a new crypto law passed by Korean Government on March 25. So users got a little more than a week to complete all the necessary deposits and transactions before any operations on the platform will cease. Now one of the tor-10 exchange services on CoinGecko platform has a 24-hour volume of almost $1,5 million and it’s unknown how much this will be affected by the decision to stop operating in South Korea.
Mass Adoption
?? Norwegian Registered Bitcoin Wallet/Exchange App BitGate Goes Live
Norwegia-registered bitcoin wallet app BitGate was officially launched and now available in Google Play and Apple App Store. It allows you to register using the BankID code unit, so remembering the passwords and keys get unnecessary, add one or more bank accounts and then trade Bitcoins directly through it, without middle exchanges. Users also can send Bitcoins to anyone in Norway using only a phone number, if the receiver has no app yet, the assets will be available at the first login. The developers are planning to add automatic deposit and withdrawal options in the nearest future and later to improve the app according to the feedback and demands from the users.
?? Elon Musk’s Tesla Launches Bitcoin Payment Option For U.S. Residents
Less than a month and a half after Tesla's major investment in Bitcoin, Elon Musk's company allowed the US buyers to purchase the vehicles with the largest cryptocurrency. The news was announced on Elon Musk's Twitter on March, 24. The instructions for the crypto payment are published on the Customer Support page of Tesla’s official website. Company explained that the customers can either scan the QR-code or put the Bitcoin wallet address on the payment page. Musk warned that trying to pay with other crypto currency will cause the loss of funds. It’s planned that afterwards paying in Bitcoins will be spread to the other countries where Tesla is sold.
We know that Elon Musk regularly tweets about Bitcoin and Dogecoin. Musk put his money (or crypto) where his mouth was last week by accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment to purchase an electric car by Tesla. The memelord also tweeted that, “Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly. Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency. What will be the next Fortune 500 company to accept Bitcoin as payment for goods or services?
?? IOTA In Talks With US Government About Vaccination Passport
Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA held an Ask Me Anything session on March, 17, where he shared some current projects and strategies of IOTA foundation. One of them is the IOTA-based vaccination passport which the company is discussing with the American partners, including the government. As they are getting closer to complete their identity protocol, IOTA might participate in the creation of this new document.
Hacking
?? Rugpull Hack on BSC Nets 9000 BNB
On March, 19 The TurtleDex project suddenly closed up, rugpulling about 9000 BNB, deleting twitter and telegram accounts. Some of the assets converted into ETH to Binance, which made many investors urge BINANCE to freeze. Interestingly, shortly before that the TutleDex replying on the rugpull related question TurtleDex said about the hands' shortness. Binance founder CZ says that the investors can get some recompense from the BSC, but no official word was published as well as the TurtleDex crew remains silent.
People
?? Vitalik Buterin: NFTs Can Be A Social Good, Not Just A Casino For Rich Celebrities
Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin in his latest blogpost named “The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy,” discourse on the latest NFT boom. He thinks that there was almost no social use of helping Elon Mas to earn one more million by selling NFT (which he decided not to do), though with the right support and management non-fungible tokens can have more valuable applications. He suggested two ways to use the technology for the common good. First on is the implementation of the decentralized autonomous organization that will use the collective approval of the decentralized community to permit certain NFTs with the guarantee of sending a certain amount for the charity. The other way is to integrate NFTs to the social media profiles so it shows where the money was invested. Using both of the ways, according to Buterin, people can be nudged towards NFTs that benefit society.
?? Twitter CEO Converts First Tweet To NFT, Sold At Over $2.9m
Jack Dorsey has sold his first NFT — the first ever made in 2006 tweet for over $2,9 million to Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi. According to the rules of Valuables platform, 95% goes to the seller and 5% is the service commission.
The first ever tweet was minted as an NFT and sold for almost $3 million! Jack Dorsey happens to be a huge Bitcoin advocate, just check out his current Twitter profile. It has one hashtag… #bitcoin. Dorsey is also the CEO and founder of Square, a financial services and mobile payment company. He converted the prize money into 50.8751669 Bitcoin and then donated all of that BTC to the charity GiveDirectly, Africa Response Fund.
?? MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin Is An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Michael Saylor, the Chief Executive Officer of MicroStrategy in an interview with Times said that his goal now is to help the companies to adopt the cryptocurrency and save themselves from the coming fiat crash and monetary inflation. Earlier in February he held a conference about Bitcoin for businesses and it seemed ten times more participants than were expected. He is also known to lead other companies by example as his company MicroStrategy made a huge investment in Bitcoin in August of the last year. Now the company made far more profit from investing in crypto than from its main activity.
One of the biggest bulls and thought leaders on Bitcoin is millionaire Michael Saylor, the CEO of Microstrategy. There are countless interviews Saylor has given about Bitcoin on YouTube in the past year. His points on BTC’s technology, economics, security, and as a store of value are impressive. So when he says that, “Bitcoin is an idea whose time has come,” everyone needs to listen. Microstrategy has recently reported owning 90,531 Bitcoins in company reserves.
Prices
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