Crypto Currency

Dogecoin rallied by more than 85%, suggesting Wall Street Bet’s crypto wing may have decided that they weren’t done with DOGE yet. After gaining the spotlight due to a 980% pump on Jan. 28, Dogecoin ( DOGE ) briefly entered the top 10 ranking by market capitalization for the first time since 2015. Once the massive pump lost momentum and traders quickly took profits, it seemed that investors would move on past the meme-based cryptocurrency and find something else to invest in.  The pump initially started when exchanges prevented retail traders from buying more GameStop and AMC stock on Jan. 28. Fueled by the Reddit discussion group r/Wallstreetbets, the army of investors turned their attention to silver and a selection of ‘cheap’ cryptocurrenceis. On Jan.28, Twitter user "WSB Chairman" asked, "Has Doge ever been to a dollar?" to his 750,000 followers. That was enough to trigger the monster rally , despite Dogecoin having no protocol upgrades or developments sin...

More than 200,000 Redditors joined the page last week. One of the most well-known online Bitcoin communities passed two million subscribers in a surge of activity on Friday, purportedly due to the media attention over the r/Wallstreetbets subreddit. According to the Metrics For Reddit analytics website, the subreddit r/Bitcoin has 2,184,941 subscribers at the time of publication, making it the 178th most popular subreddit among more than 100,000 active pages. The Bitcoin ( BTC ) subreddit hit the two million subscriber milestone on Friday, more than 18 months after reaching one million. Though much of the growth in the subreddit following the 2017 bull run was gradual, interest in r/Bitcoin exploded last week, with more than 200,000 accounts subscribing to the page between Jan. 26 and Jan. 30, from 1,982,681 to 2,184,941. Subscriber growth for r/Bitcoin. Source: Metrics for Reddit Many of the new subscribers may have been drawn to the subreddit following mainstream media outle...

A Melvin Capital client claims that the firm has "massively de-risked" its investment portfolio following the controversy involving short-selling GameStop stocks. Melvin Capital started 2021 with $12.5 billion in assets before retail investors from Reddit caused the firm to lose billions on its GameStop short positions. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the hedge fund has a little more than $8 billion in assets at the end of January, which includes a $2.75 billion investment from Citadel and Point72 Asset Management earlier this month. This represents a 53% loss, according to people familiar with the firm. In the report, a client claims that Melvin has "massively de-risked" its investment portfolio following the controversy involving short selling GameStop stocks. People familiar with the hedge fund said Melvin has restructured its portfolio to improve its ability to exit securities easily. The hedge firm, as well as Citron Capital — another firm invo...

Bitcoin price fell back into the descending triangle but this dip may attract buyers to altcoins and DeFi tokens in the short term. Over the past seven days, the crypto market saw an uptick in volatility as Bitcoin ( BTC ) and Dogecoin ( DOGE ) price rallied higher simply because of social media activity. In situations like these, traders who make their investment decisions based on emotions tend to incur heavy losses and this is exactly what happened last week. Dogecoin’s ( DOGE ) recent pump and dump caused several new traders who bought due to FOMO to lose money within a short time and this scenario is likely to play out again as social media groups have decided that collective pumps of altcoins is a new method of investing. A similar trend currently seems to be developing in Bitcoin ( BTC ), which has retraced a large portion of the up-move that was caused due to the “Elon pump” on Jan. 29. This shows that barring a few emotional buyers, most professional traders may have use...

In 2020, holding the top 100 altcoins equally was a more lucrative investment than Bitcoin up until Dec. 18, according to eToro. Investors who knew when to swap Bitcoin ( BTC ) and altcoins could have boosted their gains significantly in 2020, according to new research from eToro , the popular social trading platform. The challenge, of course, is pinpointing when the coveted alt season begins.  In its latest quarterly report, eToro breaks down various cryptocurrency investment themes related to the 2020 bull market. It also devotes an entire section to alt season – the part of the cryptocurrency market cycle where altcoins rally against the dollar and, possibly, outperform Bitcoin. The research found that the top 100 altcoins, when held equally, were “a more lucrative investment” than BTC for most of 2020 – until Dec. 18, to be precise. However, investors who knew when to cycle from BTC to altcoins and vice versa could have nearly doubled their gains for the year. As eToro ex...

The only way for DeFi to realize its potential is through an omni-chain approach, enabling assets of any kind to flow freely through all platforms. It’s now virtually unarguable that decentralized finance is blockchain’s “killer use case.” Total value locked in DeFi grew by over 3,000% over the year leading up to January 2021. On the DApp Radar rankings , eight of the top 10 DApps on Ethereum are DeFi. Uniswap sees more users than any other application and is set to average $1 billion per day in trading volume for January. Given the challenges we see with centralized exchanges, the push toward DeFi is hardly surprising. Centralized platforms offer limited lending and staking opportunities, and those that do exist depend on users putting their trust in the exchange. They’re also subject to region blocking and trade censorship, suffer from fragmented liquidity due to a disparity in product offerings, and have a limited range of instruments. By comparison, DeFi users now have access...

Kumar Gaurav said "there is no way any government" can outright ban crypto given its nature as a global and decentralized system. Kumar Gaurav, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Cashaa, believes the Indian government’s latest efforts to regulate digital currencies are more of an attempt to prevent illicit activities in the industry rather than outright ban crypto. According to a bulletin released by the Parliament of India on Friday, the governing body will be considering a bill intended to "prohibit all private cryptocurrencies" while also creating a regulatory framework for a digital rupee issued by the Reserve Bank of India, or RBI. The central bank announced last week that it would be "exploring the possibility" of a digital currency. However, the bill also says it will allow for "certain exceptions to promote the underlying technology of cryptocurrency and its uses." In a statement from Gaurav shared with Cointelegraph, the Ca...

MSTR stock has surged by roughly 113% since Dec. 8 when it was downgraded by a Citigroup analyst. On Dec. 8, 2020, Citigroup, one of the largest banks in the world, downgraded MicroStrategy'ss stock (MSTR). Since then, MSTR stock is up 113.27% from $289.45 to $617.31, as the price of Bitcoin ( BTC ) rallied. In the same period, the Citigroup stock has declined slightly by 0.63%, from $58.36 to $57.99. MicroStrategy stock vs. BTC and Nasdaq. Source: ecoinmetrics Why has MicroStrategy stock performed so strongly despite the downgrade? MicroStrategy has been investing its treasury holdings in Bitcoin, making BTC is treasury reserve asset. Currently, it is the biggest public company holder  with over 70K BTC worth roughly $2.4 billion at today's prices.  Moreover, on Dec. 9, 2020, MicroStrategy announced raising $550 million in capital from convertible bonds. In an official statement, MicroStrategy explicitly said that it intends to invest in Bitcoin with the proceeds of...

In the digitizing world, identity is everything and blockchain is to make it safe for everyone: users, businesses and governments. Decentralized identity is a function of blockchain technology that delivers real-world benefits to users quickly and easily, allowing them to benefit from things such as easier logins, faster credit checks and an overall smoother online experience. The proliferation of websites, e-commerce hubs and social media platforms means we can all have a huge database of logins, passwords and usernames to remember. As these increase, the use of password managers has become commonplace (as has the use of one-time passwords and two-factor authentication) to effectively allow websites and services to double-check our identity. The result is that the end-user now faces an almost overwhelming number of hoops to jump through if they lose their password or two-factor authentication application or access to their smartphone. The whole process of transacting online has b...

The GameStop short squeeze and Bitcoin have a lot more in common than appears at the surface, according to Paolo Ardoino. The sudden rise of stocks like GameStop (GME) have shined a positive light on Bitcoin ( BTC ), as more retail investors look to “rail against” the financial status quo, according to Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino. Bitcoin’s price peaked north of $38,500 on Friday, just as U.S. stocks concluded their worst week of trading since October. The divergence between BTC and stocks was partly due to a massive short squeeze of institutional investors by a Reddit group called r/WallStreetBets. The Reddit buying frenzy was centered around GameStop, the video game and consumer electronics retailer. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, also added the Bitcoin symbol to his Twitter page, possibly signaling his newfound support of the digital currency. Paolo Ardoino believes the GameStop saga is only the beginning of a mass revolt against the financial status quo and that Bitcoin...

As another $2-trillion stimulus package looms in the U.S., institutions will continue to look at BTC as a hedge against inflation. For example, just last week, when the currency was hovering around the $30,000 threshold, a whole host of pundits was warning investors to brace for impact, suggesting that the premier crypto asset was on the verge of a correction and could once again dip to around the $20,000 region. However, in just one day, Bitcoin was once again playing with the bulls, retesting the $38,500 limit, only to witness a selloff and eventually settle around the $33,500 region. While for most crypto veterans that might have been another day at the office, others branded the upsurge as “Elon’s Candle,” which relates to Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who included “Bitcoin” in his Twitter bio as well as sent out the following cryptic message “in retrospect, it was inevitable” to his 40 million-odd followers online. Regardless of the cause, has the recent price volatility sca...

The time has come to make decentralized finance more P2P-oriented than it has been so far. During this first wave of decentralized finance projects and services, users have been more than willing to part with their funds. It is very similar to how decentralized exchanges work, as convenience seems to trump privacy and security in DeFi. Just because some platforms offer a high annual percentage yield does not mean anyone should give up control of their funds. Considering that DeFi is designed to be built on blockchain technology, there is no reason for go-betweens, intermediaries or fees. Unfortunately, these aspects are all present in a lot of solutions today. Regrettably, users have to pay to deposit funds and withdraw them again afterward. Concepts like these will eventually be the downfall for DeFi unless developers address them soon. Uniswap, currently the fourth-largest Ethereum DeFi project by total value locked, shows how noncustodial DeFi works. The DEX never takes contro...

In the future, owning unique art won’t be restricted to the elites, but will everyone have digital art on their walls? With the nonfungible token market approaching the frothing point, perhaps it’s time to sit back and ask: “What’s happening here?” The $750,000 in proceeds from the recent sale of a single “alien” CypherPunk NFT, after all, could have paid for a reasonably sized house. The crypto world at large is only 12 years old, entering adolescence, but crypto art — art on a blockchain — and nonfungible tokens are just out of their terrible twos. The launch of an epoch-defining CryptoKitties goes back to 2017 and 2018, and Ethereum’s nonfungible token, ERC-721 — which is used by many digital galleries and also non-art NFTs — wasn’t developed and rolled out until early 2018. What is being discussed here is still very new. Moreover, Bitcoin ( BTC ), the world’s first blockchain project, was initially just a more efficient way to transfer money, though it soon became more — a k...

Bitcoin is slowing down and weakening on-chain metrics are forcing traders to turn cautious in the short term. The price of Bitcoin ( BTC ) is showing overall weakness as it struggles to establish $34,000 as a support level. Overall, BTC appears to be stagnating without signs of a short-term relief rally, leading traders to be cautious. One concerning trend is that the volume of Bitcoin has been stagnating along with its price, apart from the “Elon pump” on Jan. 29 . This trend indicates that there is an overall drop in buyer demand since the $42,000 top despite BTC hovering in the low $30,000 region. BTC/USDT 4-hour price chart (Binance). Source: TradingView.com Bitcoin gets choppy after revisiting $38,000 On Jan. 29, the price of Bitcoin rose to as high as $38,461 on Binance after Tesla CEO and the world's richest man, Elon Musk, ostensibly showed support for Bitcoin. However, before this rally, on-chain analysts were already warning that the momentum of Bitcoin was slow...

For managers, entrepreneurs and builders working with blockchain, performing a cost-benefit analysis of DLT implementations is crucial. Blockchain technologies and their associated market gained tremendous momentum this past year. The colossal developments and the aggressive funding of ideas across this nascent industry have sparked some serious debate as to the veritable value of blockchain. Before implementing blockchain technology, managers, builders and developers need to ask themselves one question: “why blockchain?” What necessitates a decentralized system? In order to understand how best to use blockchain technology, we must first define the trust assumptions in the system under consideration. Often, blockchain use cases overlook this question of a third party without ever considering whether that use case could be better met with a distributed or centralized alternative. Criteria for a decentralized system: A uniformly accepted single source of truth. The system must re...