Crypto Currency

Behind this western U.S. state, Illinois and New York were the next states most interested in the two major cryptocurrencies. The Golden State of California may be America's most inquisitive state about Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), new data from CoinGecko has revealed.  In a report shared by CoinGecko, internet users from California accounted for a whopping 43% of all Bitcoin and Ethereum web traffic searches on the crypto tracking website. This is despite the entire state population only accounting for 11.9% of the U.S. population. Bobby Ong, COO and co-founder of CoinGecko said it was “unsurprising” that California took the crown in the blue-chip cryptocurrency interest, given its place as a “major technological hub.” California is also home to Silicon Valley — one of the largest technology and innovation hubs in the world. Among the largest companies situated in Silicon Valley to have invested in blockchain-based applications and crypto startups include Apple, Google,...

A joint effort to permanently store and authenticate Colombian property titles on the XRP Ledger looks set to stall as the new government focuses on other priorities. A partnership between the Colombian government and Ripple Labs to put land titles on the blockchain appears to have stalled following the project being "deprioritized" by the new administration. The project was initially announced by the outgoing government’s Ministry of Information Technology and Communications just two weeks before the newly elected president Gustavo Petro was sworn into office. According to an Aug. 30 report from Forbes, the interim director of the National Lands Agency Juan Manuel Noruega Martínez said the project is not part of the agency’s strategic priorities for 2022, stating:  “This isn’t one of the projects defined in the PETI [Strategic Plan for Information Technologies]” The shift comes as something of a surprise considering Colombia's new president is thought to be friend...

The number one attribute to succeed in the crypto industry is a “start-up mentality” and the ability to “roll with the punches," a crypto recruiter tells Cointelegraph. The ongoing crypto winter has seen budgets and jobs slashed, but the search for top-tier talent hasn’t stopped across several Web3 verticals, according to some crypto recruitment firms. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Kevin Gibson, founder of crypto recruiting firm Proof of Search said that the majority of staff cuts in the crypto market have been from centralized exchanges, most notably the 18% staff cut at Coinbase in June, 10% cuts at Gemini in July,  and the 5% cut at Crypto.com. Despite this, he said there is “still a great deal of demand” for crypto job seekers to get work with “Game-Fi, Metaverse, De-Fi and NFT-oriented companies.” Gibson explained that crypto job boards continue to be dominated by developer and engineer roles, adding there is also “a shortage of experienced CTO, CMO, and token experts.” ...

Dressed up as legitimate desktop software, this sneaky malware has infected thousands of machines across 11 countries, forcing them to unknowingly mine Monero (XMR). Crypto mining malware has been sneakily invading hundreds of thousands of computers around the world since 2019, often masquerading as legitimate programs, such as Google Translate, new research has found.  In an Aug. 29 report by Check Point Research (CPR), a research team for American-Israeli cybersecurity provider, Check Point Software Technologies, the malware has been flying under the radar for years, thanks partly to its insidious design which delays instaling the crypto mining malware for weeks after the initial software download. . @_CPResearch_ detected a #crypto miner #malware campaign, which potentially infected thousands of machines worldwide. Dubbed ‘Nitrokod,” the attack was initially found by Check Point XDR. Get the details, here: https://t.co/MeaLP3nh97 #cryptocurrecy #TechnologyNews #Cyber...

After first raising concerns about the wallet, Michael Benko noted he was pleased to finally get an official answer about the mysterious whale wallet. After much speculation, the wallet hodling more than 22 billion of Axie Infinity’s total supply of in-game token Smooth Love Potion (SLP) has been identified as an address belonging to Binance. The wallet was first highlighted by Axie Infinity player and tech co-founder Michael Benko, who raised concerns about it having over 50% of SLP’s total circulating supply, which could potentially have an impact on the game's ecosystem.  Following a Cointelegraph report on the matter , Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin confirmed on Twitter that the address is a “Binance Ronin gateway contract.” A previous statement to Cointelegraph from Sky Mavis co-founder and chief operating officer Aleksander Larson had only shared that the wallet did not belong to Sky Mavis nor Axie Infinity.  Ultimately it was Zirlin who put the matter to bed...

The trademark application comes months after filing a lawsuit against NFT project MetaBirkins for allegedly using its Birkin brand to sell digital collectibles. Luxury brand Hermès is laying the groundwork for its entrance to Web3 after filing a trademark application covering NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and the Metaverse.  According to an Aug. 26 filing to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the trademark covers downloadable software to view, store and manage virtual goods, digital collectibles, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs “for use in online worlds.” It also filed trademarks for “retail store services featuring virtual goods” as well as fashion and trade shows in “online virtual, augmented or mixed reality environments” and for “providing an online marketplace for buyers and sellers of virtual goods.” Luxury brand Hermès has filed a trademark application for its name claiming plans to expand into ▶️NFTs + Virtual currency ▶️Crypto + NFT trading ▶️Virtual goo...

Bitcoin difficulty completes its largest single upward readjustment since January, with average hash rate eyeing new all-time highs of its own. Data from on-chain monitoring resource BTC.com confirms that on Aug. 31, Bitcoin’s network difficulty hit new all-time highs. Bitcoin seals biggest difficulty jum since start of 2022 Despite the recent BTC price drawdowns , Bitcoin’s network fundamentals are telling an optimistic tale as August comes to a close. Both difficulty and hash rate are climbing, reflecting conviction among miners over long-term profitability of their network participation. It also suggests that the mining sector is absorbing lower profits versus costs in the short term. Difficulty, which added 9.26% at its Aug. 31 automated readjustment, now stands at its highest ever. Competition among miners is as healthy as ever. For comparison, the last time that difficulty increased more at once was in January (9.32%), and before that, in August 2021 (13.24%). According...

The CEO of Binance US was reached out by a Subcommittee chairman for producing various documents — in an attempt to help review the measure taken to protect investors. Brian Shroder, the president and CEO of Binance US, received a federal letter requesting the urgent disclosure of official documents that prove the exchange’s adherence to various investor-centric safety protocols. The request comes from a Subcommittee chairman under the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In the letter addressed to Shroder, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi from the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy highlighted the lack of participation from crypto exchanges in helping the US government curb financial fraud and protect investors, stating: “I am concerned by the rapid growth of fraud and consumer abuse. I am also concerned by the apparent lack of action by cryptocurrency exchanges to protect consumers conducting transactions through their platforms.” Krishnamo...

AVAX's recovery aligns with similar upside moves across the top-ranking crypto assets. Avalanche ( AVAX ) bulls snubbed the sensational claims made by a self-proclaimed whistleblower website that the project's parent firm, Ava Labs, paid lawyers to damage its competitors' reputation. Avalanche price recovers from serious allegations AVAX's price established an intraday high of $19.75 on Aug. 30, two days after bottoming out locally at $17.50, amounting to a 15% rise. The token's modest recovery followed selloffs incurred by a sensational CryptoLeaks report . ️ #Avalanche is the top rising topic in #crypto following a claim that its #blockchain was attempting to manipulate regulatory systems. After hitting a 7-week low about 9 hours ago, $AVAX is up +7.5% since. We're watching how news of this unfolds. https://t.co/Ry1mGvdMap https://t.co/OHmNMkpAzS pic.twitter.com/kk3zue4d3G — Santiment (@santimentfeed) August 29, 2022 AVAX's price fell 3.5% o...

The new service offers Ethermine members a chance to collectively stake their ETH and earn 4.43% interest annually on top of their ETH deposits. As little as 0.1 ETH ($159) required to enter. Ahead of the rapidly approaching Ethereum ( ETH ) Merge on Sept. 15, Ethermine, the world’s largest Ethereum mining pool has unveiled a new staking pool for users. Notably however, it is not available to U.S. miners The new service offers Ethermine members a chance to collectively stake their ETH and earn interest on top of their deposits. As little as 0.1 ETH ($159) required to enter. However the smaller the holding, the greater the fee. The platform is currently offering stakers an annual ETH interest rate of 4.43%. At the time of writing, 393 Ether worth roughly $626,000 at current prices has been invested into Ethermine's new pool. Staking pools such as these hold significance as they offer competitive interest rates and a lower barriers of entry than solo staking as node operators, ...

776’s fund is called “Kryptos” and is set to capitalize on the current bear market when it launches in October. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital (VC) firm Seven Seven Six (776) is looking to raise a crypto investment fund worth $177.6 million, while current and former executives from Galaxy Digital and Genesis are raising a $500 million fund of their own. 776’s crypto play According to an Aug. 29 report from The Information, 776’s fund “Kryptos” will launch in October to capitalize on the current bear market. It emphasized there are currently some bargain bin token discounts on the market that are ripe for the taking. “This is the best time to buy if you’re really long on the industry. It’s on sale. Everything is on sale,” said Katelin Holloway, Founding Partner at Seven Seven Six. The firm registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to become an investment advisor in April, enabling the firm to invest in crypto and manage crypto investment fund...

Storing an NFT “in chain” means that the NFT can be generated completely off the underlying smart contract, without any need for an off-chain storage provider. PROOF, the private community behind the Moonbirds NFT collection, has announced it is shifting its blue-chip collection completely “in chain” — allowing images to be fully contained within the underlying smart contract.  In a community live stream named “Future PROOF” on Aug. 30, Harri Thomas, director of products at PROOF explained that the new approach will mean that in the future, the viewable image of a Moonbird NFT will be “constructed from the contract itself from art layers, which are going to be stored on the blockchain.” “We’ve talked about putting the birds ‘on chain’, so what I’m here to tell you today is that they’re not only going to be ON chain, they’re going to be put IN chain.” Thomas explained that their Ethereum-based NFTs will be different from most other NFTs which are simply tokens that point to whe...

The code bug has plagued the cETH market and has affected Compound’s front-end user face, but the CEO confirmed that “funds are not immediately at risk.” Decentralized lending platform Compound has been plagued by a code bug in a recent governance proposal to update its price feeds.  The code error has “temporarily frozen” the Compound ETH (cETH) market, causing cETH transactions to revert, but Compound Labs stated that despite the front end not working, “funds are not immediately at risk.” Compound Labs announced on Aug. 31 that the code bug came from Proposal 117: Compound Oracle Upgrade v3, which was implemented a couple of hours ago to update the oracle contracts on the Compound protocol to a new version that uses Uniswap V3 instead of V2 for price feeds. An hour ago, Proposal 117 was executed, which updated the price feed that Compound v2 uses. This price feed, while audited by three auditors, contained an error that is causing transactions for ETH suppliers and borro...

JPMorgan’s Umar Farooq said that use cases haven't arisen fully and regulation hasn't yet caught up. The head of JPMorgan’s digital assets unit Umar Farooq has suggestedthat most of the crypto assets on the market are “junk” and that real crypto use cases are yet to fully present themselves. During a panel discussion at the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Green Shoots Seminar on Aug. 29, Farooq stated that regulation is yet to catch up to the burgeoning industry which is holding back many traditional financial (TradFi) institutions from getting involved. He also opined that with the exception of a few, utility for most crypto assets is lacking: “Most of crypto is still junk actually, I mean with the exception of I would say, a few dozen tokens, everything else that has been mentioned is either noise or frankly, is just gonna go away.” “So in my mind, the use cases haven’t arisen fully, and the regulation hasn’t caught up and I think that's why you see the financial...

The New Mendoza Tax Administration crypto payment service turned on as of Aug. 24. In another shift toward widespread crypto adoption in Argentina, citizens from the Mendoza Province can now pay government fees and taxes using cryptocurrencies.  In an Aug. 27 statement, the Mendoza Tax Administration (ATM) described the new crypto payment service as fulfilling "the strategic objective of modernization and innovation," giving "taxpayers different means to comply with their tax obligations." The service officially began operation on Aug 24., but at this stage, it will only accept stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) for tax payments. Citizens can pay through the portal on the ATM website using any crypto wallets like Binance, Bybit, and Ripio. Once the user chooses cryptocurrencies as their payment option, the system sends a QR code, with the equivalent amount of stablecoins converted to pesos by an undisclosed online payment service provider. When ATM receives ...

One study indicated the NFT market is headed for a $230 billion valuation by 2030 — an increase of more than 20 times compared to its height in 2021. There is no denying that nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have taken a hit in recent months. Market conditions have plunged, scams and hacks are frequent, and there is an increasing number of low-quality projects, pushing many to question the value of NFTs and their place in Web3 altogether.  Over the last crypto cycle, NFT market conditions have been largely correlated to and reliant upon the general crypto market. As technology and digital assets soared in valuation, it became easier for individuals and investors to justify speculating on the nascent NFT asset class — often paying exorbitant premiums with the conviction that some tangible utility and value might be derived at a point in the future. Combined with the fact that NFTs, by nature, are relatively scarce and illiquid, it set up the perfect storm for dramatic price appreciatio...

The response comes as Ripple Labs and other critics believe the SEC has overstepped its mark on the enforcement of the crypto space. Ripple Labs General Counsel Stu Alderoty has hit back at a recent opinion piece by Security and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler, arguing that the regulator's crypto market shakedowns aren’t protecting consumers.  In an Aug. 28 opinion piece on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) titled “The SEC Wants to Be America’s Crypto Cop,” Alderoty claimed the SEC is “pushing aside his follow regulators” instead of concentrating on providing regulatory clarity for crypto. He gave an example of the recent “shakedown” of BlockFi by the SEC, which led to the company ending “up on the auction block” and two other similar companies going “belly up," arguing:  “Consumers weren’t protected, they were left holding the bag.” The piece came in response to Gensler’s Aug. 19 article “The SEC Treats Crypto Like the Rest of the Capital Markets” which was also ...

Smart contracts governing DeFi platforms identified as a particular cause for concern for the enforcement agency. The U.S Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a fresh warning for investors in decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, which have been targeted with $1.6 billion in exploits in 2022.  In an Aug. 29 public service announcement on the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, the agency said the exploits have caused investors to lose money — advising investors to conduct diligent research about Defi platforms before using them, while also urging platforms to improve monitoring and conduct m rigorous code testing. The law enforcement agency warned that cybercriminals are out in force to take advantage of "investors' increased interest in cryptocurrencies," and "the complexity of cross-chain functionality and open source nature of Defi platforms." The #FBI warns that cyber criminals are increasingly exploiting vulnerabilities in decent...

Wall Street Journal's Jean Eaglesham and Vicky Ge Huang suggested that such a “thin cushion of equity” could cause mayhem in the market if Tether’s liabilities were to outweigh its assets. An article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has claimed that Tether’s balance sheet is in a position that even a 0.3% drop in value of its reserve assets could “render Tether technically insolvent.” In an Aug. 27 report , WSJ journalists Jean Eaglesham and Vicky Ge Huang focused on the cloudy nature of Tether’s USDT reserves and its long-awaited audit that has been in the works since 2017. Eaglesham and Huang suggested that such a “thin cushion of equity” could cause mayhem in the market, if Tether’s liabilities were to outweigh its assets: “A 0.3% fall in assets could render Tether technically insolvent — a development that skeptics warn could reduce investor confidence and spur an increase in redemptions.” At the time of writing, Tether has $67.74 billion worth of assets and $67.54 billio...