BitMex’s 100x Group has awarded its last Bitcoin development grant of the year. The company has awarded a grant valued at $40,000 to Calvin Kim for his Bitcoin scalability solution, Utreexo — a project originally created by Tadge Dryja from the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. Bitcoin’s protocol checks every proposed transaction to make sure that the sender has enough coins to complete the request. All unspent Bitcoin (BTC) is saved in what is known as UTXO, or Unspent Transaction Outputs. While the entire Bitcoin blockchain is currently around 300 GB, the UTXO…
Month: August 2020
DeFi investment hype fuels rise in crypto exit scams
It’s hype season in the crypto space once again, and unsuspecting investors are at risk of suffering losses. Riding on the coattails of decentralized finance tokens that have provided staggering yields, rogue actors are flooding automated market makers like Uniswap with fake tokens. These schemes range from the elaborate to the downright lazy, but many seem to be hitting their mark, likely preying on the greed or ignorance of newbie crypto enthusiasts. Survivors of the many pump and dumps that dominated the 2017 initial coin offering era can probably identify…
Ethereum’s Balancer (BAL) Surges 25%—and More May Be to Come
Bitcoin and Ethereum have bounced a few percent over the past few hours, as are altcoins like Balancer. The Ethereum-based BAL is up 26% in the past 24 hours according to Coin Market Cap, reaching a price of $23.50 for the first time in many days. At a 26% gain, Balancer is the second best-performing crypto asset in the top 100 cryptocurrencies, only underperforming Cosmos (ATOM). Analysts say that the asset could be primed to move higher, especially as the decentralized finance space continues to move higher. Related Reading: Crypto Tidbits:…
Researcher Re-mines Satoshi’s Bitcoin Blocks To Discover His Secrets
Sergio Dermain Lerner, a researcher known for looking at the mining patterns of the original Bitcoin (BTC) miner, has turned his attention on the Bitcoin blocks mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. Lerner made a preview of his latest findings available to Cointelegraph. His research is based on the irregular pattern of the Least-Significant-Byte (LSB) of the nonce field of block. This past June, Lerner published a blog that expanded on his original research from 2013. He suggested that for an unknown reason, Satoshi refrained from mining in the first five minutes of…
Analyst on Why Ethereum’s Bullish Market Structure Is Intact After Strong Drop
Like most other crypto assets, Ethereum has slipped lower over the past four days. After peaking on Monday, all cryptocurrencies have retraced as Bitcoin has fallen lower seemingly due to a rise in the value of the U.S. dollar against foreign currencies. Ethereum has actually underperforming Bitcoin in this retracement, dropping around 11.5% from its year-to-date highs as opposed to just 7%. This seems to be the case with all altcoins, whereas capital flooded to BTC during the correction as investors sought safety. Despite some fearing this downtrend is set…
Hashgraph Sets to Scale a Mental Health Platform to Billion Users
Hashgraph has partnered with the Chopra Foundation to develop a mental health platform that they hope will scale to 1 billion users within five years. The platform’s initial focus will be on suicide prevention, though they hope to eventually turn it into a broader mental wellbeing network. According to the press release, the “Never Alone Initiative” will “serve a global community, delivering secure access to scientific research, the work of mental health and wellness experts, and pragmatic tools and practices for everyday use.” We asked Hashgraph CEO Mance Harmon whether…
People Have Spent Almost $7M on ETH Gas for Uniswap
Press time data from EthGasStation shows decentralized exchange Uniswap as the place users have spent the most Ethereum (ETH) on gas payments over the past 30 days. Uniswap participants shelled out a combined 17,700 total ETH as fuel to send their trades through — equalling $6.99 million spent on gas over the past month. Tether (USDT) came in second place. People spent a combined total of $6.39 million in ETH as gas to transact the popular stablecoin. Chainlink (LINK) ranked eighth. Uniswap has taken the crypto world by storm in…
Looks Like DeFi is Coming to Prediction Markets
PlotX seeks to create robust prediction markets for the burgeoning DeFi space by taking a slightly different approach than Augur and other similar projects. Its founder Ish Goel told Cointelegrpah that his company follows in Uniswap’s footsteps: What Uniswap did for exchanges, PlotX essentially is planning to do that with prediction markets. Unlike many of its competitors, PlotX generates markets automatically and focuses on short-term predictions instead of trying to cover all durations. For every trading pair that gets added to the platform, the algorithm automatically creates hourly trading pairs…
Barstool Sports Founder Unprepared for Bitcoin, Exits After $25k Loss
After recently entering the crypto space, Barstool Sports founder turned stock trader, Dave Portnoy, seems as though he is not quite ready for Bitcoin (BTC) trading yet. “I’m getting killed right now in Bitcoin,” Portnoy said in an Aug. 21 video posted on Twitter. “It took me months to figure out the stock market, I admit that,” he said. “I went in, I lost money — that’s what’s happening in Bitcoin,” he added, noting his unwillingness to mess around with the asset to figure it out, stating a lack of…
Grayscale’s Litecoin-Based Asset Sees Wild Premium Swings
Grayscale’s LTCN asset, boasting publicly quoted over-the-counter shares, currently trades far above the price of Litecoin (LTC) — its underlying asset. At press time, Litecoin trades at $60.62, while LTCN shares trade at $54.01. The two prices seem close, although each share of LTCN equals just 0.094 LTC, according to Grayscale’s website. Buying roughly 10.64 LTCN equates to ownership of 1 LTC. At current prices, however, buying 1 LTC worth of LTCN costs about $574 — over $500 more than the price of 1 LTC purchased on the crypto markets. Aug. 20…