Day: September 13, 2020

Bitcoin Reaches 144 Weeks From All-Time High: Why This Number Matters

boss

At the turn of tonight’s weekly close, Bitcoin will have reached 144 weeks from the asset’s all-time high at $20,000. On this crucial date, Bitcoin price is currently trading at roughly 50% from the high. But it could be the last time the asset is priced any lower, according to the previous bull market and this mysterious number. Why is the number 144 so special to financial markets, and what could this mean for the first-ever cryptocurrency? Does Time and Date Matter As Much To Financial Markets As Price, Patterns,…

Filecoin unveils the second phase of Space Race

boss

Filecoin has invited all miners around the world to participate in the second phase of its contest Space Race, which aims to help prepare its mainnet.  Filecoin explained in a post that it decided to conduct Space Race 2 after the large participation of miners in the first Space Race, who numbered more than 356 miners from 32 countries worldwide, and after the results from its first iteration.  The second Space Race is open to everyone beginning Sept. 14 until Oct. 5. According to Filecoin, the experiment will consist of…

New technology changes the game

boss

Economists, pundits, institutions and investors often talk about the global financial system. When stocks go up and trade thrives, they applaud its contributions to prosperity; when the markets crash and stocks dip, they blame its inhuman scale or its untrustworthy manipulators. But anyone who has attempted to diversify their portfolio with foreign stocks or acquire another nation’s bonds quickly comes to the same conclusion: The global financial system isn’t a single entity. “The system,” singular, is really “The systems,” plural. How do the pieces of the global financial system interact?…

COVID-19 shook out retail investors but emboldened BTC whales: Report

boss

As the COVID-19 pandemic began, retail and institutional Bitcoin investors took very different approaches, new research from OKEx Insights and Catallact showed.  The research, which looked at on-chain BTC transaction data from January to the beginning of August 2020, found retail investors largely pulled back and took a wait and see strategy with Bitcoin. Larger, possibly more institutional investors, on the other hand, accumulated BTC. The report does not take into account transactions in the bulk of August and September when prices fell.  Retail transactions, those representing less than one-tenth…

Bitcoin price abruptly drops 3% after miner outflows hit 5-month high

boss

The price of Bitcoin (BTC) dropped from $10,580 to as low as $10,258 on Coinbase on Sep. 13. The 3% fall within nine hours comes after on-chain data hinted at a potential miner sell-off. Miners continue to apply high selling pressure on Bitcoin Throughout the past week, on-chain analysts have said that miners have been selling relatively larger amounts of BTC. Miners are one of the two unmatched sources of selling pressure in the cryptocurrency market besides exchanges. Consequently, when miners move their mined BTC, it can cause immense selling…

The Blockchain Service Network will stimulate China’s CBDC plans

boss

From the Chinese government’s perspective, cryptocurrencies are not considered legal tender; instead, they are categorized under a type of “virtual commodity,” but some industry players believe the Blockchain Service Network (BSN) infrastructure can stimulate the development of virtual currencies like a CBDC.  During an interview with Cointelegraph, Eden Dhaliwal, Global Managing Director at Conflux Network, a layer-1 blockchain protocol and the only state-endorsed public blockchain project in China, stated that the government of China is highly motivated to launch a CBDC to “dominate the digital commerce landscape and make the…

Privacy laws might prove to be a blessing in disguise for crypto

boss

Anti-establishment and counter-government sentiments fuelled the early days of crypto. More than a decade later, crypto is slowly moving away from its wild-west early days and into a more organized system that traditional financial institutions are reluctantly adopting.  Crypto has also managed to attract the no less reluctant attention of various regulators. With reactions ranging from a complete ban on crypto transactions to making authorities question the overall role of regulation, cryptocurrencies have wreaked havoc on policymaking everywhere.  So far, regulators have mostly focused their attention on positioning digital assets…

How on-chain KYC can breathe new life into enterprise blockchain

boss

Of all the developments in blockchain technology over recent years, enterprise adoption has perhaps been the most anticlimactic. As the initial coin offering bubble started to inflate during 2017, blockchain entrepreneurs and commentators alike were hyping the technology as a solution for almost every industry and business problem in existence.  Fast-forward to 2020, and progress in enterprise blockchain has been lethargic at best. Almost without exception, notable implementations of enterprise “blockchain,” such as IBM’s Food Trust or Maersk-led Trade-ins, have used distributed permissioned ledgers. Proponents of blockchain technology point to…

What centralization does to businesses

boss

The failures of centralization in protecting individual and business data have been highlighted repeatedly over the past few years. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Sony and many more have all faced large-scale data hacks that have exposed the private information (and more) of their customers. The problem is not just data theft — banks, financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges have all suffered at the hands of malicious actors. Yet, huge amounts of information about our lives and livelihoods are still entrusted to centralized organizations, simply because that has always been the…

AstraZeneca Resumes Trials for COVID-19 Vaccine, AZN Stock Slightly Up

boss

In partnership with U.K.’s Oxford University, AstraZeneca said that it will resume the phase three clinical trial for its COVID-19 vaccine contender AZD1222 since it got an approval from UK’s Medicines Health Regulatory Authority.  After pausing its work on the coronavirus vaccine citing safety concerns last week, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca plc (NYSE: AZN) has resumed the clinical trials after receiving a green signal from UK’s Medicines Health Regulatory Authority. Meanwhile, on Friday AZN stock closed with a 1.24% rise, at $53.73. Then it climbed an additional 0.037% to $ 53.75.…