The Australian government’s Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology has released a draft report citing blockchain technology more than 50 times. The report is in response to Australia’s first recession in 30 years as a result of COVID-19, which was confirmed in the June quarter’s negative growth announced on September 2. The document makes numerous recommendations about how the nation can “embrace technology and become globally competitive” said committee head Senator Andrew Bragg. He added: It is my hope this interim report can be seen as a…
Month: September 2020
Yield farming satire MEME turns into multi-million dollar crypto project
Degenerator, or MEME, an obscure project that began life as an airdrop to Telegram users, has managed to garner a $3 million market cap and is seeking to carve a niche for itself as a non-fungible token (NFT) farming protocol. MEME emerged from a joke posted by ConsenSys’ DeFi product lead Jordan Lyall, who created a joke advertisement ‘The Degenerator’ — a fictitious tool for creating ponzinomics-inspired yield farming tokens. The joke quickly struck a chord with the crypto community, receiving significant engagement on Twitter. However, within hours of Lyall…
Celo price spikes 32% after Coinbase listing
Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, will now offer support for Celo — an announcement that led to a 32% price surge in less than two hours. According to a Sept. 3 blog post from Coinbase, the exchange now supports the utility and governance token for the Celo platform. Coinbase this week also announced that UMA would be available for trading on Coinbase Pro starting on Sept. 8. The exchange appears to be prioritizing support for tokens for projects in which it is invested. Coinbase currently holds…
MIT is helping the Boston Fed build a CBDC that can be scaled for consumer use
The MIT Digital Currency Initiative, or DCI, is helping the federal reserve bank of Boston build a digital currency with the goal of scaling for consumer use. The DCI’s director Neha Narula told Cointelegraph: “We’re trying to build a high throughput, low latency transaction system that could be used by consumers and could handle the security and resilience required for a national currency.” The multi-year collaboration between the two organizations is still in very early stages and not much information is being released to the public. Yet the focus is not…
ETH miner revenue reaching a new all-time-high may be bad news for low volume yield farmers
On September 2, the revenue of Ethereum (ETH) miners reached an all-time high of 51,541 ETH. While this may be good for the miners, it could turn popular DeFi projects into a mousetrap. Ethereum miner revenue, percent from fees and total gas used. Source: Glassnode. When denominated in USD, these numbers are still below the record set on January 10, 2018 — when miners earned $32 million versus $23 million on September 2. The price of ETH at the time was approximately three times the current rate. However, what is…
Davey Day Trader Portnoy says crypto is boring right now
“I’m begging my crypto friends to get involved in the stock market,” Portnoy, also known as Davey Day Trader, said in a Sept. 2 tweet. “Bitcoin is stuck in the mud,” he explained, adding: “Let me lead you. We will get back to crypto later. The time to strike is now! No time for weak hands! Make the move!” Included in the tweet, Portnoy posted a scene from the movie “Captain America: The First Avenger” — the scene in which the main character, Steve Rogers, outsmarts his military team, pulling…
Digital cold war? United States and China vie for blockchain supremacy
Two nations, two visions of the financial future: “The tech cold war is here — and the US isn’t winning,” wrote Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen in an opinion piece for The Hill recently. According to him, China has “a once-in-a-century opportunity to wrest away American stewardship of the global financial system, including its ultimate goal of replacing the dollar with a digital yuan.” Western values of openness and freedom could be lost in this new financial order. Others have sounded similar concerns. “There is a new space race. It is…
Bitcoin could hit $500k or drop to zero
In September’s crypto outlook newsletter, Bloomberg’s analyst Mike McGlone observed that the price of Bitcoin (BTC) could either be heading to the $500,000 mark, or it could fail. McGlone has continued to reiterate that in his view, Bitcoin is set to become digital gold. He emphasized once again how Bitcoin’s limited supply and increasing demand were key adoption indicators, and drew comparisons to the 2017 bull run: “Much of the broad crypto-asset market echoes 2017’s excesses, but the foundation is firming due to expanding decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and finance (DeFi).…
Blockchain regulation: Speedbumps, roadblocks and superhighways
The current state of blockchain innovation in the United States is a tale of two asset classes. On one hand, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s reluctance to embrace or endorse blockchain-based securities has ground the innovation in that sector to a crawl. On the other hand, regulators in the banking, money transmission and commodities spaces have demonstrated a willingness to work with blockchain companies to permit the offering of assets and asset classes in those spaces. As a result, non-securities blockchain-based assets and businesses have proliferated in recent years. Years…
Payment giants drive crypto adoption by engaging with startups
Financial services giants Visa and Mastercard have shown an increased interest in the trillion-dollar digital payment sector through their recent acquisitions of innovative fintechs. In January this year, Visa acquired fintech firm Plaid for $5.3 billion. The San Francisco-based firm enables data sharing of financial information between different fintech apps like Venmo and Chime, supporting over 2,000 financial institutions. As such, the acquisition could strengthen Plaid’s global wire transfer capabilities. Mastercard has also made some major fintech acquisitions. In June this year, the payment giant announced plans to acquire financial…