January 17, 2023

‘To the moon’ or ‘total crash’? Bitcoin price hits new 4-month highs

January 17, 2023 boss

Bitcoin (BTC) spiked higher around the Jan. 17 Wall Street open as nervous analysts waited for further cues. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView Opinions diverge over Bitcoin’s fate Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD briefly touching $21,594 on Bitstamp, marking its highest since Sep. 13. As bullish impulses continued to hit the chart, reactions stayed conservative amid an atmosphere of suspicion over the true source of Bitcoin’s return to form. One such cautious take came from Michaël van de Poppe, founder and CEO of trading…

Whales Move Billions Of XRP Following Price Spike

January 17, 2023 boss

The broader cryptocurrency market has seen improvement in investor sentiment in the last weeks, and so has XRP. Even the global crypto market cap is up by 0.11%, reflecting the rate at which most tokens are rallying over the past few days. A recent WhaleAlert report reveals massive XRP whale transfers happening amid the token’s price surge. The report showed the movement of nearly 429 million tokens (about $167 million) on multiple whale addresses in the last 24 hours. According to the WhaleAlert, the largest single whale transaction was a…

What is the Ethereum merge?

January 17, 2023

▶ Coinbase Website: Coinbase.com ▶ CEX Website: cex.io Ether has massively outperformed bitcoin ahead of a long-awaited upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain known as the merge. ▶ Coinbase Website: Coinbase.com ▶ CEX Website: cex.io Youtube version

South Korea Launches Metaverse Replica of Seoul

January 17, 2023

As part of a three-year effort to expand its public services, Metaverse Seoul will allow users to take their avatars to tax offices, access youth counseling and read e-books. Source

Solana Foundation, Ripple, GBBC and Others Form Partnership to Promote Crypto Solutions for Climate Change

January 17, 2023

Hwang, who works on building the infrastructure for the initiative, including carbon credit measurements, which calculates the reduced amount of greenhouse gases generated by human actions, said his team has been meeting every week for the last two and a half years hosting workshops and forums focused on education. The initiative looks to come up with principles of cooperation and best practices for climate-related blockchain efforts in different sectors, as well as business cases for climate-crypto projects. Source

Ethereum Startup Obol Labs Raises $12.5M to Decentralize Validators

January 17, 2023

In addition to providing software that can make outages and mishaps less likely for validators large and small, Obol thinks it will be able to ameliorate some of the issues with centralized control. “Today we think of validators as individuals or single entities,” Oisín Kyne, CTO at Obol Labs told CryptoX. “We think validators should actually be run by communities,” he continued. “Instead of only being able to run a validator alone, we want to enable you to run validators with a community of other stakers cooperatively.” Source 12.5MDecentralizeEthereumLabsObolRaisesStartupValidators CryptoX…

1 in 3 Members Got Cash From Crypto Exchange’s Bosses

January 17, 2023 boss

Emmer, who is co-chairman of the Congressional Blockchain Congress, has argued that the FTX collapse was a “failure of character,” not of crypto, but added that the industry will keep growing. “You do not get growth without taking risk,” he told a cryptocurrency industry crowd in Washington, D.C., the week after FTX went down. Source

Crypto Lender Nexo Sues Cayman Island's Regulator for VASP Registration

January 17, 2023

Nexo has sued the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority to overturn its rejection of Nexo’s application to register as a virtual asset services provider. Source

Masa Finance launches soulbound Web3 identity protocol for Ethereum

January 17, 2023 boss

Masa Finance has launched the first soulbound identity protocol for the Ethereum mainnet, according to a Jan. 17 press release shared with Cointelegraph. The protocol will allow for standardized soulbound tokens to be minted on Ethereum for Know Your Customer verification, credit scores and other use cases. Soulbound tokens are tokens that cannot be transferred from one wallet to another. The concept was popularized via a blog post from Vitalik Buterin, who argued that these tokens could be used to signify governance rights for decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols or to…

Myth Buster: Ethereum Shanghai Hard Fork Won’t Create Major Selling Pressure

January 17, 2023 boss

With the “Merge”, the Ethereum blockchain successfully mastered the biggest upgrade in its history on September 15 last year. Even before the switch to Proof of Stake (PoS), investors were able to stake ETH to receive rewards. However, the prerequisite was that a minimum of 32 ETH had to be staked and could not be accessed until the next upgrade, meaning the ETH could be unstaked. This changes with the Shanghai hard fork, which is tentatively scheduled for March this year. As NewsBTC reported, the upgrade is not only causing excitement,…