“Publicly traded business intelligence company MicroStrategy said it will invest $250 million of its excess cash in bitcoin, gold and other “alternative assets” over the next 12 months as a hedge against U.S. dollar (USD) inflation.
CEO Michael Saylor, who unveiled MicroStrategy’s new capital allocation strategy on a July 28 earnings call, said the weakening USD is no longer a tenable place to park MicroStrategy’s sizable cash reserves.
Near-zero interest rates, infinite helicopter money and the specter of coming inflation are all forces Saylor said are chipping away at the dollar.
It makes sense to shift our treasury assets into some investments that can’t be inflated away.”
“Online fintech and blockchain investment platform BnkToTheFuture is moving client assets to a Hong Kong-based trust company citing a “systemic risk” with traditional banking.
With a recession approaching, investors need a way to protect their assets from exposure to fractional reserve banking.
The most important difference will be that client money is “legally segregated” under a trust structure, but there is no guarantee of segregation at a bank.”
“Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been clogging the Ethereum network, but not in the way most analysts would have guessed. Transaction spamming is one of many reasons the average Ethereum user fee has increased some 800% since May.
Algorithmic trading firms have created bot swarms to watch the Ethereum transaction queue (called the mempool). These bots wait for large trades on DeFi platforms such as Uniswap. After they go through, the bots quickly place orders to take advantage of price movements in what is called “backrunning.”
On July 29, the Geth team approved swapping the execution model to a first come, first served basis. Yet, it remains to be seen if mining firms will update to the new Geth version. Miners could keep doing business as usual if they value the extra pocket change from DeFi traders more than helping out the network in general.”
See Also: Ethereum Transaction Fees Fall by 75% as Congestion Eases
“The new “staking” system could lock up so many of the network’s native ether tokens that investors who want to trade them may have to rely on derivatives markets.
The new staking system could soak up as much as 30% of the ether tokens in circulation.
Financial incentive to buy and hold both increases the security of the network, and could lead to dramatic price appreciation.”
“An Indian government official has claimed that two ministries and the Reserve Bank of India are actively working on a legal framework to ban cryptocurrencies on the subcontinent.
Once Parliament resumes for the session, we are hoping to get [the law] ratified.”
“Chainlink (LINK), in partnership with a video game called War Riders, has introduced human readable Ethereum (ETH) names. Unlike ENS, which is fully decentralized and involves registration and upkeep costs, this newly proposed hybrid solution would be absolutely free for gamers.
The fact that it is not fully decentralized makes the proposed system a “hybrid solution”. Users must instead rely on the robustness and security of Chainlink’s oracles.”
See Also: Coinbase Follows Huobi in Supporting .Crypto Domains-Based Payments
“The attack works by the bad actor creating a transaction that looks like an altcoin payment (a coin that isn’t Bitcoin) when it actually takes Bitcoin out of the wallet instead.
A new version of the Bitcoin app will be released today, with an update that will display a warning and prompt for confirmation when an unexpected path is used—therefore solving this issue.” (the fix is now live)
See Also: Opyn Removes Liquidity From Uniswap After $370K Stolen in DeFi Exploit
“Over 8,000 works have been sold on the platform, earning artists over $1.3 million and collectors over $430,000.
Artists are able to digitally sign their work on the platform by creating a tokenized certificate before entering it into an online auction. Collectors can then purchase and resell works in secondary markets.
For artists, these NFTs also offer a new way to capitalize on growth over time through structured royalty fee systems.”
The Disrupt 