“Publicly traded business intelligence firm MicroStrategy purchased 21,454 bitcoin on Tuesday, effectively pouring all $250 million of its planned inflation-hedging funds into the digital currency.
MicroStrategy, a Nasdaq-listed software firm worth over $1.2 billion, said the cryptocurrency provided a ‘reasonable hedge against inflation.’ MicroStrategy ‘accordingly has made bitcoin the principal holding in its treasury reserve strategy.‘
This investment reflects our belief that bitcoin, as the world’s most widely adopted cryptocurrency, is a dependable store of value and an attractive investment asset with more long-term appreciation potential than holding cash.
We find the global acceptance, brand recognition, ecosystem vitality, network dominance, architectural resilience, technical utility and community ethos of bitcoin to be persuasive evidence of its superiority as an asset class for those seeking a long-term store of value.”
“Multiple national banks responded to the OCC’s June “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking”. Several banks, including U.S. Bank and PNC, indicated they might be interested in actually providing crypto custody and other services to customers.
The responses by just under a dozen banks, among a total of 89 submissions from think tanks, policy advocates, crypto startups and other entities, represent one of the strongest signs yet that traditional financial institutions view the still-nascent crypto space as a legitimate asset class.
Fresh guidance from the OCC may help provide the necessary legal comfort for banks to provide crypto-native analogs to traditional bank services.“
“Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch.exchange has launched its own DEX. As part of their efforts, they promised to fix two major issues with this type of exchange — front-running and impermanent loss.
The Mooniswap exchange is an automated money market, or AMM, similar to Uniswap or Balancer.
Inspired by a two year old post from Vitalik Buterin, they adopted the concept of virtual balances. When a high-slippage trade occurs, the internal balance of the exchange does not immediately reflect that change. At first, any new trade is still executed at the old price. The added benefit of this system is resistance to front-running.”
See Also: DEX Aggregator 1inch Raises $2.8M From Binance Labs, Galaxy Digital and More
“Status v1.5 introduces a bunch of new features that make your messaging experience a whole lot more enjoyable, without giving up your privacy or security.
Brighten up your private and group chats with images, turn up the volume with audio messages, and show some love with emoji reactions.”
“Applied zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography on Ethereum has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last eighteen months. These recent advancements in applied zkSNARK technology have allowed us to build Dark Forest: a fully decentralized and persistent RTS (real-time strategy) game.
Dark Forest is an MMO space-conquest game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographically-specified universe.
Up until now, it has been nearly impossible to build incomplete information settings on decentralized systems. This is because the data layers of most decentralized systems are, by design, completely open and transparent. With zkSNARKs, players can keep private state while publicly submitting verifiably-valid actions. This allows us to build games like Dark Forest, which relies on a “cryptographic fog of war” secured with zkSNARKs.”
See Also: Iden3 builds zkRollup scaling solution for Ethereum
“Blockchain infrastructure startup Alchemy, which helps decentralized finance (DeFi) projects run or access nodes, just launched its full suite of products to the public, after a two-year closed beta serving teams including MakerDAO and Kyber Network.
Right now, building with blockchain, it’s like trying to build a skyscraper with a hammer and a shovel. Alchemy is bringing the construction equipment so it’s easier to build things.”
“Developers are now able to build dapps and run nodes on either permissioned blockchains or major public chains through the global version of the network.
Available permissioned blockchains include Hyperledger Fabric and FISCO-BCOS, patented by digital banking company Tencent’s WeBank. Six major public chains are also available on the network now: Ethereum, EOS, Tezos, NEO, Nervos and Cosmos’ IrisNet.”
“The League of Entropy is launching the first production-ready version of drand, a network that produces “randomness” (also known as entropy) for anyone to use.
Randomness is an essential piece of cryptography that ensures security by adding unpredictable information to the mix.
League of Entropy’s drand beacon network is unique in that it generates randomness in a new way that doesn’t rely on a single point of failure. It’s analogous to having several dice rollers generating numbers and stringing them together, so no single one needs to be trusted.
Filecoin, a decentralized storage network, will be the first to use the randomness generated by League of Entropy as an integral piece of its network. This “beacon” can be used for all sorts of applications, from election auditing, to lotteries, to cryptocurrency.”
“Businesses can use DLT to track a single item in real time in a secure, verifiable and transparent way.
Supply chain management is already an established use case for blockchain – the likes of Daimler, Tesla and Amazon have all explored using DLT in theirs.”
See Also: Mitsubishi Launches Blockchain Platform for Metal Trading
“Deribit has started listing ether (ETH) options with strikes above $1,000, and some traders are now betting the cryptocurrency will reach that price by year’s end.
Volumes have been decent and open interest [open positions] is over 2,500 contracts already, indicating some traders believe ETH can potentially show a price move of over 180% in five to seven months.
At press time, the delta of the $1,120 call option expiring in December is 0.11. In other words, the probability of ether rising above $1,120 on or before Dec. 25 is 11%.”
“The move comes a day after crypto exchange rival Binance.US joined the group.
Recent weeks have demonstrated to us that the Blockchain Association is not interested in the membership criteria we had worked to establish to underpin the mission of this organization.”
The Disrupt 