“Most of these coins have chalked up notable gains in recent days in a potential sign that investors are realizing the revenue potential of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and other DeFi solutions.
The DeFi coins look undervalued if we compare bitcoin‘s (BTC) valuation to Uniswap, the biggest DEX by trading volume.”
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“Trader and analyst Alex Kruger foresees a continued rally toward $1,920 ahead of the launch of ether futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Feb. 8.
I don’t expect a crash after the launch, as it happened in 2017. For two reasons. First, the market is now more mature, the macro is different, and there are different players involved. Second, ETH remains a high beta asset. BTC determines the market direction, ETH follows.”
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“Seattle-based Protego Trust Bank has received conditional approval for a trust charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to custody digital assets. Protego is the second applicant to receive conditional approval from the OCC, following Anchorage.
The newly chartered trust bank will also offer a trading platform for clients, a service for issuing new digital assets and a peer-to-peer lending platform for its clients.
Protego’s integrated offering will be of great benefit to institutions that want to be able to store their assets in a federally regulated bank.”
“Some argue the “Chinese New Year dump” will not happen this year because institutional investors in the U.S. and Europe have been the main drivers of the current bull run. That is in contrast to 2017’s bull market, which was heavily powered by retail investors in Asia.
In 2018, bitcoin’s price dropped to $5,947.40, down 37.2% from a high point at $9,471.46 during the 14-day period. In 2019, for the same period, bitcoin’s price fell to $3,346.14, down 8.3% from an earlier high at $3,648.50. For 2020, the drop was 10.5%, from $9,181.97 to $8,220.87.”
“The new round comes off the successful launching of 0x’s DEX router, Matcha, which came out in June and has processed $2.7 billion in orders. A 0x Labs report from October contends that 0x’s routing architecture delivered the best overall price seven times out of 10.
The funds will also be used to further build out 0x Labs’ trading desk business, Periscope Trading; the professional-grade aggregation service, 0x API (which underlies offerings from companies such as ShapeShift, MetaMask and Zapper); and furthering its work on the underlying open-source protocol.
The market is realizing that these tokens represent real value being added in the market.
The biggest difference between 2021 and 2017 is that crypto now consists of productive assets.”
“The Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), the blockchain infrastructure provider backed by the Chinese government, plans to offer blockchain analytics and financial auditing services for Ethereum developers in its network through a new partnership with Big Four auditor Ernst & Young (EY).
EY OpsChain will integrate procurement and traceability functions into BSN, where its users on Ethereum can run procurement activities using tokens and smart contracts. The EY Blockchain Analyzer will offer blockchain analytics and financial statement audits to the users.
China is one of the largest markets for blockchain technology in the world, and, while EY teams have been operating there for several years, this is the EY organization’s first big step in deploying the EY blockchain platform in a scalable manner.”
“The exploit was a complex arbitration attack on Yearn’s version 1 DAI yield vault, [which] netted the attacker $2.7 million in profits, and cost the vault $11 million in DAI.
Shortly after the vulnerability disclosure, stablecoin Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino announced in a Tweet that the company had frozen $1.7 million in stolen funds, which will presumably be returned to the project. Likewise, senior Yearn core developer Banteg has informally proposed to the MakerDAO community the creation of a purpose-built collateralized debt position (CDP) to make affected users whole.
We are contemplating opening a cdp with the minted yfi to make the vault whole.
DAOs bailing out DAOs is the future we deserve.”
“Centralized payment companies such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal will need to adapt if they are to survive the potential demand for blockchain-based stablecoin payments, according to research firm Gartner.
While new bitcoin (BTC) offerings from such firms are helping to prepare the transition to a future payment infrastructure, their revenue is based on charging transaction fees for clearing and settlement. The fee strategy, which sits at odds with blockchain’s peer-to-peer model, could be the very thing that sees these firms fall behind the competition from stablecoin payment networks.
Companies we speak to are justifiably skeptical of these services. After all, the revolution of blockchain payments is that they execute peer-to-peer and eliminate central intermediaries and associated bank fees.
Will these centralized financial services companies go forward in line with the spirit of blockchain peer to peer payments at the risk of cannibalizing their existing central-clearing house based-revenue streams? The answer will depend on whether or not these firms have any practical choice.”
“This week, Bitcoin startup ZEBEDEE will launch the first servers for popular first-person PC shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) that implement Infuse, its technology that allows users to earn small amounts of Bitcoin based on their in-game performance.
The announcement of our Bitcoin integration with CS:GO has resonated with gamers in a way I haven’t seen before in blockchain gaming. Waitlist sign-ups are already enough to keep our first 10 servers full. I have a good feeling that we’ve finally cracked the infiltration of crypto into mainstream gaming.
When playing on one of ZEBEDEE’s Infuse servers, you’ll scan a QR code at the start of the match with a smartphone app to pay a small amount of BTC, as little as 100 satoshis. Over the course of the game, your potential winnings will fluctuate as you rack up kills and/or die, with your share of the pot based on your percentage of the total game score.
Players can cash out at any time, and transactions are handled by the Lightning Network. Ultimately, ZEBEDEE plans to also launch servers that require no entry fee thanks to the support of partners, whose advertising will be implemented into the experience instead of charging players to compete.”
“Average trade volumes jumped 282% year-over-year, from $9.8 million to $37.4 million. The total volume of payments hit $916 million, up 80% from the previous year. Commercial payment values rose 37.3% year-over-year, exceeding 22,000 transactions per day, which is reportedly higher than Bitcoin (BTC).
In January, Dash outperformed Bitcoin in terms of the number of brick-and-mortar retailers accepting digital payments in the United States.”
“The CBN said it was reminding regulated banking institutions that ‘dealing in cryptocurrencies or facilitating payments for cryptocurrency exchanges is prohibited.‘ As such, all banks should ‘identify persons and/or entities‘ transacting with cryptocurrency or operating crypto exchanges on their platforms and ‘ensure that such accounts are closed immediately.‘”
The Disrupt 