The Disrupt

“The appearance of the golden cross marks a dramatic comeback for bitcoin since a “death cross” appeared in the price chart three months ago. At the time, bitcoin was descending from the all-time high near $65,000 reached in February.

Bitcoin was changing hands at around $9,500 in May 2020, the last time a golden cross appeared. Over the remainder of the year, the price tripled, and then doubled again early this year before peaking.”

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“The storied magazine gave a nod to the crypto wunderkind in its 2021 edition, which dropped Wednesday. The honorific comes as Ethereum continues to grow as a major force in the world of finance and beyond.

‘What makes Vitalik so special, though, is that he is a builder’s builder,’ Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote for Time. ‘I’ve never been more excited about the potential of the internet thanks to him.'”

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“Engineers succeed in restoring service across Solana’s network of node-runners after the system was in the dark for almost 20 hours. Even so, service remained spotty immediately following the patch.

The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.”

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“Coinbase has sold $2 billion worth of debt via junk bonds, up from an initial target of $1.5 billion due to strong market interest. The move highlights crypto’s evolution from a fringe asset class to one under the spotlight of mainstream financial types.

The strong demand is clearly a big endorsement by debt investors.

The exchange joins Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy, which sold $500 million worth of bonds in June to fund its bitcoin purchases.”

See Also: Coinbase Applies to List Crypto Futures Products

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“The financial services giant urged the regulator to approve its fund, citing increased investor interest in crypto. Fidelity also pointed to the rising number of investors holding bitcoin and similar funds worldwide.

The SEC has yet to approve a bitcoin ETF. Presently, there are more than 10 applications pending. Fidelity originally filed its Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust in March with a follow-up response in June.”

See Also: EU set to invest $177B in blockchain and other novel technologies

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“Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Invest, has doubled down on her prediction that the price of Bitcoin (BTC) will grow tenfold in the next five years and said the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFT) and the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade has massively increased Ark’s confidence in Ether’s (ETH) future.

Our confidence in Ethereum has gone up dramatically as we have seen the beginning of the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

I’m fascinated with what’s going on in DeFi, which is collapsing the cost of the infrastructure for financial services in a way that I know that the traditional financial industry does not appreciate right now.

Her BTC price thesis is based on more companies adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets and institutional investors allocating around 5% of their portfolios toward Bitcoin or other cryptos.”

See Also: Ethereum’s Infura Releases Tool to Prevent Overpayment of Transaction Fees

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“Tether Ltd., the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin, has pushed back against lingering speculation that its dollar-pegged currency USDT is backed by commercial paper issued by the now cash-strapped Chinese property giant Evergrande Group.

Tether does not hold any commercial paper or other debt or securities issued by Evergrande and has never done so.

Tether’s denial comes amid Evergrande’s deepening liquidity crisis. The troubled property giant with $300 billion in liabilities warned Wednesday that it could default on its massive debts.”

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“Allegations of insider trading at OpenSea appeared last night, courtesy of a Twitter account called @ZuwuTV, and quickly went viral. In a thread, the Twitter user assembled a paper trail of transaction receipts tied to Nate Chastain, OpenSea’s head of product.

In a statement issued Wednesday, OpenSea said it uncovered evidence of insider trading by one of its employees.

Yesterday we learned that one of our employees purchased items that they knew were set to display on our front page before they appeared there publicly.

Insider trading on NFTs is, of course, not explicitly illegal yet, because there’s so little legal precedent for digital assets on the blockchain, but OpenSea is coming down hard anyway. The company says it’s implementing new policies that prohibit this kind of behavior.“