As the title indicates, I am taking a break from writing on this site. There are psychological and financial reasons for my decision. I am out of money. I am out of food. Someone stole my phone. My Internet connection and bank account have been shut down. My credit cards are useless. I walk a… Read More Taking A Break
Global identity startup Worldcoin’s token WLD is a natural at swimming in crypto’s murky waters. A week after launch, its price is already up by 4.6%. As of this writing, it is changing hands at $2.37, down 1.4% since yesterday. This is despite the fact that governments and regulators around the world have expressed reservations… Read More 8/2: Worldcoin Token, MicroStrategy, and An Imminent Crash
That crypto is a house of cards with worthless tokens is an open secret. It is, to quote Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine, a toy system. But it makes for a good academic study into how risk and volatility are transmitted across a system. In the latest instance of this study, decentralized lending platform Curve Finance… Read More Notes 8/1: Hack at Curve Finance, Bitcoin Price
Tether, the algorithmic stablecoin that straddles all of crypto, released an attestation report for its second quarter this morning. As usual, it is a sham and a mishmash of meaningless statistics and assertions. The report does not provide much clarity about its finances though it does bring to light some of the underlying risks. According… Read More Notes 3/31: Tether Attestation Report, Stablecoins as Free Banking, and The Banality of Another DeFi Hack
Sometimes, actually most of the time, it is difficult to distinguish between actual news and trolls in crypto. And so we have Flashbots, a startup that claims to remove the “negative impacts” of Ethereum’s controversial Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) practice, announcing a raise of $60 million at a billion dollar valuation. According to the startup,… Read More Notes 7/29: MEV Funding, Lightning Problems, and Tether Market Cap
Bitcoin price continues to remain equable in its chosen range of between $29,000 to $30,000. Right now, the cryptocurrency is changing hands for $29,243.94, unchanged from its price a day ago. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization shrugged off positive data about an increase in US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – news that should… Read More Notes 7/28: Bitcoin Price, Tether and Bitcoin, and Palau Stablecoin
Fed Chair Jerome Powell raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point yesterday and refused to commit to a pause in future hikes. But the stock market did not buy his spiel and sent equities higher. Crypto markets followed suit, albeit in a less dramatic fashion than usual. Bitcoin price rose by only one percent… Read More Notes 7/27: Bitcoin Price, Bitcoin Miners,And Lido Tricks
One of the most interesting developments in the last week has been the launch of FedNow, an instant payment settlement service for banks and financial institutions from the Federal Reserve. Up until now, settlement times between banks in the United States vary between one to three days. The promise of FedNow is instant settlement for… Read More On FedNow
Here’s a zinger of a news item from crypto. Bluechip Stablecoin Ratings Agency has come out with ratings for stablecoins operating in the crypto ecosystem. Binance’s native stablecoin BUSD and Gemini USD have received an A rating while algorithmic stablecoin Tether gets a D. Apparently, the factors considered while deciding the rating are governance, ability… Read More Notes 7/25: Stablecoin Ratings, Bitcoin Price
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic this year and there have been many posts discussing its intersection with cryptocurrencies. Can the combination of AI, with its potential to reshape human existence, and cryptocurrencies, another supposedly world changing technology, produce a revolution? If Worldcoin, the latest project from OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, is any… Read More Notes 7/24: Worldcoin, Crypto Markets
In its almost fifteen year existence, crypto has produced many a tale. The latest one is that of payments app Strike. The app claims to use the Lightning Network (LN), bitcoin’s second layer, to expedite cross-border payments and make them cheaper. That network is still under construction and has myriad problems. But that hasn’t stopped… Read More The False Promises of Payments App Strike
What’s the deal with bitcoin price? It has been flapping around, range-bound for most of the last month. As of this writing, it is at $29,854.41, unchanged from yesterday. On a weekly basis, it is down by almost 4%. There are no catalysts to further pump its price in a fast diminishing cohort of crypto… Read More Notes 7/20: Bitcoin Price
Binance burned $484 million worth of its native token BNB yesterday. Burning is the equivalent of taking tokens out of circulation. For a valuable and useful asset, that action should translate into a price bump because there are fewer of its numbers in circulation. While BNB is mostly useless, previous burns of the token have… Read More Notes 7/19: BNB Danger at Binance, Tether’s Peg Still Off at Binance.US, and An Ether Sale
Bitcoin price has stalled this quarter but Coinbase has already won big. Shares for the cryptocurrency exchange, one of the biggest in North America, have jumped by 90 percent in the last month, lifting their price to $105.81 this morning. Coinbase investors pushed up its stock because they are supposed to be enthused about two… Read More Notes 7/18: Problems at Coinbase and Binance
Tokenization of securities and real world assets (RWA) is one of the promises of crypto. And tokenizing U.S. treasuries is a low-hanging fruit because the market for such securities is already liquid. According to rwa.xyz, the market value of blockchain-based investment products for treasury bills, bonds, and money market funds into tokens totals $614 million.… Read More Notes 7/17: Tokenized Treasuries, Lido and Binance Rewards
Bitcoin price, which rallied past the $31,000 mark yesterday, is back to where it was earlier. As of this writing, it is changing hands at $30,339.56, unchanged from a day earlier. That figure is also unchanged from a week earlier, meaning the expected start date for a bull market ahead of next year’s halving is… Read More Notes 7/15: Bitcoin Price
It was a time for profit-making in crypto markets yesterday and this morning. Bitcoin price surged past the $31,000 mark after a New York court judge ruled that programmatic sales of Ripple’s native token XRP at cryptocurrency exchanges were not securities. It crested at $31,700 before retreating. The price of Ripple’s XRP skyrocketed by 96%… Read More Notes 7/14: Bitcoin Price, XRP Ruling
There’s a fresh attempt to regulate crypto afoot in Congress. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) have proposed a new version of the bill they introduced last year. According to CoinDesk, the bill draws a demarcating line between securities and commodities. That might help settle a long simmering dispute between the Commodities Futures… Read More Notes 7/13: A Revised Bill To Regulate Crypto, Ethereum’s Lido Problem
One of the safest bets for a crypto story during a slow news cycle is bitcoin price. After last month’s mild rally, the cryptocurrency’s price hasn’t seen much action in July. But Standard Chartered is predicting good things for it for the future. According to the bank, bitcoin price could jump to $50,000 by the… Read More Notes 7/11: Bitcoin Price, GBTC Discount
Decentralized finance (DeFi) was supposed to be the savior and next iteration of modern finance. Investors don’t seem to think as much. The total value locked (TVL) in DeFi systems has slumped from a peak of $178 billion in November 2021, when bitcoin price set a record, to $44.5 billion, as of this writing. It… Read More Notes 7/10: DeFi Total Value Locked Declines, Bitcoin Hash Rate Surges
Bitcoin miners are bulking up their reserves in anticipation of next year’s halving event. Riot blockchain is reported to have purchased 7.6 EH/S of mining machine capacity for $162.9 million. HUT8, a Canadian bitcoin company, is pursuing a merger with U.S. Bitcoin Corp. The combined entity will have total hash rate, or computing power deployed… Read More Notes 7/9: Bitcoin Mining