Bitcoin Press Release : DeFiChain and Litecoin Foundation strike agreement to offer Liquidity Mining for the popular cryptocurrency on the DeFiChain platform. DeFiChain users can earn up to two DFI per LTC block mined using the DeFiChain desktop application.

11th February 2021, Singapore: DeFiChain , the world’s leading blockchain on the Bitcoin network devoted to decentralised monetary applications, has today announced that Liquidity Mining with full rewards will be available with LTC on the DeFiChain platform. Following a successful one-week testing period, the Liquidity Mining program on DeFiChain will award two DFI coins — DeFiChain’s native digital currency — for every block mined.

By adding Liquidity Mining capabilities for LTC, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world, the platform highlights its commitment to delivering more opportunities, options and diversity for its users, and adds to the existing suite of benefits provided to its users.

“Litecoin is one of the most popular and widely used cryptocurrencies in the world, and we are delighted to be partnering with them to offer Liquidity Mining for Litecoin on DeFiChain. Liquidity Mining on DeFiChain allows market making to be done in a fair and transparent manner” 

Said Julian Hosp, Chairman of DeFiChain. He continued:

“In order for it to be used by such a vast community, it has to be highly liquid and available in multiple markets. The integration and availability of LTC on the DeFiChain platform gives users another option, thereby empowering holders of the cryptocurrency to provide measurable, beneficial liquidity and earn rewards in return.”  

DeFiChain ’s DEX (decentralised exchange) offers fast transaction speeds, low fees, low transaction fees, high security, and a fully decentralised trading environment. On DeFiChain, a gamut of Litecoin holders can utilise their holdings and computing resources to provide liquidity and earn sizable returns in the process.

Jay Milla from Litecoin Foundation said: 

“This marks the beginning of a new era for LTC, being available on one of the world’s fastest growing decentralised platforms. DeFiChain’s mission, to provide fast, intelligent and transparent financial services is aligned to our own. Throughout the years, Litecoin has continued to grow to become an industry leader, as one of the oldest and most widely utilized and traded cryptocurrencies. It continues to maintain its position within the top cryptocurrencies ranked by market capitalisation.”

DeFiChain, one of the leading blockchains built upon the Bitcoin’s network infrastructure, which democratises market making and liquidity provisions by empowering its rapidly growing community. With this partnership, traders and investors, both retail and institutional, will be able to earn rewards based on the actual, measurable liquidity they create for Litecoin, which in this case, equates to two DFI per block mined. 

To access LTC-DFI Liquidity Mining pools on DeFiChain, simply download the DeFiChain desktop app from https://defichain.com/downloads/ , deposit DFI to the DEX to swap part of it for LTC, then select “Liquidity” from the menu on the left-hand side and the “+” symbol under “Add or remove liquidity” to select the amount to add. It couldn’t be easier. 

About DeFiChain

DeFiChain is a blockchain platform dedicated to enable fast, intelligent, and transparent decentralized financial services. The DeFiChain Foundation’s mission is to bring DeFi to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Unlike most of the other DeFi projects that are built on the Ethereum network, DeFiChain is built on Bitcoin (as a software fork), and leverages Bitcoin’s security by anchoring to the bitcoin blockchain (via Merkle root) every few minutes.

By dedicating the functionality of a blockchain specifically to decentralized finance, DeFiChain is able to provide high transaction throughput, reduced risk of errors, and intelligent feature development.

Visit https://defichain.com for full information including roadmap and upcoming features.

Join on Facebook

Meet the team LinkedIn

Join the community on Reddit

Keep updated on Telegram

Follow on Twitter

Subscribe on YouTube

About Litecoin Foundation

The Litecoin Foundation is a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance Litecoin for the good of society by developing and promoting state-of-the-art blockchain technologies. Litecoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. The Litecoin Foundation Ltd. is headquartered in Singapore (registered UEN# 201709179W) with an active team contributing from around the globe. 

For more information, visit litecoin-foundation.org.

Media Contact Details

Contact Name: Kavi Saglani

Contact Email: [email protected]

DeFiChain is the source of this content. This Press Release is for informational purposes only. The information does not constitute investment advice or an offer to invest.

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In this week’s Defiant podcast episode, I speak with Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner, billionaire investor and Shark Tank star —and Defiant subscriber :)

It’s been hard to pin down if Cuban is a crypto skeptic or believer. He has questioned the value of bitcoin and called its price surges a bubble, but he has also accepted crypto payments for his basketball team, and tweeted about using Aave and selling NFTs. You’ll have no doubt after listening to this interview where he stands: Cuban is a crypto bull, but more specifically a DeFi and Ethereum bull. 

He says his general stance hasn’t really changed; he still believes bitcoin can’t be used as currency, but thinks its underlying narrative has strengthened, to become powerful enough to support it as a store of value.

But what he’s really excited about is smart contracts, which are allowing developers to make any decentralized application they can dream of, sparking innovation and compounding network effects, and most importantly, laying the foundation for what he calls “friction-free banking.”

Because most of this innovation is happening on Ethereum, he believes ETH is becoming a better story of value than BTC.

We talk about NFTs and how he believes they’ll be a game-changer, predicting digital collectibles will overtake the physical collectibles market. We also talk about DAOs, and he muses how much better Wall Street Bets would be if it was a blockchain-based forum where users could pool their tokens and invest together.

Cuban also goes over his takeaways after using DeFi dapps like Aave, and talks a bit about his portfolio, which right now holds more Bitcoin than Ether. But that may change. He says when there are pullbacks, he’s buying more ETH, not BTC.

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🙌 Together with: 

Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance

Ledger, a hardware wallet combined with the Ledger application to securely buy, sell, exchange, stake, lend & manage your crypto

Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi

Casper, an enterprise-focused blockchain which aims to introduce unprecedented security, speed and scale for businesses

CR: Mark has made waves recently in DeFi. He's been tweeting about using Aave and buying and selling NFTs. So that's really cool to hear. And I'm really excited to talk about all that stuff with him. But first, let's go back in time a bit and just tell me about your crypto journey. Like what first got you interested in crypto and Bitcoin? And what was kind of your first reaction to this?

MC: So, I'll go back to the beginning. When Coinbase first came out, you know, I like to play with technology, I'm a tech geek and have been for a long time. And so I tried it, some people sent me some Bitcoin because it was dirt cheap back then and wanted me to see it. But the conversation back then was mostly about it becoming a currency. And that's why they're called cryptocurrency, which is really a misnomer, right, because very few of them if any of them are actually currencies. 

“I like to play with technology, I'm a tech geek and have been for a long time. And so I tried it, some people sent me some Bitcoin because it was dirt cheap back then and wanted me to see it.”

And so as somebody who had written software, and I did a lot with distributed databases, my very first company, we were a systems integrator. So I would write multi-user applications, distributed applications. And then I sold my company to CompuServe, which had a worldwide network that VISA was on and I did a lot of business with Lotus Notes, which had replication servers. And so I really had an understanding, not as much as some people, but what I felt was a strong understanding of distributed databases and decentralized databases.

And so I was all in on blockchain. But like any other new programming language or platform or anything, there was a long ways to go before blockchain was really going to be ubiquitous. But even back in the beginning, I remember getting into arguments with people by Southwest back then. I was all in on blockchain, but the argument on Bitcoin in particular was always it was going to be a currency. And over the next five years, I was certainly a naysayer. And to this day, I'm not a believer that Bitcoin will become a currency. And most bitcoiners aren't even saying it's a currency anymore. And when they had the split in 2017, that kind of confirmed right, you're not going to do it. And I've listened to all the talk about lightning over the years, and how that was going to change everything, and it just hasn't. 

“I was all in on blockchain, but the argument on Bitcoin in particular was always it was going to be a currency. And over the next five years, I was certainly a naysayer. And to this day, I'm not a believer that Bitcoin will become a currency.”

So long story short, what really started to change was even after 2017, and the big price movements, over the last year or so, you've seen people, maybe two years only start to refer to Bitcoin as a store of value. Nobody's really talking up the whole currency thing any longer. At the Dallas Mavericks, we started taking Bitcoin for tickets and other purchases back in, I think, 2015. And I think, ever since then, we've sold maybe $300 worth.And I did it because I wanted to see if people would actually use it as a currency. 

And back then, some people tried. You had people going across the country trying to live off a Bitcoin and all that. But now people are like, no, I'm not going to spend my Bitcoin as a currency, I want to see it appreciate. So what really changed was one, watching people change their mind about it being a currency, and start recognizing that it's only a store of value; and two, starting to see the maturation of blockchain apps, particularly on Ethereum; and then three, this past summer, watching on DeFi go nuts. 

“So what really changed was one, watching people change their mind about it being a currency, and start recognizing that it's only a store of value; and two, starting to see the maturation of blockchain apps, particularly on Ethereum; and then three, this past summer, watching on DeFi go nuts.” 

So for me DeFi, I really was okay now, blockchain in particular, is really starting to mature. You're starting to see applications that are really coming into play. You're starting to see NFT. And it's not so much just about how much is sold and market value, but more just that people are becoming more comfortable with it. And so we're starting to see these applications that are just popping up left and right. 

And it reminded me so much of the early days of the internet, where the mid-90s people started talking about internet applications, but the internet had been around for 10 years, right? But it was mostly in universities. And so it was very analogous to what's going on with blockchain. You had early adopter applications. You had banks and private organizations trying to use blockchain. You had people trying to come up with new ways to use it. And then bam, smart contracts came along, and it just blew up. And Bitcoin no longer was all about, well, it's going to be a currency and people would argue about the block size and all that shit, right? It was more now, okay, what can smart contracts do? 

And now that people have come up with these ideas, and people are starting to put money into it, you're really starting to see it. So that's what's got me really excited lately. That was a lot longer answer than you expected. Right?

CR: No, I love it. Because you touched on a lot of other topics that I wanted to bring up in this interview. Because I think it's kind of hard to pin you down because you present yourself sometimes as a Bitcoin and crypto skeptic and sometimes as a crypto bull. And I think now you've kind of explained why that happens.

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Hot off the heels of the Reddit–fueled GameStop stock surge comes a new investing craze by the name of “Dogecoin.” This latest fad in cryptocurrency recently shot up several orders of magnitude, from trading at fractions of a cent to several cents per share, with a total valuation exceeding $10 billion. So far, it has risen over 1500% in price. As with the GameStop rally — entirely driven by publicity rather than any real, underlying value — Dogecoin’s surge was driven by a bevy of internet memes, rocket emojis, and Elon Musk tweets.  

Earlier this February, Dogecoin’s valuation began to rise, immediately jumping 30% in reaction to SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and rapper Snoop Dog tweeting about the cryptocurrency.

Elon Musk first tweeted about the satirical currency on February 4 th , writing “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto.” The billionaire tech CEO later shared a video promoting Dogecoin, in addition to a collection of memes.

Shortly after, rapper Snoop Dogg joined in, promoting Dogecoin on his own timeline

A brief primer on cryptocurrencies:

The most ubiquitous and widely known cryptocurrency today is Bitcoin. Conceived in 2009, Bitcoin, like all other cryptocurrencies, is a decentralized, digital currency; only existing electronically. Unlike the US Dollar, or any other Fiat currency, Bitcoin isn’t bound to a central bank or government. This means that there is no governing body — like the Federal Reserve — keeping track of how many are already in circulation, deciding how many should be in circulation, or deciding to print (create) more Bitcoins.  

Bitcoins, unlike the myriad of files you have saved on your computer, can’t be copied. A bitcoin isn’t a binary string saved locally on your computer. It is an entry on a dynamically growing global ledger called Blockchain.  

The Blockchain ledger records every Bitcoin transaction that has ever happened. As of February 2021, the Bitcoin Blockchain has reached a whopping 330 GB. Because Blockchain is decentralized there isn’t a single, universal ledger, but multiple ledgers; and they all keep track of the same information. Each Bitcoin transaction broadcasts to the network of ledgers information regarding the account numbers associated with the transaction and the number of bitcoins being exchanged.  

All of this is made possible thanks to cryptography – where cryptocurrency gets its namesake. When someone creates an account on the Bitcoin network, called a “wallet,” it is associated with a private and public key. This is the sort of encryption that governs nearly all security on the web.

Other cryptocurrencies, aside from Bitcoin, are variations on the same technology: blockchain. These are called “ altcoins .” Although the underlying technology is the same, their “rules” vary slightly. For example, some altcoins can be “mined” (produced) at faster rates than Bitcoin. Some altcoins have higher circulation limitations. And for some altcoins, the hardware requirements to produce them are far laxer than the vastly expensive supercomputers needed for Bitcoin. Almost anyone can make their own altcoin. There are, therefore, an overwhelming number of different altcoins in circulation: Ethereum Tether, Litecoin — and you can see them all in Coinbase. While some do offer more appealing features and a lower price when compared to the ubiquitous Bitcoin, they can be highly volatile and unpredictable.

This brings us to the latest headline-making altcoin: Dogecoin. Dogecoin was started as a joke, in 2013, via a sardonic tweet by a then-Adobe employee, Jackson Palmer. Poking fun at the deluge of altcoins flooding the cryptocurrency market, Palmer wryly remarked, “Investing in Dogecoin, pretty sure it’s the next big thing.”

The joke caught on and spread. Before long, Palmer was contacted by Billy Marcus, a software engineer from IBM. In collaboration, the pair launched Dogecoin in December of 2013 with a Shiba Inu as its mascot. Two weeks later, the value jumped 300%, buoyed by both viral press, and China’s hardline ban on Bitcoin trading.  

Recollecting the ironic inception of his digital currency, Palmer explained in a Vice interview , “One night after work, I sat down with a beer, I had too much time on my hands, and I bought Dogecoin.com. Then I Photoshopped the logo onto the coin and put it up there.”  

Dogecoin was then thrust even further into the spotlight when Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted about the currency, sending its trading value soaring. Today, Dogecoin has a market cap of close to $10 billion — roughly the same market value as Dropbox and Pinterest.

Does investing in Dogecoin make any sense? Does it really have any intrinsic value?  

According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, a single entity owns 28% of all Dogecoins currently in circulation. And as further revealed by blockchain data , the top 20 Dogecoin holders preside over 50% of the supply — 20 entities hold over 5 billion dollars of the cryptocurrency.

The currency’s cofounder, Jackson Palmer, who left the project in 2015, has since said , “With no immediate plans for development, it looks like the coin will slowly become stagnant in the future. The circulating supply of Dogecoin is astronomical, which will deter the price of the cryptocurrency from rising any further.”  

Meanwhile Billy Marcus, technical brawn behind Dogecoin, told the Wall Street Journal in an interview , “The idea of dogecoin being worth 8 cents as the same as GameStop being worth $325. It doesn’t make sense. It’s super absurd. The coin design was absurd.”  

As far as its legitimacy as an investment is concerned, Dogecoin’s entire value is attributed to the hype surrounding it. Its value ebbs and flows according to the number of times Elon Musk tweets about it, and the amount of money other people are willing to put down just to partake in a meme. Much like the GameStop craze that preceded it, Dogecoin’s value is not based on anything tangible, but merely the attention it garners.  

In his same interview with Vice, Palmer left an optimistic outlook on his accidental creation, citing its caustic origins as, for many people, a beguiling steppingstone into the intimidating and foreign world of digital currencies,

“Cryptocurrency has a lot of growing to do, and it also has a lot of stabilizing to do… If all we’ve done with Dogecoin at the end of the day is grow awareness in a decentralized currency such as Bitcoin, then I think we’ve done a good job, because for a lot of the people who are using Doge now, it’s their first cryptocurrency that they’ve ever used, and they’ve started mining. They’re learning, and I think it’s great that people actually want to learn about it because it’s associated with this doge meme.”

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Bitcoin Press Release : DeFiChain and Litecoin Foundation strike agreement to offer Liquidity Mining for the popular cryptocurrency on the DeFiChain platform. DeFiChain users can earn up to two DFI per LTC block mined using the DeFiChain desktop application.

11th February 2021, Singapore: DeFiChain , the world’s leading blockchain on the Bitcoin network devoted to decentralised monetary applications, has today announced that Liquidity Mining with full rewards will be available with LTC on the DeFiChain platform. Following a successful one-week testing period, the Liquidity Mining program on DeFiChain will award two DFI coins — DeFiChain’s native digital currency — for every block mined.

By adding Liquidity Mining capabilities for LTC, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world, the platform highlights its commitment to delivering more opportunities, options and diversity for its users, and adds to the existing suite of benefits provided to its users.

“Litecoin is one of the most popular and widely used cryptocurrencies in the world, and we are delighted to be partnering with them to offer Liquidity Mining for Litecoin on DeFiChain. Liquidity Mining on DeFiChain allows market making to be done in a fair and transparent manner” 

Said Julian Hosp, Chairman of DeFiChain. He continued:

“In order for it to be used by such a vast community, it has to be highly liquid and available in multiple markets. The integration and availability of LTC on the DeFiChain platform gives users another option, thereby empowering holders of the cryptocurrency to provide measurable, beneficial liquidity and earn rewards in return.”  

DeFiChain ’s DEX (decentralised exchange) offers fast transaction speeds, low fees, low transaction fees, high security, and a fully decentralised trading environment. On DeFiChain, a gamut of Litecoin holders can utilise their holdings and computing resources to provide liquidity and earn sizable returns in the process.

Jay Milla from Litecoin Foundation said: 

“This marks the beginning of a new era for LTC, being available on one of the world’s fastest growing decentralised platforms. DeFiChain’s mission, to provide fast, intelligent and transparent financial services is aligned to our own. Throughout the years, Litecoin has continued to grow to become an industry leader, as one of the oldest and most widely utilized and traded cryptocurrencies. It continues to maintain its position within the top cryptocurrencies ranked by market capitalisation.”

DeFiChain, one of the leading blockchains built upon the Bitcoin’s network infrastructure, which democratises market making and liquidity provisions by empowering its rapidly growing community. With this partnership, traders and investors, both retail and institutional, will be able to earn rewards based on the actual, measurable liquidity they create for Litecoin, which in this case, equates to two DFI per block mined. 

To access LTC-DFI Liquidity Mining pools on DeFiChain, simply download the DeFiChain desktop app from https://defichain.com/downloads/ , deposit DFI to the DEX to swap part of it for LTC, then select “Liquidity” from the menu on the left-hand side and the “+” symbol under “Add or remove liquidity” to select the amount to add. It couldn’t be easier. 

About DeFiChain

DeFiChain is a blockchain platform dedicated to enable fast, intelligent, and transparent decentralized financial services. The DeFiChain Foundation’s mission is to bring DeFi to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Unlike most of the other DeFi projects that are built on the Ethereum network, DeFiChain is built on Bitcoin (as a software fork), and leverages Bitcoin’s security by anchoring to the bitcoin blockchain (via Merkle root) every few minutes.

By dedicating the functionality of a blockchain specifically to decentralized finance, DeFiChain is able to provide high transaction throughput, reduced risk of errors, and intelligent feature development.

Visit https://defichain.com for full information including roadmap and upcoming features.

Join on Facebook

Meet the team LinkedIn

Join the community on Reddit

Keep updated on Telegram

Follow on Twitter

Subscribe on YouTube

About Litecoin Foundation

The Litecoin Foundation is a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance Litecoin for the good of society by developing and promoting state-of-the-art blockchain technologies. Litecoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. The Litecoin Foundation Ltd. is headquartered in Singapore (registered UEN# 201709179W) with an active team contributing from around the globe. 

For more information, visit litecoin-foundation.org.

Media Contact Details

Contact Name: Kavi Saglani

Contact Email: [email protected]

DeFiChain is the source of this content. This Press Release is for informational purposes only. The information does not constitute investment advice or an offer to invest.

When predicting how the cryptocurrency economy will evolve, many people have looked to the start of the internet itself. They imagine certain standards or protocols becoming dominant, with value accruing in the application layers. 

But cryptocurrencies are different. 

Value is captured within a coin’s economy rather than just in its code and in the way an application is monetized. In addition, value (measured by price and market cap) keeps moving from layer one (L1), like Bitcoin and Ethereum, to layer two (L2) and application protocols that are being built on top of L1, such as Cosmos, Hiro and Uniswap. 

With full interoperability, and with blockchain agnostic protocols such as The Graph, L1 blockchains may become just rails with fees attached. Most value will move into agnostic protocols and use-specific blockchains.  

To understand where value is being captured and on what layer it is being created, it’s useful to review the evolution of L1 and L2 over the last decade.

That was the approach of Bitcoiners in the early days, myself among them. There was one blockchain and one platform to power all digital asset use cases and applications. 

When people started to think about the technology beyond bitcoin as a currency, the first technologies to market were protocols developed on top of Bitcoin, such as Colored Coins, Counterparty and Mastercoin (Omni), then referred to as “Bitcoin 2.0.” 

In 2012, when I started working on Colored Coins with a group of early Bitcoiners (Vitalik Buterin among them), not many were thinking beyond building on top of Bitcoin. To me at least, it was 100% clear that Bitcoin would be the only significant platform, and that by using L2, it would create digital asset use cases leading to the decentralization of finance (DeFi).  

Others, such as the founders of Ethereum, Ripple and more, were confident that a second wave of innovation could evolve without building it on top of Bitcoin, given Bitcoin’s limitations and governance principles. They were convinced that a better platform could be built to suit all kinds of use cases.

Developers spent years trying to “solve” Bitcoin problems. But maybe people finally realized there is no problem to solve. Bitcoin is what it is.

That phase of evolution envisioned a blockchain as a protocol standard, like the “TCP IP standard,” as a layer on top of Bitcoin.

With the Bitcoin blockchain not able to satisfy the innovation needs of the use cases that had been built on Colored Coins and other Bitcoin 2.0 layers, and with the acceleration of Ethereum-based innovation, all the cool kids started to build on top of Ethereum. It was a much better platform for testing, scaling and creating far more complex use cases in one of the biggest financial sandboxes in the world. 

The ICO (initial coin offering) period of 2017–2018 saw funding for many different use cases, along with a growing community of developers and a critical mass using Metamask. It became clear that Ethereum was taking the lead, becoming the go-to place to build your blockchain dream use cases. The ERC-20 standard won.  

The Ethereum community invented DeFi and made it the killer real-life use case. With Bancor being one of the first, a full industry started to form, including alternatives for loans, flash loans, yield farming and more. It quickly became the go-to for building applications, while Bitcoin was left behind as a platform, becoming maybe what it was “only” supposed to be – new and better gold. At the same time, new generic sandbox platforms started to emerge, including Polkadot and Cardano created by Ethereum’s founders.

It is close to impossible to develop a blockchain that perfectly fits all use cases. For example, using blockchain for micropayments is different than using it for NFTs. You can still develop NFT applications and use them on top of Ethereum. But wouldn’t you prefer a blockchain and an ecosystem of tools tailored for your specific use case?   

On the back of the painful gas fees attached to using Ethereum (which also proves an incredible market fit for DeFi), there are talented teams, such as Cardano and Polkadot, trying to build other sandbox blockchain approaches like ETH, adding better scale, interoperability and other features. 

See also: Cardano’s ADA Is Now the Third-Largest Cryptocurrency by Market Cap

As we are still in an emerging technology phase, anything and everything can happen. But the question that is most interesting to investors is where most of the value will be captured in terms of layers? 

The answer, I believe, depends on the use case. 

I believe that in some use cases, value will be captured on L1, and with some use cases, value will be captured on L2.

More blockchains are choosing a niche market, understanding they cannot win in the race of a “blockchain for everything,” and deciding to be the go-to blockchain for a specific market. This is where we will see value being captured on L1 being the “go to“ blockchain for a specific use case. I envision this trend will keep accelerating. 

Take the USDC stablecoin. Will you send your dollars on an expensive and slow blockchain, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum? Or will you use a fast and low fees- based network, such as Algorand, that is focusing its resources on building the financial rails?

See also: NBA Top Shot Overwhelmed by Demand in Record $1M Pack Drop

FLOW was built for the NFT market and developed by the leading team that had experienced the disadvantages of using Ethereum with CryptoKitties. In my opinion, FLOW is one of the most exciting consumer-based blockchains, working with the National Basketball Association and other big players.

We used to think that L1 should always be more valuable than L2 as all L2 protocols are being built on the foundation of an L1. It’s kind of similar to thinking of an app (L2) being built only on top of IOS (L1) and being worth more than the Apple stock. While rarely possible in the centralized world with Apple owning the app store, this is easily possible in the crypto decentralized world.

For example, The Graph is one of the projects that makes you question that assumption. Its agnostic approach creates value on top of different L1 chains as well as for users looking to index the different chains.  

In the long term, I foresee each blockchain L1 will be “tagged” with a specific market, becoming the “blockchain for…” Those with no specific identity, that are trying to be a bit “better,” might “lose” their value to L2 while being measured only by their fees, just like banks today. 

Known as the “digital oil” of the crypto-space, Ethereum fuels the protocol layer. The second-largest cryptocurrency has hit new records at the start of 2021, at the value of $1522 making it reach a new all-time high and a market cap of $176,673,547,677 at the time of writing. 

Undoubtedly, the ‘Gold Is Lame’ statement from Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, proves to be true as the digital assets continue to gain popularity. It would not be wrong to say that we will witness ETH crossing $2,500 by the end of 2021.  

There is a never-ending comparison between BTC and ETH in investor’s minds. On learning the differences in details between these cryptocurrencies, I analyzed that it is similar to comparing cheese and vegetable pizza. Everybody has their own preferences!

Although you don’t need to dig deep in terms of which is better, what we are more concerned about is to see the benefits you enjoy after investing in any crypto-asset. A short comparison of what these currencies are about will help us to get clarity.  

It is worth noting that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, while Ethereum is a decentralized platform to program other ideas.

The weekly charts of ETH show a high surge in its prices. The current value of ETH is $1695.098215 showing a rise of 1168% since 2020. And mind it – this price action is not by mistake! 

So now, let’s jump into the technicality of ‘why and how’ the price would hit $2,500 by the end of 2021. 

The official launch of the Ethereum blockchain was in 2014, however, the future was not always clear. The claim that Ethereum can easily cross $2,500 in 2021 is due to the cup and handle pattern seen in its trajectory .

The cup and handle show the bullish trends in the charts, where the right side of the chart shows the extending uptrend. There can be multiple reasons associated with this bullish behavior, for example:

If you remember the “Gold Is Lame” statement of Vitalik Buterin, then let me tell you the basics of it. The current market cap of gold is around $10 trillion, which is on and off 2% of the total global wealth. Simply if 2 to 3% of this switch to Bitcoin, the value of BTC will hit $100,000. 

Analyzing the pattern of 2017, where Ethereum gained an astounding 10,000%, BTC managed to add 1500% to its value. It has been seen that the BTC wave always pulls the Ethereum towards surge. Thus, the value of Ethereum is ought to go up in the coming year. If the trend of 2017 will be repeated, then it is no surprise that Ethereum will cross $2,500 by the end of 2021. 

On the launch of the parallel staking network Eth 2.0, five years after the launch of Ethereum, a large no. of the user, participation can be seen on the ETH 2.0 network. Statistics show that investors are stacking Ethereum which is again a big factor in the surge of Etereum prices. 

The new chain is working as the backbone of a future Ethereum network. The release of the beacon chain on Dec 1, soon sets the Ethereum price All-Time High in a short span of two to three months. 

Decentralized Finance has replaced the centralized ways of transferring money, where one can transfer money without any central authority in between. Since decentralized applications or dApps run on a blockchain network, mostly Ethereum due to its open-source blockchain-based decentralized platform, on which multiple applications can be developed. 

According to the coin base annual review of 2020, more institutional investors are buying ether, as it seems to be a store of value. The crypto-exchange is experiencing growing numbers of institutional clients looking for stronger returns and hence giving wind to the crypto bull. 

According to the statistics by the World Economic Forum, 10% of the global Gross Domestic Product will be facilitated by blockchain technology. Technology helps foster innovation. For example, facilitating healthcare records, sustainable energy sharing, food distribution, and so on.  

Interestingly, crypto-games are also on the Ethereum platform, which is increasing the acceptance of the token extensively. Given that Ethereum is an alternative to global currencies, it facilitates smart contracts and applications as well. Which craves the way for huge potential in the minds of investors. 

With Ethereum rising in its value by more than 20 percent and constantly breaking an all-time high continuously over the last two weeks, crypto analysts are predicting that the near-term price of Ethereum will remain bullish in the near future. Konstantin Anissimov, executive director of London-based cryptocurrency exchange CEX.IO, pictured that “the rapid price increase is just a matter of days before it breaches the $2,000 mark.”

  In my opinion, Ethereum reaching $2,500 by the end of this year 2021 is very much possible due to multiple reasons. The first being, a transition of 2-3% of the economy to the crypto-market, which will provide Ethereum wind beneath the wings. Secondly, the decentralized applications. Yes, applications hold significant importance nowadays. Running on the P2P network, decentralized applications allow multiple processes without any central authority including in between. 

Ethereum is set to hit new heights in 2021, so hold your breath and get ready for the ride. In the end, the final decision always belongs to you. Figure out and see if Ethereum is something that can be called a good investment.  

These days, news about bitcoin and cryptos is everywhere.

We recently covered the topic on my latest American Consequences podcast, and I’m working on a feature story about bitcoin for our next magazine, publishing soon (keep an eye on your inbox!). 

In the meantime, we wanted to share with you even more valuable insight… Today, we’ve got Internet entrepreneur and crypto investor Eric Wade to talk about the biggest investment opportunity of 2021.

Eric’s cryptocurrency career began by mining bitcoin. Soon, he turned to mining Ethereum and then even taught himself how to build and program his own miners. As the wave of interest in cryptocurrencies grew in 2016 and 2017, Eric began mining dozens of other cryptos.

And as an investor, he’s made big profits… You won’t find a better guide in the crypto space than Eric.

I trace the dawn of the Internet as we know it today to a single event…  

It happened in 1994… The release of a web browser ultimately called “Netscape Navigator.” 

Until that moment, the Internet was the province of programmers and computer engineers. You had to have hard-to-find hardware and specialized knowledge just to access it.

And once you did, you’d find a tiny screen crammed full of text and a dictionary full of keyboard commands.

Here’s what the first version of the Netscape Navigator browser looked like…

Colors and pictures suddenly appeared beside text… And Netscape Navigator even came with new security features that made it possible to safely process credit-card transactions online.

The Internet was never the same.

Today, I can’t help but think that the cryptocurrency world is like the Internet in 1994…

Using bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, and others requires specialized knowledge. And many people – maybe you’re one of them – have been turned off over the past several years because of these so-called barriers to entry… 

Addresses, marking the location of cryptos, and private keys to access them look like gibberish… Sometimes, you even have to type specialized commands into web forms to interact with smart contracts. And you often must spend hours migrating tokens from one blockchain to another.

I know that dealing with these clunky features can be hard, frustrating even…

That’s why my analyst Fred Marion and I spend a good amount of time in our Crypto Capital newsletter providing step-by-step instructions on how to get started. And of course, we precisely detail how to buy each and every crypto we ever recommend. 

It’s a little more work, but I believe being a part of this revolutionary industry is more than worth the small amount of additional effort to get started.

Many people who have been along for the ride in bitcoin’s parabolic price move over the past few months probably agree. And there is much more upside ahead… 

Today, I’ll explain why crypto is on the cusp of a “Netscape moment” – a breakthrough that we look back on today with obvious recognition of the brilliance of web-browsing software and everything that came after Navigator 1.0. 

Soon, crypto will go mainstream…

Let’s discuss why you want to bet on radical innovation…

When I was 27 years old, I made a once-in-a-lifetime investment that shifted the course of my life forever… My business partner and I paid $7 to acquire the rights to the domain name Wallstreet.com.

Owning Wallstreet.com meant I could use a cool e-mail address ([email protected])… And I got an even cooler nickname. (Clients half-jokingly called me “Wall Street.”)

But most important, for the cost of a cheap tie, I yielded a return so much bigger than any other asset class in the world that many people have trouble believing it… 

In 1999, when I was 31, my partner and I sold Wallstreet.com for more than $1 million… We locked in 14,000,000% gains in a little more than four years on the same domain we had bought for $7.

I was once interviewed about the sale…

“How do you get to where you sell a $7 domain name for $1 million?” the interviewer asked.

I responded with the truth… 

“You need to be able to say no to selling a $7 domain for a quarter of a million dollars,” I said. 

It might not be the first answer you expect, but imagine sitting across the table from someone offering you $250,000 in cash for little more than a word you spent $7 to buy…

It’s hard to say no. 

But I turned down a lot of offers on the path to $1 million. And that’s because, back then, I quickly realized that the Internet wasn’t going to be a passing fad. 

I was being offered $250,000 for Wallstreet.com for good reason. Folks were starting to realize what I had previously realized… The Internet had the power to change everything about the way we lived and worked.

That was still the case when I sold Wallstreet.com for $1 million… But by then, I was satisfied selling it for that higher number – a life-changing amount of money for me and my family. 

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies have the same potential…

Until now, the Internet has always required us to trust third parties…  

We trust banks with the “dollars” that are stored in our bank account – but certainly aren’t sitting in the vault waiting for us… 

We trust Alphabet (GOOGL) to hold and protect our searches and spreadsheet data…

We trust Facebook (FB) with our photographs and personal interests or “likes”… 

We put a lot of power in platforms like Twitter (TWTR) simply by using it…

And we hand over a lot of data to Amazon (AMZN) whenever we use its marketplace… which is used to sell more products back to us, like things we merely mention in a conversation.

Blockchains are different than private databases…  

Rather than locking all the information away for a certain person or group to use, the data stored on a blockchain are done in plain view on computers all around the world.

In the simplest terms, this is precisely what a decentralized blockchain is… data that anyone can see and verify at any time. 

Imagine a bank like JPMorgan Chase (JPM) opening up all of its accounting books and giving everyone the ability to review its individual accounts at any time. Each account wouldn’t have a customer name, of course, but it would have a unique identifier… So you’d know that Account-1ac7, for example, had $20,201 in it. 

Once you have publicly verifiable data like that, you can start doing things that have never been possible before. For example, I could write a program that says if any account has more than $10,000, I’ll lend it $5,000 in, say, Ethereum (ETH) tokens, at an interest rate of 5%.

In a yield-starved world where central banks like the Federal Reserve have already said they’ll likely keep interest rates low for years to come (and in the case of the Fed, keep printing dollars and buying assets, too), that sounds pretty good to me. 

In this scenario, consider if Account-1ac7 applies for a loan… The software could simply verify that the account has the appropriate balance, put a hold on $10,000 of those funds, and transfer it $5,000 in Ethereum instantly. No middleman or human would need to be involved.

And the thing is, this isn’t just conjecture… It exists today. 

This movement is called decentralized finance (“DeFi”), and the industry is growing faster than any financial innovation I’ve seen in my three-decade career in finance.

Fans of DeFi are so ardent, they have a description for the “old world” of banking that most people use today… “Traditional Finance” or “TradFi.”

Since TradFi is closed off and gated, it requires several layers of middlemen. It requires brokers, clearinghouses, auditors, and specialized insurers. 

DeFi replaces all of that with a few lines of computer code. As I recently wrote in a special report…

DeFi uses “smart contracts” to do all of the things that banks can do – like issuing loans, interest accounts, and even bonds and derivatives. You see, smart contracts are computer programs that run automatically on blockchains. So even people who don’t have bank accounts can get involved. All you need is a mobile phone and crypto.

This technology today offers interest rates between 8% and 12% for lending, borrowing, and trading… and even buying digital art through blockchain-based smart contracts that execute automatically without human intervention.

And the interest is one thing, but the underlying value of all of these platforms is going to grow even faster than they are today…

If you’ve paid attention to the crypto space over the past year or so, you can see that we’re rapidly heading toward a world where literally all assets will be stored on blockchains. I’m talking about all assets across industries that you might not think of as being associated with cryptos today… 

In the future, you’ll be able to borrow money against your Apple (AAPL) stock, for example… or take out insurance on the Ethereum you’ve stored in an interest-bearing account.

The concept scarcely existed a year ago. We can verify that because everything in DeFi is trackable on blockchains… 

A year ago, just $800 million was being put to work in DeFi trading, lending, and insurance platforms. Today, that number is roughly $37 billion – up more than 4,000%. Take a look…

However, I admit that it can be hard to use DeFi right now… You must download special browser plugins and – quite frankly – use some poorly designed websites that are often built by anonymous developers.

That’s why I’m so excited about the marriage of DeFi and TradFi that is just starting to happen today…

The big players need to enter the space in a big way. When they do, rather than forcing users to learn new tools, they’ll simply make them easy to use on existing platforms. 

That is the crypto “Netscape moment” I’m talking about. And there are signs everywhere that it’s upon us…

PayPal (PYPL) launched the ability for its 360 million active users to buy and sell crypto in October 2020. And the digital-payments company is expected to allow users to pay for goods and services with crypto sometime this quarter.

Facebook is quietly working on the launch of its dollar-pegged crypto Diem this year. And just a few weeks ago, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – basically the U.S. Treasury – told U.S. banks it can use blockchains to store and transfer funds. 

Today, perhaps 200 million folks use crypto in one way or another…

And banks, social media networks, and payment processors are about to give billions of their existing users simple ways to use crypto, too.

In some cases, those users won’t even know they’re using crypto. A bank could, for example, convert dollars to a dollar-pegged crypto to process a payment instantly – instead of the traditional two to three days for an automated clearinghouse to do it.

And what if banks decide to give their customers access to the DeFi services that are already attracting millions of users around the world? The industry would explode overnight.

We’ve seen prices on cryptos go parabolic in the past. Today, bitcoin trades for about $47,000, up roughly 360% since this time a year ago. And late last month, Ethereum pushed through its all-time high of more than $1,400 (previously set in 2017). Now, it’s setting new all-time highs almost daily.

My subscribers have ridden these moves higher, and I believe the popularity of crypto is about to take off… but the window to make the biggest gains might be closing fast.

And what I’m really excited about now is seeing the number of cryptocurrency users go parabolic, too. With the DeFi movement accelerating, 2021 is the year I believe that will happen… 

Then, maybe one day, 20 years from now, somebody will post screenshots of the early versions of what these platforms and software look like… They will be that important.

P.S. With all this in mind, I want to urge you to check out my latest presentation on what I see going on in the crypto world today, including the details of the unlikely story that led me to a simple strategy for trading cryptos… 

This is the same strategy that has helped a small group of subscribers see gains like 273%… 292%… 596%… and a whopping 1,175%. With massive gains like these, you might feel like you’ve missed the boat. But hopefully I showed you today why that’s not the case at all… far from it.

Folks who invest in cryptos now still have the opportunity to make potentially life-changing returns… And it’s not as difficult to get started as you might think. Click here for my latest presentation. It includes a free, easy-to-understand demonstration with all the details.

What does it take to move Bitcoin almost 20% higher? The answer: Elon Musk simply tweeting “#bitcoin.” In fact, this simple move may have just sparked the next big crypto rally. Right now, people are pouring into cryptos like we haven’t seen in years… but please,   don’t do anything until you see what this crypto insider says first.

Read our latest issues of American Consequences by clicking here.

Love us? Hate us? Let us know how we’re doing at [email protected] .

Trish Regan Publisher, American Consequences February 15, 2021

Blockchain platform Cardano aims to disrupt unfair legacy centralised systems and distribute power to individuals around the world, but it needs your help.

The decentralisation movement really started when Bitcoin was released in 2009 as a global digital currency with a fixed supply that’s immune to inflation, has no central bank, and cannot be shut down.

However, Bitcoin has its limitations. While it’s arguably the ultimate “store of value” asset – which is currently driving its value in a world of endless money printing and low or even negative interest rates – it cannot be used to run decentralised applications.

Ethereum is the most well-known decentralised app platform after first being proposed in 2013. As the first mover, it’s also the most widely adopted. There’s currently over $23 billion “locked” in Ethereum-based DeFi (Decentralised Finance) apps. Cardano thinks it can do better.

Ethereum was co-founded by eight blockchain pioneers; Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Diiorio, Amir Chetrit, Jeffrey Wilcke, and, last but certainly not least, Charles Hoskinson.

Hoskinson left Ethereum following a dispute about accepting venture capital and the need for a more formal governing structure. He went on to found Cardano in 2015 and became the CEO of the project’s main developer, IOHK.

“Back in 2015, I got to a point where I said, ‘Hey, you know, I have the ability to do a cleanroom approach, where we just assume nothing exists, start from the science and first principles’ and say, ‘Okay, with all that we know, how would we actually build a cryptocurrency if we could do it all over again,’” says Hoskinson.

“So we launched a very aggressive research agenda in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, and Tokyo Tech, and a lot of other institutions like the University of Athens and a small army of PhDs.”

Six years on, the project is only just gearing up to launch support for smart contracts—something which hasn’t gone unnoticed when even newer platforms have beat Cardano to it. It’s easy to misconstrue as due to a lack of effort.

Cardano has taken a notoriously academic approach–-posting around 92 peer-reviewed papers. Other projects have followed the more Silicon Valley approach of “move fast and break things” and we’ve seen the subsequent issues with security and scalability.

Hoskinson and the rest of the Cardano team want to disrupt “big tech” and more fairly distribute power across society, so it shouldn’t be surprising they’re not following the Silicon Valley template.

At its core, blockchain is about trust–-so Cardano’s methodical approach to getting things right from the start has gained it a fair share of fans. But why should developers build on Cardano over Ethereum? Hoskinson explains:

“As a developer, you should care about a collection of things—your software lifecycle, predictability of cost, and how much it is going to cost you to run on that infrastructure. You should care about user experience as you scale from thousands of users to millions. And, obviously, you have to care about the security of the underlying infrastructure You also have to think about your development experience and how you deliver a secure experience to your customers.

Furthermore, these applications don’t just live in the cryptocurrency space, there are hybrid applications–-some of them live on the blockchain, and some of them live off of a blockchain.

As a consequence, when you look at all of these things, it turns out that Etherum is not really a good experience for all of them. It doesn’t have predictable costs, the on-chain, off-chain stuff is still a bit muddled to a point where people are putting a lot of their stuff on off-chain infrastructure.

There’s a lot of other little problems that have leaked in and that’s okay, you know, they were the first mover and it’s kind of like saying, ‘Hey, building a website on Internet Explorer 6, or Netscape, is that going to be a great experience?’ Probably not, you know, maybe you have to use Flash and all this other weird, wonky stuff to be able to do something.”

While critics say Cardano is late to the party, it’s only just getting started. Hoskinson points out that while there are something like 22.4 million developers in the world, only around 80,000 use or know Ethereum’s Solidity language. Of those, only around 10,000 are active dApp (decentralised app) developers.

“[Developers] are writing .NET applications, Java applications, and these types of things. So, the first thing we said is: ‘Is it possible to create a framework that over time can bring all of these mainstream programming languages into our space for both the off-chain infrastructure and the on-chain infrastructure and do that in a safe, sustainable way with predictable costs?’

We launched a project out of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with a professor named Grigore Roșu, who runs a company called Runtime Verification and they work with DARPA, NASA, Boeing, and these other large companies, and they’re experts in formal methods, virtual machines, compilers, programming languages and so forth. For 15 years, they’ve been working on this universal meta-language called K.

Basically, what K is all about is it allows you to describe the semantics of a programming language and then, over time, it can be used to build all your tooling. And, as you upgrade your programming language – like when you go from F# 4 to F# 5, or Scala 2 to Scala 3 – you could just automatically upgrade your infrastructure without a human being writing a single line of code.

We invested millions of dollars into building out a virtual machine specifically for this, it’s called IELE, and we’re bringing that to market with Cardano probably late first half, early second half of this year. That’s going to allow us to start capturing mainstream programming languages–-JavaScript, C#… and bring them into the current ecosystem. So, if you’re a developer there, you can start writing smart contracts, you can start writing dApps, and you also have a clear way of doing deployments for your on-chain, off-chain code.”

The whole space is currently just a speck relative to the size of the legacy industries up for disruption, especially finance. Cardano has even created a language called Marlowe specifically for financial contracts.

Marlowe is based on the functional programming language Haskell and aims to provide the highest level of security required for financial purposes while enabling such contracts to be created in a LEGO-like, brick-by-brick manner so contracts can be “co-designed with a financial expert, not a programmer” and ultimately broaden who can participate.

Naturally, Cardano believes it offers a better home for those value-generating projects with its lower fees, increased decentralisation, and higher scalability.

Cardano is launching an Ethereum virtual machine – known as KEVM, of which a devnet is already live – to help current Ethereum developers evaluate whether it’s worth transitioning over.

“Anything you can do on Ethereum, you can do on that. So if you want to take the Celsius smart contract, you can go and compile it and run it on the devnet. It’s 100 percent backwards compatible with Ethereum. Really this is first a testing framework to get a sense of costings and also get a sense of portability.

We have things like the ERC-20 converter and other projects, and these are all about porting stuff from Ethereum to Cardano. It’ll just run better, faster, and cheaper on our system. So that’s really the point of that, that devnet is to begin those conversations and get all the kinks out.

Then what’ll happen is we’ll upgrade the devnet to a permanent sidechain. And then that sidechain will run connected to the Cardano mainnet. So, when you deploy apps, you can reuse that code for Cardano’s mainnet and you don’t have to go over and learn Plutus and build on new infrastructure and so forth, you can still stay in the Ethereum ecosystem, it’ll just run better, faster, and cheaper on our side.

That will be a permanent side chain, so we’ll keep upgrading it. As the Ethereum virtual machine upgrades – as the Solidity infrastructure upgrades – these things will just keep upgrading and staying with it.

It’s kind of like when Mac created boot camp and you could run Windows on a MacBook. For a long time, the best Windows laptop was actually a MacBook Pro.”

Some high-profile decentralised apps, most notably the exciting AI project SingularityNET, have already begun moving from Ethereum to Cardano–-primarily due to the current dApp leader’s notoriously slow transactions and high fees. Ethereum 2.0 is rolling out to address its issues but it’s a process that will take years to complete.

“Current speed and cost issues with the Ethereum blockchain have increased the urgency of exploring alternatives for SingularityNET’s blockchain underpinning,” said Ben Goertzel, renowned AI expert and founder of SingularityNET, earlier this year.

“The ambitious Ethereum 2.0 design holds promise but the timing of rollout of different aspects of this next-generation Ethereum remains unclear, along with many of the practical particulars.“

Goertzel has also called functional programming – enabled by Cardano’s use of Haskell-based languages like Plutus – “invaluable” for blockchain-based AI developments.

During a recent interview, Alex Mashinsky, CEO of crypto lending platform Celsius, also expressed interest in switching to Cardano. Hoskinson believes it’s because Mashinsky is “getting tired of paying $2.5 million per year in transaction fees.”

When asked whether he expects many projects to jump from Ethereum, Hoskinson teases there are many conversations taking place and also with “bigger companies that are interested in entering the space.”

Hoskinson, however, acknowledges that Ethereum has improved substantially in recent months and isn’t out to replace the project but offer developers an enticing alternative in a space which has room for many platforms to co-exist.

“Dapp developers are businesses, they’re building a dApp because they want to accomplish something, they want to solve a particular problem,” Hoskinson says. “You should look at Ethereum and Cardano like you look at Rackspace and Amazon and Digital Ocean. It’s kind of silly if you say, well, you can only build on Amazon.”

After DeFi, interoperability is arguably the next big trend in blockchain–-after all, trading a centralised “big tech” monopoly for a decentralised one isn’t much better.

Cardano is integrating a sidechain protocol which provides a non-interactive way of safely moving value between two chains that support it. This mechanism will be the primary way value will flow between CSL and a CCL layer. Federated bridges are expected to be built with other blockchains as Cardano grows in value and user base. To help accelerate this growth, Cardano supports a restricted version of Plutus for interoperability scripts.

The commitment of Cardano to interoperability can be seen in its support for oracles which enable vital outside information to be pulled in. Cardano is building its own and looks set to use Wolfram Alpha.

“Wolfram Alpha is an amazing engine, you can query and say: ‘How many shipwrecks have happened in Florida between 1950 and 2000 as a result of a hurricane and with more than a million dollars worth of cargo loss?’ And they’ll give you an answer.

So that’s a great engine to plug-in. But there are many great engines to plug-in.”

To facilitate other providers, Cardano is building a framework for oracles. Hoskinson highlights that it will help to address the key questions like: “What’s the reliability of that information? How much does it cost me to get it? Can it be censored at inconvenient times? Can it be given in ways that bias it towards my competitors?”

“It’s a very complex problem, but it’s a prerequisite to useful smart contracts–-so you can’t ignore it,” says Hoskinson.

It’s often said that there’s an app for everything these days. Truly original ideas are in short supply and it’s hard to compete against the incumbents. Decentralised apps offer a huge growth opportunity while helping to address some of the biggest issues we all face today.

You can watch our full interview with Hoskinson here:

When I see big name companies not taking their stand when it comes to innovation, I weep. Just take a look at how the world stood still when the Corona virus affected the world. Business started dying off and at same time, more business sprout out. When big issues always arises, it will pave way for more greater things to come in place. When the Corona virus outbreak came in place, it was as if we all are going to die off with the deadly virus. Take a look at it today, we are all living with the disease and at same time, we are looking fine and more better than yesterday.

This virus has created a problem and also this problem has opened more ways for people to make more money from it. We all have been preaching about remote work for long now. I think the era is gradually coming. I am really happy seeing that people are at home sitting down and doing few task and making money from it. The world has changed to that very stage where you don't have to go out of your comfort zone, carry one or two things before you make ends meet from it. With your data and smart phone, you can change your bank account for good.

I was checking different cryptocurrency project and I must say that I am really impressed by the steady growth I have been seeing so far. Just take a look at how the cryptocurrency world has been fairing lately, this shows that more companies has started using cryptocurrency. This is why it is really a pain in my butt seeing my country is saying that they want to ban people who are into cryptocurrency instead of using this cryptocurrency to better our nation. Imagine if my country took the risk by investing little part of our budget into cryptocurrency or diverting the money they are stealing into blockchain. It could have impacted the economy positively instead of this decision.

I have been looking at the sport companies for some time now, it pains me to see that many of them have not really used the corona virus opportunity to get things running. If those sport companies started using cryptocurrency, the use case of cryptocurrency will touch a new milestone and it will really means a lot to the world in general.

Permit me to break this down for we all. Let us take the English premier league as a case study. Imagine that players salary is being paid with cryptocurrency and also while making signings during transfer window, if cryptocurrency is being used. This will rake in a lot of money for the companies in charge of that. Imagine if I have a blockchain that powers such movement, it will really change my life for good as more and more people will start using the service once they see how scalable it is. For me to gain from it, I have to make sure that I diverse a way that will sees me getting paid back some percentage. This will be what I will use in running and maintaing the blockchain. I will call this the blockchain fee, same thing Ethereum blockchain has.

If those companies have this ideas and start converting all this into cryptocurrency, alot of things will be more easier. I recently heard that master card is about embracing cryptocurrency in all ways. This is because they knows the potential that blockchain has. Using blockchain to powers the league will really mean alot to cryptocurrency.

I just talked a little, more things can be achieved with cryptocurrency if sport companies started accepting it. The beauty of blockchain/cryptocurrency at this stage is endless. I will be happy to see more sport companies keying into what I just suggested and taking relevant measures that will help to beautify the chain.

I know many of those companies are already looking on this. They are already thinking of a way to integrate a service that will help to see such project running. Such coin that will powers such transaction might surpass any cryptocurrency in the world. This is because people will love to buy the cryptocurrency because they sees that their favourite stars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Mohammed Salah, Neymar, Lionel Messi, Ibrahimovic and host of other great players are using such service. The worth of the coin will be massive and it might changes the life of others who key into it other than just players too.

I will end the post here today, my aim is to see more companies taking this mouth watering opportunities and growing cryptocurrency and sport to an apex height.

Stay bless as you go through this post

Benzinga CEO Jason Raznick and O’Shares ETF Investments Chairman Kevin O’Leary participated in a YouTube discussion with O’Shares CEO Connor O’Brien Thursday, covering topics such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets, potential economic recovery trades and the recent volatility in Bitcoin price (Crypto: BTC) and other cryptocurrencies.

WallStreetBets: Raznick discussed the crazy trading action in GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME) and Benzinga’s coverage of the surreal story behind the volatility on its live YouTube channel.

Related Link: GameStop Drama Continues: Soaring Stock Halted, Cramer, Citron Weigh In

“Obviously the WallStreetBetters were behind this for a while, but the day Andrew Left from Citron Research was going public about [his short thesis], his Twitter video wasn’t working. He came live on our show when we had 600 viewers on our show. Within 8 minutes, the WallStreetBets guys showed up. We had 13,000 to 15,000 people in there going crazy,” Raznick said.

Within an hour-and-a-half of Left's Jan. 21 Benzinga interview, GameStop shares had skyrocketed from $41 to $80.

“They were calling me a boomer because I didn’t own the stock, and they were threatening if I didn’t buy the stock they were going to thumbs down, unsubscribe. I basically bought 100 shares live on the show because I’d never seen anything like it.”

O’Leary said he doesn’t believe there will ultimately be much regulatory fallout from the GameStop fiasco.

“The market actually performed quite well. Short squeezes have happened in the past, they’re going to happen in the future,” the "Shark Tank" judge said. 

“I think the regulator may say look, we’re going to force complete transparency on the long and the short side. If you’re short ... you’ve got to disclose. And if you’re long, you’ve got to disclose.”

COVID-19 Trades: Raznick said Benzinga users are following COVID-19 developments closely. Benzinga surveys its users constantly, and Raznick said the sentiment regarding the pandemic recently shifted.

“The consensus is people are tired of being home and they’re going to be going out and taking action, not now but within the next couple of months. The perception has changed in the last month-and-a-half, I would say.”

O’Leary said the vaccination rollout may not go as smoothly as many are anticipating.

“What I think happens over the next 90 days is that we hit 66% with the vaccinations and we hit a brick wall. I think the rest aren’t going to do it, and as a result we’re going to be getting the COVID flu every year, slightly more deadly flu,” he said.

O'Leary said he and other professionals may never again be comfortable getting on a crowded elevator in December, which may be bad news for commercial real estate in the long-term.

Raznick said leisure travel stocks like Spirit Airlines Incorporated (NYSE: SAVE) will likely recover more quickly than business travel stocks like Hilton Hotels Corporation (NYSE: HLT).

Government Stimulus: Raznick said unprecedented government stimulus has been good for Benzinga’s business, but it’s also scary how many younger Americans appear to be treating their stimulus checks carelessly.

“It is a little concerning with rates going up right now that the mortgage market could get hurt. Is inflation going to spike up?” Raznick said.

In the short-term, Raznick said the government stimulus has been a major boon for stocks like Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) because the market is anticipating many Americans will use their checks to put deposits on cars.

O’Leary said the government needs to cut off its paycheck protection program at this point.

“There are businesses that are going to go out of business no matter how many rounds of funding we give them, so they shouldn’t be funded,” he said.

Cryptocurrency: Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently called Bitcoin a “highly speculative asset” that consumes a “staggering” amount of energy.

Raznick said the appetite for crypto content from Benzinga’s audience is staggering.

“The severe FOMO that happens in this world has happened in crypto,” Raznick said.

“It’s another asset base and you can diversify and be there, but you have to be careful.” 

He urged crypto investors to remember the deep pullbacks in Bitcoin prices that occurred in 2018 and at other points in the past.

“People have to know it’s not as secure as putting money in a checking or savings account,” Raznick said. 

O’Leary said he is up big on small investments he made in Bitcoin and Ethereum (Crypto: ETH) back in 2017.

The current crypto craze is similar to the California gold rush in the 1800s in that the most savvy investors were selling mining supplies rather than buying gold, he said. 

“I’m going to invest in crypto infrastructure and put together a bunch of investments in that space and own the coin. But the point is I like to have less volatility but I want to capture the growth.” 

Benzinga CEO Jason Raznick, left, and O'Shares ETF Investments Chairman Kevin O'Leary at Benzinga's Detroit headquarters in 2018. File photo by Dustin Blitchok. 

February 24, 2021 | William T. | 4 mins

South Korea is among the countries at the forefront of cryptocurrency adoption. What is the current state of cryptocurrency in South Korea?

South Korea had been exposed to the concept of and even the actual usage of digital tokens long before Bitcoin became a household name. People were exchanging in-game credits to real money and using microtransactions over a decade ahead of the birth of cryptocurrency. And this explains how South Koreans didn’t bat a single eye when Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008.

But it took a few more years until 2017 before the Bitcoin hype started to gain ground in South Korea. By then, more people, powered by the millennials, had invested in Bitcoin, also partly because of the 9.8-percent youth unemployment rate in the country at that time. 

It was also in that year when the government made Bitcoin legal in South Korea not as a legal tender but as a remittance method applicable for financial institutions. Moreover, the government greenlit local Korean cryptocurrency exchanges to operate under the supervision of the Korean Financial Services Commission (FSC). 

From then on, South Korea became a powerhouse in the world of cryptocurrency trading, even making up 30 percent of all cryptocurrency trading recorded in the world. In fact, since last year, users can withdraw LTC from over 13,000 crypto ATMs in the country.

The Bitcoin hype in the country, along with the rising popularity of Ethereum three to four years ago, had forced the government to enforce stricter implementations of the KYC and AML policies. For instance, minors, government employees, and foreigners cannot use Korean cryptocurrency exchanges. 

How the government regulates cryptocurrency trading in South Korea continues to evolve as places where to buy Bitcoin in South Korea are required to comply with new policies and laws. In fact, the National Assembly unanimously approved in March 2020 the landmark crypto bill that would forcefully end anonymous trading in South Korea.

The said crypto bill, which would take effect in March 2021, cryptocurrency exchanges must complete the regulatory requirements laid out by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) under the FSC before September 24 this year.

These requirements include the complete compliance of exchanges to constantly flag and inform the unit of suspicious transactions taking place on their platforms within three working days. All reports submitted to the FIU must include the transactions’ values in Korean won. 

Additionally, the FIU requires all exchanges to delist from the platform all privacy coins, including Monero (XMR), Bytecoin (BCN), and ZCash (ZEC), among others.

But even before the implementation of the new crypto bill, the South Korean government has been actively monitoring cryptocurrency trading in the country. In fact, the National Tax Service last month conducted an investigation and audit on Korea Digital Exchange, a Korean cryptocurrency exchange operated by Flybit.  

Flybit, initially named Dexko until April 2020, had to submit all data and transaction details from 2017 to 2019 for the National Tax Service to check for any signs of transaction anomalies or tax evasion.

This incident was not the first time because South Korea’s National Tax Service had also conducted a special audit of exchanges Coinone and Bithumb back in 2018. The Bithumb exchange, in the end, received a $69 million tax bill, which the company called groundless.

On another note, reports state that the Ministry of Economy and Finance targets full implementation of the crypto tax policy on January 1, 2022. With this, the government could levy 20 percent on capital gains derived from cryptocurrency trading in the country.

With the delisting of privacy coins from South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges in full swing, it is clear as day that Bitcoin and Ethereum would remain as the top Korean cryptocurrency coins.

During the bear market in 2018, Ethereum trading remained stable. And with the major comeback of Bitcoin as of late, with the Bitcoin price in Korea currently at over 55 million KOR, it is only evident that Bitcoin will be difficult to top as the leader of all South Korean cryptocurrency coins.

But it was not too long ago when the government actually dreamed of creating its own coin. In 2018, the country’s capital Seoul initiated the conception of S-Coin, envisioned to become a payment method to be used in paying for subway fares and for welfare programs funded by the city.

And what started from a vision will soon become a reality as Seoul will reportedly launch its S-Coin this year. This would mark the city’s plan to make Seoul a smart city by 2022, one that uses both cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

Gambling in South Korea is illegal except for the selected land-based casino which by the way is open only to foreigners. And when it comes to online gambling, the government is even more strict, completely preventing local residents from engaging in online gambling activities, such as when you bet on sports or play poker. 

While players can still access offshore online casinos, they are better off using cryptocurrency, which the government recognizes as an asset rather than a legal tender. With this, players can access Bitcoin casino sites based and licensed elsewhere, allowing them to explore provably fair games, experience blockchain betting, and benefit from fast, anonymous transactions.

Follow BestBitcoinCasino.com on Twitter for the latest news and developments in crypto and blockchain gaming.

If you’re interested in getting an updated 2021 list of all Bitcoin casino reviews for this market, check out the casino review section.

With PayPal, Tesla, Mastercard, BNY Mellon and others entering the cryptosphere, isn’t it becoming more clear than ever before that digital assets are now part of the mainstream? That their mass adoption has started and it is a matter of the present, not the future?

“Tesla’s purchase of Bitcoin no doubt sent a shockwave through the corner offices of every chief financial officer and corporate treasurer in America and beyond. One of Bitcoin’s many benefits is that it acts like digital gold, diversifying corporate holdings and lowering currency risk. Every financial executive ought to be sharpening their pencils to understand if and ultimately when they should be buying it.

While Tesla is not the first public company to buy Bitcoin for its treasury, it is by far the most important. How poetic it is that Elon Musk, a space entrepreneur, pushed Bitcoin to its escape velocity in corporate America!

The decision by Tesla follows a slew of high-profile announcements by large companies, which fits a pattern of accelerating institutional and corporate adoption. Equally consequential to the treasury allocation was Tesla’s decision to accept Bitcoin. This follows in the footsteps of several other large innovative firms such as PayPal, Visa and others that are building a superhighway to Bitcoin mass adoption, enabling not only Bitcoin buying and selling but integration into their merchant networks. By the end of 2021, I’d expect many more firms to not only hold Bitcoin but have a real Bitcoin strategy.”

“This is a very promising sign for mainstream interest and its increasing willingness to embrace blockchain. Moreover, it affirms that blockchain and Bitcoin are here to stay for the future.

Throughout 2020, increasingly more financial institutions invested in Bitcoin, and I am confident that blockchain adoption is accelerating as the global financial paradigm shifts to fully embrace digitization and decentralization. Moving forward, we must continue pushing for effective standards across the industry as well as greater integration to fully deliver on blockchain’s game-changing potential.”

“Tesla’s purchase of $1.5 billion in Bitcoin not only continues the momentum of public companies purchasing crypto but could be a watershed moment that establishes some allocation of digital assets as a cornerstone of a healthy, diversified treasury.

Regardless of industry, businesses should follow these early adopters establishing in-roads to the payment rails and financial infrastructure of the future. That starts with Bitcoin and will steadily expand to projects that are just outside the frame and focused on the programmable, smart asset side of the ecosystem where enterprises can find more use cases beyond digital gold.”

“The embrace of Bitcoin and Ether by institutional investors and corporate treasury departments in recent months represents a watershed moment for the global economy — the early concrete signs of a paradigm shift in how global business, financial and economic systems will be constructed. They are being rearchitected on a new real-time automated, objective trust foundation, as represented by the Ethereum and Bitcoin networks.

Today, corporate finance departments are learning how to manage BTC and ETH tokens for value preservation, transaction friction reduction and upside, as these systems will grow in size and value dramatically with adoption over the next few years. Tomorrow, their treasuries will plug into the decentralized finance protocols being built largely on Ethereum for borrowing, lending, trading, equity and bond issuance, full lifecycle token management, insurance, prediction markets, trade finance, tokenization and factorization of invoices, loyalty tokens and NFT art that can be projected on the walls of their board rooms. They will do this because they will be able to configure and issue financial instruments without the need for intermediaries, and they will be able to wire up financial flows to suit their needs in real time. And they will do this because that’s where the liquidity is.”

“Tesla’s bold move to invest $1.5 billion of its treasury into Bitcoin, as well as to accept Bitcoin as payment for Tesla vehicles in some jurisdictions, blows the doors wide open for corporate America and high-net-worth families to seriously consider putting a small part of their net worth in Bitcoin as a store of value, instead of bonds, gold, dividend stocks and commercial real estate, which have been underperforming historical standards.

With only 18.6 million Bitcoin in the world — and perhaps as much as 4 million to 5 million lost or not being offered for sale — there isn’t enough to satisfy the demand of 46.5 million global millionaires, nor 1% to 5% of the estimated $4 trillion of cash on corporate balance sheets in the U.S. alone. Add in 1.8 billion millennials, mostly in countries with broken currencies or banking systems, and one can see that the supply of and demand for Bitcoin are not in balance.

Over time, this demand will trickle down to Ethereum, which already has a large part of the Fortune 500 developing applications on it, as well as innovative cryptocurrency platforms in DeFi and NFTs — and numerous billionaires, including Mark Cuban, have recently hopped on those bandwagons. We are in the year after the halving — what I call ‘Bitcoin summer’ — and parabolic growth has occurred following every four-year halving event so far. This year will likely not be an exception.”

“In the face of the pandemic, domestic inflation and global uncertainty, mainstream businesses have jumped into digital assets with newfound enthusiasm. From public companies like Tesla and Square to funds like Grayscale and the Tudor Group, prominent institutions are increasing their exposure to Bitcoin. In aggregate, these institutions are estimated to be holding over 6% of the 18.6 million Bitcoin in circulation, amounting to over 1.2 million BTC. After Bitcoin surpassed an all-time high of over $48,000 in early February, the total value of these institutional holdings eclipsed $55 billion.

In the last six months, BitGo has onboarded many corporate accounts through the process of education, intelligent market access, asset accounting and reporting, and more — all while keeping assets stored in regulated, qualified custody with the highest levels of security for deep cold storage.

Bitcoin’s mainstream acceptance stands to only grow exponentially as more institutional investors embrace cryptocurrencies, clearing the way for future entrants to follow them. This escalating market demand from large entities will likely continue impacting Bitcoin’s value and may even serve to mitigate its volatility. With the final Bitcoin expected to be mined in 2140 and over $2 trillion of monthly trade volume, there’s still plenty of time to enter Bitcoin — for businesses and individuals alike. Despite the tremendous acceleration of institutional investors, we are likely only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to mass adoption. Additional corporations and funds are soon to see the success that these first-movers have enjoyed and thus will begin to follow their lead.”

“The recent announcement by Elon Musk of Tesla’s investment in Bitcoin is yet another example of the broadening acceptance of Bitcoin, and of digital assets as an asset class in its own right. We are quickly getting to the point where announcements like this will no longer be viewed as ‘news’ and will no longer cause reactions in the market.

Take for example the recent announcement by BNY Mellon, which we think is more important but caused not a stir in the market. Taking a step back, we think the success of Bitcoin, and of digital assets more broadly, is a strong harbinger of the power of global retail-driven innovation in financial markets. Look at the recent activity in GameStop as another example. We think this trend will continue and will raise important policy and regulatory issues that will need to be addressed by governments and central banks around the globe.”

“When I tweeted at Elon about accepting Bitcoin three weeks ago, I had no idea he would be so responsive, first by accepting Bitcoin and next by managing his cash by buying some Bitcoin. I expect that the action he has taken will be pervasive, first for the early adopter companies that use OpenNode or the Lightning Network to accept Bitcoin, and next for the chief financial officers of the world to recognize the need to own some Bitcoin to hedge against coming inflation and against further printing of fiat currency by politicians.”

There are two things at odds in developing a secure, immutable ledger of transactions for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).  You want the immutability and security of decentralized cryptocurrencies, but you also want the centralized control of a permissioned distributed ledger; which creates some contention in the design.  

You will continue to see most CBDC designs and a lot of distributed ledger platforms stating that they are NOT blockchain.  I would point you back to my CBDC nonsense article that kicked off this series for a refresher.  Essentially, when a CBDC like China’s digital Yuan states that this is not blockchain - they are trying to tell you the same thing R3 was trying to say to you when they noted that Corda was not blockchain.  ‘Not Blockchain’ is telling you that it is not decentralized,  but it is still a distributed ledger design and it still uses the hashing techniques of blockchain to make the ledger an immutable chain of events.  It does not, however, behave or operate like Bitcoin. For most solutions in the CBDC space, this is good enough for the ledger but maybe not for operations.

A central bank offering a digital currency is potentially taking on a single ledger’s operation for an entire economy.  If you want to go with ‘a single ledger to rule the world of money’ in your country, you have a lot to consider in scaling that solution to all participants of your economy.  It won’t matter if you are trying to centralize the ownership of a tokenized currency or an account-based model. While an account-based offering is potentially 87 times more complicated, you still need to scale and process transactions efficiently and effectively with immutability that participants can trust.  With the centralized model, the keys to the kingdom are the administrative IDs that control the nodes.  The number of nodes, the location of the nodes and the ability to keep all the nodes in sync to effectively serve millions of people 24x7x365 will be difficult for just about any central bank.  None of the world’s current central banks have taken on a technology delivery of that scale - ever.   A centralized model means that a compromise of any credentials in the infrastructure not only disrupts the operation of the currency but can also erode trust in the currency itself.  Centralized infrastructures would be under almost constant attack - no central bank is equipped to deal with that level of scrutiny or liability.

Multi-ledger solutions at least spread the liability around. They also allow you to create mechanisms to bolster the security and immutability in one ledger by leveraging the other.  Let’s start with a two ledger model using everyone’s favourite arbitrary split between retail and wholesale money operations.  The central bank would operate a ledger that manages the creation/destruction of wealth.  The central bank would operate that ledger with a dispersion of nodes amongst the participant banks.  While this ledger provides all the liquidity for the banking system, the banks would create a retail banking ledger that would allow them to dispense and utilize that liquidity with all the people and businesses in the economy.

Now the scaling has changed significantly.  The central bank’s wholesale ledger doesn’t need to be a massive infrastructure project,. The liability is somewhat shared between the central bank and the direct banks to whom the central bank lends liquidity.  There is some extra security for the central ledger with the distribution of nodes, but control of the nodes becomes a new concern.  Strict limits and controls need to be in place on the nodes that participant banks operate.  In the same way that a decentralized cryptocurrency is concerned about 51% of the nodes overpowering the ledger, you could create scenarios where a compromised bank or a motivated group of banks could add or use their nodes to overpower the central ledger.  

I considered this in a few cryptocurrency designs that would work to block the 51% method of overpowering a network. A party creating any decentralized cryptocurrency operates a group of nodes and generally tries to maintain balance in the node population to ensure that no single group can control a majority of the nodes.  In our design, a cryptocurrency operator would also employ an independent 3rd party that utilizes a variety of cloud computing operators to run a group of nodes in the network. That operator could scale the number of nodes up or down in response to surges in the node population. This would ensure no party could ever reach 51% control within the network, making this style of attack cost-prohibitive.

Going back to our two ledger model, you now have a second ledger for the retail banking operations of the economy. ou are again splitting the cost and liability of the infrastructure to drive this ledger across a wider group of organizations that are already there.  Direct participant banks can also deploy and operate nodes with the smaller indirect banks and financial services companies that further spread the liability and builds the scale to accommodate the operations of a large economy.  The administrative keys to the operations of both ledgers still need to be carefully guarded.  Transactions between the wholesale and retail ledgers can also be utilized to increase the transactional records’ immutability on both ledgers.  You want to avoid scenarios where a two ledger solution operates independently of each other since having independent wholesale and retail ledgers would kill most of the benefits of splitting the ledgers in the first place.  Suppose you don’t have a direct correlation between the issued wholesale currency to the retail use of that liquidity within the economy. What was the point of creating a digital currency? Linking the liquidity assignments on the central bank token ledger to the dispersement of tokens in the target accounts on the retail banking ledgers means that those cross points become an added layer of transactional integrity for both ledgers.  

The most significant value of side-chain or inter-chain transactions is that both (or all) chains gain immutability and security within the ledgers.  You would need to wrest control of both ledgers to effect any level of change because the cross-ledger transactions could not change without changing the other ledger at the same time.  With intra-ledger transactions chained to inter-ledger transactions, you will likely only be able to change a minimal number of items within a given ledger.

If you take this concept to the Nth degree in the ‘independent ledger’ model where every wallet is its own independent ledger, you can see the value in creating a secure and trusted delivery model for large-scale economies.  The tokens are issued centrally, dispersed via banking and financial entities and operated by everyone in the ecosystem. Any person or business could operate one ledger or dozens - it wouldn’t really matter.  Those ledgers could be tied to a device or they could live in the cloud.  Millions of ledgers that are continually making interchain transactions are making the overall economic ecosystem more and more secure over time. This solution also means that the sizes of each ledger will be more manageable.  In decentralized cryptocurrencies, we are now starting to see some of the infrastructure cracks and challenges created by single ledger chains operating for decades with every transaction centralized.

Suppose you were looking to move away from the hashing chain model to a more cryptographic-reliant model,, which the Europeans are still promising a research paper on, then the mechanisms of highly dispersed independent ledger methods would merge into that type of solution nicely.  If each currency user operated a cryptographically secured independent ledger that was tied to their identity factors, then the ability to continually enhance the transactional integrity of that ledger as it transacts with other ledgers could be exponential.  I am interested to see what the European consortium tables on a purely cryptographic driven solution.  In five models that I have devised, two models are provably unsustainable over time, two models offer no real differentiated value over hashed Merkle Trees but potentially become a growing liability to the economy as time and technology may generate an ability to crack the cryptographic models.  The 5th model using independent ledgers is clearly more workable.  The difficulty with most purely cryptographic models on a single ledger or small set of ledgers, is that as the operational pool of uses of that cryptographic model persists, patterns start to appear, so as billions and trillions of examples within cryptographic model become available to analytics and we devise better technology to analyze that data, the patterns create the cracks and the whole ecosystem gets decimated.  

The independent ledger model offers a chance to create millions of uniquely seeded ledgers that can then generate unique cryptographic signatures at every point where they intersect and that has a better chance of being sustainable over decades of use.

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The last 48 hours have been extremely chaotic for Bitcoin. After climbing to a high of $ 58,354 on February 21. The world’s largest cryptocurrency fell to $ 44,900. In this sense, the price of Bitcoin had a correction below USD 50,000.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is valued at $ 45,700. With its market capitalization dropping below the $ 1 trillion mark as well after breaking past its immediate support level. This is recorded by our internal tool, Crypto Online.

However, analysts qualify this decline as a correction after the uptrend seen last week. Emphasizing that it is precisely the people and investors who see an opportunity that possibly generate an increase in the short term in the price of the digital currency.

As often happens in these cases, the fall of Bitcoin also generated a domino effect among the main altcoins of the ecosystem. Which for this February 23 also capitalize quite pronounced falls compared to what has been seen in the last 24 hours.

Among these cases, currencies such as Ethereum (ETH), Ripple’s XRP, Litecoin (LTC), Chainlink (LINK), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Stellar (XLM), Uniswap (UNI), Dogecoin (DOGE), AAVE, Monero stand out. (XMR), Huobi Token (HT) and many others, which fell on February 23 with losses between 10% and 20%.

Bitcoin will be the savings method of choice for 1 billion people on their cellphones by 2026, predicts MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor.

In an interview with CNBC on February 23, Saylor, whose company owns more than 70,000 BTC, continued his public defense of Bitcoin, calling it “the dominant digital currency network.”

Saylor spoke a day after US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described Bitcoin as “inefficient.” Comments accompanying a price drop of more than 20% from the all-time highs of $ 58,300.

For him, however, the comments were of little consequence compared to the wider use of Bitcoin, which is rapidly entering the financial lives of more and more people.

“The story that is not told here is that Bitcoin is a progressive and egalitarian technology,” he said on CNBC’s Squawk Box segment.

“We are going to see a day where 7 to 8 billion people have a digital gold bar on their phone and use it to keep their life savings with it.”

He then cited Bitcoin’s 12-year race to become a trillion-dollar asset, two to four times faster than tech majors such as Amazon, Google and Apple.

Major European Bitcoin (BTC) mining company Northern Data is considering going public in the United States.

Germany-based Northern Data plans to raise up to $ 500 million in the initial public offering, or IPO, Bloomberg reported Feb. 22.

The company is working with Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse to proceed with the IPO. According to anonymous people familiar with the matter.

According to the report, the company is considering conducting a new share sale later in 2021, with the intention of boosting Northern Data’s shareholder base as well as its global profile.

Northern Data shareholders include investors such as Galaxy Digital founder Mike Novogratz, as well as companies such as investment firm Cryptology Asset Group and EOS developer Block.one.

Northern Data has been listed on the German OTC market since 2015, where shares rose more than 300% over the past year.

“So the world needs this and I think you can expect that we will have a billion people storing their value (essentially a savings account) on a mobile device within five years and they are going to want to use something like Bitcoin,” he added.

The economic commentator, stock investor and defender of gold, Peter Schiff, always a protagonist in debates on social networks for his position against Bitcoin, surprised his followers with a question on Twitter that they did not expect.

Schiff asked:

If I had to buy some BTC, how will I know when to sell? If your answer is never to sell, what is the point of buying in the first place?

– Peter 🍆 Schiff (@PeterSchiff) February 21, 2021

Of course, his question left people puzzled and dubious in the first place: Will Schiff finally give up on Bitcoin or did he simply ask this trick question as a challenge?

What did happen is that Schiff received more than 300 responses and some of them were answered.

User Adam asked him if the same did not happen with the sale of shares:

I’m not talking about the need to sell. I am evaluating when to sell. With a stock there is a way to measure valuation. Not with Bitcoin. Also, since BTC is so volatile, I can’t sell if the price drops 20% to cut my losses as I can do it on any day, ”Schiff replied.

For his part, the user David told him that he would sell to exchange it for goods and services that he wishes to acquire. To which Schiff commented:

‘I can’t change it, since merchants don’t accept it. I need to sell it first, either myself or using a broker like Bitpay. But I don’t mean small amounts. When do I sell to make a profit or reduce my losses? ‘

Like this one, more discussions related to the same question emerged. But, no matter how hard the crypto community makes to argue with Schiff, it can’t seem to convince him of the benefits of Bitcoin.

Where do you think the price of Bitcoin is going? Let us know in the comment box.

Related

At approximately 1 a.m. ET on Jan. 30, somewhere outside New York City, a CoinDesk reporter came across what could be crypto’s next craze. Or perhaps its latest trial. While searching the annals of Clubhouse, the increasingly popular audio-only app, I stumbled across a dark conspiracy: A group of men masquerading as lizards talking about a new cryptocurrency. 

A lounge of men masquerading as lizards had gathered as tokens teleported from an originating contract into their digital wallets. And here, basking in the light of public display, they discussed how to get the word out. A full-on, unfettered conversation.

“Are we on 4chan yet?” one asked, mentioning the pseudo-anonymous messaging board known as a font of memes and anti-social messages. They weren’t, but things apparently had gone awry anyway.

That’s not the type of commentary one would imagine coming from, say, Satoshi Nakamoto when unveiling Bitcoin to the world. But it’s the pinnacle of social performativity that has found a home on Clubhouse. 

Clubhouse is a social media platform open to anyone with an invite and an iPhone. It has become the place to be for tech moguls and, more and more, crypto tastemakers looking to chat. Elon Musk pops in from time to time to talk about bitcoin and dogecoin, while other crypto luminaries including Meltem Demirors, Caitlin Long and Neeraj Agrawal appear more regularly. 

Like any social media platform, Clubhouse is what you make of it. There’s room enough for genuine discussion alongside scammers and multi-level marketing schemes. Some see it as the next vector for crypto adoption, which could be true; others as a way to replace some of the socialization missing during the pandemic age. It can get pretty weird, pretty quick. 

None know this better than Arya Bahmanyar, better known by his alias CoinDaddy, and his coterie of technologists and artists building “Lizard ETH.” Though Bahmanyar would reject being called a Lizard “leader” – there are no “devs,” he said – he was the figure to answer for the group, when a reporter came sniffing around. 

In a message he pinned to the group’s public Telegram channel, Bahmanyar said Lizard is a “meme art project” and a “statement on the absurdity of DeFi and the current state of Ethereum.” It has no prescribed value or use, and anyone can claim LZRD for free (except for Ethereum gas fees). (To be sure, Bahmanyar is not the leader of the group nor the token’s creator.)

Its main utility, in fact, seems to be as an icon around which a group of like-minded friends can talk and s**tpost. “It is a project of friendship,” Vincent Terracciano, a member of the LZRD Telegram channel, told CoinDesk repeatedly. 

In crypto’s decade-long run, the distinction between memes and this novel form of money has become difficult to parse. In 2013, people made sense of bitcoin by calling it “magic internet money.” In 2017, lambos were a shared desire of the nouveau riche. This summer saw the rise of yield farms, where “DeFi degens” would plow ETH into Yams, Sushi and Pickles. 

See also: Michael Casey – Memes Mean Money

CoinDesk Chief Content Officer Michael Casey went as far as saying money itself has always been a meme. So it makes sense to talk about the “internet’s native money” in terms of a language born on the web. Further, one could expect that anywhere a meme could thrive, crypto would too. 

Like all good and decent technologies, Clubhouse is flattening hierarchies among users and providing a space for anyone to be heard – literally. That may sound odd to say about a company that has thrived on hype around its exclusivity – you have to be invited to the club, for now – but the app’s appeal is more than just FOMO or bragging rights.

“It’s not just a phone call,” Steven McKie, a founding partner at the crypto-focused venture firm Amentum Capital, said over Zoom. “Anyone can randomly pop in and out, so everyone maintains this modicum of professionalism by default. It really does feel like a good episode of [National Public Radio] sometimes.” 

Others have compared the experience to tuning into a podcast, going to a conference or hanging out at a coffee house. This clubby vibe, bordering on yuppie professionalism, hasn’t been lost as the app grows. December’s 600,000 users has surged to six million. Andreessen Horowitz, which invested $10 million in May, reinvested in January at a $1 billion valuation. 

“Everybody loves podcasts in the crypto space. What better than an ephemeral podcast where you just had to be there,” McKie said. “Especially during COVID this past year, we’ve just been glued to our phones, reading things on Twitter, Slack and Telegram. It’s just exhausting.” To the extent that Clubhouse offers something new, it’s by making it easier to engage empathetically with other people, McKie said. 

See also: Bitcoin Bull Run: OGs on Why This One’s Different

Apart from semi-private lizard lounges, this reporter has tuned in for guitar jams and listened to lawyers debating Twitter bans, all in service of the job. There’s always at least five channels dedicated to self-help and often at least one meta-room focused on Clubhouse moderation and etiquette. 

And crypto-specific rooms? There’s investment advice for newbies. Chats about the granularities of bitcoin’s source code. CoinDesk has been experimenting with running rooms focused on news events. Both the number of crypto groups and their relative size are growing along with Clubhouse and CoinMarketCap’s worth. 

A club called “Bitcoin” had just over 12,000 followers on Jan. 15. Less than a month later it’s approaching 20,000. While that particular group, which hosts the Weekly Bitcoin Meetup, is led by the closest thing crypto has to public figures – including Brekkie von Bitcoin, Dan Held, Marty Bent, Amanda Fab, Nic Carter, among others – that’s not the case across the board. 

Many of the most prominent voices on Crypto Clubhouse are relative unknowns on the “it’s always Blockchain Week somewhere” conference circuit. Few have Twitter clout.

“I’ve been educating people on bitcoin since 2013. There’s been nothing like Clubhouse so far,” Lamar Wilson, a crypto startup founder and influencer, told CoinDesk in a video interview.

Wilson is far from unknown among early bitcoin adopters, though he isn’t a name often in the news. He founded Pheeva wallet, an early backdoor to get bitcoin wallets on iPhones (before that portal was slammed shut) and runs the Koinda Facebook group, which boasts about 25,000 followers. 

He also runs the Black Bitcoin Billionaires group on Clubhouse, which has grown past 17,000 followers in under two months. The group holds themed discussions on a daily and weekly basis, frequently moderated by Najah Roberts, chief visionary officer of an over-the-counter desk called Crypto Blockchain Plug. They both put in at least four hours a day running rooms or popping into others. 

Crypto Virgin Hours is probably the best-known chat room. It attracts approximately 200 participants every afternoon, offering a chance for the interested but unanointed to ask basic questions about wallets and coins. 

“Our mission is to onboard the world onto bitcoin,” Wilson said. “People always ask if I have to be Black to be in the group. No – It’s called that just to say it’s run by Black people, but everyone is welcome.” To that end, Black Bitcoin Billionaires partnered with Cash App to get one million satoshis in Black hands during February.

Wilson considers bitcoin to be a tool for Black people to accumulate wealth to pass to the next generation. “Bitcoin is a great equalizer. It’s an asset anyone can have access to without worrying that anyone can take it from you,” he said.

“Clubhouse is the first big social media application that Black people have been an early majority on,” Wilson said. “In every room that you’re in, it’s at least 50% Black. I think it’s because this is what we do as Black people. We go to barber shops, we go to beauty salons and talk. It fits the African American culture.”

On a day I tuned in, Roberts was fielding a lot of questions about dogecoin, generally steering people away from the meme currency. “It has no purpose, it’s a parody coin. I can’t explain it,” she said, with a laugh. “I have some for fun. But I don’t even know what exchange mine is on. I’ve had it since 2017.”

Although she called it a “pump and dump,” Roberts didn’t put investors off, telling them, “If you made money, be comfortable with your profits.”

See also: Emily Parker – Why We Should Take Dogecoin Seriously

While it’d be a mistake to say Clubhouse is a haven of sound investment advice, it seems less scammy than the bowels of Telegram or Discord. In part, that’s from the efforts of people like Roberts, Wilson and others including Cory Klippsten, founder of SwanBitcoin.  

If you spend any amount of time on the crypto side of Clubhouse, you’re bound to bump into a couple of people with “SwanBitcoin” in their usernames, the name of the bitcoin startup for which they work. They’re not there to shill their app necessarily, but usually trying to educate users on the good word of bitcoin.  

Klippsten joined the app in December and immediately got to work bringing others like him aboard. First he brought his colleagues, then his friends, before ultimately spinning up a Telegram chat to “hack” a way to share invites. (Clubhouse gives out invites to each new person who joins, and additional invites for those most active on the app.) He estimates this scheme brought in more than 1,000 bitcoin proselytizers. 

“Now, basically two-thirds of Bitcoin Twitter is on there,” he told me over Zoom. “The purpose is to make sure, if the word ‘bitcoin’ is used, there’s a bitcoiner there in the conversation to explain reality.” This isn’t to say Klippsten is a “toxic maximalist,” an epithet used to describe people who still think of Ethereum as an alt-coin project. 

“That’s what’s great about Clubhouse, you’re talking to real humans. It’s not the same as 280 characters on Twitter, where you fire something off and you’re done,” he said. He recalled one room where someone started “going off” on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was quickly moderated. 

“Even if you disagree with some things he’s done – I disagree with some things Cash App has done – that’s inappropriate when you’re doing it on audio,” he said.

That said, the self-moderation of Clubhouse can only go so far. Like other social platforms, there have been numerous reports of misogynist, racism, anti-Semitism and outright bullying. Clubhouse’s founders, who declined to be interviewed, has largely been silent on such issues so far.

“You know, the system isn’t perfect, but it’s a beta platform that’s growing. I do think that there are way more pockets of positivity than negativity,” Bomani X, a pseudonymous artist and former face of the app, told CoinDesk. 

Bomani said one of the biggest draws has been the connections he made in the crypto community. He works as a digital strategist for musicians such as Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne, and chatting on Clubhouse has gotten him to think about how crypto could expand artists’ rights over their own music. 

See also: Audius Has Big Numbers by Crypto Standards but Can It Take On SoundCloud?

Nothing is in the works right now, but he’s thinking about how blockchain can refigure broken payment models for artists and create new opportunities for fan engagement. “I definitely would love to see what the music-crypto space has to offer, especially as a creator myself,” Bomani said. 

Meanwhile, Ayra Bahmanyar said Lizard “is a completely neutral canvas everyone who feels they want to can paint on.” 

That’s true for Clubhouse, too.

UPDATE (2/20/21, 16:00): Clarifies Arya Bahmanyar’s role in Lizard ETH. Replaces Bahmanyar’s photo. Bahmanyar contacted CoinDesk post-publishing to emphasize that the LZRD tokens have no utility and are no longer claimable. They were created as “social commentary on the absurdity of Clubhouse’s rampant Bitcoin Maximalism,” he said.