Category: Crypto News

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Bitcoin Crypto News

Bitcoin Futures Perpetual Funding Rate Rises as Price Surges Above US$50,000

Bitcoin Futures Perpetual Funding Rate Rises

Over the past week, Bitcoin (BTC), the largest digital currency by market capitalization, has surged past US$50,000 to currently US$54,000 (AU$71,000). This does not come as a shock due to the massive demand from institutions.

As recently as March 8, Crypto News announced that Chinese software company, Meitu as the latest corporate Bitcoin investor. The company allocated US$17.9 million in Bitcoin. Aside from the growing lists of Bitcoin buys, recent data from Glassnode, a crypto analytics platform, showed that the Bitcoin futures perpetual funding rate is rising again. This signals that traders are betting big on the cryptocurrency via leverage.

BTC Funding Rate is Gradually Rising

Image

As seen in the diagram above, the Bitcoin futures perpetual funding rate across all exchanges is nearing 0.06 percent. This is obviously not the same levels recorded in February; however, a Bitcoin futures perpetual funding rate above 0.01 percent usually indicates that traders are overextending their bullish trades.

The increasing trades in the futures market become more evident as there is currently an uptick in the open interest in Bitcoin futures across all derivative trading platforms. During press time, there was 349.27K BTC worth of open interest (about US$15.9 billion) across all exchanges, which represented a 13.25 percent increase on a 24-hour count, according to the market data from ByBt, a digital currency tracking platform.

Binance holds the lion’s share of the market as it saw about US$3.41 billion open interest in BTC futures during the time of writing. Bybit, OKEx, and CME follow the list with US$3.04 billion, US$2.65 billion, and US$2.26 billion in open interest, respectively. 

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Blockchain Crypto News Ethereum Gas

Ethereum’s New Transaction Pricing Mechanism ‘EIP 1559’ Good for Users, Bad for Miners

Ethereum are introducing Improvement Proposal EIP 1559 to help address issues with high transaction fees (known as “gas price”) and improve user experience. The update is scheduled to be included in the London hard fork in July or August 2021.

EIP 1559 is probably one of the biggest milestones we’ve seen recently […] Now, they’re actually controlling inflation on Ethereum

Eric Turner, Director of Research at Messari

Users traditionally have to set the Gasprice for a transaction, which is part of an auction process that allows miners to select transactions to process. With a higher than average Gasprice the user has an increased likelihood of their transaction to be processed faster. This mechanism can lead to:

  • Mismatch between volatility of transaction fee levels and social cost of transactions
  • Needless delays for users
  • Inefficiencies of first price auctions
  • Instability of blockchains with no block reward

How are miners affected by the hard fork?

Ethereum mining revenue grew 65.1% from January to February, and transaction fees grew with 122.1% this lead to a total mining revenue of over $1.3 billion. Users have been up in arms about fees as well as some users having to play many times the value of the transaction in Gasfees.

This means that miners have the most to lose from the proposal being implemented since transaction fees will be limited to a smaller range and also gradually increasing the difficulty of mining on the network. Thereby decreasing the reward and frequency of rewards. A community survey conducted on EIP 1559 included eight of the nine mining projects, and resulted in seven of the eight refusing to implement the IEP.

Additionally, 60% of Ethereum network’s hash power is against the proposal, however developers are going through with it regardless of the discontent shown by miners.

Why is this good for users?

Due to the reduced supply of Ether as a result of the burning process the value of Ether may increase because of the scarcity of the token. The update also helps reduce inconsistency in the price of fees stopping the guesswork needed to process a transaction or the reliance on sites like ETHGasStation. This will also allow wallets and users to auto-set the gas fees and inclusion fees.

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Crypto News Fashion

Crypto Fashion Week Gives Us A Glimpse Into The Future Of Style

The first Crypto Fashion Week was held from 22 to 26 February 2021 and offered us a taste of digital fashion’s creative future. The show presented worlds of fashion, as digital art and blockchain technology intersected.

The week-long celebration of on-chain digital fashion gathered an exciting collection of world artists, designers and tech experts to showcase their talents in a futuristic way.

What Is Crypto Fashion Week?

Crypto Fashion Week brought ideas to reality with its inspiring virtual runway that showcased amazing ideas that are way ahead of their time.

From developing virtual sneakers for more sustainable consumption to artists uploading and selling designs on blockchain marketplaces, the event demonstrated the infinite possibilities of digital couture – both online and offline.

There’s no denying that crypto fashion is on the rise, interconnecting technology with design. According to Lady Phe0nix, co-founder of crypto art consultancy Universe Contemporary and co-organizer of Crypto Fashion Week.

These are the visionary people and companies moving the culture forward, and this is a rare chance to gather them together in the same place and time to get a glance at their hottest projects and to celebrate digital fashion in all of its exciting forms.

What Is Digital Fashion?

Digital fashion items aren’t just for the shows – they are being purchased and worn virtually. Who says fashion is limited to tangible or physical materials? The crypto world as eliminated all boundaries, intertwining design and technology to an extent never before seen.

From changing dress colours to shifting background landscapes, or gravity defying flows of a skirt, digital fashion is about exploring the limits of creative expression. Co-Founder of The Dematerialised, Karina Nobbs, explains:

Digital Fashion is a computer generated representation of a garment or an accessory. It can be experienced across physical and digital touchpoints and traded as an asset. It can be worn on an avatar or tracked and layered on a real body.

CFW Highlights

Technology was well and truly embraced for the event with sessions hosted on a variety of different platforms, including Clubhouse, Twitch, YouTube and in the Metaverse – a boundless territory of interactivity that has been described as the new internet.

The featured artists, designers, and companies participating in Crypto Fashion Week are the most influential and accomplished in the growing field of digital fashion, including:

  • Maghan McDowell, innovation editor or Vogue Business and fashion-tech journalist.
  • Natalia Modenova, founder of DressX, the first fashion brand featuring digital collections and 3D designers.
  • Kesh, a visual artist, designer and musician, who has collaborated with high-end brands such as Mochino, American Apparel and SKIMS.
  • Amber Jae Slooten, The Fabricant.
  • DNA Block
  • Master of Shapes
  • Meta Factory

Workshops were also offered, featuring LUKSO, FTFKT, The Fabricant, The Dematerialised and Newlife.Ai., as they shared how they have embraced digital fashion.

Future Fashion

Watch this space. According to CFW, this booming industry is “expected to be worth millions in the short term”.

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Bitcoin Crypto News Ethereum Institutions

Chinese Software Company Meitu Buys $40 Million in Crypto

The Hong-Kong registered company Meitu announced on 7th March that they purchased $22 million in Ethereum (ETH) and $17.9 million of Bitcoin (BTC) in the open market.

This adds to the every growing list of institutional crypto purchases over the past year.

They stated the reason for buying was to help diversify their holdings away from cash, preparing the company for entry into the blockchain industry with Ethereum and believing it will enhance shareholder value in the long-term.

Here are some quotes from the announcement:

Against this backdrop, the Board believes cryptocurrencies have ample room for appreciation in value and by allocating part of its treasury in cryptocurrencies can also serve as a diversification to holding cash (which is subject to depreciation pressure due to aggressive increases in money supply by central banks globally) in treasury management.

The Board takes the view that blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt both existing financial and technology industries.

The Group is currently evaluating the feasibility of integrating blockchain technologies to its various overseas businesses, including but not limited to launching Ethereum-based dApps.

Who’s Meitu?

Meitu released a popular app which allowed photos to be touched up in the early 2010s, but their stock shrank from HK$18 in 2017 to less than HK$3 today. Now it looks like they are turning to cryptocurrency in a bid to revive the stock price and provide value to their almost 300 million monthly active users.

Meitu chairman Cai Wensheng has been an advocate of crypto and said in 2018 that he personally bought about 10,000 Bitcoins.

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Crypto News NFTs

You Can Now Buy Tweets as NFTs

NFT mania is in full swing, and you can now buy your favourite tweets with crypto. A project called Valuables by Cent has recently launched, allowing Twitter users to sell their tweets minted on the Matic blockchain as an NFT.

Some of the tweets have sold for thousands of dollars. Currently the most expensive tweet sold is this one by CZ of Binance.

How it Works

Anyone can make an offer on any tweet. Then it’s up to the author of the tweet to login and accept the offer. You can use a web browser crypto wallet such as metamask extension to interact with the website and claim your ETH payment, with 95% going to the tweet author and 5% going to the project as sale commission. Read more on the project FAQs.

View Tweets on the Matic Blockchain

Why Would You Pay to “Own” a Tweet?

Owning any digital content can be a financial investment, hold sentimental value, and create a relationship between collector and creator. Like an autograph on a baseball card, the NFT itself is the creator’s autograph on the content, making it scarce, unique, and valuable.

from Valuables by Cent FAQs

Whats next for NFTs?

Could people buy Tiktok’s? Plain colors? Images? Grains of sand?

Categories
Crypto News NFTs

Plain Colours NFTs Are Selling For Thousands of Dollars

Plain colours are being are auctioned as NFTs on Tezo’s blockchain in a project called tzcolors. Yes, you read that right: colours such as red, blue and purple are being sold for money as crypto tokens.

Some colours such as Platinum have sold for as much as 675 tez, which currently is around $3,700 AUD! And Twitter blue is on a starting price of 100,000 tez which will set you back around half a million Aussie dollars at the time of this writing.

There are 1690 unique colours called “tzcolors” divided in three categories: Standard, Epic and Legendary. The project is basically quoted as “an experiment to showcase the tooling of the Tezos ecosystem like Beacon, Taquito, SmartPy”.

How it works

Each colour artwork is sold in a 7 day auction. On completion, the highest bidder wins the colour and can claim it. An owner of a colour artwork can create a new auction and specify the minimum bid amount and the auction duration. Each bid additionally extends the auction end time by 5 minutes.

The colours are priced in Tezo’s coin called XTZ (referred as “tez”) with the exchange being roughly $5 AUD = 1 XTZ at the moment.

Another example: if we take a look at the “lemon iced tea” colour, it’s being sold for 10.1 tez – currently worth around $50 AUD. That’s some pretty expensive tea!

Tezos Blockchain Transaction

What are NFTs?

A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a special type of cryptographic token which represents something unique; non-fungible tokens are thus not mutually interchangeable. This means each colour artwork is represented by one unique token that only exists once.

NFT mania is taking off right now! Related reads:

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Crypto News

BlockFi Downtime And Public Sign-ups Temporarily Disabled

New signups to BlockFi have been temporarily suspended, while they do system upgrades, and assure that all users funds are safe.

If you go to the signup form on the website, you’ll get an error upon signup: “An error has occurred, please check the fields and try again.”. And many users are saying on Twitter that they are unable to login.

It’s not the first time they’ve had downtime in services, with users posting on Reddit that they were seeing grey screens and were unable to login.

Growing pains?

BlockFi is not alone unfortunately. Other major platforms and exchanges have recently experienced downtime, possibly as a result of the (re)gained popularity of cryptos and the corresponding pressure on the systems involved.

The credit service company seems to be steadily expanding – offering new services such as crypto yield earnings, crypto backed loans, crypto credit cards with Bitcoin rewards and trading. Issues like these could be due to an accelerated growth, following what looks like being a sustained uptrend of the whole FinTech and crypto space.

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Crypto News NFTs

Microsoft Introduces NFTs To Minecraft Game With More Than 126 Million Players Worldwide

Microsoft introduces NFTs to Minecraft, allowing players to collect in-game digital assets granting them access to special quests and other benefits across multiple platforms.

The tech giant acquired the popular block-building adventure game Minecraft for $2.5 Billion in late 2014 and has been trying to improve the game ever since.

Crypto Gamers Guild in Minecraft

Update: we are starting to see more games integrate blockchain technology to enable in-game currency and trading.

How NFTs Will Work in Minecraft

The engine behind the NFTs is a project called Enjin (ENJ) which provides the blockchain where the digital assets are stored.

Players scan a QR code which then drops the NFT automatically to their Enjin wallet and they can link their wallet to cross-platform gaming network MyMetaVerse. If you’re a Minecraft user, you can follow the video instructions on how to use your blockchain assets with the game.

MyMetaverse Hub linking to Enjin Wallet

With two new scaling solutions, Enjin aims to remove gas fees, while also supporting fungible and non-fungible token (NFTs) from any blockchain.

The first technology used is called JumpNet which is a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus protocol built on a private Ethereum blockchain which the CTO of Enjin stated was created in order to bring “forever-free scaling” to Ethereum and is planned to launch 6 April.

NFTs Are Hot At the Moment

In late February Logan Paul raised $3.54 million by moving 1772NFTs in one day, from there many more NFT(Non-Fungible Tokens) projects have jumped up. From Nyan Cat being sold for almost $600,000, to Kings of Leon releasing a NFT album, to the Banksy piece “morons” that has now been burned and is going to be auctioned on SuperFarm.

When looking at interest over time from Google searches, NFTs have had a sharp rise in popularity from the 11th of February onward and has become quite the hot topic of debate.

NFTS on Google Trends – Source

With people like Gary Vanerchuck weighing in and dubbing it as disruptive as Napster was to the music industry, and then others calling it a bubble.

Are NFTs more than just collectables?

The ability that NFTs give to artists to directly monetise their own work, be it art/music/manga/animations might be a game-changer for their respective industries. On the other hand, lesser-known artists also need platforms for exposure. If curators can fill the gap there might be a major shift from traditional platforms to newer ones that run on blockchain technology.

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Crypto News Institutions Ripple

Ripple to Provide Blockchain Support for Central Banks Issuing CBDCs

Ripple is moving forward with a new private version of its XRP ledger to provide support for Central Banks issuing CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currency). The new ledger will be based on the same blockchain that powers XRP.

80% of Banks Seeking Blockchain Technology

While the battle with the Securities and Exchange Command (SEC) continues, Ripple will conduct a pilot of this new private network to provide Central Banks with effective and flexible solutions for the issuance and management of their digital currencies.

The company stated that as cryptocurrencies move forward into the mainstream and more institutions are digital assets, over 80% of Central Banks are desperate to issue their own CBDCs.

This also means that more banks are considering using blockchain technology for their ecosystem, thus moving on and embracing the advantages (and challenges) of digital assets.

Hundreds of Thousands of TPS for Banks

This new private ledger will be tested to handle tens of thousands of TPS (Transactions per Second), and eliminating the tedious delay usually inherent to wire transfers. The network is expected to potentially scale to hundreds of thousands of TPS in the future —while maintaining speed and low fees. Some key features that the ledger will provide are:

  • 61,000 times more efficiency compared to PoW (Proof-of-work) blockchains.
  • Same protocol verification system used by the XRP ledger.
  • Less energy-intensive
  • High scalability, up to tens of thousands of CBDC transactions and possibly hundreds of thousands in the future. 

A New Network For Banks

Ripple is also exploring a new way to bring institutions into a more DeFi (Decentralised Finance)-style ecosystem. The company is planning to bring together all CBDC ledgers into a single network, enabling interoperability with full technological and financial independence.

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Basic Attention Token Crypto News DeFi

BAT Price Rises 30% on Brave Browser Building a DEX Announcement

Privacy web browser Brave are planning to build a Decentralized Exchange Aggregator which will enable its users to swap tokens using the browser.

The browser recently achieved more than 25 million monthly users, who can get rewards using the Basic Attention Token (BAT) and will now be able to receive further benefits, like discounts on transaction fees for BAT holders.

New features of the Platform include:

  • A new, native Ethereum wallet implementation, replacing the existing Crypto Wallets in Brave.
  • Redesign of the current UI with UX designed to reduce friction among accounts.
  • Mobile as well as desktop support.
  • A JavaScript Ethereum Provider API (window.ethereum) supplied to web pages by default, without the need to install a separate extension.
  • Custom experiences for DeFi and NFT use-cases.
  • Options for buying crypto with fiat payment methods such as credit/debit cards, bank accounts, and smartphone wallets.

Benefits of BAT token holders include:

  • Discounts when utilizing BAT for paying transaction fees.
  • Discounts for users that hold BAT balances in their wallet.
  • Multi-chain support with many assets and blockchains.

One of our goals is to make tokens and crypto easy to use for all of our users. The custom DEX which we plan to explore could help achieve this goal by enabling users to exchange BAT and other assets at lower fees, and with better user interface and security, by being built into Brave.

Brendan Eich, Brave CEO and co-founder

Good News for BAT HODLers

Fans, holders and HODLers of the BAT token were rewarded with a recent price jump since the announcement.

source

Decentralized Web

The new features will be the first of any web browser and will provide a new “decentralized web” for Brave users, including:

  • BAT utility for search engines.
  • Use of BAT for e-commerce.
  • Use of BAT for VPN and various private communication platforms.
  • BAT rewards for content verified on IPNS.
  • Ability to use BAT for content pinning on IPFS (file sharing).

Take a look at the BAT Roadmap 2.0 for more information.