Billionaire investor and Shark Tank veteran Mark Cuban says the crypto sector is going to fundamentally transform the way businesses function.
In a new interview, Cuban tells Jason Calacanis of the Angel Podcast that blockchain technology and decentralized finance (DeFi) are on the verge of revolutionizing many industries.
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The entrepreneurial titan explains that as the nascent DeFi sector grows and becomes more user-friendly, businesses and individuals will realize that they can gain access to what is essentially a streamlined financial system absent of the hassle embedded in traditional banking.
“Banking… if you have $10,000 in the bank and you need to borrow $2,500 to go on vacation knowing you’re going to get a bonus at the end of the year. Maybe you could put it on your credit card you’re going to pay your 19%… and if you wanted to get an actual loan from your bank, it’s a hassle. For me to get a loan from the bank is a hassle… no matter how much assets I have.
Well, you go onto Compound, I use Aave, and you just put the money there and if I want to borrow $2,500 bucks it takes me less than 15 seconds… The point is that the amount of friction involved to do it versus dealing with banks and we’re six months into this whole thing in terms of being consumer-friendly… This shit is crazy. It’s going to change how all businesses work.”
Cuban says that as smart contract platforms became more reliable and user-friendly, the crypto space hit a pivotal point and the idea of decentralizing finance in other areas began to seem possible.
“To me, once people got a feel for the blockchain particularly on Ethereum and the smart contracts started to become open source and understandable and the apps started getting written so that they could be used by consumers, that took a step forward.
At that point, people realized Bitcoin’s not a currency. It’s a store of value, Ethereum’s not really a currency even though you can buy things on the blockchain, but with smart contracts you can decentralize authority and it’s trusted by everybody.”
Cuban goes on to outline his prediction that as DeFi rises in popularity so will non-fungible tokens (NFTs), describing a future in which nearly every physical asset that can be digitized will be.
“Then this past summer you really started to see decentralized finance (DeFi) take off and that just changed the whole game and that got people involved in putting money in wallets, figuring out wallets you know yield farming and then from there it was like collectibles. Now I have my wallet, I have money in my wallet I can go to Rarible.com, I can go to OpenSea… I can go wherever and all these things that I’m into I can collect… Effectively, you’re able to monetize anything that’s digital. Period, end of story.”
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any loses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.
As new institutional and retail investors enter the cryptocurrency space on a daily basis, large-cap top performers like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) attract the lion’s share of investor’s attention as they are the well-known ‘secure’ blockchain projects.
Once these new investors get a taste of the mainstay cryptocurrencies and how to navigate the volatile markets, their attention soon turns to smaller cap coins as they search for the up-and-coming projects that could be the next big thing.
Currently, CoinMarketCap shows that there are 8,475 tokens and more are added daily. This makes it difficult to keep up with the latest developments and find solid projects with real-world potential.
With that in mind, here are some interesting projects that have been gaining strength over the past few weeks.
MRPH/USDT
Morpheus Network (MRPH) is a blockchain platform focused on logistics and supply chain optimization through the use of its SaaS middleware platform which is integrated with emerging technologies.
Supply chain managers are able to use the platform to create a digital representation of their network as information collected is transformed into actionable data, with all steps in the supply chain being notarized on the Morpheus blockchain.
MRPH was trading at a price of $0.412 on Jan.15 before an influx of trading activity lifted the token more than 920% to a high of $4.44 on Feb.8.
MRPH/USDT 4-hour chart. Source:TradingView
The rapid rise in price was due in part to the fresh attention the project received from several well-known YouTube influencers and recent verifiable MRPH partnerships, such as China’s Qingdao Maple Leaf International Trading Co. and the possibility of a partnership with Coca-Cola in Latin America.
Speculations aside, the Morpheus platform currently has more than 100 integrations with industry-leading service providers including DHL, FedEx, SWIFT, Oracle, and Salesforce. With significant real-world partnerships and the attention of cryptocurrency influencers, MRPH has strong fundamentals and is likely to gain more attention from investors.
BMI/USDT
Bridge Mutual (BMI) is a more recent arrival to the decentralized insurance space but it has quickly garnered the attention of investors.
The insurance platform offers coverage for stablecoins, centralized exchanges and smart contracts. It also allows users to provide insurance coverage, determine insurance payouts, and recie compensated for taking part in the ecosystem.
BMI’s initial decentralized exchange offering (IDO) was conducted on Jan. 30 with a token price of $0.125 and it was first listed on Uniswap for $1.03. Since listing, BMI has rallied by 540% to a high of $5.46 on Feb. 3. Currently, BMI trades at $3.24 following the downturn in the market that began on Feb. 21.
BMI/USD 1-hour chart. Source:CoinGecko
Decentralized insurance has thus far been dominated by Nexus Mutual (NXM), but BMI’s arrival offers a fresh challenger to a field with growing demand due to the risky nature of investing in DeFi platforms.
REEF/USDT
Reef (REEF) is a Polkadot-based DeFi platform that aims to offer cross-chain trading powered by a yield engine and smart liquidity aggregator that enables automation of the exchange process.
One issue Reef developers hope to provide a solution for is high gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain that are currently making DeFi unusable for many community participants. The team also hopes to help connect liquidity pools from separate networks, avoiding the need for multiple accounts which can be difficult to keep track of.
REEF/USDT 4-hour chart. Source:TradingView
Work on the project began in the second half of 2020 with the completion of its IDO on Sep.30. Following its listing on Binance and Uniswap in late December of 2020, REEF price bottomed out at $0.0067 on Jan.13 and has since increased more than 750% to a high of $0.054 on Feb.11.
DeFi remains one of the hottest growth areas in the cryptocurrency sector and Reef is well-positioned to capitalize on its continued growth. As the Polkadot ecosystem grows its user base and provides solutions that provide relief from high Ethereum transaction costs, cross-chain functionality projects like Reef stand ready to benefit as decentralized finance goes mainstream.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 19: One of the custom paintings in a stairwell of the Electronic … [+]Frontier Foundation offices, September 19, 2013 in San Francisco, CA, USA. (Photo by Peter DaSilva for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The Washington Post via Getty Images
Recently, there’s been a lot of activity around encryption, bitcoin and the connection between financial and personal liberty and digital rights and tools. As protest movements emerge around the world, there are also moves to create backdoors into encryption and to weaken the same technologies that are underpinning and supporting meaningful dissent from Hong Kong to Nigeria.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) director Cindy Cohn has been at the forefront of fighting for digital rights, both as a lawyer and advocate on important Constitutional cases. Here’s her thoughts on what it means to lead a digital rights advocacy group in a volatile time where digital rights are under threat.
Question 1: What were your challenge areas in 2020, and what are some of the immediate priorities that have come up during our current time?
We set three challenge areas for the year 2020, but I would say that we’ve done a lot on them, there have been intervening events.
Our three challenge areas for 2020 were the rise of public-private partnerships between the police and private companies for surveillance purposes, the need to really articulate the role of the public interest Internet, especially in Europe to try to make sure that rules that get passed because Europe is mad at Facebook don’t have bad effects on Facebook competitors or little businesses and also things like the Internet Archive and Wikimedia that are very much public interest pieces of Internet infrastructure.
And then the third [area] was to talk about the problems of content moderation and how the content moderation strategies of big tech are troubling and also causing these collateral effects like attacks on end-to-end encryption.
Those were the three things we started out with. Of course, the two big things that intervened and one small thing are, well, one big thing is COVID, of course — and so we spent a lot of time on working on how to think about the kinds of tracking applications that are coming out on COVID — soon we’ll be talking about immunity passports […], how to think about those things and how to weigh the tradeoffs.
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The second big thing that happened was the big racial justice movement and police violence against people of color and the response — and that has led us to really refresh and push out alot of the work that we do around protecting yourself in protests, as well as raise some concern on the use of facial recognition technologies and the impact they have on political protests — and then the third thing is the election in the United States.
Question 2: What is going on with end-to-end encryption? Should there be backdoors?
There’s probably a much more erudite version of this on the EFF website. The general framing of this, I try to frame it for people who may not be in the thick of it because it can feel really technical.
Imagine a world in which the local police come around and knock on your door and say “there’s crime around here, and some of it is really serious crime, so what we want you to do is to make sure that your door’s not locked because if you’re a criminal, we want to be able to come in and catch you”, and most people would get that’s a really insane way to go about law enforcement because, first of all, if there’s crime about, you want to be more secure not less secure, and why are the cops treating me like I’m a potential defendant as opposed to the person who needs to be protected?
These two things would come up for me immediately and I think they would for most people. Law enforcement isn’t doing their job right if the way that they’re trying to do their job is to make me less secure in order to make their job easier.
[…]
I’ve been involved in trying to protect end-to-end encryption, first to free it up from government control with the Bernstein case in the 90s, and now trying to protect it for the 30 years I’ve been involved with Internet policy — a time that predates even the World Wide Web. I can give you 20 other reasons as well, but I think those are the two biggest ones in terms of how to talk to people who aren’t deep in this debate about it.
Question 3: How does the EFF think about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies?
We do a lot of work to support cryptocurrencies — we passed the period where we were nervous about the regulatory state. […] We do a lot of work to support financial privacy and we think that bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies are really for us as a civil liberties group — we think about it in the framing of financial privacy and the importance of this. My colleague Rainey Reitman does a lot of work on this, and we do a lot of work talking to regulators on why financial privacy matters and why they should respect it.
Question 4: Talk to us a bit about your work on Jewel v. NSA as chief counsel. What’s currently going on with mass warrentless surveillance?
The Jewel case had an argument in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just on November 2nd, the day before the elections — where it sits as a legal matter is that the government claims secrecy and that because of this secrecy the case should be dismissed— some version of this state is been where we’ve been since we’ve launched the case in 2008. We’ll see if the Ninth Circuit buys it — there are several other decisions that have come out of the Ninth Circuit in the last couple of years that makes us think they will reject the government’s position. But that really just gets us to the starting gate of the case so we’ll have further to go. So that’s where that is, and we’re waiting to see what the panel is going to do.
In the overall fight about NSA surveillance […], the bigger thing is that the NSA has abandoned two of the three big programs that it had that the [EFF] sued over. One of them is the mass collection of telephone records, which they didn’t really abandon but Congress made them stop. They do something else that honestly doesn’t seem to collect fewer records, so there’s still an ongoing fight about that.
The underlying authority for that mass collection actually got extended to March 2020, and then they never renewed it. The underlying legal authority for the mass telephone collection has expired. We don’t think that that’s limited them too much because the way that these programs work if they’ve launched it while they still have authority, they get to keep doing it. They usually cannot start a new investigation. Because it’s all secret, we don’t know what loopholes are there, but on the surface, that’s what it’s supposed to look like.
The other one is the mass metadata collection, which the [NSA] stopped a long time ago actually, because it didn’t work — and Congress was breathing down their necks about the fact that it didn’t work so they stopped that one.
But the tapping into the Internet backbone, which is really to me the bigger of the programs in terms of our security and the risk of mischief is still going on as far as we can tell. They’ve had to limit it and they’ve had to slowly narrow it, but the core of the program where they’re sitting on the Internet backbone watching all of the traffic that goes by with a secret list to pull off what they want — that’s still going on.
Question 5: If people are interested in preserving their digital rights, what can people do?
The first thing I would say is that while there are some individual things that people can do, if you reduce this to a problem about your choices, you’re going to fail. You’re going to be overwhelmed. We have to stand up for policy choices and legal choices that make these tools available to us. Yes, people can use things like Signal and Tor (I’m on the board of directors for the Tor Project), they can use DuckDuckGo rather than Google to have more private searches — there are a suite of tools that you can use such as Mastodon rather than Facebook for your social media.
There’s a suite of alternative tools that people can use, but they’re all very small and weak compared to how big they ought to be, and I think we have to stand up for legal and policy solutions that make these tools better available to us. Supporting end-to-end encryption against these kinds of attacks is one of the big things that we do and a place where we put a lot of our efforts in — but also just in general, how do we move away from the surveillance business model as well as the surveillance state. Both of them are growing greater right now and both of them require not just technical solutions, technical solutions are important but we also have to have policy and legal solutions — tech can’t do this by itself.
People can support organizations like us that do this work — there’s a ton of them and it’s a movement. If EFF is the one you want, we have cool swag — but there are organizations all around the world, big and small that are working in the digital rights movement — it’s not hard to find them, we have a bunch of them in our Electronic Frontier Alliance. In addition to supporting the tools by using the tools and building the tools, you need to support the laws and policies that protect the tools.
Furucombo, a dApp focused on easily creating multi-step transactions for trading and DeFi without knowing how to code, just got compromised. At press time, a hacker managed to drain over $14 million of users’ funds.
Furucombo, a dApp focused on easily creating multi-step transactions for trading and DeFi without knowing how to code, just got compromised. At the moment of writing, a hacker managed to drain over $14 million of users’ funds.
The hacker compromised Furucombo’sproxy smart contract, which enabled them to withdraw ETH and ERC20 tokens.
The hacker’stransactiondraining ERC20 tokens. Source: Etherscan.
The hacker then started sending funds to the mixer Tornado Cash to cover their tracks and withdraw funds.
The hacker’stransactionto Tornado Cash. Source: Etherscan.
Currently, the hacker’s address holds over 4,560ETH, worth roughly $6.8 million, and more than $7 million in ERC20 tokens, including more than 5.5 million DAI. These holdings do not include funds that were sent to Tornado Cash for laundering.
The hacker’s Ethereumaddress.Source: Etherscan.
Anyone who interacted with Furucombo proxy should revoke their approvals to withdraw funds from their wallet usingRevoke. The addresses of Furucombo contracts to check:
0x57805e5a227937BAc2B0FdaCaA30413ddac6B8E1
0x17e8ca1b4798b97602895f63206afcd1fc90ca5f
Over the last year, there werenumerous hacks and exploits of DeFi protocols. The space is nascent, but the Total Value Locked in DeFi smart-contracts continues to grow, exceeding $37 billion at the time of press. Furucombo’s hack is another reminder for DeFi users to seriously consider contract security and not use money in new protocols that they can’t afford to lose.
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Coming every Saturday,Hodler’s Digestwill help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.
Top Stories This Week
Increasing stock market volatility drags Bitcoin and altcoin prices lower
Bitcoin has had an exceptionally trying week, and it doesn’t bode well for March — a month that’s traditionally bearish for the world’s biggest cryptocurrency.
After hitting record highs of$58,300last Sunday, Bitcoin suffered a dramatic reversal of fortunes — crashing to$46,000on Tuesday. Elon Musk might not have helped matters… in the run-up to the correction, he had tweeted that BTC and ETH seemed high.
Analysts and investors alike breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday when Bitcoin managed to retake$50,000— with some proclaiming that the asset had undergone a “healthy correction.”But this narrative proved shaky when BTC plunged yet again on Friday to lows of $44,454.84.
All of this comes amid a backdrop of unease in the traditional markets, and this week’s price activity suggests BTC faces an uphill struggle if it’s going to appreciate further.Generally, analysts are looking for $50,000 to become an established support before expecting any bullish continuation.
MicroStrategy purchases another $1 billion worth of Bitcoin, now owns 90,000 BTC
A flurry of good news throughout the week may have prevented things from going bad to worse for Bitcoin.Early in the week, two institutions announced they were doubling down on their BTC buy-ins.
MicroStrategy purchased an additional19,452coins, with CEO Michael Saylor declaring that his company has no intention of slowing down.It came after Squareannouncedit had purchased 3,318 BTC for $170 million — following on from a $50-million spending spree in October 2020.
Bitfinex and Tether also announced that they had reached a settlement with the New York attorney general, linked to ongoing allegations that Tethermisrepresentedthe degree to which USDT stablecoins were backed by fiat collateral.Under the terms of the deal, both companies will have to pay $18.5 million in damages, report on their reserves periodically, and stop serving customers in the state.
On Friday, JPMorganhelped to cheer up the marketsby telling clients that allocating 1% of a portfolio to Bitcoin would serve as a hedge against fluctuations in stocks, bonds and commodities.
Cardano is now a top-three cryptocurrency as ADA price soars 27% in 24 hours
Moving beyond Bitcoin, there’s been a lot of movement in the altcoin markets.
Last week, Binance Coin had stolen the show with a stunning triple-digit surge that helped it become the world’s No. 3 cryptocurrency.Fast forward to this week, and it’s now been overtaken by Cardano’s ADA.
A fresh wave of optimism and buying volume on Friday pushed its price to a new all-time high, and momentum for the project has been building throughout February.Open interest for ADA futures also rose to $580 million, surpassing Litecoin to become the third-largest derivatives market.
Despite NFTsentering into a bull market— with a report suggesting that they’ll explode in popularity even more as 2021 continues — it’s definitely been a week to forget for Ether. After touching new all-time highs of$2,000last weekend, ETH has tumbled by more than26%this week… taking it below$1,500at times.
All of this comes as anexodusfrom the Ethereum blockchain continues, with 1inch becoming the latest DeFi project to expand to Binance Smart Chain.
Musk no longer world’s richest man after Tesla and Bitcoin slump
As the old saying goes: “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day.”
The sun was certainly shining on Elon Musk when the week began.One analyst hadsuggestedthat Tesla had made $1 billion in profit since making its Bitcoin investment.That’s more than the profit generated by selling electric vehicles (what it’s known for) across the whole of 2020.
Alas, that was before the carnage seen on the crypto markets.To make matters worse, Tesla’s share price has dropped by more than 20% from the highs of $890 seen on Jan. 26.These joint factors prompted Musk to lose his crown as the world’s richest man. Some analysts wasted little time in attributing TSLA’s crash to its association with Bitcoin.
But there’s another threat on the horizon, with reports suggesting that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioncould investigateMusk’s alleged impact on BTC and DOGE through his many, many tweets.
The billionaire made a concerted effort to shrug off these concerns, suggesting he would even welcome such a probe.
Coinbase has held Bitcoin on its balance sheets since 2012
We’ve been learning a lot more about Coinbase this week as it gears up to launch on the stock market.One particular hipster-ish announcement came when the exchange declared that it’s held Bitcoin and other cryptos on its balance sheet for nine years.
Coinbase sought to package this announcement as a paean to other corporations that might be considering a similar move — touting itself as an authority in advising institutions about how to deal with their own prospective investments.
In other news, the companysubmittedits S-1 report to the Securities and Exchange Commission this week.The filing revealed that the exchange generated revenues of $1.1 billion in 2020 — 96% of which came from transaction fees.Net income in 2020 came in at $327 million… a stark contrast to the $46 million loss seen the year before.
Winners and Losers
At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at$46,609.99, Ether at$1,470.17and XRP at$0.43. The total market cap is at$1,429,222,267,885.
Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week areFantom,Pundi XandCardano. The top three altcoin losers of the week areDodo,HorizenandVenus.
For more info on crypto prices, make sure to readCointelegraph’s market analysis.
Most Memorable Quotations
“As gas price stays too high, we see a lot of projects, tokens and users coming to BSC, and this is the right moment for 1inch to expand to other blockchains.”
Sergey Kunz, 1inch co-founder
“Since our founding in 2012, Coinbase has held bitcoin and other crypto assets on our balance sheet — and we plan to maintain an investment in crypto assets as we believe strongly in the long-term potential of the cryptoeconomy.”
Coinbase
“Incredible scale for a technology that critics claimed couldn’t scale.”
Ryan Watkins, Messari researcher
“It’s very rare to see pre-GPU era bitcoins move, it only happened dozens of times in the past few years. And no, it’s probably not Satoshi.”
Antoine Le Calvez
“The company now holds over 90,000 bitcoins, reaffirming our belief that bitcoin, as the world’s most widely-adopted cryptocurrency, can serve as a dependable store of value.”
Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy CEO
“[I’m] very positive on Bitcoin, very happy to see a healthy correction here.”
Cathie Wood, Ark Investment Management founder
“We are now sitting on 2.35x the previous cycle ATH OF 20k. WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED.”
Bitcoin Archive
“Square believes that cryptocurrency is an instrument of economic empowerment, providing a way for individuals to participate in a global monetary system and secure their own financial future.”
Square
“I think you can expect that we’ll have a billion people storing their value — in essence, a savings account — on a mobile device within five years, and they’re going to want to use something like Bitcoin.”
Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy CEO
“We’ve experienced 2018 & 2019. This is nothing.”
Michaël van de Poppe, Cointelegraph Markets analyst
“I do think people get drawn into these manias who may not have as much money to spare. So, I’m not bullish on Bitcoin, and my general thought would be: If you have less money than Elon, you should probably watch out.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft founder
“But we’re now to the point where ETH 1.0 — oh, we need ETH 2.0 so soon, come on, Vitalik, get it going, man — ETH 1.0, most regular users are priced out of using the majority of applications on Ethereum.”
Lark Davis, crypto influencer
“I lost most of my life savings and haven’t received a response from a human. I’d think they would refund or they would lose all their customers. I’m sick to my stomach but will join the lawsuit with plenty of proof(screenshots) if not refunded.”
u/dtk6802, Reddit user
“In our view, many institutional investors are entering with a buy-and-hold mentality given their understanding of Bitcoin as digital gold.”
Martin Gaspar, CrossTower research analyst
“I think Tesla is going to double down on its Bitcoin investment.”
Dan Ives, Wedbush analyst
Prediction of the Week
1 billion people will store life savings on their phone in Bitcoin by 2026 — MicroStrategy CEO
We love an outlandish prediction here at Hodler’s Digest… and Michael Saylor certainly delivered the goods this week.
The MicroStrategy CEO declared that Bitcoin will be the savings method of choice for a staggering 1 billion people in just five years’ time.That’s despite the fact that just 21 million BTC exist… and his company already owns 90,000 of it.
Saylor’s comments came after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen launched her latest attack on Bitcoin, describing it as “inefficient.”
In a confident interview with CNBC, he declared that Bitcoin “is the dominant digital monetary network,” adding:“I think you can expect that we’ll have a billion people storing their value — in essence, a savings account — on a mobile device within five years, and they’re going to want to use something like Bitcoin.”
FUD of the Week
Bill Gates warns Bitcoin buyers: If you have less money than Elon Musk, watch out
Microsoft founder Bill Gates had a big warning for Bitcoin buyers this week.
Speaking to Bloomberg, he warned:“Elon has tons of money, and he’s very sophisticated so, you know, I don’t worry that his Bitcoin would randomly go up or down.”
Gates said it would be a mistake for the average investor to blindly follow the mania of optimism surrounding Musk’s market moves, telling those who aren’t billionaires to “watch out.”
Criticizing Bitcoin’s energy consumption, he added:“I do think people get drawn into these manias who may not have as much money to spare. So, I’m not bullish on Bitcoin, and my general thought would be: If you have less money than Elon, you should probably watch out.”
This isn’t to say that Gates thinks digital currencies are a bad thing. He just believes that they should be transparent, reversible and (essentially) centralized.
Whale who sold Bitcoin before 2020 crash cashed out $156 million before this week’s 20% dip
As you’d expect, a post-mortem is now fully underway after this week’s carnage in the crypto markets.
Curiously, data from Santiment suggests that the initial crash may have been linked to a huge transaction that took place after Sunday’s all-time high of $58,300.The transfer of 2,700 BTC — worth $156 million at the time — was the second-biggest transaction of 2021.
It’s possible that this whale cashing out contributed to unbearable selling pressure in the market, which snowballed into the largest one-hour candle in Bitcoin’s history.If enough alarm bells weren’t ringing, this self-same wallet also dumped 2,000 BTC just before last March’s infamous flash crash.
Crypto influencer warns Ethereum fees will drive users away
A prominent crypto influencer has warned that Ethereum’s competitors will continue to siphon away users should Eth2 fail to launch soon amid ever-increasing gas fees.
Lark Davis said Ethereum’s skyrocketing fees has meant that only “rich investors” can afford to use the network, prompting smaller users to switch to competitors like Binance Smart Chain.
Describing the current gas fee prices as “totally loco,” Davis urged Ethereum developers to expedite the launch of Eth2 in response to the skyrocketing to prevent a further exodus of users to cheaper alternatives.He added:“We’re now to the point where ETH 1.0 — oh, we need ETH 2.0 so soon, come on, Vitalik, get it going, man — ETH 1.0, most regular users are priced out of using the majority of applications on Ethereum. […] A transaction on Uniswap costs $50 on average these days, and that is just crazy.”
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Historical data shows that it is nearly impossible to consistently predict Bitcoin’s price action and many traders that attempt this end up losing money. Now that Bitcoin trades near $50,000, the ultimate goal for most traders is to hold on to their current holdings and incrementally add to them in a way that is not terribly risky.
Options strategies provide excellent opportunities for traders who have a fixed-range target for an asset. For example, using leveraged futures contracts might be a solution for a scenario where one expects a price increase of up to 28% over the next month. Of course, using a tight stop loss lessens the viability of the trade.
On the other hand, using multiple call (buy) options can create a strategy that allows gains that are four times higher than the potential loss. These can be used in both bullish and bearish circumstances, depending on the investors’ expectations.
The long butterfly strategy allows a trader to profit from the upside while limiting losses. It’s important to remember that options have a set expiry date; therefore, the price increase must happen during the defined period.
The Bitcoin (BTC) calendar options below are for the March 26 expiry, but this strategy can also be used on Ether (ETH) options or a different time frame. Although the costs will vary, its general efficiency should not be affected.
Profit / Loss estimate. Source: Deribit Position Builder
The suggested bullish strategy consists of buying 1 BTC worth $48,000 call options while simultaneously selling double that amount of $56,000 calls. To finalize the trade, one should buy 1 BTC worth of $64,000 call options.
While this call option gives the buyer the right to acquire an asset, the contract seller gets a (potential) negative exposure.
As the estimate above shows, if BTC is trading for $48,700, any outcome between $49,380 (up 1.5%) and $62,630 (up 28.6%) yields a net gain. For example, a 10% price increase to $53,570 results in a $4,000 net gain. Meanwhile, this strategy’s maximum loss is $1,350 if BTC trades below $48,000 or above $64,000 on March 26.
This allure of this butterfly strategy is the trader can secure a $4,050 gain, which is 3x larger than the maximum loss, if BTC trades from $53,550 to $58,460 expiry.
Overall it yields a much better risk-reward from leveraged futures trading considering the limited downside.
The multiple options strategy trade provides a better risk-reward for bullish traders seeking exposure to BTC’s price increase and the only upfront fee required is the $1,350 which reflects the maximum loss if the price is below $48,000 or above $64,000 at the expiry date.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of theauthorand do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision.
The highly regarded crypto analyst known in the industry as Smart Contracter is cautioning traders that Bitcoin may be readying itself for another sharp drop.
In a new tweet, the pseudonymous trader tells his 106,000 followers that Bitcoin is facing an important support level that, if lost, will likely precipitate a fall to the low $40,000 area.
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“This is pretty much how I’m seeing BTC here. 46,000 is the last line of defense, we lose that and it’s straight to $40,000-$42,000 in my opinion.
I’ll also probably start unloading some spot around $54,000, if/when we get there.”
Source: Smart Contracter
The analyst also shares that he likely won’t take any long positions over the weekend, as the king coin does not appear to be finished with its price correction.
“Unfortunately, BTC price action overnight still looks corrective and yet another lower high forming.I was anticipating a weekend pump but I think we will sweep the lows again at some point this weekend. No interest in longing just yet.”
Source: Smart Contracter/Twitter
Widely-followed crypto trader and analyst Michaël van de Poppe shares that he too believes Bitcoin is currently moving within a critical support zone and appears bearish on shorter timeframes.
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The trader also tells his 34,500 YouTube subscribers that while Bitcoin does not appear ready to continue its rally, the king coin is still far above the 21 weekly moving average and as such remains bullish over higher timeframes.
“If we look at the daily timeframe for Bitcoin we can see that we’re currently in a support zone. So we have been discussing that [range] in between $42,500 and $45,000 as a very critical support zone. That is where we are currently. However, we have rejected that $52,000 zone.
Also, if we have the weekly timeframe we can watch a very important moving average for an ultimate bottom scenario. And that’s the 21-weekly moving average. We can see that if we zoom out there’s nothing to worry – we are in a very bullish cycle still.”
The analyst warns traders that Bitcoin’s painful correction will likely take three to four weeks until the king crypto finds a bottom and that the crypto markets in March are not usually kind. However, if the flagship crypto can again breach the $52,000 level, then Van de Poppe may be convinced that the charts have turned bullish again even on shorter timeframes.
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any loses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.
The latest “evil contract” exploit has netted an attacker over $14 million in stolen funds.
Furucombo, a tool designed to help users “batch” transactions and interactions with multiple protocols at once, fell victim to the attack which centered on token approvals from users.
The attacker’s address currently has $14 million is various cryptocurrencies, but the attack appears to be larger as they have been transferring ETH to privacy mixer Tornado Cash in batches over the last hour.
This attack is conceptually similar to the $20 million “evil jar” attack that struck Pickle Finance last year, as well as the $37 million “evil spell” exploit that hit Alpha Finance earlier this month. In these “evil contract” exploits, an attacker creates a contract that fools a protocol into believing it belongs there, giving them access to protocol funds.
So what happened to Furuсombo
An attacker using a fake contract made Furuсombo think that Aave v2 has a new implementation.
Because of this, all interactions with ‘Aave v2’ allowed transfers approved tokens to an arbitrary address. pic.twitter.com/gQVxJqiAmL
— Igor Igamberdiev (@FrankResearcher) February 27, 2021
In this case, the attacker ‘tricked’ the Furucombo protocol into thinking that their contract was a new verison of Aave. From there, instead of draining funds from the protocol as in previous evil contract exploits, they instead leveraged the ability to take the funds of every user who had given the protocol token permissions.
“Infinite permissions means you can wipe everyone who interacted with Furucombo,” said whitehat hacker and co-founder of DeFi Italy in a statement to Cointelegraph.
This exploit type appears to be growing increasingly popular, now accounting for over $70 million in user funds lost in just a few months.
The team confirmed the attack in a Tweet, saying that they “believed” they’d mitigated the exploit but recommended revoking permissions “out of an abundance of caution:”
Today at 4:47 PM UTC the Furucombo proxy was compromised by an attacker. We have deauthorized the relevant components and believe the vulnerability to be patched but we recommend users remove approvals out of an abundance of caution.
— FURUCOMBO (@furucombo) February 27, 2021
Users can leverage tools like revoke.cash to do so.
The attack comes during a period of wider reflection in the DeFi world on security and the utility of auditing companies. In the last three months, three different auditing and code review services have emerged, each with a different incentive model designed to encourage more thorough and dynamic security practices.
ADA/USD – Bulls Ignore Overall Bearish Market And Set Fresh ATH
Key Support Levels: $1.30, $1.22, $1.10.
Key Resistance Levels: $1.49, $1.56, $1.61.
While the overall market continues to struggle, Cardano bulls are forcing new ATHs today as the cryptocurrency surged past the previous ATH at $1.20 yesterday to set a new one today at $1.49.
Cardano did see some sideways price movement during the week with the weakness generated from Bitcoin. However, ADA managed to remain supported at $0.95, provided by a short-term ascending trend line.
On Wednesday, it rebounded from this trend line and continued its previous bullish momentum upward. ADA has since dropped slightly from the ATH as it now trades at $1.38.
ADA/USD Daily Chart. Source: TradingView
ADA-USD Short Term Price Prediction
Looking ahead, the first resistance lies directly at the ATH price of $1.49. Beyond the ATH, resistance lies at $1.56 (1.414 Fib Extension – purple), $1.61 (1.272 Fib Extension – red), $1.70 (1.414 Fib Extension – red), $1.75, and $1.80 (1.618 Fib Extension – red).
On the other side, the first support lies at $1.30. This is followed by $1.22 (.236 Fib), $1.10, $1.07 (.382 Fib), and $1.00.
The RSI is now in overbought territory but still has room to push higher before becoming extremely overbought. This suggests there the current bull run can continue beyond $1.50.
Cardano is also performing extremely well against Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency managed to surpass the previous February resistance at 2100 SAT on Wednesday as it continued to create fresh highs for 2021.
Today, ADA pushed higher from 2660 SAT to spike above 3000 SAT and set the 2021 high at 3194 SAT. It has since dropped lower from this high as it trades at 2950 SAT.
ADA/BTC Daily Chart. Source: TradingView
ADA-BTC Short Term Price Prediction
Looking ahead, the first resistance lies at 3000 SAT. This is followed by 3194 SAT (today’s high), 3450 SAT (1.618 Fib Extension – green), 3660 SAT (1.272 Fib Extension – blue), 3800 SAT, and 3900 SAT (1.414 Fib Extension – blue). Added resistance lies at 4000 SAT and 4245 SAT.
On the other side, the first support lies at 2800 SAT. This is followed by 2660 SAT (.236 Fib), 2330 SAT (.382 Fib), and 2200 SAT.
Likewise, the RSI is overbought but still can push upward before becoming extremely overbought, indicating that there is room to push higher.
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In a time when mass surveillance and data harvesting are ever present and not a day goes by without news of companies selling user data for profit, Nym Technologies is building a next generation privacy network that can change the way people use the internet.
Chelsea Manning, a famous whistleblower and technologist, says “As methods for network traffic analysis have dramatically improved in the last decade, I have frequently called for research (most notably in 2016) into alternative methods to Tor that avoid exposing the data within the network to such analysis. Nym is one such viable alternative worthy of research, and developmental implementation.”
Nym was conceived in 2017 and was the first privacy project to receive funding from Binance Labs in 2018, followed by a $2.5M raise from other well known investors. Today, the actual design of Nym has been made public after extensive review by technologists like Chelsea Manning, academics like Carmela Troncoso, and venture capital firms like Polychain Capital.
Carmela Troncoso (EPFL) notes “I spent a long part of my career working on improving mix-based anonymous communications systems. It is thrilling to see how the Nym team, a unique combination of expert software engineers and privacy experts, have made mixnets a reality.”
The Nym network is a generic, decentralized, and incentivized infrastructure that provides privacy to a broad range of applications and services, including any blockchain. A core component of Nym is a mixnet that protects the metadata of the internet packets sent to it with privacy superior to both VPNs and Tor.
Metadata is “data about data”, and includes IP addresses of the users, geolocations, information about who talked to who, when, and how often. All of this metadata can be monetized or used without users knowledge. Now it can be protected by Nym.
Anyone can join the network by running a node and get rewarded in NYM tokens for providing privacy to the network. Nodes do useful work anonymizing packets for users and services.
NYM tokens can be transformed into anonymous credentials that allow users to privately prove their “right to use” of services in a decentralized and verifiable manner. This allows users to be private at the network level as well as the application layer. Cosmos and the European Commission are amongst the many who have been supporting the use of Nym’s anonymous credentials.
The 3rd-party applications and services that can integrate their systems to the Nym network to protect their users from malicious actors and preserve their privacy range from crypto apps (wallets or DeFi projects) to messaging applications, IoT devices, or literally any data transfers over the internet that can leak metadata.
Currently, Nym is running an incentivized testnet with a 1500 capped number of nodes on the Liquid network, but this limit will raise in the next major release due to the high demand of people who want to join the network and test its features out.
Throughout human history, privacy has been considered a great asset and a prerequisite for freedom. However as privacy was not built into the fabric of the internet, power is now in the hands of a few powerful players. Nym is setting off to change this and give power back to users so they can decide if and how they reveal their data. To know more about the technicalities, read the whitepaper or join the Nym Telegram channel to stay up to date.
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