Day: March 18, 2021

The US Government Sold Bitcoins at a 21% Premium

by CryptoPotato

The General Service Administration, a part of the US government, has successfully auctioned off 0.7501 bitcoins. Although the portion of sold BTC is not that impressive, what’s intriguing about this purchase is that the buyer paid a substantial 21% premium due to the high number of bidders.

US Government Sells Bitcoin With a Premium

The GSA is a government agency that typically auctions surplus vehicles or office supplies. However, it has decided to expand its portfolio by enabling citizens to bid on bitcoin, as reported by The Washington Post.

The two-day auction of 0.7501 bitcoins began on Monday and ended on Wednesday. Upon the closure of the event, the highest bidder won with an offer of $53,104. Approximately at the time, BTC traded at around $55,400, meaning that the winner had to pay a premium of 21% for his purchase through the government.

“Auctioning off this share of cryptocurrency broke new ground for our GSA Auctions platform, and we are extremely pleased by the enthusiasm we’ve seen from our bidders.” – commented Acting Regional Administrator Kevin Kerns.

Apart from the bitcoins, the GSA also auctioned an aircraft engine, five barrels filled with 2,750 pounds of spent ammunition casings, and a 2008 Ford Escape.

It’s worth noting that the US government has sold bitcoins in the past as well. However, they employed the services of the United States Marshals Service (USMS). One such case occurred last year when the USMS sold 4,041 bitcoins (worth roughly $40 million at the time).

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France Does it Too

Earlier this week, the French government auctioned off a sizeable portion of 611 bitcoins (worth about $34 million) seized from hackers in 2019. The French Agency for the Recovery and Management of Seized and Confiscated Assets divided the sale into two batches – 437 lots of between 0.11 and two BTC and 41 lots of five to 20 bitcoins.

According to Yves Benaim, the founder of 2B4CH – a Swiss cryptocurrency platform – the government believes that the asset price will depreciate in the coming months, which is why the sale happened this week.

“Technically, the French ministry is allowed to sell something that has been seized if they think the value might go down. It’s interesting that they are selling it now, betting that the price will go down, that it was just a bubble.”

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Ethereum Could Reduce Fees With Batch Transactions

by Cryptobriefing

Key Takeaways

  • Ethereum developers have created a proposal that could improve support for transaction batching.

  • The feature will add the capacity for fee sponsoring and could reduce transaction fees by up to 20%

  • The proposal could be part of Ethereum’s July upgrade or a later update, but this is not guaranteed.


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A new Ethereum proposal, EIP-3074, could reduce transaction fees by improving support for batch transactions.

EIP-3074 Could Reduce Fees

Ethereum developer Matt Garnett introduced the proposal on Twitter.


Currently, batch transactions are only available in Ethereum’s smart contracts, meaning the feature is primarily used by DApp and DeFi developers. As the proposal explains, the feature allows a wallet to “become” a smart contract wallet without actually deploying a new smart just to batch transactions.


EIP-3074 is primarily motivated by the need for sponsored transactions—the ability for users to send transactions in which the fees are paid for by another party.

Garnett told Crypto Briefing that the proposal could also indirectly improve fees. “I expect there will be an indirect effect on fees paid by users because the the intrinsic gas cost of a transaction can be amortized across a batch of transactions.” He added that the expected discount is about 20%.

He concluded that this benefit is “only for users who have their transaction relayed by a sponsor who batched transactions from other users – thus dispersing that intrinsic cost.”

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When Will Ethereum Add the Feature?

EIP-3074 has been proposed for Ethereum’s London upgrade, which will take place in July. On Friday, it will be determined whether the proposal will be accepted in that upgrade.

The main factor that could prevent the feature from being implemented is a possible attack vector. “If an invoker has a severe security flaw, all accounts that used the invoker in the past would be at risk,” Garnett wrote on Twitter.

Even if the proposal is not introduced in July, the London upgrade will also feature a more notable upgrade: EIP-1559, which will aim to improve fees through fee burning. Ethereum 2.0, as it progresses, will also improve fees through sharding and staking.

For the past several months Ethereum has faced massive congestion, and its average transaction fee is currently $21. As such, it is vital for the Ethereum development community to reduce fees.

At the time of writing this author held less than $75 of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and altcoins.

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Messari CEO thinks a fresh wave of crypto regulation could be imminent

by Cointelegraph

Regulators may see crypto’s recent growth as a problem, according to Messari CEO and founder Ryan Selkis. 

“I’ve never been more bullish on crypto but I think everyone might be mispricing global regulatory risk,” Selkis tweeted on Thursday, adding:

“When crypto looks like a toy, it’s not a threat. When stablecoins hit PayPal volumes and go private, it starts to look like a weapon.”

In the months following its drop below $4,000 in March 2020, Bitcoin (BTC) has surpassed $60,000 in price. DeFi assets have surged over the past year or so as well. Yearn.finance (YFI) went from less than $1,000, all the way up past $48,000, based on CoinMarketCap data. Nonfungible tokens, the current industry craze, may be the biggest of them all — An artist known as Beeple recently sold an NFT artwork for $69M at auction.

Selkis noted his price target for taking profit on what one can assume to be Bitcoin, relative to hi regulatory concerns. “I’ve got early sell orders set for $80k,” he said in his tweet. “Selling 5% 80-100k, and another 5% $100-125k,” he said in a separate tweet as a response to one of the comments on his initial post. “Then we’ll see where things go from there,” he added.

During the last major crypto boom in 2017, initial coin offerings, or ICOs, were the big thing. U.S. regulatory bodies increased their governance on the sector in the years following, taking action against a number of projects. Regulation has also affected crypto in other regions in various fashions, including the European Union, with its 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive.