The U.S. Department of State’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said El Salvador should ensure Bitcoin is well regulated under its new legal framework.
In a Wednesday press conference following a meeting with President Nayib Bukele, Nuland said the United States was taking a “tough look at Bitcoin” following the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline and suggested El Salvador take a similar approach. The country passed a law in June making Bitcoin (BTC) legal tender, legislation that will go into effect on Sept. 7.
“I did suggest to the President that whatever Salvador chooses to do with regards to Bitcoin, you ensure that it is well regulated, that it is transparent and that it is responsible, and you protect yourself against malign actors,” said Nuland.
#ElSalvador
Victoria Nuland aseguró que en su reunión con el presidente @nayibbukele conversaron sobre la implementación del #Bitcoin como moneda de curso legal en el país.
Vía @cardozaTCS. pic.twitter.com/NsWmqsY3u0
— TCS Noticias (@tcsnoticias) July 1, 2021
Nuland’s meeting with the President as well as Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandra Hill Tinoco was scheduled as part of a visit to El Salvador, Paraguay and Panama at the end of June to discuss migration, democracy, and regional goals.
However, it seems crypto may have been part of the planned agenda. U.S. officials including President Joe Biden have made public statements addressing ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure after the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack caused gas hoarding and shortages in certain areas of the United States.
Related:El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to every adult citizen
The discussion on Bitcoin between U.S. and El Salvador officials comes as the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, is speaking with lawmakers in the Central America country regarding a loan to support the local economy. The U.S. State Department reportedly supports the financial agreement, though the IMF has expressed concerns over the country’s recent adoption of Bitcoin, saying the move “raises a number of macroeconomic, financial and legal issues that require very careful analysis.”
The CEO of Skybridge Capital, Anthony Scaramucci, has announced that the firm will launch an Ethereum fund. The fund is planned to be a private fund. Alongside this, Skybridge Capital has filed for an Ether ETF with the SEC. The fund already has a pending Bitcoin ETF filed with the SEC.
Anthony Scaramucci was on The Scoop podcast to talk about his bitcoin journey and the fund’s crypto game plan going forward. The fund had made the news late last year when it announced that it had invested $182 million in bitcoin.
Related Reading | Robinhood Fined $70M For Causing “Significant Harm” To Customers
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This makes it one of the first hedge funds to properly dip its feet into the crypto market. A big bet made in Bitcoin when the coin was still trading for less than $30,000 apiece.
The investment firm partnered with a number of crypto firms to achieve this. Skybridge Capital expected institutional money to flow into the market and they didn’t want to be too late to get in.
Skybridge Capital Going All In
Scaramucci said on the podcast that the fund was fully committed to crypto.
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“We have a full commitment to crypto,” Anthony Scaramucci, CEO, Skybridge Capital
The CEO explained that they planned to launch the Ethereum fund on July 1st. And then they would file for an ETF. A path that a lot of firms have been taking but have had no success so far.
This is due to the fact that while the SEC has received numerous filings for Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, it is yet to approve a single one.
Ethereum back in the red | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com
With the bull market, the number of Bitcoin and Ether ETFs filed with the SEC has grown significantly. Skybridge Capital now joins in a long line of investment funds waiting on the decision of the SEC.
Firms wait with bated breaths as the SEC takes its sweet time in deciding if it will approve the ETFs or not. Countries like Canada have approved Bitcoin and Ether ETFs and have recorded much success with the ETFs. But the U.S. SEC is yet to approve a single one.
Although approvals are not forthcoming, it says a lot about the current state of the market when so many firms are filing for crypto-related ETFs.
More Institutional Money In The Market
Scaramucci took the time to talk about the adoption of digital assets in the financial world. The CEO believes that while everyone might not jump in, there will be enough people coming into the market, enough to drive the price of the assets up.
“I just think it’s one of those weird assets where the higher the prices go, the more people are going to be drawn into the pool,” said Scaramucci.
Anthony Scaramucci sees the buy-in from Morgan Stanley into its Bitcoin fund as a sign that institutions are ready to get into the crypto market. Hence, he is very bullish that more institutional money is going to flow into the market.
Related Reading | How Ethereum Can Reach $2 Trillion In Market Cap, Matthew Sigel
Skybridge Capital is not the only firm with vested interests in the crypto market. MicroStrategy has been ramping up its Bitcoin portfolio over the last year. With a $500 million buy recently pushing the portfolio over 100,000 bitcoins.
Goldman Sachs had also taken the plunge and had started offering customers Bitcoin and Ether options and futures. It had also filed a Bitcoin ETF with the SEC but like others, it has not gotten approval.
Skybridge Capital currently has a $500 million Bitcoin fund. And it plans to keep investing and growing the fund and other digital assets funds.
Featured image from Crytpoknowmics, chart from TradingView.com
Because of its volatility, the Bitcoin market is a new market every day. The outcome is always surprising, no matter how well one predicts the future. This time, though, the situation appears to be a little different, since Bitcoin may have just verified top analysts’ notion. BTC’s price increased on the 4-hour chart, and it also performed well on other time frames.
The Wolf of All Streets Speaks
These were the thoughts of Scott Melker, called “The Wolf of All Streets”. He picked up the monthly chart in his most recent analysis video and brought up some fascinating observations. BTC first broke through the EQ line, or mid-line, on the monthly chart. From June 2019 to November 2020, the king coin had held its candles under the line for nearly 17 months. In December 2020, the currency broke over the line, and it is currently re-testing the line for support. Melker made a prediction about where the coin would go from here. Melker said:
“Even if it went next month to the top of the channel (the upper trend line), that’d be $158,000, a month later 168, 176 you see it takes a few months…That gets us to those 230, 250, 280 thousand targets”
Bitcoin monthly chart | Source: Scott Melker, TradingView
On the daily chart, BTC was breaking the mid-line of the descending channel. The coin has been actively pushing up and it managed to flip it into support. Moving forward resistance will be the 50 MA or the top of the channel as well.
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Bitcoin daily chart | Source: Scott Melker, TradingView
The 4-hour chart, last but not least, showed a likely Wyckoff accumulation rise. The spring appears to be in place, and $36k should hold as support. As this appears to be a sweep of the lows at the present, such a movement may even drive Bitcoin up to $42,000.
Bitcoin 4-hour chart | Source: Scott Melker, TradingView
Related article | Plan B: The Next 6 Months Will Make Or Break Famed Bitcoin Model
Rekt Capital Supports Melker’s Prediction
Popular analyst Rekt Capital too supported this prediction. Recently he tweeted about Bitcoin’s movement keeping 50 WEMA in mind and how it could create a potential bull market as well.
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9.
Now let’s briefly turn our attention to the 50 Weekly Exponential Moving Average (50 WEMA, blue)
This EMA has figured as a vital source of support in #BTC Bull Markets as well
See my previous thread about why the 50 WEMA is worth keeping in mind:https://t.co/bPriAunVxR pic.twitter.com/Rgb3fRO5zV
— Rekt Capital (@rektcapital) June 12, 2021
With all of these potential protests, Congressman Bill Foster’s latest statement is concerning. He recently claimed that ransomware assaults, which are becoming more common, pose a danger to Bitcoin’s legal position. Foster added in a virtual event,
“I’m not there yet, but there’s significant sentiment in congress that if you’re participating in an anonymous crypto transaction that you are a de facto participant in a criminal conspiracy,”
Related article | Bull Signal From Bitcoin Bottom Is Best Hope Yet For Continuation
The growth of USDC in 2021 is more tremendous than that of Tether. The Ethereum-based USDC stablecoin is gaining immense traction as the experts deem it as the most dominant asset.
In coming weeks it is very likely USDT’s share of the stablecoin supply on Ethereum will fall below 50% for the first time.
USDC is quickly emerging as the dominant stablecoin on Ethereum in large part due to its growing role in DeFi.
1/ pic.twitter.com/LklIUagMWj
— Ryan Watkins (@RyanWatkins_) June 29, 2021
According to the analytics research, there is now an increase in the demand for USDC due to abrupt popularity in the DeFi ecosystem. Such demand has positioned USD Coin to bag more market shares in the crypto space.
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From what Ryan Watkins, a credible researcher, predicted, the stablecoin share for Tether on Ethereum could dip below 50%. In addition, Watkins revealed that more than half of USDC’s total supply is now in smart contracts.
The equivalent value for this USD Coin supply is about $12.5 billion. According to Messari, CoinMetrics data estimates show that USDC’s stablecoin supply is over 40% on Ethereum.
In his tweet, Watkins said that the next few weeks might not favor USDT’s stablecoin supply on Ethereum. He envisages a dip below 50% for the first time for USDT’s stablecoin supply share.
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On the other hand, he sees USD Coin becoming the prepotent Ethereum stablecoin because of its high reputation in the DeFi ecosystem.
Related Reading | VeChain Announces The World’s First National eNFT Adoption, Why It Could Be Huge for VET
More so, Watkins further acknowledges:
“Although this percentage is not as high as DAI, USDC leads by a wide margin in dollar terms and has become the preferred stablecoin in DeFi for now.”
This makes it the most preferred digital asset for staking in DeFi protocols’ smart contracts.
He said that even though USDC’s percentage is still low compared to DAI, it’s ahead with a wide margin in terms of the dollar. This pushes USDC to emerge in the DeFi sector as the preferred stablecoin.
From its 1.3 billion circulating supply, USD Coin made an upward growth of over 1,820% since the beginning of 2021. According to Circle, the coin’s stablecoin supply is currently at 25 billion.
Moreover, a recent report suggests USD Coin will get more exposure once it’s issued on other networks in the near term. A few hours ago, one of the biggest media outlets in the cryptocurrency industry reported that the USD Coin will gain huge attention once it goes live on other networks. The report reads:
“We anticipate that in the coming months USDC will become available on Avalanche, Celo, Flow, Hedera, Kava, Nervos, Polkadot, Stacks, Tezos, and Tron.”
What’s Ahead For Tether (USDT) As USDC Gains Significant Traction
Tether’s transparency report reveals that there are 62.7 billion circulating USDT. This portrays an increase of about 200% since the beginning of 2021.
Currently, only 30.9 billion from the total supply are on the Ethereum network. This value has been experiencing consecutive dipping through the year caused by high network transaction fees.
Related Reading | TA: Ethereum Remains Strong, Why ETH Could Rally Above $2.3K
According to a researcher, the largest USDC consumers are DeFi lending protocols such as MakerDAO, Aave, and Compound. Their holding is about 23% of the total USD Coin supply.
The researcher explained that while the launching of Compound Treasury still pends, there’s likely to be a continuation in the trend.
Treasury is a new product that will offer institutions 4% interest on USD Coin. This new product will also give initiatives that will revolve around the DeFi API of Circle.
The Circle protocol is a new platform that promotes decentralized finance operations for businesses.
Recall that Clinbase, a U.S. crypto exchange, promised 4% interest on USDC holdings earlier this week. Their action was a spark to the stablecoin.
As the USDC stablecoin's significance grows, the bulls are keeping its price intact | Source: USDCUSD on TradingView.com
While the bears keep the entire DeFi market in the red zone, the USD Coin is thriving and it has claimed the most dominant stablecoin spot.
Featured image from Pixabay, Charts from TradingView.com
Barely more than two weeks ago I listened live along with more than 20,000 others to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and his brother/campaign manager Karim discuss their country’s decision to officially make bitcoin legal tender. Celebrities, billionaires, developers, intellectuals, politicians and anonymous plebs alike listened in while the president answered questions from people with the niche expertise to know exactly what to ask and what to go on impassioned rants about.
It was living history on what was essentially a giant Twitter-enabled conference call. Those listening heard the floor debate in the background and cheers ringing out when the legislation passed with overwhelming support. As curious bitcoiners peppered him with questions, Karim Bukele was overwhelmed with the moment. The good and the bad, the opened possibilities for the people of El Salvador and the known-unknowns of an anticipated international reaction. The very real-life consequences of adopting open-source code designed by crypto-anarchists as money.
El Salvador is a country that’s seen extremely difficult and violent times for several decades, now add to that the crises of 2020 and the pandemic. When President Bukele spoke about bitcoin, he didn’t talk about the price. He contrasted the dystopian vision of the future that young Salvadorans (plus many nihilistic millennials and zoomers worldwide) believe will manifest — a precarious future of decline, climate catastrophe, migration, war and poverty — with a hopeful vision of a prosperous El Salvador built on the Bitcoin network.
A nation state legalized, embraced and mandated bitcoin as currency alongside the US dollar. Legislation is also planned promising permanent residency to anyone that invests three bitcoin in El Salvador. There will be no capital-gains tax on bitcoin and no property tax. Existing debts can be paid in bitcoin. Utilizing the Lightning Network, bitcoin will fulfill its potential as a true medium of exchange and unit of account. To pull it all together into a perfect meme sent from heaven, work is already beginning on infrastructure to use El Salvador’s plentiful, 100% renewable geothermal energy from volcanoes for bitcoin mining. This is the opening shot of a Bitcoin Revolution. Or, that’s at least how the revolutionaries see it.
This all sounds absolutely absurd.
Maybe the whole crypto thing is just a curiosity not worth any further thought? A corrupt wannabe Pinochet in a small, insignificant country using magic internet money to launder cash for local El Chapos and corrupt politicians. The tulip-bubble-ponzi found it’s next victims. Sure, some people got rich buying this thing while nearly everyone around them said they were an idiot. They got lucky. But really though, the idea that bitcoin can be a world reserve currency is insane. Bitcoin definitely is not the spark for revolution on the scale of the Renaissance, the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. It’s a scam and all these dumb people who bought into it will learn a painful lesson, and to be honest they deserve it for being so dumb.
The idea of bitcoin. The existential question: What is bitcoin? What do you think bitcoin is? What does its existence mean for the world? For you and your family? For your neighbors and community? Because whatever diverse and contradictory answers individuals may have for those questions, there is at least one answer that everyone agrees on. Bitcoin exists, and there will only ever be 21 million.
Any idea is meaningless without human beings acting out its consequences in real life. Essentially all ideas are based on an absurdity, on meaningless ideals in some poor soul’s head, passed from generation to generation, peer-to-peer as our ancestors taught us. Ideologies — systems of ideas — are the highest form of absurdity. As clearly evidenced by the entire history of Church and State from the Oracle of Delphi to Donald Trump, from the Inquisition to the Gulag Archipelago.
The highest form of absurdity: Cult of the Supreme Being at the peak of the Reign of Terror, Thermidor Year 2.
Image source
Revolution is absurd, right up until the moment it happens. A true revolution is a paradigm shift in ideology, a change in the ideas which shape how human beings assign meaning to the situation we all find ourselves in. With this, social structures are shaken to the ground and rebuilt in entirely new forms or left to deteriorate and crumble. States are overthrown, reorganized and founded. Power is reshuffled and wealth redistributed among ethnicities, classes and cliques. Kings lose their l. Mobs lose their minds. The daily life of the common plebian is forever changed by a new sovereignty, and the old way of looking at the world no longer makes any sense. The old way falls back into total absurdity.
Bitcoin is absurd, right up until the moment of hyperbitcoinization. Bitcoin is meaningless without the involvement of people and the social consequences it has in the real world. It’s often said that Bitcoin is a religion and its supporters are cult members. But a word that is more fitting is ideology. Bitcoin is an ideology still in its childhood, and the infamous toxic behavior of plebs resembles radical political activism as much as fundamentalist religion. For millions of millennials around the world Bitcoin is an attractive ideology. It just so happens one of those millennials is the popular young president of a small yet politically significant country to US interests.
20th century ideology has grown stale and discredited with nothing to offer the world.
Consider the alternatives. The previous century was dominated by warring ideologies: capitalism, socialism and nationalism. Old World empires collapsed worldwide. Dozens of new nation states were born. Two massive World Wars left the European continent a pile of bloody rubble. Multiple genocides happened at unprecedented speed and scale. Violent revolutions and civil wars shook the world. Hundreds of millions died.
When the Berlin Wall fell, the end of history was declared with capitalism triumphant. Time continued to progress anyway. Socialism maintained a precarious but real position as ideological opposition to Pax Americana, notably in community activism, academic institutions and importantly, Latin American countries. Nationalism and traditional religious movements claimed space amongst the abandoned working classes and many former Soviet Bloc countries. As regional conflict, migration, economic inequality and financial crises escalated in the new millennium, reactionaries reacted and varying degrees of what could be categorized as neofascism reappeared.
Salvadoran history is filled with neoliberal military dictatorships, communist guerrillas, right-wing death squads and corrupt politicians. It’s a microcosm of 20th century ideological conflict. On top of that, El Salvador also exemplifies major challenges of the 21st century: the continued sociopolitical reckoning of decolonization, globalization, mass migration, lack of opportunity, climate instability, economic inequality and access to technologically-enabled abundance.
President Bukele disrupting the global financial system with a prominently displayed painting of martyred Catholic saint Óscar Romero behind him.
Image source
El Salvador’s sudden move to make bitcoin legal tender might be the seed that grows into a major ideological camp in global politics. A new frame of reference to measure the world against and try to make sense out of it. A world in which the battles of capitalism and socialism are transcended by a competing system built on Bitcoin. A system providing historically unique property rights, capabilities and power to the individual as well as communities alienated by centuries of colonization and imperialism. And doing so while at the same time strengthening the hard-fought gains of the Enlightenment currently under attack from both the radical left and right.
If bitcoin is hope it needs to prove it in the developing world, not on Wall Street.
Creating new property rights that do not require a State to enforce is a revolutionary act. What impact such a revolution can have on politics, economics and the daily lives of people is to be determined. Developing nations around the world will be watching to see if the Bitcoin experiment in El Salvador is successful. If it is, a spark may well be lit that leads to an upending of the financial system as we all know it. It is the Bitcoin domino theory.
Nothing about the future can be predicted with certainty. Just like the price of bitcoin, revolutions are unpredictable and volatile events with drastic moves in all directions. When revolutions happen it’s often the revolutionaries themselves that are most surprised by where, when, why and how the spark is lit, and just how far things go.
In 1789, Maximilien Robespierre was a 31 year-old provincial lawyer that carried a copy of The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau with him at all times. He was vocally against the death penalty and supported a constitutional monarchy. As a 36 year-old kingslayer in 1794, he declared “terror is the order of the day,” executing his political opposition on both the left and right, chopping heads off counter-revolutionaries by the tens of thousands and was finally shot in the face and met “Madame la Guillotine” as a tyrant. The tipping point was not the blood-drenched streets of Paris or the quarter-million dead in the Vendée. It was the absurdity of the Festival of the Supreme Being.
If events such as the fall of Robespierre seem far outside the possibilities of magic internet money, consider the impacts of a protocol that Bitcoin is often compared to: the internet itself. Only a decade ago the Arab Spring began and the concept of the “‘Twitter Revolution” was born. Protests raged, regimes fell and civil wars ignited as images of rebellion were liked, shared and retweeted. Social media disrupted the status quo. The social media of money and Bitcoin could have impacts just as profound.
It wasn’t only dank memes that rocked the Arab world. Still in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, food prices in the region were rising fast. The spark was lit when a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire in a suicidal act of desperation against petty local corruption destroying his business. Social media and the internet gave regular people new power to organize and change their circumstances. Within months, decades-old authoritarian regimes were overthrown.
In a similar way, a Bitcoin Revolution will be shaped by the new power available to the individual and the circumstances it exists in. Instead of rising food prices, it could be inflation. Instead of a crisis in mortgage-backed securities, it could be a war in Taiwan or Ukraine, or a global pandemic. Circumstances in some countries will lead to attempts to ban, criminalize and control bitcoin. Other countries will make another choice.
El Salvador chose to embrace the Bitcoin whirlwind. And others will follow.
The reason this series is titled “Bitcoin is Absurd” is simply that the idea of bitcoin becoming a world reserve currency seems ridiculous, fanciful and totally absurd. Certainly not something to be thought out and debated as an inevitable outcome. Writing tomes on the revolutionary political implications of magic internet money could turn out to be a meaningless waste of time based on pure Moonism. That doubt will persist until the very last moment before a Bitcoin Revolution. Then it will just be common sense.
Post-World War I and II philosophy hit a giant brick wall of nihilism and despair that made Nietzsche seem downright optimistic. The Great Wars revealed any appeals to civilized behavior and human progress as illusory. Then came another revelation: ‘l”On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, a speech by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev denouncing Stalin and his regime of terror.
For many intellectuals, philosophers, revolutionaries and idealists in the first half of the 20th century, a glimpse of hope existed in socialism and the Russian Revolution. Tales of repression, starvation, show trials and concentration camps were easily brushed aside as imperialist propaganda until Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech. The illusion of a worker’s paradise became a nightmare, and the last ideological hope for an idealist concerned with the truth was exposed as a fraud. Everything people could believe in was exposed for the absurdity it was.
One of those disillusioned intellectuals fought in the French Resistance against the Nazis and subsequently became a famous writer. Albert Camus thought long and hard about his experiences during the war and watched as the Soviet Union was exposed. His conclusion: life is absurd and if any meaning exists it’s clearest manifestation is the rebel. A rebel who decides they will no longer accept the conditions of their life and creates meaning in the act of rebellion itself. The individual rebel not only acts in defense of their own human dignity, but implicitly for the dignity of all people.
Albert Camus: Embracing the Absurd
Image source
Bitcoin may be absurd but it is also an act of rebellion against the global monetary system. It is already the decentralized central bank of the internet, and in less than three months it will also be legal tender in a sovereign nation. During the Twitter Spaces with President Bukele, he responded to a question about criminals using bitcoin and said: “Weapons are bought in US dollars right now. Money laundering is done in US Dollars. The drug cartels use US Dollars.”
The contrast could not be greater. In President Bukele’s mind the US dollar is the worn-out, violent status quo and Bitcoin is a tool to create a new path forward for the country he leads. A rebellious push through the decades of tragedy that have befallen El Salvador. A counter-narrative to the dystopic future many young Salvadorans accept as inevitable. Life is absurd, no matter the narrative. Camus saw that and chose to rebel, because rebellion in the face of oppression is the only real choice. President Bukele, whether he knows it or not, chose to rebel, and brought a nation along with him.
This is a guest post by Demi Pop. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
Bitcoin price continues to struggle to regain any type of bullish momentum, and keeps grinding at repeatedly tested support. In the past, when this happens, the support ultimately breaks down and a cascade of liquidations begin.
However, there’s a bullish signal brewing that is thus far the best hope for further continuation to the upside. The reason for the hope, is because the last time Bitcoin gave such a signal, it was the bear market bottom and that support eventually held for good. Could it happen again during the bull phase of the market cycle?
Crypto Market Price Action Potentially Feigns Weakness While Buyers Load Up
Bitcoin price is in a dangerous spot, down more than 50% from local highs, but unable to regain its footing. Each meager attempt to recover has been met by another selloff and fall to support.
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Support isn’t breaking either, but even the strongest support levels eventually break down. The more tests of that support, the more likely that support might fail.
Related Reading | The Missing Ingredient From A Full On Bitcoin Reversal
That is unless although price action looks weaker, buying is actually gaining strength. And that’s exactly what the Relative Strength Index suggests on the three-day timeframe.
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A bullish divergence has formed on the three-day Relative Strength Index | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
The Relative Strength Index, or RSI, measures the strength of an asset compared to price action, and can tell analysts when an asset is oversold or overbought. These conditions can lead to a reversal, or provide other intel about the price action.
After such a deep selloff, Bitcoin still hasn’t reached into oversold territory, but it has found support at a rising trend line that dates back to the bear market bottom. The only other time this trend line was touched between then and now, was on Black Thursday.
Related Reading | Analyzing The Critical Bitcoin June 2021 Monthly Close
If the rising RSI trend line holds, support in price action might also do the same. And if it does, there’s a chance a similar reaction could result. Following each touch of this trend line has followed with months of powerful uptrend.
It is only when these impulses end does Bitcoin comes crashing back down, and the RSI touches down again. At the same time price action hits the trend line, there’s also a bullish divergence – a signal that also was visible during the bear market bottom. Could it once again be indicating a bottom is in, but the bottom of the bull market?
Breaking below a trend line that supported both past bottoms could be disastrous, so whatever the conclusion, it should yield significant results.
Featured image from iStockPhotos, Charts from TradingView.com
Baby Doge is a Dogecoin knockoff but not a technical spinoff.
Elon Musk tweeted about Baby Doge today, and its price went up as much as 130%.
Self-proclaimed Dogefather Elon Musk, also known as the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, tweeted today about Baby Doge, a Dogecoin spinoff, and helped jack up its price by as much as 130%.
“Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo,” tweeted Musk in an apparent reference to the Baby Shark Dance, a children’s song, and YouTube’s most-viewed video with 8.8 billion hits.
Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo,
Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo,
Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo,
Baby Doge
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2021
Baby Doge—a baby cryptocurrency that’s only 22 days old—is currently trading for $0.000000001516. That is to say, it’s worth fractions upon fractions of a penny. But its price is also up 549.5% since its inception, according to CoinGecko data.
But what is Baby Doge and how does it differ from the original canine cryptocurrency, Dogecoin?
Baby Doge shares much of the symbolism with Dogecoin but has nothing to do with it on a technical level—it’s not a spinoff in that sense. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that exists on its own blockchain network (also referred to as “Dogecoin,” not unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum.) Baby Doge is a token that runs on top of another blockchain’s infrastructure.
Dogecoin is a fork from Luckycoin, a now-defunct cryptocurrency that itself was forked off from Litecoin. And Litecoin, currently the 14th-largest cryptocurrency, came into existence as a fork of Bitcoin. As such, Dogecoin developers work to maintain a close proximity to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Baby Doge, a BEP-20 token, was developed on the Binance Smart Chain. So, in terms of technical design, Baby Doge is more similar to Shiba Inu (SHIB), another Dogecoin knockoff that was recently listed on the biggest U.S. crypto exchange there is, Coinbase.
Launched last summer as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum network, SHIB started off trading on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as Uniswap. It’s currently trading for $0,00000835, down 3% over the past 24 hours.
Elon Musk and Doge
Baby Doge’s developers says the token “has learned a few tricks and lessons from his meme father, Doge” and wants “to impress his father by showing his new improved transaction speeds & adorableness.”
If it’s the Dogefather that it hoped to impress, that may have just worked.
After all, Musk has long advocated improving the technical infrastructure of Dogecoin. Dogecoin developer Ross Nicoll told Decrypt in May that since Musk started talking to the developers in 2019, he has “encouraged them to improve the higher transaction throughput.”
Musk said that if Dogecoin implemented key changes, then it would win against Bitcoin “hands down.”
“Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down,” Musk tweeted on May 16. “Low fees & high volume are needed to become [the] currency of Earth.”
But perhaps Musk’s interest in Baby Doge isn’t necessarily rooted in technical details. Last week, Elon Musk got a Shiba Inu puppy named Floki, and so he may well be partial to baby versions of Dogecoin these days.
In reply to the question why he loves Dogecoin so much, Musk once said, “Doge has dogs & memes, whereas the others do not.” And what’s memeable and cuter than a pup?
Doge has dogs & memes, whereas the others do not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 25, 2021
In a cuteness comparison, Baby Doge developers claim the token scores 9,000, while Dogecoin comes in at 5,000, and Shiba Inu rates… 100. The way things are going, maybe that’s the only crypto metric that really matters these days.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
Choppy markets after a major pullback offer ample time to take a survey of the cryptocurrency landscape and find solid projects with improving fundamentals that have caught the attention of analysts and tokenholders.
One project that has piqued the interest of many, including researchers at Delphi Digital, is Curve Finance, a decentralized exchange for stablecoins that focuses on providing on-chain liquidity using advanced bonding curves.
CRV/USDT 4-hour chart. Source:TradingView
Three reasons why Curve DAO Token (CRV) is attracting the attention of analysts include attractive yields offered to tokenholders who participate in staking, competition for CRV deposits on multiple decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and healthy earnings for the Curve protocol as a whole despite the market downturn.
Yield opportunities attract tokenholders
The root source of analysts’ bullish point of view comes from CRV’s attractive yield when staking the token on the Curve platform as well as other DeFi protocols.
Users who opt to stake their tokens directly on Curve Finance are offered an average APY of 21% and are given vote-escrowed CRV (veCRV) in exchange, which allows participation in governance votes that take place on the protocol.
Vote-locking CRV also allows users to earn a boost of up to 2.5 times on the liquidity they provide on Curve.
The amount of CRV tokens being locked in the protocol for governance was originally projected to have surpassed the total token issuance by the end of August 2022, but this estimate has since been moved forward thanks to an increase in demand for CRV deposits following the launch of Convex Finance in May 2020.
If the current pace continues, the rate of lock-up will have surpassed issuance by the end of August 2021.
Forecasted CRV locking pre and post-Convex Finance launch. Source:Delphi Digital
This could potentially lead to upward pressure on the price of CRV if the daily demand continues to rise while the available supply decreases, making for a bullish long-term case for the price of CRV.
Competition for CRV deposits
Curve Finance has emerged as one of the cornerstones of the DeFi market thanks to its ability to provide stablecoin liquidity across the ecosystem while offering token holders a less risky way to earn yield.
Due to its rising importance, demand for CRV and the governance power that comes with it have increased among DeFi platforms that have integrated Curve’s stablecoin liquidity.
The two biggest contenders for CRV liquidity outside of the Curve platform are Yearn.finance and Convex Finance, which together control roughly 29% of the veCRV supply currently in existence.
Convex vs. Yearn veCRV holdings. Source:Delphi Digital
Demand for more CRV deposits has led to a battle between these two platforms as each of them attempts to offer the most attractive incentives to lure CRV holders, with Convex currently offering an APY of 87%, while Yearn offers stakers a return of 45%.
Related:Altcoin Roundup: Stablecoin pools could be the next frontier for DeFi
This demand from DeFi platforms, in addition to the Curve Finance protocol, puts further pressure on the circulating supply of CRV and is another piece of data to take into account when evaluating the long-term outlook for CRV.
Revenue from providing stablecoin liquidity
A third factor catching the attention of analysts is the ability of the Curve Protocol to generate revenue in both bull and bear markets as the demand for stablecoin liquidity continues regardless of whether the market is up or down.
Almost forgot! Fee distribution time is up. Special thanks to @synthetix_io for their awesome fee sharing program: almost $400k came from it! pic.twitter.com/pjF1UIFGiK
— Curve Finance (@CurveFinance) June 17, 2021
According to Delphi Digital:
“Curve is one of the few DeFi protocols that has earnings (i.e. protocol revenue) with a healthy trailing 30d P/E of ~39.”
On top of continued revenue growth, the stablecoin component of Curve has helped shield the platform from the sharp decline in total value locked (TVL) seen on most DeFi platforms. Currently, Curve’s $9.34 billion in TVL makes the protocol the top-ranked DeFi platform in terms of TVL.
Total value locked on Curve Finance. Source:Defi Llama
The resilience of the protocol’s TVL combined with the ability to generate revenue from staked assets and the growing competition for CRV deposits by integrated DeFi platforms are three factors that have caught the attention of cryptocurrency analysts and have the potential to lead to further growth of the stablecoin-focused protocol.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Blockware announced Thursday that they have raised $25M in a second oversubscribed fundraising round.
They plan to use the funds to expand their bitcoin mining operations in Kentucky, and will also install 8,000 more bitcoin mining rigs on its Paducah campus, where it recently purchased 5 acres of land.
The company has already purchased the necessary rigs, and 6,000 more that it has slotted for resale operations to other miners. Funds from previous seed rounds paid for the purchase of all 14,000 rigs.
“Currently, only an estimated 10% of the hash rate worldwide is generated in the U.S. By providing low hosting rates, Blockware Mining will create better worldwide distribution of the Bitcoin network while making the hash rate in the U.S. more globally competitive.”
The fast-growing mining company plans to more-than-treble its entire global hashrate in a year. Blockware’s current capacity runs at some 0.3 exahashes per second (EH/s). That’s one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) hashes every second.
With profits from bitcoin mining and other mining-related business operations, as well as investor funding, Blockware is hoping to reach a global hash capacity in excess of 1 exahash by mid-2022.
The company noted in the press release that like its previous private placement, the round was oversubscribed. That means investors lined up to offer more than the mining company was seeking at this time, an indication of investor confidence in Blockware’s operations.
In previous rounds, the bitcoin mining firm raised a total of $7 million in funds. That brings its total accumulation of privately equity placements to $32 million.
Kentucky enjoys some of the lowest industrial energy costs for electricity in the United States. That’s good for a business in an industry with a bottom line that’s notoriously sensitive to the rise and fall of energy prices.
Last month, Stoltzner told Kentucky Today:
“Obviously, for bitcoin mining your power usage is a large percentage of your operating costs. So we were looking for a location that gave us favorable power rates and on top of that to acquire land that was in good proximity to a substation.”
Blockware claimed that one key to their success has been its strong efforts to make inroads with local authorities as it builds operations in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Earlier this week, we reported that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency miners are currently fleeing China after Beijeng’s crackdown on mining operations there. Blockchain research firm Crypto Head recently named the United States the most crypto friendly country in the world.
