Cardano Vies With Ethereum for Most Active Developers: Report

In brief

  • Ethereum and Cardano ranked first and second for most active monthly developers.
  • Cardano beat Ethereum on the number of Github commits per month.

The developers behind Cardano, a proof-of-stake blockchain that aims to compete with Ethereum as a playground for decentralized applications and NFTs, is getting ready for its much anticipated Alonzo update this weekend.

They’ve been hard at work, according to numbers from crypto investment group Outlier Ventures.

Outlier’s most recent Blockchain Development Trends report, which analyzed the top 50 blockchains by their native assets’ market caps from July 2020 through June 2021, found that Cardano had the most commits per month on GitHub code repositories, with 701. That was 24% higher than its commits from the previous year. Ethereum came in second with 447, IOTA ranked third with 394, Filecoin fourth with 368, and NFT-centric blockchain Flow rounded out the top five 305.

Ethereum and Cardano ranked first and second in terms of monthly active developers, with 168 and 165 per month, respectively. Additionally, other protocols—including Avalanche, Ocean, Terra, and Cosmos came on strong in the last year with triple-digit-percentage growth over the previous year.

Github commits is a proxy indicator of a blockchain community’s underlying health, though an imperfect one. Nonetheless, glancing at last year’s report is instructive in determining how seriously to take these numbers.

Outlier Ventures’ Q2 2020 report found a “substantial rise in developer activity” for Polkadot and Cosmos. A few months later, Polkadot’s DOT came “from nowhere” to land in the top 10 by market capitalization. Cosmos’ price, meanwhile, has risen 438% in the last year, according to data from CoinGecko.

The same report identified EOS, Bitcoin Cash, and TRON as seeing large drops in developer activity. Indeed, while the coins for all three blockchains have seen considerable gains over the past year, the networks themselves have largely fallen out of the public discourse as platforms that have emphasized DeFi applications and NFTs have taken the spotlight. (EOS and TRON both have decentralized applications but have not gained much traction, per data from DeFi Llama.)

Decentralized finance applications, which let people trade, borrow, and lend crypto assets on a peer-to-peer basis without going through financial intermediaries, exploded in popularity during last year’s DeFi summer. That wave was quickly followed by a rush for NFTs, blockchain-based tokens that are used to indicate ownership in a digital or real-world asset. 

Both DeFi and NFTs originated years ago on Ethereum before making their way to other platforms, such as Solana and, soon, Cardano. And both are made possible by smart contracts, pieces of code that automate blockchain transactions and remove the need for third parties.

But Cardano’s smart contract rollout ran into preemptive criticism from Ethereum developers and others this week when the first decentralized application built atop Cardano, a decentralized exchange known as Minswap, shut down its testnet due to a “concurrency” issue. Essentially, there’s one transaction per block—a hindrance to transaction-heavy DeFi applications that rely on blockchain-based smart contracts for every asset swap, crypto loan, or other function. Cardano argues that its smart contract design is a feature, not a bug, as it improves security and lessens the likelihood of unexpected fees.

Regardless, we know one thing for sure: They’re working on it.

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RMRK Launches the Most Advanced NFT System in the World

September 9, 2021 – Zug, Switzerland


RMRK, an advanced non-fungible token (NFT) project, has released their Kanaria bird NFT project, ushering in the first wave of next-generation NFTs.

Mahalleinir from D1 Ventures, an early backer, said,

“The long-anticipated release of Kanaria has been well met by the community, and Bruno Škvorc, [project founder of Kanaria], who has a vision beyond his time, has been able to achieve with the RMRK standard on Kusama what many on Ethereum are still trying to accomplish.”

In March 2021, RMRK launched a gamified ‘initial collectible offering’ called Kanaria, pioneering an NFT crowdfunding approach that netted them a total of $6 million in limited-edition egg NFT sales. Over 8,500 out of a total of 9,999 eggs were claimed by participants.

With an innovative feature of on-chain emotes, owners and observers could drop reactions on these NFTs, influencing the look, feel, functionality and inventory of birds that would “hatch” from the eggs. Starting with September 2021, the eggs have hatched into advanced NFTs on the Kusama blockchain (Polkadot’s value-bearing canary network).

Škvorc said in an explainer and announcement thread,

“RMRK NFTs are natively connected to every chain that connects to the [Kusama] relay chain. They are multi-chain by default.”

With this release, Kanaria is now a full-fledged NFT ecosystem, complete with a secondary market where items (wearables, backgrounds, etc.) are traded between bird owners. There are plans to release more collections of compatible NFTs far into the future.

The RMRK team is looking to build on its success with Kanaria and make the full RMRK 2.0 standards available for adoption across all Substrate-based ecosystems and later into EVM chains like Polygon and Moonriver.

Through powerful partnerships with some of the biggest parachains and candidates in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem already sealed, the RMRK standards for NFTs 2.0 are poised to become the first unofficial shared runtime environment in the Polkadot ecosystem, allowing seamless transfers of non-fungible assets to and from any supported chain, natively, and at almost zero cost, while the multi-chain evolvable nature of these NFTs opens new unprecedented doors.

Škvorc adds,

“… imagine … coming up with a game in the future and simply reusing the NFTs that already exist by adding a new resource to them – giving them eternal liquidity and long-lasting forward compatibility without planning in advance … imagine if you could put a branded hoodie onto a cryptopunk. How much exposure is that?”

You can learn more about RMRK at rmrk.app, take Kanaria for a spin at kanaria.rmrk.app and play around with their official minting and trading UI for 1.0 NFTs called Singular on singular.rmrk.app. You can also watch a live demo of Kanaria’s functionality in this replayable crowdcast.

Reach out to the team at hello@rmrk.app, on Telegram or on Twitter, and read their blog on Subsocial.

This content is sponsored and should be regarded as promotional material. Opinions and statements expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of The Daily Hodl. The Daily Hodl is not a subsidiary of or owned by any ICOs, blockchain startups or companies that advertise on our platform. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in any ICOs, blockchain startups or cryptocurrencies. Please be advised that your investments are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility.

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SEC Charges Crypto Startup Rivetz With Illegal ICO

Key Takeaways

  • Crypto key management company Rivetz has been charged by the SEC with operating an illegal securities offering.
  • The defunct company ran an initial coin offering in 2017 that raised $18 million from U.S. investors and the public.
  • Rivetz failed to deliver on its promises, while its founder spent the funds raised on personal expenses.




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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Rivetz with operating an illegal and unregistered securities offering.

Rivetz Failed to Register With SEC

Rivetz was founded in 2015 with the stated goal of creating a key management system based on trusted hardware.

According to the SEC, Rivetz sold digital assets called “RvT tokens” to investors in the U.S. and elsewhere through an ICO beginning in 2017. However, Rivetz was not registered with the SEC.

The SEC noted that RvT sales raised $18 million in cryptocurrency from investors in this way, and that it had promoted the RvT tokens by promising future value and availability on exchanges.


Rivetz Tokens Had No Utility

The SEC went on to criticize RVT’s lack of utility, stating “buyers could not purchase any goods and services using RvT tokens, and the tokens had no other use in any Rivetz product or service.”

Furthermore, the firm spent or redeemed all of the crypto assets that the sale had raised by March 2018. Some of those funds were used by founder Steven Sprague on personal expenses.

Rivetz is now defunct. The company’s web presence seems to have ended some time in 2020 when its website went offline. Its Twitter profile was last updated in September 2019.

SEC Decisions Remain Controversial

Defunct crypto companies that failed to meet their promises are often targeted by the SEC. In other similar cases over the past few months, the regulator targeted Coinschedule and Loci.

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While the news around Rivetz may be seen as a justified penalty for wrongdoing, it also comes alongside more controversial SEC actions.

Earlier this week, the regulator threatened to sue crypto exchange Coinbase over its lending products. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has contested this, calling the SEC’s actions “sketchy behavior.”

Meanwhile, the SEC has also delayed decisions on a VanEck Bitcoin ETF, a repeatedly rejected investment fund proposal that has been under revision since at least 2017.

Finally, the SEC is locked in conflict with Ripple, which is fighting the claims that its XRP sales violated regulations.

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

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Will The Cardano Smart Contracts Upgrade Trigger A “Sell The News” Event?

Cardano smart contracts upgrade is almost upon us. With just three days left, there is a lot of speculation as to what the price of the digital asset will do until then. The weeks leading up to the launch have seen the asset hit multiple new all-time highs. That is until the crash that rocked the market on September 7th. Cardano suffered an 18% flash crash that saw it lose most of its gains for the previous weeks.

Now, with the market still reeling from the crash, the digital asset has begun to regain some of the lost value. But at a much slower pace. One news that has helped to hold the price up has been the confirmation of the Alonzo Hard Fork that had been scheduled for September 12th. Developer IOHK posted on their Twitter that the project was all set for the mainnet upgrade.

Related Reading | The September Curse And How It’s Preparing Bitcoin For Another Rally

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But as the date draws closer, the reality of what the upgrade might do for the price of ADA looms over the community. Most maintain a positive outlook for the coming upgrade. Others, on the other hand, believe that this will trigger a “sell the news” event.

Are Investors Planning To Dump Their Cardano Bags?

Historically, with important upgrades like these, there have been instances where investors piled up their bags in anticipation of a big reveal and then promptly dumping their holdings with the release. This happens not only in the crypto market. Financial markets are notorious for events like these. Hence the existence of the phrase “sell the news”.

A good indicator of investors’ attitude towards dumping is market sentiment. Currently, the overall market sentiment has moved into the negative. The Fear & Greed Index shows that the market came out of “Extreme Greed” at the start of the week and lost over 30 points to move into the “Fear” territory. This indicates that investors are more likely to sell their holdings than buy.

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Fear & Greed Index chart from Alternative.me

Fear & Greed Index chart from Alternative.me


Market sentiment falls into fear | Source: Fear & Greed Index on Alternative.me

Related Reading | Cardano Confirms Launch Date For Smart Contracts Mainnet Upgrade

All of the hype leading up to the launch of the upgrade had fueled the rally that led to the new all-time highs. But with current sentiment and market correction only just beginning, a more conservative approach from investors can be expected on September 12th. Although, an uptick in the price can be expected once traffic picks up on the network, which would require ADA tokens to carry out activities like interacting with decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and minting NFTs.

As of the time of writing, ADA price has seen some recovery that moved it out of the $2.4 territory to its current trading price of $2.59, with a 24-hour price change of 8.52%. Cardano still maintains its number 3 position on the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap with a current market cap of $82 billion.

Cardano (ADA) price chart from TradingView.com

Cardano (ADA) price chart from TradingView.com


ADA trading above $2.5 | Source: ADAUSD on TradingView.com
Featured image from Cardano Feed, charts from Alternative.me and TradingView.com

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Bitcoin And The SALT Conference With Anthony Scaramucci

Anthony Scaramucci discussed the SALT Conference, politics, our changing world and Bitcoin’s future.

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Bitcoin is just one important aspect of the accelerating changes we see in the contemporary world. From culture and medicine to art and education, the shifts we are beginning to see will undoubtedly only gain momentum in the near future.

One of the events that shines a light on this is the well-established SALT Conference, and the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast” was lucky enough to host a conversation with the brains behind this event, Anthony Scaramucci.

Scaramucci is also the founder of SkyBridge, and has had years of experience across different high-powered sectors of the economy. We got into a fascinating conversation centering on the conference, but also delving into many topics including the education system, psychedelics, literature, and so much more.

“Our political class has failed us,” Scaramucci said. “They don’t think long-term. They don’t think strategically. They react to the efforts of lobbyists, and they react to the efforts of influences of foreign powers, frankly.”

Scaramucci has a very unique take on cryptocurrencies and decentralization and some of his views may not align with the majority of our audience, but they are incredibly thought-provoking and worthwhile for the open minded. So, to hear it all and for a few more reasons to entice you to attend The SALT Conference, be sure to check out this episode.

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Algorand Price Doubles in Two Days as Ethereum Rivals Ascend

In brief

  • Algorand’s ALGO cryptocurrency doubled in price between Tuesday and earlier today, rising above $2 for the first time in over two years.
  • El Salvador will utilize Algorand’s proof-of-stake blockchain network for infrastructure and services.

There’s no shortage of smart contract blockchains aiming to knock Ethereum off of its pedestal as the leading network for dapps, DeFi, and NFTs.

Algorand is one of them, and now its native ALGO cryptocurrency is in the midst of an almost Solana-like price surge.

ALGO reached a high of $2.44 per coin today, according to CoinGecko—a rapid increase from the $1.20 price point seen on Tuesday during a market-wide morning flash crash. Currently, the price is slightly off that mark at $2.30 per coin. As of this writing, Algorand is up 98% on the week and 168% over the last 30 days.

Algorand’s price hasn’t been this high since the coin was first launched in June 2019. CoinGecko’s data shows an all-time high of $3.56 from that time, but the coin rapidly fell below the $2 level and remained there until yesterday. It has jumped 35% over the last 24 hours alone, as of this writing.

Launched in 2019, Algorand is a blockchain platform that uses an energy-efficient proof-of-stake model—akin to Solana and the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 launch.

It’s designed to be a fast, scalable system for decentralized applications and DeFi protocols—the kind that enable users to trade, borrow, and lend crypto assets without third-party intermediaries. At its peak price today, Algorand reached the 12th spot on CoinGecko’s ranking of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

There are a few recent factors that may explain Algorand’s recent surge. On August 31, financial services firm Koibanx announced that it had signed an agreement with the government of El Salvador to develop the Latin American country’s blockchain infrastructure on Algorand.

El Salvador adopted leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin as legal tender this week, albeit not without technical hiccups along with resistance from some Salvadorans. Additionally, Koibanx will use Algorand for further blockchain-based infrastructure and services, such as a COVID-19 tracking system as well as financial services platforms.

Rival blockchain platform Solana could also be a factor here. Over the last month, Solana’s SOL cryptocurrency has jumped from a price of about $37 per coin to a peak of $213 yesterday.

Solana is seen as a key competitor to Ethereum, thanks to its low fees and ability to handle a much larger amount of transactions at any given time, and both NFTs and DeFi are growing on Solana. Algorand is another alternative to Ethereum and Solana—and it’s one with a lower-priced coin and smaller market cap, potentially suggesting to investors that it has more room to grow. Investors who missed out on Solana’s recent surge might hope for similar gains with Algorand.

Algorand’s DeFi usage has indeed grown of late, with about $90 million in total value locked within DeFi smart contracts on the platform, per data from DeFi Llama. In terms of the amount of ALGO locked in those protocols, it’s a 53% increase over the last month. Even so, it pales in comparison to the amount of DeFi activity on other platforms: Ethereum has $125 billion worth of assets locked up in DeFi protocols, while Solana sits at nearly $8.6 billion.

However, there hasn’t been much buzz around NFTs on Algorand yet. An NFT acts like a deed of ownership to a digital item, including images, video clips, and more, and most of the current NFT ecosystem lives on Ethereum. Solana is starting to make waves in the NFT space, however, with popular collections like Degenerate Ape Academy and Aurory popping up in recent weeks and generating tens of millions of dollars in transaction value.

Even comedian Steve Harvey has a Solana NFT as his Twitter profile picture. Given the immense gas fees (transaction costs) of trading NFTs on Ethereum right now, we could see a push for NFTs on a wider array of rival platforms. Algorand hasn’t seen anything like that yet, but the success of Solana’s early NFT collections could provide a potential template ahead.

“The Algorand ecosystem has experienced significant growth this year in NFTs, DeFi, and beyond,” Algorand Foundation Head of Marketing Stephen Duignan told Decrypt via email. 

Duignan said that over $500 million entered the Algorand ecosystem in the first half of the year, including a $100 million fund from Arrington Capital, as well as the Algorand Foundation’s grants program. “As we look ahead, there will be increased adoption of Algorand-based DeFi applications and decentralized governance that will continue this momentum,” he added.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

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Here’s What Triggered Bitcoin’s Painful Plunge, According to Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz

Billionaire Mike Novogratz believes Bitcoin’s big price drop this week is no surprise.

The value of the top coin plunged by 17% to $43,050 on Tuesday, its lowest price in nearly a month.

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In a new interview with Bloomberg TV, the CEO of digital asset firm Galaxy Digital says BTC became overbought as a series of fundamental factors and positive news stories triggered hype among investors.

[0:32] “The market got too long. It got long for good reasons. I think in the last eight weeks, there has been a giant realization that crypto’s not just Bitcoin being bought as a hedge against bad monetary and fiscal policy, but maybe more importantly, it’s web 3.0. It’s the internet of value transfer…

[0:52] When you see companies like Visa buying an NFT and saying they think digital goods is a big part of their future; Walmart and Amazon, the two biggest retailers in the world putting up help wanted for science crypto engineers and crypto experts, there’s a realization that this is a technology play and no investor wants to miss the next internet. This is the next internet.”

Novogratz says that while it is difficult to predict the short-term movement of the crypto market, it is easy to see its long-term trajectory.

[3:44] “Just look at a 15-year or 12-year long chart of the Bitcoin price and think about the adoption that is happening all over the world. You know it is now an asset. It’s a store of value…

[4:03] Stan Druckenmiller said it was an asset. He’s literally the best investor we’ve seen in 30 years. It’s an asset. There are enough institutions that have said they believe in this as a store of value.”

Featured Image: Shutterstock/Pavel Chagochkin/Vladimir Sazonov 

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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.

Featured Image: Shutterstock/Pavel Chagochkin/Vladimir Sazonov

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VORTECS™ Spotlight: Fantom’s 500%+ rally was signalled by this key trading metric

Fantom’s FTM asset has been one of the top trending tokens of the week, and it barely noticed Bitcoin’s (BTC) midweek swoon that halted many altcoin rallies. Despite Bitcoin’s price dropping below $43,000, FTM has added 114% in U.S. dollar terms and 127% in its BTC pair over the last seven days. 

FTM’s monthly stats look even more impressive, with nearly 500% growth against both benchmarks. While it is par for the course for altcoins to rally when Bitcoin consolidates, FTM’s price movement is completely asymmetrical to most of its peers.

Let’s investigate what’s behind the record-breaking run and whether there is a way for traders to determine if the rally has the potential to continue.

Current growth drivers

Fantom is a layer-one smart-contract platform that boasts its own high-speed consensus mechanism and modular architecture that is designed to make it compatible with any distributed ledger.

The platform has seen explosive growth in its user activity over the last few months, with the number of unique wallet addresses increasing by 5,700% from May to August and the number of daily transactions rising to hundreds of thousands.

As Cointelegraph reported, decentralized finance (DeFi) activity within the Fantom ecosystem has been surging as well, spurred by a hefty incentive program that contributed to an almost 20% rise in the total value locked on the blockchain just 24 hours after launch.

These fundamental advances led FTM to rally from $0.30 a month ago to above $1.80 at the time of writing.

The early bird gets the worm

Price charts were not the only rankings that FTM dominated this week; the token also did extremely well in terms of its VORTECS™ Score, an algorithmically generated metric that compares the observed patterns of market conditions around the coin against years of historical data.

This quantitative-style metric is able to assess whether an asset’s outlook is bullish, bearish or neutral for the next 12 to 72 hours. The indicator is exclusively available to the subscribers of Cointelegraph’s data intelligence platform, Markets Pro.

It seems that the combination of market activity and social sentiment parameters that preceded FTM’s recent spikes resembled the patterns that came prior to price spikes in the past. This is why the coin posted an ultra-high VORTECS™ Score of 90 this week — a value indicating the algorithm’s tremendous confidence that in the past, the observed conditions consistently came up shortly before dramatic price increases.

FTM price vs. VORTECS™ Score. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

As can be seen in the chart above, the asset’s VORTECS™ line turned dark green (corresponding to values above 80) on Sept. 6 against a price of $1.30. By that time, the asset had already made sizable gains, so traders were likely uncertain as to whether it was still a good time to invest in the altcoin.

Yet, the historically favorable conditions captured by a streak of strong VORTECS™ Scores were so robust that FTM confidently continued its upward run. As mentioned earlier, the altcoin was even relatively unfazed by the 16% dip in BTC price on Sept. 8. And by Sept. 9, FTM conquered a new all-time high above $1.80.

The data doesn’t lie

Crypto assets vary in the extent to which their price rallies resemble those in the past, in terms of market and social activity metrics. FTM belongs to a group of tokens that demonstrate consistent behavior on these key indicators before their prices go up.

Since early 2021, FTM has recorded 34 days during which its VORTECS™ Score hit a value of 80 or higher, a result bested by only six other coins. When the asset scores high, it usually sees gains in the next 72 hours. Out of 34 days with a VORTECS™ Score of 80+, FTM generated a return of at least 3% on 27 occasions and at least 5% on 23 occasions. The data also shows FTM generating a return of 10% or more on 20 occasions.

On average, the coin’s price increased by 0.2% after 48 hours and by 3.6% after 72 hours of reaching a score of 80. FTM also reached the ultra-high VORTECS™ Score of 90 on multiple occasions, adding an average of 3.7% after 48 hours and 5.3% within 72 hours of hitting this threshold.

While a high VORTECS™ Score is not a prediction of price movement, it can give traders some actionable ideas regarding the health of an asset’s outlook and also alert them to opportunities that they wouldn’t otherwise consider.

Cointelegraph is a publisher of financial information, not an investment adviser. We do not provide personalized or individualized investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are volatile investments and carry significant risk including the risk of permanent and total loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Figures and charts are correct at the time of writing or as otherwise specified. Live-tested strategies are not recommendations. Consult your financial advisor before making financial decisions.