Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz remains bullish on Bitcoin (BTC) despite the flagship cryptocurrency’s lackluster performance over the last few weeks.
In a newinterviewon CNBC, Novogratz explains whyBitcoinis not trading as well asEthereum (ETH)right now.
“If you look at the Ethereum price, Ethereum still trades bullish. People see Ethereum as a technology bet and Bitcoin as a debasement of fiat currency bet.”
In spite of BTC’s weak price action, Novogratz continues to be optimistic about the prospects of Bitcoin as he names three macro tailwinds that can keep the king crypto from falling below the $40,000 level.
“There are new players lining up to participate in this crypto economy, from the Mid East to all over the US to pension funds and so there’s a bid belowthe market. It’s an institutional bid. They’ve done their work. They’re waiting to participate.
I think people now have woken up that crypto is an asset class. That Bitcoin is part of acrypto portfolio. That even if the Fed starts acting more hawkish, it’s an amazingly complicated plane to land for Powell and Yellen.
We’ve got a political environment that wants to spend more money. We have a monsterbudget deficit and if you raise rates too fast, you’re going to sink the economy, and no politician wants to do that and so we lost [an] apolitical Fed chairman.
All Fed chairmen are now political just based on the deficit. This idea of independent central banking is now farce, and so Powell can act tough for a while because he just got reappointed, but if he starts doing things that put Biden’s reelection at risk, you’re going to hear something.”
I
Check Price Action
Don’t Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get crypto email alerts delivered directly to your inbox
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram
Surf The Daily Hodl Mix
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.
Scalability on the Ethereum (ETH) network has been a point of contention within the cryptocurrency ecosystem for years, primarily due to high fees and network congestion during periods of peak demand.
The latest solution to emerge as the final fix to Ethereum’s scalability woes are Zero-knowledge rollups (ZK rollups), a form of scaling that runs computations off-chain and submits them on-chain via a validity proof.
Zk rollup season
— cryptowarlord.eth ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (@CryptoWarlordd) December 7, 2021
Earlier in the year, protocols that opted to use optimistic rollups such as Optimism and Arbitrum dominated the headlines and were touted as the best solution to scaling on Ethereum, but aside from Arbitrum, the hype for those protocols has quieted down and traders have pointed out that even optimistic rollups have higher than desirable fees when the network is under peak demand.
Early successes in 2021
At the same time that optimistic rollup solutions were in the spotlight, protocols that adopted the ZK rollups model quietly demonstrated their capabilities.
dYdX, a decentralized perpetual and futures exchange, was one of the earliest adopters of ZK-rollup technology through its partnership with StarkWare, whose StarkNet network is a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup.
To date, the platform has seen a decent amount of success and at times managed to process a higher 24-hour trading volume than Coinbase.
Loopring (LRC) is another protocol that has utilized ZK-rollups to decrease transaction costs and speed up its throughput capabilities, which has helped drive the price of LRC to a new all-time high of $3.83 in early November.
LRC/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView
Related:Ethereum layer-two TVL reaches all-time high
ZK-rollups could be the next “rotation” for traders
Following last week’s sharp market-wide sell-off, ZK-rollups have reemerged as a buzzword in crypto sector.
Polygon, a layer-two platform for the Ethereum network, made headlines with the announced acquisition of Mir, a project developing two subcategories of zero-knowledge proofs known as PLONK and Halo.
The 250 million MATIC token investment by Polygon, which already offers some of the lowest fees of any protocol on the Ethereum network, was done in an effort “to explore and encourage all meaningful scaling approaches and technologies at this stage,” according to Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
Another much-anticipated protocol that has been gaining traction recently is zkSync, a scaling solution created by Matter Labs that secured $50 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz in early November.
zkSync total deposits vs. total unique users
According to Digital Delphi, the two main projects that are live on zkSync is ZigZag, a decentralized exchange, and a funding platform called Gitcoin.
Analysts at Delphi Digital said,
“According to
L2 fees, token swaps through ZigZag on zkSync have the lowest fees.”
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.
According to the official press release shared with CryptoPotato, the latest move is a part of the collaborative effort, wherein BlockchainSpace plans to connect a huge number of guilds and players to the virtual world created by The Sandbox.
The Sandbox-BlockchainSpace: Collaboration
For the uninitiated, BlockchainSpace describes itself as the “guild hub of the metaverse.” It offers the infrastructure and technology. With the partnership, the team behind the metaverse platform will provide access for its 2,600 guilds and 680,000 players to the growing virtual world of The Sandbox. As per the announcement, BlockchainSpace’s guild infrastructure enables tracking interaction and connects players with the help of its network across the world.
This isn’t the first time the two entities have collaborated. As a matter of fact, The Sandbox and BlockchainSpace had previously joined forces to develop the Philippine community, launched voxel non-fungible token (NFT) art contests, among other initiatives.
While revealing that the renewed partnership will be dedicated to introducing more guilds and players into The Sandbox ecosystem, the press release further added,
“Moreover, it is a valuable showcase for BlockhainSpace’s guild infrastructure and network and how it can scale to projects on The Sandbox level. Scaling communities for NFT games is a crucial aspect of building and expanding the appeal of the metaverse.”
The Sandbox and Battle of Metaverse
In November this year, The Sandbox, which is a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based blockchain gaming unicorn Animoca Brands, had raised $93 million in a funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. Other investors such as Animoca Brands, Samsung Next, True Global Ventures, Polygon Studios, Liberty City Ventures also participated in the round.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Sandbox saw significant adoption this year., especially due to the NFT explosion and the subsequent capital inflow into the sector that helped the platform’s growth trajectory. As a result, it managed to fetch high-profile partnerships that included the likes of Snoop Dogg, CryptoKitties, The Smurfs, Care Bears, among others.
Besides, the latest partnership comes just a day after Adrian Cheng, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong real estate behemoth New World Development, announced exploring metaverse and his plans to invest in the blockchain gaming platform. The property tycoon also went on to reveal his intention to acquire one of its largest plots of digital land.
SPECIAL OFFER (Sponsored)
Binance Free $100 (Exclusive): Use this link to register and receive $100 free and 10% off fees on Binance Futures first month (terms).
PrimeXBT Special Offer: Use this link to register & enter POTATO50 code to get 50% free bonus on any deposit up to $1750.
Pat Doyle is the co-founder of Pink Swan Trading, the holding company of Genesis Volatility and Degen Data. The former caters for sophisticated options traders while the latter provides analysis of NFT projects.
Ethereum layer 2 solution Polygon is unveiling a massive acquisition worth hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its repertoire of scaling technologies.
In a new blog post, Polygon (MATIC) announces the acquisition of Mir, a startup focused on developing zero-knowledge (ZK) technology.
ZK-rollups are layer 2 solutions that bundle hundreds of transactions off-chain and produce cryptographic proof that is instantly verified by the mainchain, resulting in a faster finality time.
With the acquisition of Mir and its recursive proof system Plonky2, MATIC hopes not only to improve the current ZK rollups compatible with ETH but also create ones that work with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
“ZK scaling represents the future of Ethereum, but scalable, EVM-compatible ZK Rollups don’t exist yet. The missing piece is efficient recursive proofs, as recursion allows us to parallelize proof generation for much better performance.
Unfortunately, the existing recursive proof systems supported by Ethereum are inefficient and slow.
This ends today. We are announcing Plonky2, a recursive proof system that is incredibly fast, and Ethereum-friendly. We believe this engineering breakthrough will be a huge value-add to the community and will open new frontiers of Ethereum scaling.”
Polygon says that Mir has been working on recursive proofs for over two years and that Plonky2 has been shown to generate recursive proofs in 170 milliseconds on a laptop computer, which makes it ideal for building a ZK rollup compatible with EVM.
According to the statement, the maximum amount committed to the deal is $100 million and 190 million MATIC tokens. With MATIC is exchanging hands at $2.07, the deal could be worth as much as $493 million.
Check Price Action
Don’t Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get crypto email alerts delivered directly to your inbox
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram
Surf The Daily Hodl Mix
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/Nithid/Vladimir Sazonov
Miami’s Bitcoin-loving mayor, Francis Suarez,told a reporterat Real Vision’s Takeover event in Las Vegas on Friday that he’s planning to take some of his 401K retirement in his favorite cryptocurrency.
The news comes a month after his reelection. Back then, the 41-year-old mayor announced he’d takehis next paycheck in Bitcoin. True to his word, Suarez has indeed beencollecting some wagesin the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, using payments processor Strike.
Not to be outdone, Jackson, Tenn., Mayor Scott Conger responded to the news early Sunday by tweeting: “All of our employees will soon have this option.”
Miami and Jackson: A Tale of Two Bitcoin Cities
Suarez and Conger both have a long history of Bitcoin maximalism in their respective cities. Back in January, Suarezhad a video interviewwith Gemini co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The three of them discussed Bitcoin and crypto regulation as part of Suarez’s mission to make Miami “the most crypto competitive city on the planet.”
Over the summer, Suarez told attendees at Miami’s Bitcoin Carnival that he’s “trying to create the Bitcoin, blockchain, and miningcapital of the world.” And earlier this year, the city’s governing commissionpassed a resolutionthat Suarez had pushed proposing to explore the practicalities of paying city workers in Bitcoin.
In June, Suarez helpedto secure $25 millionin funding from investment firm Borderless Capital to help blockchain startups and entrepreneurs in the city. That same month, Blockchain.com announced it was relocating to Miami from New York, citing the city’s “welcoming regulatory environment.”
And in early August, CityCoins, a blockchain project that promotes investment in cities by enabling people to buy or mine city-specific tokens, launched MiamiCoin,netting a sweet $8 millionin revenue for the city in just two months.
Meanwhile in Tennessee, Conger established a blockchain task force to discuss the possibility of accepting property tax payments in Bitcoin.
The task force also will look into giving Jackson employees the option to invest in Bitcoin through dollar-cost averaging—a method where investors buy Bitcoin periodically to negate its volatility.
Conger is an unabashed Bitcoin maxi. This year he briefly rocked laser eyes on his Twitter profile picture to signal his prediction Bitcoin will rise to $100,000. In early April, he even knocked heads with Suarez to discuss integrating cryptocurrencies into Jackson’s economy.
Conger’s response to Suarez’s announcement about receiving his retirement in Bitcoin might be the beginning of a sporting rivalry between the two Bitcoin-maxi mayors.
Bitcoin price has yet to reclaim the $50,000 level, but the actions of options market makers and margin traders at Bitfinex suggest the most recent correction is over.
Attention: to my Facebook friend who is building a version of the metaverse that nobody wants as a starter.
The last few years must certainly not have been easy. Your business model centered around polarization and, subsequently, outrage has ironically unified many of us against relying too much on your social media platform. Your government — whose sniper rifle accuracy you know all too well as they took out your ill-conceived stablecoin project shortly after your expensive global advertising campaign went live — has tuned in to the many whistleblowers exposing how your company captures and sells attention. It has called you in for questioning. Although to be fair, they also needed to speak with you to better understand the basics of digital ad revenue.
What do people do when they are cornered? One of two things: fight back or flee the scene. As the walls close in, it seems that you have chosen to flee. Instead of addressing the deep-rooted issues of your business model, you’ve simply renamed the company, borrowing from a cyberpunk term coined in a 1992 dystopian novel that’s all about escaping a decaying world and getting hooked on an alternative illusionary reality, only to completely disregard the shortcomings of the real world. That’s probably not the connotation you had in mind when you rebranded the company, but it is the more accurate version of what you are promising to build.
Related: What Facebook’s rebranding tells us about Big Tech’s ‘Game of Platforms’
Understanding the Metaverse
There is no ultimate definition of the Metaverse yet, but Grayscale’s attempt in their recent report is getting very close. It depicts the Metaverse as a set of interconnected experiential 3D virtual worlds where people located anywhere can socialize in real-time to form a persistent user-owned internet economy spanning the digital and physical worlds.
While most of the adjectives in that definition are subject to debate and interpretation, one, in particular, stands out and is perhaps the most aligned with what we’re building in Cryptoland: user-owned. In the metaverse, we are constructing projects like The Sandbox, Decentraland, Axie Infinity, My Neighbour Alice, Star Atlas and Revv Racing. It is the users that ultimately own content as in-game NFT assets. The idea is that everyone has equal access to the means of production, in-game economics and consumption rooted in verifiable ownership of digital assets. What’s more, these in-game assets are transferable, ready to be traded on marketplaces and, at some stage even, to slide between worlds — your racing car skin designed for Revv Racing could be sent to another wallet connected to another racing game, giving your FlameBoi Design another chance to cross the checkered line and take the gold. Yes, one day, our user-owned in-game assets will slither wildly as they slip away across the Metaverse.
This vision for the Metaverse has little to do with your corporatized version of a nauseating virtual reality (VR) game of ping-pong with a childhood friend in a different timezone, wearing a disorientating headset that scans everything in the room, only to be fed you the “Recommended Purchases for You” sidebar minutes later.
Related:New tribes of the Metaverse — Community-owned economies
Building something new
You talk about replacing precious real-world social interactions with a digital immersive “experience,” conveniently overlooking that your company will then own everything about that experience — from the visible interactive game elements all the way down to the metadata. Instead, the crypto version of the metaverse is driven by the same motivation as other Web 3.0 projects in this space: rebuilding our digital world to restore ownership to the individual. It has nothing to do with VR or your vision of a “better world.”
We’re building a new environment to spend our time and creative energy in. One that is equally accessible, rooted in crypto-economics and, at some stage, perhaps largely run by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). And while corporations are welcome to participate and produce their own assets in the crypto metaverse, they should not own any outsized part of it, as it takes the power away from the individual and from the main goal in question: to create a Metaverse that is user-owned.
Centralized dreams have no business snooping around the metaverse. Not going to make it.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Ben Caselin is the head of research and strategy at AAX, the crypto exchange to be powered by London Stock Exchange Group’s LSEG Technology. With a background in creative arts, social research and fintech, Ben develops insights into Bitcoin and decentralized finance and provides strategic direction at AAX. He is also a working member of Global Digital Finance (GDF), a leading industry body dedicated to driving the acceleration and adoption of digital finance forward.
A non-profit dedicated to government oversight is taking legal action against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), alleging conflicts of interest in its handling of the crypto space.
Empower Oversight is suing the SEC to compel the regulator to comply with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and reveal communications between its senior officials and their current and former employers regarding crypto assets.
The watchdog’s lawsuit alleges that SEC officials were subject to conflicts of interest by declaring digital assets like XRP as securities while appointing others like Ethereum (ETH) as non-securities.
Empower Oversight’s suit highlights how former top SEC executive William Hinman allegedly received substantial sums of money from a law firm connected to Enterprise Ethereum Alliance during his time at the SEC.
“Hinman reportedly continued to receive millions of dollars from Simpson Thacher while at the SEC.Simpson Thacher is a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, an industry organization aiming to ‘drive the use of Enterprise Ethereum.’
In a June 2018 speech in his official capacity as an SEC official, Hinman declared that the Ethereum cryptocurrency, Ether, was not a security. After his declaration, Ether’s value rose significantly.After departing the SEC in late 2020, Hinman rejoined Simpson Thacher as a partner.”
The suit also says that Marc Berger, leader of the SEC Enforcement Division and the one who brought the lawsuit against Ripple Labs, also left the SEC for the same law firm. Ripple Labs was sued by the SEC in December of 2020 for allegedly issuing XRP as an unregistered security.
In addition, the watchdog brings up how SEC Chairman Jay Clayton publicly declared that Bitcoin (BTC) was not a security, causing its price to rise. According to court documents, Clayton then left the SEC to join One River Asset Management, a crypto hedge fund that deals exclusively with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
According to Empower Oversight, the SEC has failed to comply with six of their eight FOIA requests. In the two they did respond to, the SEC claimed they had no records of the information.
Check Price Action
Don’t Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get crypto email alerts delivered directly to your inbox
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram
Surf The Daily Hodl Mix
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.
