DeCenter – Blockchain and Bitcoin – Telegram
DeCenter – Blockchain and Bitcoin
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DeCenter is the #1 blockchain community in Russia with over 75 000 experts. And this is our channel for English-speaking members.

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🐻 Market Wrap: Bitcoin Options Lean Bearish as Some Altcoins Outperform

Bitcoin traded lower on Friday along with equities as demand from buyers faded.

The brief price bounce over the past two days was limited as bitcoin (BTC) eventually dipped below $48,000, although charts suggest pullbacks could stabilize around the $46,000 support level, or the level at which buyers tend to purchase or enter into a stock.

BTC is roughly flat over the past week, compared with a 1% drop in ether (ETH), a 5% rise in Solana’s SOL token, and a 38% rise in Avalanche’s AVAX token over the same period. The wide dispersion in crypto returns this week suggests that investor appetite for risk remains strong. Typically, the overall crypto market begins to trend higher when alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) start to outperform bitcoin.

For example, the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council published a report on Friday warning Congress about stablecoin and decentralized finance (DeFi) risks. Meanwhile, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delayed its decision on Grayscale and Bitwise spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF), which also contributed to the sour mood in crypto markets on Friday.

@DeCenterOrg
🐂 ‘Monster bull move’ means whales could secure the next Bitcoin price surge

Bitcoin (BTC) whales are the center of attention this week as buying and selling habits split the BTC price narrative.

The second half of November produced a marked uptick in the buy/sell ratio on major derivatives trading platform Deribit, and for contributing analyst Cole Garner, this is a sure sign that price action will react positively in the near term.

“I recently discovered the ratio of market buys & sells of perpetuals on Deribit Exchange is a sick leading indicator,” he commented.

Exchange reserves more broadly are now at four-year lows, meaning exchanges have less BTC on their books than at any time since the old all-time highs of $20,000 in 2017.
🏛 US Goes to Court to Recover $154M Stolen From Sony, Converted to Bitcoin

The United States Department of Justice has announced the filing of a civil forfeiture complaint to retrieve over $150 million of embezzled funds in Bitcoin. The FBI tracked down the funds during a robbery investigation involving Sony.

“The United States took action in a federal court today to protect and ultimately return more than $154 million in funds that were allegedly stolen from a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Group Corporation and then seized by law enforcement during the FBI’s investigation of the theft,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

An employee of Sony allegedly embezzled these funds in May 2021, converting them to over 3,800 Bitcoin (now worth over $180 million).

That Sony employee has been named by the Justice Department as Rei Ishii. Ishii was an employee of Sony Life Insurance Company Ltd, a Sony Group subsidiary. According to the Justice Department, Ishii allegedly diverted the $154 million when the company attempted to transfer these funds between their own financial accounts.

@DeCenterOrg
💸 $33.5 billion worth of ETH in largest Ethereum contract

The single largest Ethereum contract containing 8,641,954 ETH worth $33.5 billion is sitting idle because it cannot be spent or sent. Beacon chain contract, claiming it to be the largest Ethereum contract with billions of dollars worth of ETH “trapped” inside it.

The contract in question is an Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain staking contract launched in November 2020, and it cannot be spent without a hard fork.

@DeCenterOrg
❄️ Kraken CEO reverses $100K BTC 2021 forecast: Crypto winter now possible

As Bitcoin (BTC) continues to trade sideways around $48,000, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell is not counting out a potential crash on cryptocurrency markets in the short term.

A crypto winter is now “possible,” Powell said in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg Technology, noting that Bitcoin and the crypto ecosystem have historically evolved around cycles based “sort of around the Bitcoin halving.”

But despite a potentially looming crypto winter, Powell is confident that the market will bounce back from a bear market once investors start buying, should BTC drop below $40,000:

“I think a lot of people see anything under $40,000 as a buying opportunity. I was personally buying when we dipped back close to $30,000 a few months ago and I think a lot of people are just waiting to come back in at rock bottom prices.”

In the interview, Powell mentioned some of his previous Bitcoin predictions, including his $100,000 Bitcoin forecast for late 2021. The CEO made this prediction in August, stating, “I think we could see $100,000 plus a coin late this year early next year.” He also predicted that Bitcoin price is going to "infinity" in March.

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🌎 Telegram-verified payments bot to accept Toncoin cryptocurrency

Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov has expressed excitement about the Telegram Open Network (TON) technology still developing after Telegram officially abandoned the project last year.

“I’m proud that the technology we created is alive and evolving. When it comes to scalability and speed, TON is still years ahead of everything else in the blockchain realm,” Durov said in a Telegram post on Thursday.

He noted that the project rebranded from TON to Toncoin. Unlike the original TON, the new project is independent of Telegram. “But I wish its team the same success. Coupled with the right go-to-market strategy, they have all they need to build something epic,” he noted.

Durov’s remarks came amid Donate, a Telegram-verified payments service, preparing to enable donations on Telegram using the Toncoin cryptocurrency.

TON on Thursday announced a partnership with Donate, saying that users will soon be able to make donations and pay for their subnoscriptions in Toncoin. At the same time, channel administrators will be able to collect their income in the cryptocurrency. The Subnoscriptions service previously announced the news on Monday.

TON is a blockchain that was created by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2017, but the two and Telegram stepped away from the project in 2020 after a lengthy battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC specifically won a case where it accused Telegram of violating the U.S. securities laws by conducting its $1.7billion initial coin offering in 2018.

Despite Telegram officially terminating the project more than a year ago, the idea of TON has not been abandoned, with the original open-source project giving rise to a number of independent spinoffs.

TON Russian community @ruton reports that as a result, the Toncoin rate increased by more than 50% per day.

@DeCenterOrg
🗽 The Presidents is an exclusive NFT and GameFi collection powered by Binance Smart Chain. The world’s first, it contains 20 000 president portraits that can be minted on the marketplace at just 0.3 BNB using the popular Metamask Wallet. The marketplace itself will open once 20% of the entire collection has been minted. A person who’ll be lucky to create the President #19 978 will get a $10 000 offering from The Presidents team.

After the collection has been fully minted, the users will be able to compete for $250 000 in the Play to Earn game “War of Morale.” To participate, they will have to form a team of ‘allies’ from at least 3 NFT presidents with 4 main skills each—offense, defense, diplomacy, and luck. Combined, all these skills become a President’s Morale, or health.

In addition, The Presidents has a cool referral program letting you earn 10% on the purchases of your invitees, as well as cashback pools through which the project will return up to 600 BNB to its users and fans for their contributions.

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🐳 Dormant Bitcoin wallet holding 321 BTC activated after eight years

A Bitcoin wallet containing millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin (BTC) has come out of dormancy. For one reason or another, the wallet has not transacted for years despite having what is considered life-changing money.

The wallet had not been used since 2013, barely a few years after the mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared. The wallet currently contains $15 million worth of BTC, and it’s unclear who owns this account or why it was reactivated on Tuesday.

The wallet has 321 BTC. After eight years, the value of this amount has increased from $6,594 to a staggering $15,103,046. By now, the funds in the wallet had appreciated almost 2,300 times.

The Bitcoin community is abuzz with speculation about who owns the wallet and why it has just come out of dormancy. Some believe that it could be a whale — an individual or group with a large stash of Bitcoin — who is about to make a move that will shake up the market.

Old, sleeping wallets from the early days of Bitcoin are being reactivated with large amounts of cryptocurrency inside. Early investors who put up a few hundred dollars and kept their stakes have evolved into BTC whales, with values continuing to rise.

Another Bitcoin wallet awoke in January after having been inactive since June 2010. The wallet had $5 million worth of BTC. In June 2021, another Bitcoin whale account with 900 BTC became active. On Sunday, another dormant address with 235 BTC ($11,114,901) was reactivated after nine years. A dormant address containing 225 BTC was activated on Thursday after almost eight-and-a-half years.

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💸 Bitcoin gains $1.5K in under an hour as BTC price erases days of downtrend

December’s Bitcoin options expiry event, worth almost $6 billion, could have provided the snap relief, traders argued, this traditionally pressuring BTC price action beforehand.

A survey by the Bitcoin Twitter account earlier in December showed that the majority of participants expected BTC/USD to be above $55,000 by the time of the expiry.

With volatility far from absent on Bitcoin, altcoins took the opportunity to follow suit, reversing some of the week’s losses.

Ether (ETH), the largest altcoin by market capitalization, traded at around $3,800 at the time of writing, still down 7.2% over the past seven days and below the $4,000 mark.

The top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap saw between 1.5% and 4% gains at the time of writing.

@DeCenterOrg
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🔥 PayPal Says It Is 'Exploring a Stablecoin' After Dev Discovers It in Code

For years, cryptocurrency has been hailed as a technology that would supplant centralized payment services because it could make transactions cheaper and cut out the financial intermediary.

But more and more, those legacy services are looking to incorporate crypto into their toolkits.

Today, PayPal confirmed that it is working on its own stablecoin after a developer discovered language about a "PayPal Coin" within its iPhone app. Bloomberg was the first to report the news.

PayPal told Bloomberg the code was part of a hackathon and wouldn't necessarily be representative of the final version.

"We are exploring a stablecoin," Senior VP of Crypto and Digital Currencies Jose Fernandez da Ponte told Bloomberg. "If and when we seek to move forward, we will of course, work closely with relevant regulators."

@DeCenterOrg
🇰🇿 Kazakh government resigns, shuts down internet amid protests, causing Bitcoin network hash rate to tumble 13.4%

On Wednesday, Kazakhstan, the second-largest country in the world when it comes to Bitcoin (BTC) mining hash rate, experienced unprecedented political unrest due to a sharp rise in fuel prices. As a result, the country's presiding cabinet resigned, but not before the state-owned Kazakhtelecom shut down the nation's internet, causing network activity to plunge to 2% of daily heights.

The move dealt a severe blow to Bitcoin mining activity in the country. As per data compiled by YCharts.com, the Bitcoin network's overall hash rate declined 13.4% in the hours after the shutdown from about 205,000 petahash per second (PH/s) to 177,330 PH/s. The country accounts for 18% of the Bitcoin network's hash activity.

Just days prior, the Kazakh government removed price caps on liquefied petroleum gas used for car fuel to align with market conditions, which doubled its price overnight, sparking violent protests. At the time of publication, the internet remains inaccessible in Kazakhstan. If extended, the consequences could be severe as internet services aside, the Data Center Industry & Blockchain Association of Kazakhstan expects the country to generate $1.5 billion from legal cryptocurrency mining (and another $1.5 billion in illicit) activities over the next five years.

The country's low energy prices have attracted both domestic and foreign entities to set up shop for Bitcoin mining. According to Global Petrol Prices, electricity in Kazakhstan costs on average just $0.055 per kWh for businesses, a fraction of the $0.12 per kWh paid by U.S. businesses.

@DeCenterOrg
🪙 PayPal reportedly confirms plans to explore the launch of a stablecoin

American fintech giant PayPal Holdings has reportedly confirmed its intent to launch its own stablecoin named PayPal Coin. The development of an in-house stablecoin was first discovered in the source code of Paypal’s iPhone app by developer Steve Moser.

Confirming the evidence found on the PayPal app, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s senior vice president of crypto and digital currencies, told Bloomberg News: “We are exploring a stablecoin; if and when we seek to move forward, we will of course, work closely with relevant regulators.”

Moser’s finding uncovered that PayPal is in the works of building PayPal Coin, which will be backed by the United States dollar. However, a PayPal spokesperson clarified that the source codes of the iPhone application were developed in a recent hackathon.

While PayPal’s digital asset is in the making, the name, logo and features of the in-house token are subject to change prior to launch. Supporting the ongoing development, PayPal has previously launched new features that allow users to buy, hold and pay with digital coins.

In addition to launching its own stablecoin, PayPal has also taken proactive measures to spread crypto-related services in jurisdictions out of the United States.

@DeCenterOrg
🦧 Bored Ape Yacht Club is a huge mainstream hit, but is Wall Street ready for NFTs?

Within months after its launch in April 2021, Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has become one of the main reasons Wall Street should take the emerging nonfungible token (NFT) market seriously, thanks to its recent sales turnover of over $1 billion.

For the uninitiated, BAYC is a collection of 10,000 cartoons of anthropomorphic apes with stylish clothes and disreputable expressions. Each ape is practically an image file that should be worthless in a sane world. Nonetheless, they have been managing to fetch astonishing sums, sometimes from some of the world's most renowned celebrities.

For instance, Jimmy Fallon, a popular American TV host, bought the image of a Bored Ape that wore a striped T-shirt and heart-shaped shades for almost $220,000 in November last year. And very recently, Academy Award-winning rapper Eminem paid nearly $462,000 for an ape that somewhat resembled him.

Meanwhile, one of the rarest Bored Apes, which had a gold fur trait, fetched $3.4 million in an online auction held by Sotheby's in October, breaking the record of another rare ape with laser eyes, which was sold to the Sandbox for $2.9 million a month before.

As stated, BAYC's net sales recently crossed the $1-billion-mark, almost 10% of what Apple earned in 2021. Meanwhile, the NFT sector, on the whole, processed sales worth $41 billion, which came to be almost equal to the global art sales in the year, data from Chainalysis showed

Matt Hougan, the chief investment officer of Bitwise Asset Management, admitted that many of their clients had been looking for exposure in the NFT space without needing to crisscross through its daunting technology.

In response, Bitwise launched a dedicated fund last mont, which tracks its own Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Collections Index — a basket of the ten largest NFT collections weighted by market capitalization — and buys and holds artworks from BAYC, CryptoPunks, and other NFT projects.

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⚡️ Neobank N26 is planning to launch a crypto trading business this year.
💼 Block job postings reveal Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin plans

In
two recent job postings on LinkedIn, Jack Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square) revealed the group’s plans to develop “the next generation of mining ASIC” and make a hardware wallet for the next 100 million Bitcoin (BTC) users.

The two roles are based at Block’s headquarters in San Francisco and were added to the job posting platform in the past 24 hours.

For the role of the custom digital design lead, the candidate will help “silicon validation of the ASIC and its prototype.” An ASIC is a small machine that can be used for Bitcoin mining and is considered the best option for Bitcoin network security. The new job posting confirms that Block sets out to develop purpose-built ASICs for BTC mining.

The second vacancy is for the hardware wallet’s global fulfillment and logistics lead. At the job’s core is “bringing easy-to-use, reliable self-custody to a global audience.” Ultimately, Block seeks to distribute its hardware wallets to over 100 countries.

The news aligns with Dorsey’s announcements made in 2021. Back when Block was called Square, Dorsey tweeted, “Square is considering building a Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide.”

Back in July, Square claimed to be developing an “assisted custody” BTC hardware wallet. It appears the plans are now coming together.

Block is the holding name for Square, CashApp, Spiral, Tidal and TBD54566975. Tidal music streaming service aside, each company is dedicated to furthering Bitcoin adoption and economic empowerment.

Among Block’s suite of companies, there are 650 jobs available around the world. For Block, there are several live listings for state public policy leadership positions across the United States as well as the two aforementioned product-related roles.

Since stepping down as CEO of Twitter, Dorsey has been vocal in his support for Bitcoin while outspoken in his opposition to Web3 — sometimes with varying results. Following a series of well-aimed tweets, he was stuck between a block and a hard place after he had tweeted that venture capitalists own Web3. Marc Andreessen, CEO of Andreessen Horowitz, swiftly blocked him.

@DeCenterOrg
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🔥 Group of U.S. banks plans to offer its own stablecoin, called USDF, in a move to tackle concerns about the reserves behind non-bank issued equivalents.

— Comprising institutions backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), one of the industry's key regulators, the group said the coin will "addresses the consumer protection and regulatory concerns of non-bank issued stablecoins," according to an announcement Wednesday.

— Founding members of the USDF Consortium include New York Community Bank, FirstBank and Sterling National Bank. The consortium wants more financial institutions to join.

— While stablecoins play a role in the broader crypto ecosystem by offering traders and investors secure entry and exit points because they are pegged to assets such as fiat currencies, there is concern about the opaque nature of some of the reserves that back up non-bank stablecoins such as Tether's USDT.

— Earlier this month CoinDesk joined a court case seeking access to documents received by the New York Attorney General's office (NYAG) from Tether.

— News of the consortium's plans emerged in November last year when Figure Technologies met with U.S. regulators to discuss issuing such a stablecoin.

@DeCenterOrg
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