Monday, July 18, 2022

LATEST CRYPTO HEADLINES OF THE WEEK - 18th of July 2022

In todays latest crypto news we are going over Michael Saylor saying ETH is security, Coinbase liquidity issues, heated ETH reddit debate and many more things you can read down below!

Australian central bank governor favors private sector crypto technology

Australian central bank Governor Phillip Lowe said that a private solution “is going to be better” for cryptocurrency as long as risks are mitigated through regulation.

Lowe commented at a recent G20 finance meeting in Indonesia. Reuters reported on July 17 that officials from other countries discussed the impact of stablecoins and decentralized finance (DeFi) on global financial systems.

Recent risks associated with stablecoins can largely be chalked up to depegging events. In May, the Terra USD stablecoin UST, which has since changed to Terra Classic USD (USTC), lost its peg and drove down the value of the entire Terra Classic ecosystem. It caused a multi-billion dollar cascade effect leading to Tether (USDT) and the DEI stablecoin briefly depegging.

Lowe suggested that strong regulations or even state backing could help mitigate the risks to the public. cointelegraph. com

Bitcoin hodling activity resembles previous market bottoms: Glassnode

The majority of Bitcoin has been “hodled” for at least three months in behavior bearing a striking resemblance to previous Bitcoin market bottoms, says blockchain analytics firm Glassnode.

In a July 16 tweet, Glassnode noted that more than 80% of the total U.S. dollar (USD)-denominated wealth invested in Bitcoin has not been touched for at least three months.

Bitcoin’s price is $21,013 at the time of writing, down almost 70% from its all-time high of $69,044 in November 2021. The current price puts around 45% of Bitcoin holders with an on-paper loss, according to crypto intelligence firm IntoTheBlock.

According to the Glassnode chart, other times that saw similar levels of Bitcoin hodling were during the end of the bear markets of 2012, 2015, and 2018.

Last week, Coinbase's head of institutional research, David Duong, wrote in a July 12 report titled “The Elusive Bottom” that on-chain data suggests that recent BTC selling has been carried out “almost exclusively” by short-term speculators. Long-term BTC holders “have not been selling into the market weakness,” he added. cointelegraph. com

$248M stablecoins flow out of Coinbase as community refutes exchange liquidity issues

Rumors surfaced Friday night that Coinbase could face liquidity issues following leaked emails stating that it would suspend its affiliate program. Business Insider reported that they received emails stating;

“This has not been an easy decision, nor was it made lightly, but, due to crypto market conditions and the outlook for the remainder of 2022, Coinbase is unable to continue supporting incentivized traffic to its platform.”

Some took to Twitter to claim the decision was indicative of liquidity problems for the top US exchange. Kurt Wuckert Jr of CoinGeek tweeted that the suspension of the affiliate program, in combination with other decisions made by Coinbase over the past several weeks, signifies a “liquidity crisis” is looming.

On July 15, around 50% of stablecoins on Coinbase Pro left the exchange, according to on-chain data from CryptoQuant; the total value came to approximately $248 million. The percentage stablecoin outflow was significantly higher on Coinbase than on other exchanges such as Binance. Only around 1% of stablecoin reserves left Binance over the same period, but the tokens had a similar value at just under $300 million. cryptoslate. com

Ethereum’s centralized dApps may overshadow the decentralization of proof-of-stake

A lively debate on Reddit Friday resurfaced the discussion of whether the computing infrastructure built on top of Ethereum is too centralized. According to on-chain data, approximately 32% of all Ethereum nodes operate on Amazon AWS servers. However, Amazon claims the number to be closer to 25%.

Since 2020 little has changed regarding the improvement of node decentralization within Ethereum. However, Pomp’s tweet is not entirely accurate.

Centralization of Ethereum

The below image shows the percentage of hosted Ethereum nodes running on AWS. At first glance, this looks highly concerning as it goes against the decentralization narrative in Ethereum.

Yet, the chart ignores nodes running on private machines instead of cloud-hosted servers. Hosting service providers facilitate around 67% of all nodes, and 29% are located in residential settings. cryptoslate. com

MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor says Ethereum is a security

In an interview with Altcoin Daily, MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor said Ethereum (ETH) is security.

According to Saylor, the fact that Ethereum was first issued via an initial coin offering proves it is not a commodity.

“There’s a management team. There was a pre-mine. There’s a hard fork. There are continual hard forks.”

He also talked about Ethereum’s difficulty bomb and how it keeps getting postponed every six months, which serves to prove the asset is a security.

If the Ethereum difficulty bomb went off, it would disincentivize miners and mark the network’s full transition into a proof of stake network.

Michael Saylor classifies most crypto assets as securities

In Saylor’s opinion, a cryptocurrency can only be a commodity if there is no issuer and no one is making any decisions on the network.

Saylor said,

“If you look at most of these cryptos, where they have hard fork after hard fork after hard fork, the problem with a hard fork is changing the protocol means that some development team is making a decision, and if you can change the protocol in a material way, you can change the monetary protocol. A hard fork can change the issuance pattern, or it can change the value of something. So that makes an investment contract under securities law.” cryptoslate.com

First Mover Asia: Bitcoin Dips Below $21K; Why the Current Bear Market Differs

Bitcoin's four-day winning streak snapped on Sunday with the largest cryptocurrency tumbling below $21,000.

Bitcoin was recently trading at about $20,800, down more than a percentage point over the past 24 hours, although still higher than it stood before starting its mini-rally on Wednesday. Market observers see the crypto continuing to trade in the $18,000 to $22,000 range that it has maintained for a month, at least until investors have a clearer sign whether central banks can lick inflation without casting the global economy into recession.

"While Bitcoin saw positive momentum this week, it remains range-bound when you take a broader view, and is still struggling to cross the $22,000 resistance," Joe DiPasquale, the CEO of crypto asset manager BitBull Capital, wrote to CoinDesk.


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