Planning to run a full node. Have some questions.

So I just downloaded Bitcoin Core. But, when I ran the software, it says I have to download the entire 350GB blockchain. This must be done whether I want to run a full node or a pruned node. I want to ask: What happens in the event of a hard disk failure or a Windows reinstallation? Do I have to go through the entire process of re-downloading and re-verifying the entire blockchain every time? Or is there a way to download a pre-verified blockchain and just continue from whereever it left off? I imagine that after setting up a full node with 350GB of data, I can just backup all the files. And then if I reinstall Windows or my HDD fails, I can just restore the backup and then carry on from whichever block it was left off? But if such a process can be done, then there must exist somewhere where I can downloaded a backed up version of a fully synced Bitcoin node, and then just carry on from there, without having to go through the tedious process of downloading and verifying from genesis myself?

Daily market updates: Performance of top cryptos | BTC, ETH, ADA, ALGO etc.

The past 24 hours were another eventful session for the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin moved past the $54,000 mark marking another period of massive rally. At one point, BTC moved more than 10% higher over its previous session. Bitcoin dominance inched closer to 45%. The largest altcoin, Ether, hovered around $3600. As BTC dominance increased, we saw the altcoins making relatively smaller moves. Markets are currently in a state of euphoria currently. The traded volumes went more than 30% higher. Over the past 24 hours, the global crypto market cap crossed $2.31 trillion.

Risk Management

A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Risks in the crypto world

The crypto world has an ocean of wealth that's beautiful both at the surface and down to its greatest depths; but it's also a risky place. As you go deeper into its depths, you accumulate more and more risk. Depending on how prepared you are, you can either get crushed by this pressure or witness the beautiful ecosystems that lay below the surface.

Of course, higher levels of risk typically result in higher rewards; risk and reward are siblings after all. But it's always important to understand what you're getting into. This post will discuss the different levels of risks that investors can either avoid or accumulate while moving through this sometimes unforgiving crypto world.

Risk Level 0 - Inherent Risks of Crypto

<Inherent risks are unpredictable and monumental events and scenarios.>

This is the type of risk that you really shouldn't worry too much about; but it's always there. An example of this would be a the Tetherpocalyspe, an utter mismanagement of the largest stablecoin in the ecosystem, USDT, with which most cryptos derive tons of their value from.

• *Other examples include the dawn of quantum computing, an internet apocalypse, and a world government ban.

• *A real-world example in relation to fiat are the prospects of a nuclear war, World War 3, or the collapse of fractional banking.

Risk Level 1 - Market Volatility

<As history has shown time and time again, crypto can easily lose half or more of its value within a couple of days>

Crypto is well-known to be a highly volatile compared to other markets—expect 5 to 10 percent movements on any given day and as much as 30 percent or more at times. Of course, not all crypto assets have the same volatility profiles and you can mitigate this risks with sound investments. Stablecoins and guaranteed futures contracts are exempt from market volatility.

Risk Level 2 - Human Error

<Human error can be realized by sending your funds to the wrong wallet; forgetting passwords; theft, robberies, or government seizure; uneventful trading; being involved or targeted in an exploit; etc.>

Human error is one of those risks you cannot avoid because...well, you're human! But there are many ways to mitigate this, ie stay the hell away from your crypto!

Risk Level 3 - Counter-parties

<Malicious actors can hack and steal from custodians, platforms, smart contracts, and price oracles that hold user assets>

These are:

1. Centralized Market Exchanges and Centralized Finance Platforms** have central points of attacks that can be exploited.

2. Decentralized Finance Platforms** sometimes run on centralized oracles, and this creates a single point of failure where malicious actors can tamper with the smart contracts.

3. Hot Wallets Aka online wallets, like all things connected to the internet, are vulnerable to cyberattacks.

These third-party entities typically do not carry the same protections as your traditional bank, but trusted platforms invest millions into dedicated professional teams to take security precautions in an effort to prevent attacks. Many of these platforms may therefore have insurance policies in place to hedge against the risk of hacks. However, generally they set a ceiling to the amount of loss that can be covered and or reimbursed. In Defi, many projects are focusing on mitigating these risks through (e.g. decentralized oracles and defi insurance platforms), however, a risks will always remain.

Risk Level 4 - Alternative Assets

<DeFi—and sometimes even CeFi—platforms will provide rewards in a local asset that has it's own market volatility risk>

For example, if you want to earn interest by holding Bitcoin in Polygon's AAVE platform, you'll be earning rewards in Polygon's native asset, MATIC, instead of in Bitcoin. Celcius, a CeFi platform, also provides an option to earn interest rewards in their native asset, CEL.

This can either result in upside risk, if the native asset goes up in value; or downside risk, if the native asset goes down in value.

Risk Level 5.1 - Impermanent Loss

<Impermanent loss is a temporary loss of funds where the liquidity provider has to provide assets in an equal ratio, and one of the assets is volatile in relation to the other>

This risk is relative to a scenario where you just held the better performing coin or token. The more volatile the asset is in relation to another, the higher the risks. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.

Risk Level 5.2 - Liquidation

<Liquidation is the risk of surrendering your funds to an exchange or platform when your deposit reaches a minimum value>

Exchanges or platforms do this to be prepared for possible scenarios where a lender won’t be able to exit a position or access their funds whenever they wish. Thus, they specify collateralization ratios and cap the borrowing/withdrawals.

This is evident among leverage trading exchanges or in defi lending and borrowing platforms. When entering defi, you can entirely skip this step and simply be a liquidity provider; hence, the reason why it's an optional risk alongside impermanent loss.

A final few takeaways:

1. The crypto world is still inherently more risky than most markets.

Remember the crypto market has only been around since 2010. Anything can happen so *never ever EVER invest more than you're willing to lose.

1. If you're going to go deep, make sure you're equipped.

There are ways to explore the depths of the crypto world without getting completely crushed and that's by being equipped with the right mentality, understanding the risks, and making the necessary preparations. Also, understand that there are risks you cannot avoid, this will help you stay vigilant.

1. You can appreciate the crypto world from any angle.

Just as you can appreciate the seas from a distance, or by exploring a coral reef, or by deep-diving into it's depths; you can do the same with the crypto world . Again, just make sure you're using the right tools and strategies. The last thing you want is finding yourself swimming in a seal suit in killer-whale territory.

Understand your risks and stay safe.

tl;dr: The deeper you dive into the ocean, the higher the pressure gets. Likewise, the deeper you go into the crypto world , the higher the risks gets. This is just the way of nature.

Cardano Rumor Rundown October 7, 2021

Hey Everyone!

Let's go...

Newly covered today:

1. The “Zombie Lobster” collaboration between Charles Hoskinson and Paul Oakenfold is actually getting coverage by the EDM media outlets! https://edm.com/news/paul-oakenfold-album-cardano-blockchain
2. Sounds like we are getting close to the Cardano Summit NFT winners being announced. It’s still unclear how many actual winners there will be. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1445672250435248131
3. dcSpark releases some mockups from the experimental version of its upcoming Flint Wallet. The mockups seem to indicate that the wallet will allow for dApp interaction from hardware wallets. https://twitter.com/FlintWallet/status/1444902727956508674
4. Charles is interviewed in the Harvard International Review. https://hir.harvard.edu/charles-hoskinson-1/

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. The Essential Cardano List has grown even larger! https://github.com/input-output-hk/essential-cardano/blob/main/essential-cardano-list.md
2. There is now an Eastern Hemisphere Catalyst Town Hall every Thursday with Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian language hosts. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1428649776111886336
3. We generally think of Cardano competitors being other blockchains or big tech. In one part of the world, the advent of CBDCs might make it “tokenless blockchains”. https://twitter.com/sinoglobalcap/status/1429430262102822920
4. If Web 3 will really be a building of new economies out of online communities and the units of value of those economies will be tokens and NFTs, it seems like a blockchain like Cardano that can generate those assets natively without smart contracts is going to be a central player. https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1429585831899983876
5. The ADA treasury is worth $1.6 Billion right now?????? https://twitter.com/nierop_pieter/status/1429656224732225536
6. There will be a crypto regulatory conference on the 23rd of September in Wyoming as part of the Wyohackathon just before the Cardano Summit. https://twitter.com/wyohackathon/status/1428718655362281479
7. Neel Kashkari of the Fed posts an anti-crypto tweet and gets heavily outliked by more than one pro-crypto response including a retweet from Charles. https://twitter.com/neelkashkari/status/1429886278942736385 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1429947349103742978
8. Forbes runs an article about how various cryptos including ADA could replace fiat according to a Deloitte survey of bank execs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2021/08/23/bankers-issue-seismic-warning-bitcoin-ethereum-bnb-cardano-and-xrp-could-replace-the-dollar-in-just-five-years-as-crypto-market-price-adds-1-trillion/
9. ADA is officially on Bitpoint Exchange in Japan! https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1430317131699163140
10. Charles gave us a brief update on Aug 24. Sounds like everything is right on schedule for smart contract launch on September 12. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1430230604071636994
11. Messari is reporting that Cardano moved more transaction volume over the last 24 hours than ETH. The amazing part was how much cheaper those transactions were on Cardano. https://twitter.com/TheADAApe/status/1430128107332280321
12. dcSpark is unveiling a sidechain project called Milkomeda that will use wrapped ADA and so-called “wrapped smart contracts”. The first sidechain, M1, will be an Ethereum Virtual Machine sidechain. This means Solidity devs can deploy their current smart contract code in M1 and those smart contracts will be accessible to Cardano users. This is “the pond”. This will be HUGE! Good work dcSpark! You guys are killing it! https://medium.com/dcspark/dcspark-announces-development-of-new-sidechain-protocol-milkomeda-cc28ed764a89
13. IOHK partners with European Business University of Luxembourg to offer scholarships including instruction in Haskell and Plutus to students across 25 countries in Africa. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/08/24/making-education-in-africa-more-accessible-affordable-and-equitable/
14. It’s interesting to note that (as pointed out by @Rob98550139) on June 23rd, EBU of Luxembourg also offered 5,000 scholarship’s in “Plutus Blockchain programming for Cardano Blockchain” to Nayib Bukele for El Salvador. Something unannounced going on there? https://twitter.com/EBULuxembourg/status/1407594850199953410
15. The August Cardano 360 is out! Another great job by Tim Harrison and company! https://youtu.be/baS9efSa2F8
16. The Cardano Foundation is reporting they have now received 440 applications to host local Cardano Summit meetups and that applications are now closed. Registration for the local meetups will come out soon. https://twitter.com/CardanoStiftung/status/1430954186607415310
17. The “Buy Cardano” keyword hits a three month high on Google. https://twitter.com/OldPaSink/status/1430946116359516160
18. Cardano competitor Ethereum suffered a consensus bug today (Aug 27) that impacted 54% of nodes. Apparently they were able to upgrade the version of Geth being run by a majority of the pools in time to head off a majority supported fork to the bad chain. But, the go ethereum developer in the link described it as “a really close shave”. https://twitter.com/mhswende/status/1431259601530458112 https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1431278258222338056
19. IOHK has initiated the testnet fork (Aug 27)! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1431286232278085634
20. The “go/no-go” meeting was today (Aug 27) on initiating the Alonzo hardfork combinator event for the 12th. The result was a “go”! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1431286232278085634
21. Here’s a good side-by-side of the size of the ecosystem in the past and now. https://twitter.com/CardanoRise/status/1431703062486392837
22. Fortune ran a very positive piece on Cardano today (Aug. 20). https://fortune.com/2021/08/20/cardano-ath-price-biggest-cryptos/
23. It looks like the details of the extremely mysterious “Cardano City” project should come to light today. https://twitter.com/CardanoCity/status/1431338443381092355
24. The Wall Street Journal runs a Cardano article. https://www.wsj.com/articles/cardanos-ada-is-the-latest-cryptocurrency-to-surge-heres-what-you-need-to-know-11630143002
25. The COTI/Wolfram/IOHK project to build an NFT Auction Site is now live. https://twitter.com/COTInetwork/status/1431971503093002243
26. CNBC runs an article on the effect the grassroots effort to the fix the crypto tax provisions has had on policy makers in Washington, D.C. These policies will affect Cardano and every other crypto. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/28/tax-reporting-proposal-creates-defining-moment-for-crypto-industry-.html
27. Beware of FlanoWallet and Flano Swap!!!!!!!! They are accused of malicious code that harvests your recovery phrase. https://twitter.com/bigpeyYT/status/1432450913487183874
28. Sebastien confirms that dcSpark is getting a ton of interest from developers wanting to work in Cardano. https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1432416579107495942
29. Charles talks about Cardano compliance functionality and confirms that he perceives heavy regulation coming for DeFi in the next 24 months based on EU and US Treasury comments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ESn46Hj9Y4
30. A new John O’Connor interview is scheduled for today (Aug 31). You may want to tune in to get the latest on Cardano’s Africa Operations from the man himself. https://twitter.com/jjtoconnor/status/1432395067185106951
31. The Public Testnet will be forked to Alonzo today (Sept 1)! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1432769865958531080
32. Some future Cardano dApps have so many followers on twitter that ETH maximalists are publicly expressing their disbelief. https://twitter.com/Southrye/status/1432515727433601024
33. Even prior to the launch of smart contracts, Cardano is generating quite an impressive amount of transaction fees. https://twitter.com/DCdoso/status/1432761425089470469
34. The Cardano Testnet has now officially forked to Alonzo allowing Plutus smart contracts. We are on track for the mainnet hardfork combinator event on Sept 12th. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1433166757620064260
35. IOHK is changing their delegation process. They will be taking applications from SPOs and asking that they recommend two other pools based on contributions in terms of building, creating, or educating. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1433104060647985157
36. Another signpost for Cardano DeFi projects. Gary Gensler (SEC Head) tells the Financial Times that in his view DeFi platforms have “a fair amount of centralisation” and “[i]t’s a misnomer to say they are just software they put out in the web...” https://www.ft.com/content/fb126d79-2e60-4002-8aba-b08887fca609
37. Cardano gets positive coverage on French Television for being “ecological”. https://twitter.com/YoadaStakepool/status/1433127940334792708
38. Charles is on CNBC talking about how crypto could be used to resist the Taliban in Afghanistan. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/09/01/cryptos-will-play-larger-role-in-afghanistan-after-us-exit-ethereum.html
39. The first solution for custom Cardano wallet addresses seems to be picking up steam. https://twitter.com/adahandle
40. One of Cardano’s competitors continued to have additional “performance degradation” and “instability” issues on it’s mainnet today (Sept 2). https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1433438629020454917 https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1433429598230876173 https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1367189272797798404
41. The SEC is investigating Uniswap. This is a very big deal! https://www.wsj.com/articles/regulators-investigate-crypto-exchange-developer-uniswap-labs-11630666800
42. Another Japanese exchange appears to be adding ADA on the 7th. https://twitter.com/sentosumosaba/status/1433714023468437508
43. We are always the github champions (again as of Sept 3). https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1433822104634408966
44. Yet another Cardano project drops their account of how they’ve already handled concurrency. https://twitter.com/SundaeSwap/status/1434304535061729281
45. Here are two other Cardano projects explaining that they’ve already handled concurrency. https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/cardano-decentralized-exchange-occamx-reaches-key-technical-milestone https://twitter.com/CardanoMaladex/status/1434115402725052418
46. Only one more week until smart contracts on mainnet (as of Aug 5)! Get your whiskey ready!
47. IOHK releases a detailed thread on concurrency and upcoming documentation to help quell some of the misinformation currently circulating on this topic. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1434518391465943048
48. Only 5 more days to Alonzo (as of Sept. 7)!
49. Despite all the negative posting about Cardano smart contracts on eUTxO, it ironically looks like some in the ETH community are actually trying to build ETH L2 on UTXO. https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1434570158853529606
50. Here’s a great article on Cardano’s Determinism by IOG’s Polina Vinogradova. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/
51. World Mobile has released a new video of towers going up in Zanzibar! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoGx_hwupsc
52. Charles releases a new video on the Alonzo Update Proposal (on Aug. 7) being submitted so that we can go live on the 12th. He also gives some hints as to his thoughts on the short-term planning of some “flavor of the week” blockchains vs. the long term planning of Cardano. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhujKbMpTEA
53. Weiss Crypto lays down yet another very positive thread about Cardano. They acknowledge that they can’t see the future of Cardano, but they vehemently reject a lot of the anti-hype. https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1435261343456768005
54. Coinbase reveals they received a Wells Notice from the SEC on their crypto loan product. This is relevant for Cardano loan projects. A low professor subsequently posted a takedown of the Coinbase Chief Legal Officer’s view on the SEC notice. https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1435439291715358721 https://twitter.com/AdamLevitin/status/1435650584271589376
55. We just saw a record number of daily transactions on Cardano (Sept 7)! https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1435559731133825031
56. Messari has updated its “Initial Token Distribution” chart to include a previously missing project and Cardano is still among the very best in the Gen 3 space in terms of broad public coin ownership. https://twitter.com/CryptoIRELAND1/status/1435708439951552513
57. After lots of criticism of Cardano layer 2 possibilities by ETH maximalists, Vitalik has ironically announced that ETH NFTs need to be moved to layer 2. https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1435413681588736007
58. We seem to already have at least five projects who have worked out their approach to eUTxO concurrency. https://twitter.com/SmaugPool/status/1435928968423673859 https://www.yahoo.com/now/cardano-decentralized-exchange-occamx-reaches-163000898.html
59. Here’s the tweet with the link for the Alonzo smart contract launch watch party tomorrow (Sept 12) at 21:30 UTC. This is going to be fun! Enjoy it, guys! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1436325831199141888
60. A Weiss Crypto analyst calls the smart contract launch an alleged event and also doesn’t realize we already have NFTS. The Cardano community was quick to correct the analyst. Weiss was then also quick to apologize. https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1436369016545857566 https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1436402039085576193
61. There is still the mystery of the lobster. Will it end up being connected to a fun smart contract to be launched tomorrow by IOHK? https://twitter.com/crypto_reflect/status/1435738017608740866
62. Over 100 smart contracts are already running on Cardano Mainnet! https://twitter.com/IOHKMedia/status/1437821632307994628
63. One of Cardano’s biggest competitors is once again suffering network problems. This time it started out as just being characterized as (more) “instability”, then they started saying that something had caused the blockchain to “start forking”. This followed their September 2 “instability” and “performance degradation” event. It’ll be interesting to see how well their community tolerates this in the future if it’s happening with their planned slashing model in effect. https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1437856638279487493 https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1437757547235131396 https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1433429598230876173
64. The Cardano Foundation subtly hints (okay just straight up says) it has some mindblowing partnerships to announce at the Cardano Summit. https://twitter.com/SidneyVollmer/status/1437855888237338627
65. Gary Gensler says that there are probably many tokens traded on Coinbase that are securities. https://youtu.be/XLc4c7vL3rM
66. Looks like Cardano Summit segments are being recorded and completed. https://twitter.com/ch1bo_/status/1437803839319691271
67. In macro news that could impact Cardano & all of crypto, it has been announced that China’s Evergrande Group will not be able to make interest payments on its loans in a few days. https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1438143063306690560 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-15/evergrande-gives-china-an-impossible-equation-to-solve-with-its-liquidity-crunch
68. It looks like we’ll get some news about further collaboration with Baia’s Wine of Georgia at the Cardano Summit. https://twitter.com/ThornhillPublic/status/1438157239982956545
69. Now one of Cardano’s most highly visible critics is implying that the Cardano community has something in common with anti-vaxxers. Unfortunately for him, it was one of his pet blockchains that was down a few days ago while Cardano just kept healthily trucking right along. https://twitter.com/spudiot1/status/1438402783040790532
70. Cardano is still crushing it in terms of daily transaction volume. https://twitter.com/Eilert/status/1438521555638644746
71. We might have gotten a peek at the virtual world that will be part of the Cardano Summit this month. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1438668061813342209/photo/1
72. Smaug gives us a rundown of how many actual Plutus scripts (19)are running on mainnet vs. timelock scripts (21k) as of Sept 17 and explains simple definitions for both. But, he also mentions down below how many Plutus scripts (213) are reportedly running on “the main testnet” not counting “other Alonzo testnets”. https://twitter.com/SmaugPool/status/1438816898234343432
73. The weekly IOHK development update is out for Sept 17. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1438921968590499843
74. Now the TX and NJ state securities regulators are after Celsius for crypto loans (BlockFi already got this treatment). Cardano loan projects should probably take note. https://www.njoag.gov/new-jersey-bureau-of-securities-orders-cryptocurrency-firm-celsius-to-halt-the-offer-and-sale-of-unregistered-interest-bearing-investments/ https://www.ssb.texas.gov/sites/default/files/2021-09/20210917_FINAL_Celsius_NOH_js_signed.pdf
75. After the Senate hearing on Tuesday September 14th, Gary Gensler (SEC Chairman) gave a quote to a crypto publication indicating that custodial lending and possibly even staking platforms might be considered securities. This is very relevant for Cardano since it has non-custodial staking whereas many of its competitors have the kind of custodial staking that Gensler may have been contemplating. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/117675/crypto-lending-staking-custody-gensler-sec
76. New IOHK blog entry on Hydra (Sept 17)! https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/17/hydra-cardano-s-solution-for-ultimate-scalability/
77. It looks like we may get an announcement of a new Cardano/COTI product at the Summit. https://twitter.com/theCOTIinvestor/status/1439551052764925957
78. We’re inching closer to the 500 votes required to name the lobster. https://twitter.com/Ada4Soil/status/1439745733079355394
79. Here’s a great description from Sebastien on where ADA staking rewards come from. https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1439542246764793857
80. Apparently the SEC is now serving crypto people at crypto conferences. Gensler is getting serious. https://twitter.com/gogoSlava/status/1439972015910408195 https://mainnet.events/agenda-2021/
81. Accusations of wash trading surface in the Cardano NFT scene. https://twitter.com/mintaCNFT/status/1439752114276904960
82. Christine Lagarde (European Central Bank President) goes on the offensive and tries to tell the world that cryptocurrencies are not currencies. https://twitter.com/BloombergTV/status/1438498107965288449
83. DIGI tweets out a great infographic explaining how Hydra layer two solution works. https://twitter.com/DIGI_StakePool/status/1440322046869737482
84. Senators Lummis & Sinema are planning to introduce a bill for responsible innovation in crypto. Caitlin Long says it will focus on (1) definitions to clarify regulatory jurisdiction, (2) consumer protection, (3) digital asset custody requirements https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1440327869293465600
85. The Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics has been established at Carnegie Mellon. Given the blockchain activity at the university it seems like the Cardano founder having ties there can’t really hurt us. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1440443081183019017
86. dcSpark is launching a new wallet called Flint that will be able to interact with Cardano dApps. https://youtu.be/dDwuwVR75HU https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1440659191731945482
87. The AWS Exec has clarified his tweet about the Cardano Summit to express that people shouldn’t read too much into it. https://twitter.com/theCOTIinvestor/status/1440662585309745152
88. There’s a fresh blog and video on the Cardano Smart Contract Certification standards and new Plutus dApp Store. https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1440799199684022283
89. Apparently RuntimeVerification is now in the Cardano audit business! This is awesome to see! We’’ll take some NASA mission-critical level auditing for our ecosystem’s projects. https://twitter.com/SundaeSwap/status/1441077920215310343
90. The Summit Agenda is now out. https://summit.cardano.org/agenda
91. dcSpark’s new open source project Fracada will allow you to fractionalize NFTs. https://twitter.com/dcspark_io/status/1441043274911866880
92. dcSpark has released Fracada which is an open source Plutus dApp for fractionalizing NFTs. https://twitter.com/SebastienGllmt/status/1443011920349462533
93. The Wall Street Journal runs a Cardano 101 type video on their main youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBKnEZYCkTo
94. Senator Toomey and SEC Chair Powell have an interesting exchange about how a US CBDC should be formulated and how it should be sharing the space with private cryptos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-46kqEn6JLc
95. As promised at the Cardano Summit, Emurgo has already made seed investments into Milkomeda from dcSpark, Adanian Labs, & ADAverse. https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1442210147405684745
96. The ecosystem map continues getting bigger and bigger (Sept 29). https://twitter.com/seal_kiman/status/1441418051237425153/photo/1
97. dcSpark has dropped a new video explaining Fracada and the future of NFTs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FvKUlh7Fs8&t=4s
98. The CFTC hits Kraken with a $1.25 Million fine for it’s margin products. Cardano DeFi projects planning to offer some kind of margin trading take note. https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8433-21
99. In late 2008/early 2009 it turns out Hal Finney was learning Haskell and trying to figure out how to reduce C02 emissions from a (future) widely used Bitcoin. That sounds a lot like Cardano. https://twitter.com/seal_kiman/status/1443593563846193155
100. Adam Dean gives us a great post-mortem on the network load created yesterday by the NFT drop(s). https://twitter.com/adamKDean/status/1443599818845081600
101. Wow! It’s looking like Meld has landed a partnership with a mobile provider in Nigeria with nine million customers. Not many details out at this point (Sept 30). But, that certainly sounds like it could be gigantic. https://twitter.com/MELD_labs/status/1443548879966949382
102. Two factor authentication via SMS once again turns out to be a bad bet. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/hackers-rob-thousands-coinbase-customers-sms-mfa-flaw
103. Grayscale releases a report on Cardano which shocks many due to its (actually) fair reporting. https://twitter.com/Grayscale/status/1443625454146097152 https://twitter.com/cardano_whale/status/1443786596721967104
104. The Wall Street Journal has dropped a video on stablecoins. A lot of the video surrounds the Tether dollar reserve controversy. It’s notable that Cardano’s Djed solves this. https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-seeks-to-regulate-stablecoin-issuers-as-banks-11633103156
105. The Biden Administration has announced they are investigating the prospect of regulating stablecoin providers like banks. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/stablecoin-regulation-cryptocurrency-banks-biden-treasury-bitcoin-circle-tether-binance-2021-10
106. Cardano users on twitter piece together that Charles was talking about visiting u/Pezesha_Africa (in regard to microfinance) in Kenya. This is big because Pezesha operates in countries with a combined population of over $300MM. https://twitter.com/thr33strikes/status/1444898320070086659
107. Crypto twitter users try to depict US Whitehouse comments out of context to fuel an economic doom narrative. However, if you listen to the whole press briefing, you will understand that these comments were based on a “what if” scenario involving the US debt ceiling somehow not being raised. https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD/status/1445059673401528328
108. The so-called “Pandora Papers” reveal globally widespread cases of wealth concealment by public officials and bring up the question of whether blockchains like Cardano should take this into account when dealing with nation-state regimes as partners. https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/
109. Remember! There is no mobile Daedalus wallet. There is no browser extension version of Daedalus. These are fakes! They will steal your ADA. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1445380773096398853
110. A human readable address project is launching on Cardano on Saturday at 4pm UTC.https://medium.com/ada-handle/creating-a-fair-beta-launch-discord-community-is-live-7f580cd98235
111. Brazil is looking to follow the El Salvador example and accept crypto as legal tender with a new bill to be voted within days. While the crypto in question is BTC and not ADA, we can hope that the biggest market cap project is just our gateway drug. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-set-become-legal-payment-154644863.html

~Army of Spies

How to get the most out of on-chain analysis - HAVE FUN!

Hey Banter Fam!

I wanted to share with you something I put on Twitter that may help to understand and interpret on-chain data for yourself.

There are a tonne of great OC analysts out there on Twitter like @woonomic, @TXMCtrades, @WClementeIII, @_Checkmatey_, @CryptoVizArt amongst many others. They all put out amazing analysis, but their comments sections are inevitably filled with "What does this mean?" or "So wen moon ser?"

I'm now a full-time crypto guy, but in a past life I made my living making super nerdy data relatable to people who weren't interested in getting in the weeds of data analysis to fully understand it all.

Even with a background in analytics, my head sometimes swims trying to get to the bottom of what some of this on-chain stuff truly means, so you're not alone if you find on-chain data a little much.

With that in mind, I thought I'd have a go here at [over]simplifying it, and hopefully make on-chain more relatable for you, if you're so inclined.

It's a longish read but if you cbf reading it all, here are some quick cheat sheets to sum it all:

A summary of some commonly used on-chain metrics and how to interpret them.

​

A summary of the flow between Demand, Liquid Supply and Illiquid Supply.

_____________________

Back to first principles: there are 3 things price can do. Up, down, sideways. No shit!

But how does on-chain data help us know what to expect?

DEMAND (Buyers)

New market participants drive every bull run. It’s always been that way, and will always continue to be. Unfortunately, on-chain data struggles to help look ahead to what demand might be coming in, but it is great at looking backwards.

Backwards looking metrics for DEMAND could be:

Short-term HODLer (Coins held for <156 days) supply - when STH supply is increasing while LTH supply is stable, this is likely to mean new investors have entered Bitcoin.

Long-term HODLer (Coins held for >155 days) supply - drops in LTH means decreasing demand from people who traditionally HODLed.

New entities and New addresses - this is self-explanatory, but it's important to use this directionally only. Glassnode has a hard time knowing if a new address is just a new wallet from an old holder, but if this metric is going parabolic, it's almost certainly bc of new market participants.

Google Trends, crypto Youtube views/subs (a Ran metric) and general engagement across crypto socials is also a great way to see if crypto is recruiting new money.

When new investors enter the market, number go UP. When current investors don't want their coins anymore, number go DOWN. How much? Well, that depends on how much is available to buy, which brings me to...

LIQUID SUPPLY (Sellers)

Often analysed right now is the declining volume of BTC being held by liquid entities. That is, if a bunch of new people wanna buy, there probably won’t be enough to go around.

In isolation, declining liquid supply means number go SIDEWAYS or UP.

In terms of what it means for upward pressure. The magnitude of the supply squeeze determines to degree of upward price movement when multiplied by the new market participants (new demand).

The sideways part is important. People disregard that, but limited supply is irrelevant if there isn’t increased demand. And the way this is measured is primarily though LTHs. This means liquid supply can decline w/o and buying. So price doesn’t necessarily have to increase as this decreases.

Some measures for LIQUID SUPPLY:

Balance on exchanges - The most liquid supply there is.

Short-term HODLers (Coins held for <156 days) supply or STH % of supply - A large percentage of this cohort is risky because traditionally this group is more likely to sell BTC. They represent more liquid supply.

Profit metrics like SOPR, NUPL and % in profit/loss can be good to get a feel for the mindset of STHs and anticipate the likelihood of their supply becoming illiquid. If we're finding that STH are selling as soon as they reach breakeven, it's a good indication they won't be migrating to LTHs any time soon so we will struggle to see sustained price growth.

Open interest and funding rates - These aren't on-chain metrics but in the event of quick price moves, this indicates how much that move will be accelerated by stop losses or liquidations. High long funding + price declines brings new sell orders (new liquid supply) = quick dump. These are freely available from Bybt.com.

Many analysts will aggregate cohorts into Illiquid, Liquid and Highly Liquids Supply groups.

STHs profit/loss ratio

ILLIQUID SUPPLY (HODLers)

And now to Long-term holders AKA strong hands AKA illiquid supply. This is your measure of what happens when it all falls to shit. That is, how much we will dump in the event of a sell-off.

So in a bull run, if this starts declining (ie. LTHs sell), it means more supply is becoming available to meet demand. Eventually this selling has a slowing effect on price which negatively impacts fresh demand and when that declines, you have what they call a blow-off top.

LTHs sell into bull runs until demand no longer meets the over-supply causing a blow-off top.

In a neutral or declining market, then it can indicate if a May 19-like dump is coming.

You can also look at profit metrics like SOPR, profit/loss or NUPL to get a feel for if LTHs may be reaching a profit-taking price zone. If this is the case, we can anticipate sell pressure ahead, therefore a decline in illiquid supply.

Measures to watch for ILLIQUID SUPPLY:

LTH supply or LTH % of total supply

LTH in profit/loss or LTH NUPL to understand potential if they might sell soon.

Miner net position change - if miners are selling, illiquid supply is becoming liquid.

Open interest and funding rates. These aren't on-chain metrics but in the event of quick price moves, this indicates how much that move will be accelerated by stop losses or liquidations. High short funding + price increases brings new buy orders (less supply) = quick pump. These are freely available from Bybt.com.

When LTHs reach high-profit zones, we can expect upcoming sell pressure.

​

Miners displaying sell pressure means we can expect less ILLIQUID and more LIQUID supply to come.

But as mentioned earlier, an increase in strong hands in isolation doesn’t mean number go up necessarily. Maybe a little, but nothing like what we’d need to reach $100k.

What we need for $100k+ is new market participants. That’s it. That’s why we keep talking about ETFs, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, etc. Because something significant needs to happen to convince people to buy BTC for the first in their lives at $50k+.

​

___________________

I've seen a lot of criticism of on-chain analysts saying they've been wrong. It's possible that at times they misinterpret some data. But on-chain data isn’t right or wrong or misaligned to price. It's just an incomplete view because it doesn't truly show demand dynamics.

Yes, this is an over-simplification and there's a lot of nuance. But for me, it just helps frame my interpretation of all this amazing data and its expected impact on price. The cheat sheets aren't exhaustive by any means. My hope is this info is helpful to you in being able to draw your own conclusions from the data shared by some of the analysts out there. If you have any questions about this, I'll be happy to discuss.

But to give you the answers to the test:

Liquid supply is very low and Illiquid supply is at an ATH. If (and it's an if!) we can get some fresh new demand into crypto, NUMBER GO UP BIG.

Credits for charts go to TXMC on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TXMCtrades?s=20. Charts have been used with his permission.

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Could the sudden crypto surge be related to the looming Default in the US Economy?

I've read countless articles today about the crypto markets and one thing seems to be consistent amongst them. Some of the best economic experts say that the only winner in the event of an Economic default, is Crypto currency. Connected to another article saying that Bitcoin will overtake the US dollar by 2050 becoming the dominant currency in the world. So with that being said, the economic default is looming and crypto markets are surging, this can't be a coincidence right. What's your take on it people.