This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt. Crypto markets finally look to be on the path to recovery after a brutal start to the new year. Bitcoin is up 8.7% over the past seven days to $37,677 at the time of writing, according to CoinMarketCap. The No. 2 cryptocurrency Ethereum is up 8% in that time, to…
Last week, non-fungible token (NFT) sales remained unscathed while crypto asset spot markets were dismal. However, a week later, NFT sales have dropped 13% to $800 million in sales over the last seven days. During the past week, NFT sales on the Ethereum blockchain have slipped 11.78% but Ronin blockchain-based NFT sales (Axie Infinity) dropped 47.83%. Weekly NFT Sales Slide…
As the two-year anniversary of the global COVID-19 pandemic begins to hurtle toward us, we are no closer to knowing when our social lives will return to normal or what will the new normal be. The effect this has had on businesses like nightclubs, music venues and musicians have been immeasurable. With crowded in-person events either made impossible — or…
In mid-May 2021, the American multinational technology company Nvidia Corporation revealed that it added a hashrate limiter to curb the use of cryptocurrency mining with its graphics processing units (GPUs). However, crypto miners now say the move was pointless, and the mining organization Nicehash details that the hashrate limiter scheme introduced by Nvidia “did not discourage miners at all.” Nvidia’s…
Transaction costs are calculated based on the transaction’s data volume and network congestion. As a block can only hold 4 MB of data, the number of transactions that can be executed in one block is limited. Therefore, more block data is required for a larger transaction. As a result, more significant transactions are usually charged on a per-byte basis. When…
Facebook announced its grand crypto plan on June 18, 2019: a “borderless global currency” called Libra, backed by a “collection of low-volatility assets like bank deposits and government securities, in currencies from stable and reputable central banks.” In other words: a stablecoin. On the same day, Facebook announced a crypto wallet called Calibra to hold your Libra. Two years and…
It was only a matter of time before China slapped a ban on Bitcoin (BTC) mining, trading and crypto services. To do anything with Bitcoin anywhere in the People’s Republic, one needs a special exemption. The Chinese government’s given reason for the Bitcoin crackdown is to reduce its well-documented climate impact. Regardless of the amount of truth in this explanation,…
In 2021, crypto exchanges chose a new marketing battleground: professional sports. Binance, Coinbase, Crypto.com, and FTX all inked multiple sports sponsorship deals—but none of them went in quite as aggressively as FTX. In the span of eight months, FTX signed deals with the Miami Heat (for stadium naming rights), Major League Baseball (official crypto exchange, including an FTX logo patch…
Flow is trading almost 30% higher on Saturday, as the majority of the crypto top 100 are in the green. Today’s move sees flow also enter the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap. Biggest Gainers Following a bearish end to the working week, cryptocurrency markets are green across the board to start the weekend. Notable gainers included solana, which is…
PayPal confirmed on Jan. 8 it is “exploring a stablecoin” that could be called PayPal Coin after a developer found evidence of such a stablecoin within the source code of the company’s iPhone app. PayPal senior vice president of crypto and digital currencies Jose Fernandez da Ponte said at the time that if the company plans to move forward with…
