💡 Fake bitcoin ETF report triggers price jump to $30k. The rise of Bitcoin dominance. Hashrate on the Bitcoin network rose to an all-time high. Ethereum validator queues drop to record lows. BIGTIME is up 250% in its first week. Uniswap Labs has introduced a 0.15% commission on swaps of certain tokens.
Bitcoin is currently trading at approximately $28,500, marking a 5% increase. This uptick in price follows a misleading report concerning the approval of the first Bitcoin spot Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This incident occurred during the early hours of Monday, U.S. time.
Earlier on Monday, the price of Bitcoin experienced a surge towards $30,000, driven by a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) by the cryptocurrency news source Cointelegraph, which falsely claimed the approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF. This misinformation led to liquidations totaling $100 million. Subsequently, BlackRock and other reliable sources promptly refuted the claim, and Cointelegraph issued an apology for disseminating inaccurate information.
In a statement released on Monday evening, Cointelegraph acknowledged that the error had originated from its social media team and pledged to conduct an internal review of its practices. Over the past 12 hours, the total amount of Bitcoin liquidations reached $137.2 million, with $45.6 million resulting from long positions and $91 million from short positions.
Furthermore, during this period, stock markets exhibited an upward trend, with the S&P 500 closing up by 1%. Simultaneously, bond prices decreased as diplomatic efforts intensified to prevent the Israel-Hamas conflict from escalating into a regional conflict.
Bitcoin's (BTC) dominance within the broader cryptocurrency market continues to ascend, posing a potential threat to the earlier 2021 rally of alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) that briefly outperformed BTC. The dominance rate has surged to 52.45% as of Monday, marking its highest point since April 2021.
This upward trajectory aligns with the bullish breakout observed in June, which signaled the conclusion of an extended period of consolidation within the range of 38% to 48%. The focal point now shifts towards the critical Fibonacci resistance level of 60.17% once the dominance rate firmly establishes itself above the June peak of 52.18%. At the time of writing, the dominance rate is registered at 51.68%.
As of October 12, 2023, the current average hash rate on the Bitcoin network has achieved an all-time high (ATH), reaching a remarkable 456.9 exahashes per second (EH/s). This is a substantial increase from the hash rate recorded at the beginning of the year, which stood at approximately 263 EH/s. Over the course of ten months, there has been a remarkable surge of 193 EH/s in the average hash rate.
The notable boost in the Bitcoin network's hash rate carries significant advantages for larger miners in the space. Analysts indicate that the cumulative hash rate for these major miners now stands at an impressive 72 EH/s. Furthermore, they have ambitious plans to amplify this figure by an impressive 182% over the next 2-3 years.
It is worth noting that on October 3, 2023, the mining difficulty for Bitcoin reached its own all-time high, registering at 57.32, underscoring the continuous growth and resilience of the network.
The entry and exit queues for validators on the Ethereum blockchain have experienced a notable reduction, even briefly reaching zero earlier today. This development signifies a substantial shift in the staking landscape. Back in May 2023, more than 90,000 validators were waiting for over 40 days to become part of the network. Presently, only a handful of validators are in these queues, and their onboarding process is nearly instantaneous.
Furthermore, the exit queues for validators seeking to withdraw their staked Ethereum (ETH) and discontinue their validation duties are minimal, numbering just below five. This suggests that existing validators are predominantly content with maintaining their stakes, adapting to the evolving dynamics of the staking ecosystem. The time needed to complete the exit process has also been significantly reduced, taking roughly 15 minutes.
Nonetheless, the prerequisites for becoming an Ethereum validator remain unchanged. Individuals desiring to participate in the network's consensus process must still stake a minimum of 32 ETH, equivalent to approximately $50,000. In return, validators can anticipate earning a yield, albeit at a lower rate compared to earlier in the year.
BIGTIME, the native token of blockchain-powered multiplayer game Big Time, has more than tripled in the first week of its existence.BIGTIME was introduced on several prominent exchanges, including OKX and Coinbase, last Wednesday. Since its launch, the token's market price has soared by 254%, reaching $0.251 and even peaking at $0.32 on Friday. To provide context, over the past five days, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization has only seen a modest 2% increase, reaching $1.056 trillion.
Big Time is an innovative multiplayer game that immerses players in various historical eras, featuring an economy centered around cosmetics and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This unique approach places the power of creating and trading cosmetics and NFTs squarely in the hands of the players.
It's important to note that only 5% of the total supply has been distributed to players through airdrops and is actively traded on the open market. This has likely created an imbalance in supply and demand dynamics, favoring the bullish sentiment. However, it is essential to be cautious, as this rapid price surge may be short-lived.
The token's fully diluted value concerning its market capitalization is relatively high, indicating the potential for supply inflation and the presence of sell-side pressure. Investors should exercise vigilance as they monitor the token's performance in this evolving market.
Starting on October 17, 2023, the Uniswap exchange's web application and wallet will impose a 0.15% commission on specific token swaps, as announced by the project's founder, Hayden Adams. Notably, this fee is distinct from the protocol fee, which is determined by a quorum of UNI token holders. Hayden Adams clarified that this fee should be viewed as a software interface (API) charge.
The 0.15% commission will apply to swaps involving the following tokens: Ethereum, USDC, wETH, USDT, DAI, WBTC, agEUR, GUSD, LUSD, EUROC, and XSGD. However, there are exceptions:
Hayden Adams also mentioned several new tools from Uniswap Labs slated for release in 2023, including UniswapX and mobile wallets for Android and iOS, among other offerings.
Interestingly, in June 2023, a quorum of Uniswap voted against introducing a protocol fee. Nonetheless, the platform already maintains a 0.3% fee for liquidity pools.
Following the implementation of this new fee, Uniswap Labs is projected to experience an average daily revenue increase of $870,000, as reported by The Block, citing data from the resource Flipside.
Arbitrum Short-Term Incentive Program Winners
Voting for the first round of grants for Arbitrum's Short Term Incentive Programme (STIP) is now officially closed. 29 projects will receive 49.6M ARB tokens ($40M) to support their development and use of Arbitrum L2.
Derivatives protocols and decentralised exchanges will receive the largest share of grants.
You can also explore the most notable raises of this week.
Membrane Labs, a cryptocurrency-focused trading and lending platform, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round, with participation from big names like Brevan Howard Digital and Point72 Ventures. The capital will be used to help build the type of grown-up trading infrastructure the crypto space needs in order to avoid further disasters.Last year saw multi-billion dollar crypto trading and lending platforms fall to pieces, revealing a chaotic mess of opaque and iniquitous operations carried on behind the scenes. The response from regulators will see crypto come into the daylight and map much closer to traditional finance.Membrane started out by building a clearing, netting and settlement engine, explained the firm’s CEO Carson Cook. This enabled institutions to choose where and how they custody their funds, whether that’s a custodian or multi-party computation MPC wallet, and then separately have their front office determine where and how they execute trades.
Untangled Finance, a London, UK-based fintech company, raised $13.5m in multi-year strategic funding.Proceeds from the funding round will be directed towards product development, ecosystem incubation and growth initiatives.Founded in 2020 by the team behind fintech Binkabi, which provides on-chain supply chain asset origination technology for financial institutions in Africa, Untangled Finance focuses on distributing asset portfolios through its DeFi yield product platform. The platform’s protocol focuses on tokenizing real-world private credit assets, such as invoices and SME loans, into on-chain structured credit pools. These pools, in turn, facilitate the issuance of collateralized debt notes to both DeFi and TradFi investors.Led by Led by Manrui Tang, and Quan Le, Untangled Finance will be launched on the Celo blockchain in early October, followed by Polygon and Ethereum via Chainlink’s Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
Web3 and the crypto platform Account Labs recently announced that it had raised USD 7.7 million in early-stage funding to create cryptocurrency wallets that let users control their private keys and access them using their Google accounts so they don’t have to remember seed phrases to log in.Together with the funding, the company revealed its UniPass wallet app, which enables users to securely send, receive, and withdraw stablecoins, such as USD Coins and USDT. Stablecoins are a form of cryptocurrency linked or “pegged” to a traditional currency, like the U.S. dollar, ensuring each token maintains a consistent value, typically at a 1:1 ratio with USD, such as USD 1. As a result, stablecoins are advantageous for holding, trading, and exchanging for services because they are not volatile.The wallet leverages the Polygon blockchain to reduce transaction fees and implements “account abstraction,” a process involving writing account information onto the blockchain. This feature enables users to utilize their Google account credentials for login, eliminating the necessity to remember a 12-digit seed phrase. This streamlined access is beneficial for adding the wallet on a new device or regaining access in case of loss
Scroll is a Layer 2 (L2) solution for scaling Ethereum, based on zkRollups with zero-knowledge proofs and compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The core component of Scroll is the zkEVM virtual machine, which is utilized to validate the integrity of EVM operations within the Scroll network.
From a technical standpoint, Scroll adheres to the classical ZK-rollup framework, which revolves around the consolidation of a large number of transactions into a single packet and the generation of succinct zero-knowledge proofs (zk-Proofs) off-chain.
Let's consider the key advantages of this solution:
As in other Ethereum scaling solutions based on ZK rollups, in Scroll, a large number of transactions are bundled into packets and then, along with proof of validity, sent to the main network.
Scroll is connected to the base Ethereum layer through the accumulator (Rollup Contract) and bridge (Bridge Contract) contracts. Together, they provide data availability for L2 transactions and enable users to transfer assets and messages between L1 and L2.
The L2 Sequencer consists of a synchronization service, a mempool, and an executor:
The Consolidation Node comprises a Relayer and two proposers, Chunk Proposer and Batch Proposer:
The goal of this multi-tiered batch transaction processing scheme is to reduce data transmission and proof verification costs. This approach increases the granularity of units of aggregation at the L1 level while considering fixed bandwidth. As a result, batch processing reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored in the contract and optimizes proof verification costs by handling a larger number of transactions in L2.
In the Scroll network, transactions are organized into batches at multiple levels:
Message exchange between L1 and L2:
Scroll has a versatile message-passing bridge that enables the transfer of tokens and allows decentralized applications (dApps) to interact between L1 and L2.
There are two main approaches to sending messages from L1 to L2: sending arbitrary messages and sending forced transactions. Both approaches allow users to initiate a transaction in L2 on L1 and invoke arbitrary contracts on L2. For arbitrary messages, the sender of L2 transactions is the "L1ScrollMessenger" contract. For forced transactions, the sender on L2 is an external owned account (EOA).
Therefore, Scroll provides users with multiple standard gateways for easily depositing tokens in the form of ERC-20, ERC-677, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 tokens. Essentially, these gateways encode token deposits into a message and send it to the L2 gateways through the "L1ScrollMessenger" contract.
At the L2 level, users can send arbitrary messages to withdraw tokens to L1 and call contracts in L1. Similar to L1, there are several standard gateways on L2 to simplify the token withdrawal process to L1.
The "L2ScrollMessenger" contract also provides a message-sending function. The difference from its L1 counterpart is that the "gasLimit" parameter is ignored because the transaction fee is paid directly on L1. The function encodes withdrawal information into the message and sends it to L1 using the same mechanism as the "L1ScrollMessenger" contract.
Conferences are a great opportunity to grab the attention of the whales in the crypto industry, spread the word about your project and win some funds! A quick line-up of the upcoming conferences below!
CoinAgenda EMEA Dubai👥 Conference🌐 Dubai, UAE📆 Date: 18 Oct 2023
xDay by MultiversX👥 Conference🌐 Bucharest, Romania📆 Date: 19 Oct 2023
Bitcoin Unleashed London Conference & Hackathon👥 Conference🌐 England, United Kingdom📆 Date: 19 Oct 2023
MoneyLIVE Nordic Banking👥 Conference🌐 Copenhagen, Denmark📆 Date: 23 Oct 2023
Delegate Summit👥 Conference🌐 Barcelona, Spain📆 Date: 23 Oct 2023
European Blockchain Convention | 2023👥 Conference🌐 Barcelona, Spain📆 Date: 24 Oct 2023
Blockchain Life 2023👥 Conference🌐 Dubai, UAE📆 Date: 24 Oct 2023
Quant Strats UK 2023👥 Hackathon🌐 England, United Kingdom📆 Date: 24 Oct 2023
State of Crypto: Policy and Regulation👥 Conference🌐 Washington, United States📆 Date: 16 Oct 2023
