Crypto News #07

The crypto to watch this week

This week, the focus is clearly on Chainlink, which joins the top 10 of the most valued cryptocurrencies. Chainlink is a system of oracles, i.e. smart contracts that provide data such as the price of an asset, the winner of a football match, or any other data outside the Ethereum blockchain.
Other services and smart contracts are able to use this data to trigger payments and make event-driven decisions.
Assets are up 28% in one week.

This week, the Bitcoin Gold asset has suffered 2 successive 51% attacks.
These attacks have allowed attackers to cancel trades on the blockchain.
This kind of problem occurs when the ability to mine a cryptocurrency has become too weak.
Even if the project managers claim that no funds could be stolen, this does not bode well for the future of this asset.

The MATIC sidechain (layer 2 ETH) reaches 7200 transactions per second on a testnet.
Once again, this is an indication that layer 2 solutions are the best for Ethereum’s scalability at the moment.

Fidelity Investments goes into crypt mining.
The company has invested in several startups specializing in mining, including the purchase of mining equipment from Bitmain.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore is ready to introduce its blockchain-based payment network to commercial applications. The payment infrastructure will be based on JP Morgan’s Quorum protocol.

All it took was a TikTok viral video to make the Dogecoin volumes explode.
The volume went up 1900% in 24 hours after the "Let’s all get rich" video.
As a reminder, there is no more development on Dogecoin for at least 3 years.

The Voice mobile application is a social network based on the EOSIO blockchain, derived from EOS, and is finally about to be released, after many reports. Available to the public in read-only mode only, the application will gradually be launched.

Bitfinex had lost access to $850 million of collateral for Stablecoin Tether in 2019.
The company had been able to make up for this loss by creating a new token, the LEO, which was successfully raised to offset these losses.
But a US court is now indicting iFinex, the parent entity, for these manipulations.

In an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, Justin Drake, member of the Ethereum Foundation, said that it is likely that the release of Ethereum 2.0 will not occur until early January (probably January 3, Bitcoin’s 12th anniversary) 2021. Indeed, a list of tests have to be done before then, which last 2 to 3 months. In addition, Thanksgiving (November 26th) and the Christmas holiday periods should not allow a release before 2021.

Circle confirms that it has sequestered $100,000 in USDC from an investor.
To do so, it used a smart-contract feature that allows it to block the funds directly.
Tether, which has the same kind of functionality, has already used it 22 times this year.

The number of stablecoin users in Brazil has quadrupled since January 2020.
USDT and BUSD would be the most used at present.
This follows the economic difficulties in which the country finds itself.
Brazilians seek to protect their money.

This week’s figures

The Bitcoin network consumes $3 billion in electricity per year.

Bitcoin’s mining capacity is at an all-time high of 148 EH/sec.

All the numbers are green for Ethereum:

• The value of Ethereum’s stablecoins is $8 billion.
• the value in DeFi is $2.2 billion.
• the volume on DEX exceeds 500 million per week
  And yet, the price doesn’t take off.