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Justin Tron’s DAO amass 600M TRX & 500 BTC echoing Nayib Bukele’s ‘Buy The Dip’

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Justin Tron’s DAO is the latest to join the ‘Buy the dip club’ netting 600 million TRX and 500 BTC worth $45 million and $15 million, respectively, mirroring El Salvador’s recent buy the dip move.

The Tron DAO Reserve took to Twitter to explain that TRX and USD are sailing amidst high market volatility and that its main goal is to “safeguard the overall blockchain industry and crypto market.

Adding it intends to “prevent panic trading caused by financial crises, and mitigate severe and long-term economic downturns.”

Founded in September 2017 by H.E. Justin Sun, the TRX network hosts the largest circulating supply of USD Tether stablecoin across the globe, overtaking USDT on Ethereum since April 2021. The network completed full decentralization in December 2021 and is now a community-governed DAO.

Tron’s stablecoin project launched

Most recently, the algorithmic stable coin USDD was announced on the TRON blockchain, backed by the first-ever crypto reserve for the blockchain industry – TRON DAO Reserve, marking its’s official entry into decentralized stablecoins.

Apart from that, the DAO Reserve plays the role of a lender of last resort to market participants and maintains reserve assets of various blockchains and blockchain-powered financial institutions. It also manages the permissions of USDD as its early custodian.

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On May 5, Tron’s algorithmic stable coin USDD went live and so far, the fiat-pegged token has been listed on a number of decentralized finance [DeFi] protocols.

Two days later, the DAO Reserve announced it has bought 504.6 million TRX to fuel the algorithmic stablecoin.

The project has a number of partners now and USDD is listed on Pancakeswap, Kyberswap, Sunswap, Sun.io, Curve Finance, Uniswap, and Ellipsis.

Tron’s USD stable coin runs in a similar fashion to that of Terra’s UST mechanism, which is backed with Bitcoin and TRX cryptocurrencies. But with Terra’s recent fall from grace and the broken dollar peg spooking the broader market sentiments, it might not look feasible of keeping a stable peg to the dollar.

Previously, The TRON DAO Reserve has announced Alameda Research as the first Member and Whitelisted Institution to mint Decentralized USD [USDD], a fully decentralized stablecoin supported by mathematics and algorithms. 

Jill Gunter weighs in on the battle between old blockchains and new protocols

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Leading crypto investor Jill Gunter has shared her view on the fierce competition between multiple established blockchains and the arrival of several new protocols.

Gunter’s exposure to crypto began in 2011 during her stint at Goldman Sachs as a derivatives trader. Then she started research on blockchain protocols and worked as a VC at Slow Ventures before co-founding Espresso Systems.

In a recent podcast, Gunter spoke about the three distinct phases of development within the crypto industry that have led it to this moment of heated competition.

The first phase according to Gunter is the era of altcoins. This period was marked by the entry of protocols like Litecoin, Dogecoin, and ZCash, when developers sought to make improvements to the Bitcoin protocol such as changing the block size to increase the throughput of the system, she explained.

“What you came out with was a lot of blockchains and a lot of tokens that had a lot of the same properties as Bitcoin, but changed the feature set,” Gunter said.

The next phase, the entrepreneur claims came with the creation of Ethereum in 2015.

Finally, the modern era of layer-one blockchains began as developers tried to tweak the feature sets of programmable blockchains to address some of the issues with Ethereum that exist today, she said

“Alternative blockchains have not been fully put to the test like Ethereum”-Jill Gunter

Pointing to Ethereum’s high transaction and gas fees as bottlenecks that have left users frustrated. the co-founder then cited the recent Yuga Labs’ metaverse land sale fiasco when people trying to buy NFTs were faced with exorbitant gas fees and failed transactions because of the popularity of the drop.

While alternative blockchains such as Solana and Avalanche offer lower costs and can process transactions much faster than Ethereum, Gunter said these other chains have not been “fully put to the test that Ethereum has been” because they haven’t had to process as many users at once.

What’s more, these newer chains have all “centralized something in some way,” Gunter stated.

Adding that all the layer-one projects out there are “making the right noises,” but have yet to be put to the test by users.

Argentina’s Banking Giant Welcomes Crypto Trading

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Argentina’s largest private bank Banco Galicia with a market cap of nearly $1.3 billion, has finally added the option to trade cryptocurrencies on its platform. As per a Monday announcement, the financial firm will allow users to buy and sell Bitcoin [BTC], Ether [ETH], USDC, and XRP.

Banco Galicia has collaborated with Lirium, a Liechtenstein-based crypto product for digital wallets and mobile banking apps.

Sources also revealed that for the time being it is offering users the ability to buy and sell crypto, but not allowing them to withdraw or send crypto, Lirium COO Martin Kopacz said, adding that the bank also offers a custody feature.

Banco Galicia plans to launch the service to all of its customers by mid-May, Kopacz noted.

Stakeholders lending support to Argentina’s biggest crypto development

In order to facilitate crypto trading and custody service, Lirium has partnered with OSL, a Hong Kong-based digital asset trading platform that began operating in Latin America last October.

Lirium is also working with four Argentinian financial institutions that plan to unveil a crypto trading service, Kopacz said, without disclosing dates. Apart from that, Lirium is working on similar integrations in Brazil and Mexico, according to Kopacz.

Reasons behind Argentina’s exponential crypto growth

In frontier markets like Argentina, cryptocurrency has skyrocketed. The nation marred by an unstable financial system and strong government intervention in the country’s economy has driven Argentines to seek solace in digital assets, according to a new report from the BBC.

The highly volatile Argentine peso, the country’s national currency, has been subjected to a range of financial controls that make the everyday citizens’ basic life essentials like buying and investing with the currency, increasingly difficult.

Amid this chaos and uncertainty, cryptocurrency has enjoyed a steady boon. Data from Chainalysis showed that Argentines earned $1.86 billion in cryptocurrency in 2021.

So far, the government has taken a relaxed attitude to the cryptocurrency boom. Recently it rolled out a so-called “innovation hub” to bolster fintech and cryptocurrency startups in a regulated manner.

The latest addition by the country’s largest bank to allow crypto is certainly a good start towards encouraging user adoption.

Here’s What Crypto Analysts Have To Say On Federal Reserve’s Next Move

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The crypto market-wide correction in Q2 is set to change as investors are fervently waiting for Federal Reserve’s action at next week’s meeting. As Santiment pointed out, price volatility is expected to continue over the next few days.

In particular, Bitcoin’s price has shed nearly 40% from its peak of almost $70,000 per BTC late last year. Ethereum too is down by nearly half.

Other major coins like Binance’s BNB-2.7%, Ripple’s XRP -4.9%, Solana, Cardano, Terra’s luna, and Avalanche have all fared poorly, erasing $1.2 trillion from the combined crypto market in a matter of months.

Experts attribute its correlation to other risk assets, which as a whole have reacted in tandem to war in Ukraine, disruption in the supply chain owing to Covid cases surge in China, current interest rate hikes, and future balance sheets machinations by the Federal Reserve.

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Here's What Crypto Analysts Have To Say On Federal Reserve's Next Move 3

Joe Haggenmiller, head of markets at leading crypto finance company XBTO Group says “Macro uncertainty has driven all risk-on assets downwards over the last few months, including bitcoin.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve came with a massive stimulus program doubling its balance sheet double, and interest rates fell to an all-time low. As a result, markets were flooded with liquidity in a bid to offset the economic damage of Covid-19 and lockdowns.

The Crypto market might recover if Fed adopts a less aggressive stance

After the pandemic showed signs of receding, inflation reached unprecedented levels causing the Fed to reverse its earlier policy.

Recently, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell signaled a half percentage point interest rate hike for the next week’s meeting. Due to this, the market is braced for the central bank to begin reducing its huge $9 trillion asset portfolio as it fights rising inflation.

But some feel the central bank might become less hawkish to avoid a recession-like scenario. Marcus Sotiriou, an analyst at the U.K.-based digital asset broker GlobalBlock said, “This is bullish for risk assets like bitcoin and equities in my opinion.”

Nonetheless, Bitcoin, crypto, and stock market traders are carefully watching for any telltale signs that the Fed might divert from its move when it meets this week.

Elon Musk has no plans to sell BTC, ETH, and DOGE

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Tesla and SpaceX pioneer Elon Musk said that he won’t sell his Bitcoin, Ether, and Dogecoin while advising his followers to hold ‘physical things’ like homes and stocks amid high inflation. Musk initially tweeted asking for opinions on the inflation rate which generated a huge response and raked roughly 128k likes at the time of this post.

In a series of tweets, discussing inflation, Musk said: “As a general principle, for those looking for advice from this thread, it is generally better to own physical things like a home or stock in companies you think make good products than dollars when inflation is high.”

He added: “I still own & won’t sell my Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Doge.”

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 14, 2022

In just a few minutes after the tweet, the value of DOGE briefly surged by 6.5%, the highest in 4 days at $0.119. The price has since retraced by almost 6% and is trading at $0.1132, press time.

Elon Musk sees significant recent inflation pressure

The billionaire entrepreneur is a big advocate of cryptocurrencies and an avid dogecoin supporter. While discussing the merits of crypto with leading figures from the tech industry, Elon Musk tweeted, “Tesla and SpaceX were “seeing significant recent inflation pressure in raw materials & logistics.”

For the record, inflation in the US hit 7.9% year-on-year in February, its highest since 1982, according to data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine as well as high inflation in the U.S. and Europe has already become a real threat to the capital of tens of thousands of private investors around the world.

Many investors are looking for ways to protect their savings from inflation using cryptocurrencies. Some however are skeptical. Chad Steinglass, head of trading at CrossTower termed crypto more like a speculative asset, rather than a defensive one.

Bitcoin- A digital gold?

That said, volatility is nothing new in the world of digital currency. Even the most stable cryptocurrencies, like BTC and ETH, can rise and fall by tens of percent within a day. In the longer term, this trend will develop which will not only increase the price of Bitcoin but also result in a gradual decrease in its volatility.

Jeff Mei, director of global strategy at digital asset platform Huobi Global believes that Bitcoin is a great hedge against inflation because there is only 21 million Bitcoin available once they’re all mined.

94,643.29 Stolen BTC from 2016 Bitfinex hack moved

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According to the reports by Whale alert, large amounts of BTC, which were stolen during the 2016 Bitfinex hack, started moving to an unknown wallet. The hackers carried out the first transaction on (Tue, 01 Feb 2022 04:14:24 UTC). Initially, they moved 1 BTC to the anonymous wallet. As of now, 26 transactions have been carried out on the anonymous wallet. The wallet holds 94643.29 BTC at the time of writing.

Whale alerts is a transparent platform for tracking and analyzing millions of transactions every day. They reported the incident on Twitter, providing the details of the move.

History of the 2016 Bitfinex BTC hack

In August 2016, almost 120,000 bitcoins – now worth roughly $4.6 billion – were stolen from the famous crypto exchange Bitfinex. The hackers may have felt that the challenging portion of their crime was over. However, barely 21 percent of the stolen bitcoins have been transferred after five years, and just 4 percent have been laundered or swapped.

The 119,756 bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex were first transmitted to a single wallet, and 79 percent of them remain there to this day. After a rush of transactions in early 2017, there were very few outflows from the wallet until 2020, when there was a significant rise in activity. In April 2021, 12,241 BTC of the stolen assets were relocated, having a value at the time of $774 million. This rise was presumably spurred by the surging Bitcoin price, which rose more than 700 percent during the prior year.

Elliptic said the hackers laundered the money through darknet markets like Hydra and privacy-focused Wasabi wallet. These marketplaces provide cash-out services with drugs, hacking equipment, and bogus IDs. These allow Bitcoin to be exchanged into gift cards, prepaid debit cards, or actual cash. Software wallets like Wasabi assist in avoiding blockchain tracing, employing a kind of transaction known as a “coinjoin”. It is estimated that over 13 percent of the profits of crime in bitcoin are laundered using private wallets.

The inability of the hackers to move the fund tells a story about the crypto industry’s maturation and how law enforcement capabilities, regulation, and blockchain analytics have combined to make crypto crimes extremely difficult. But to date, they were unable to trace back to the hackers who committed this monstrous loot.

DFINITY foundation inches closer for direct integration of ICP with BTC

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The DFINITY Foundation announced that the team focusing on implementing the direct integration of its native Internet Computer [ICP] with Bitcoin [BTC] has completed its first phase to unlock smart contracts on the BTC network. Announcing via Twitter, the foundation quoted a line from Vitalik Buterin’s “future will be multi-chain, but it will NOT be cross-chain..” asserting that ‘Direct integration is next-level cryptography and R&D called it.’

Through a series of tweets, DFINITY mentioned that in order for both networks to ‘talk to one another,’ an ICP canister smart contract needs an ECDSA public key and to sign in a secure way and submit the transaction to BTC.

The announcement of the integration of Internet Computer and Bitcoin was first made on September 2021 through a press release that claimed will facilitate smart contracts to directly operate on bitcoin balances for the first time. A community vote was initiated on September 15 and approved on September 17 with a 96.55% consensus.

As per the blog post,

The Internet Computer protocol will be able to securely generate the ECDSA signatures involved in bitcoin transactions on behalf of smart contracts, using chain key cryptography [after the Taproot Bitcoin upgrade in November, Schnorr signatures will also be created]. Meanwhile, Internet Computer network nodes will directly consume Bitcoin blocks, to ensure that balance information is always available to smart contracts.

DFINITY Foundation extensive web of developers

The Internet Computer network was launched by the not-for-profit DFINITY Foundation based in Zürich and is joined by many community contributors. Project R&D is pursued by a team that consists of more than 200 people that includes many leading cryptographers and computer science researchers and engineers. The project is the result of a multi-year R&D effort, which concluded in the launch of the Internet Computer network’s Genesis on the 10th of May 2021.

Two weeks ago, Dfinity’s Internet Computer connected Ethereum Bridge. Dubbed as Terabithia, the bridge enables cross-chain contract communication, asset mirroring, and transfers across different blockchains and is built on a forked version of the Ethereum scaling tool StarkWare.

Bitcoin [BTC] is at the exact same price it was a year ago- Expert

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Bitcoin [BTC] has kickstarted the new year on a choppy session amidst a slew of developments. These include the US Federal Reserve’s December rolling out minutes signaling the possibility of an interest rate hike. Along with that, the sporadic Internet shutdowns in Kazakhstan have triggered many panic sell-offs. On the price front, BTC is down by 16% over the last 30 days and has shed more than 38% from its previous ATH on November 2021.

The above events prompted numerous predictions of the asset’s possible trajectory among crypto experts. One of them is leading on-chain analyst Matthew Hyland who tweeted his observation stating that Bitcoin [BTC]’s current price matches exactly what it was one year ago. In a quick run down, on January 7, 2021, BTC’s price reached $40K for the first time in history. By mid-May, the asset’s price made a new record when it touched the $66K zone for the first time but shortly after, slipped below that region.

After five months, Bitcoin’s price continued plunging below the $40K zone around September 21, 2021, prompting crypto advocates to claim that the price top was not in yet. The prediction proved correct as, after 50 days, the price of the king coin hit a new peak at $69K on November 10, last year. However, crypto proponents still believe that the bull cycle is not yet over, and anticipate one more parabolic uptrend in the near future.

Bitcoin price poise for a rebound?

Creator of Bitcoin Index [CBBI] Colin, who happens to host a Youtube channel name, “Colin Talks Crypto” believes that the market cycle has been lengthened. The Youtuber on January 5 tweeted with the caption saying that “Because of the apparent lengthening cycle of this bull run, I now think it is more likely for us to see a $300,000 bitcoin price than a mere $100,000 bitcoin price.” The very same day, Colin added:

I’m happy that the bitcoin price is crashing— not because I like the price to go down, but because it means the upside surge is sooner to come. It’s like, ‘let’s get this crash over with so we can move into more bullish territory!

Paraguay’s Bitcoin [BTC] Bill Targets Mining and Trading

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A highly anticipated bill seeking to regulate mining and trading in Bitcoin [BTC] and other crypto-assets in Paraguay finally gets the green signal from the country’s Senate as per a recent announcement. Revealing more about the same, Senator Fernando Silva Facetti, one of the co-authors of the bill, said on his official Twitter handle that the bill will be debated in Paraguay’s Chamber of Deputies in the year 2022.

According to the bill, the Industry and Commerce Secretariat will be overseeing crypto mining in the country, with the help of the Anti-Money Laundering Office and the National Securities Commission. In addition to that, the National Electricity Administration will be involved in the activity’s regulation. Interestingly, the cost of electricity in the South American nation is the lowest in the region costing a mere $0.05 per kilowatt-hour, according to Paraguayan Congressman Carlitos Rejala, who further added that nearly 100 percent of energy output originates from hydroelectric sources.

Earlier in July this year, in an interview with a leading media firm, Rejala gave an insight into the draft bill that was released then. The bill hinted at stronger regulatory control from the country’s regulators in terms of bitcoin mining, as well as providing safety to investors from enterprises that offer bitcoin services.

During that time, Rejala said,

“With this we want to welcome the innovation of cryptocurrencies in Paraguay to the world. This is the result of a very strong and arduous teamwork of many experts in the field, both local and foreign.”

Bitcoin nearing its end?

With BTC price has been laying low, academic Eswar Prasad of Cornell University went on to predict an apocalyptic picture of the king coin’s survivability in the near future. Emphasizing that ” bitcoin is not serving well as a medium of exchange” owing to its high volatility and is environmentally destructive”, eventually leading users to look for other crypto-assets with enhanced use cases.

Well, not all is doom and gloom, in a recent survey conducted by CNBC revealed that a staggering 83% of millennial millionaires own cryptocurrencies and that they’re planning to add more in 2022 despite the ongoing price drawdown in the crypto market.

Bitcoin [BTC] metric signals underbought condition for the first time in 5 weeks

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Bitcoin [BTC] price action has been in consolidating for the week. However, the king coin’s 30 day Market Value to its Realized value [MVRV] reading has recorded a clear drop into the negative territory for the very first time since September 30 this year. The metric which measures the average returns of investors indicated that the flagship crypto asset has fallen into the underbought zone in a span of 5 weeks, propelling new hope for bullish investors. Shedding further details, prominent on-chain market intelligence platform, Santiment observed,

Bitcoin’s 30-day MVRV, measuring the returns of 30-day trading addresses, indicates that it’s crept into negative territory for the first time since September 30th. For bulls, this is a great sign, indicating a mild signal of $BTC being underbought.

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MVRV is the metric that depicts the ratio of Bitcoin‘s market value to its realized value. A reading above 3.7 indicates massive selloffs in the event of the crypto asset’s price topping out. On the other hand, an MVRV below 1 signals increasing buying pressure among traders in anticipation of BTC bottoming out. Currently, the reading stands a little below 1 which means there is further upside potential for the crypto asset’s price movement.

In short, Bitcoin is currently in the underbought territory but more and more investors are rushing in to expand their position. Many market speculators believe that it could be primed for another bull run, hence trimming their decade-long allocation and adding it, BTC may be the way to go. Many institutional players have resorted to trimming their Gold positions to rake in more Bitcoin. One such is Jefferies’ Chris Wood.

Investors rush towards Bitcoin [BTC] leaving yellow metal behind

Christopher Wood, who leads the Equity Strategy division at Jefferies, has recently added another 5% weightage to his Bitcoin portfolio along with the existing five percentage allocation initiated in December last year. With the latest addition, Wood has increased the total share of BTC to 10% by cutting down his gold allocation by 5%.

In his weekly analysis, Wood said he has not yet given up on gold but added that Bitcoin is gradually replacing the yellow metal as a store of value and warned that ignoring reality would be risky for ‘aging gold bugs’. He, however, is yet to add Ethereum to the pension fund portfolio because he believes that the altcoin is not a store of value but has the potential to surpass Bitcoin in the near future.

In addition to that, he also said that the cryptocurrency industry has slowly started to gain traction in the conventional financial ecosystem and that banks along with other legacy financial establishments should focus on working together and capitalize on the burgeoning blockchain technology rather than adopting a “wait and watch” approach and be disrupted by it.