Coinbase is exploring listing on the US stock market, and will host its first-ever investor day in August. If the SEC approves Coinbase’s plans, it could go public via direct listing as early as this year. No formal declaration of the intent to go public has yet been made. Coinbase’s value was estimated at $8 billion in 2018.
The CENTRE Consortium, a collaboration between US crypto exchanges Coinbase and Circle, has frozen $100,000 of its stablecoin, USDC through blacklisting an address. When an address is blacklisted, it can no longer receive or send coins. The move was made in compliance with law enforcement.
The expanding DeFi industry based on Ethereum hit a new milestone of $2 billion in locked ETH. The value of this market has grown by 100% over the past month. The Compound, Maker, and Synthetix protocols currently account for roughly three quarters of the space’s value.
Electrum, a Bitcoin light wallet we frequently recommend for its reliability and convenience, added support for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Launched in 2011, Electrum is now the oldest Bitcoin wallet to support Lightning. It’s available for Windows, Linux, OS X, and Android systems.
Venezuela’s armed forces seized 315 Bitcoin Antminer S9 ASIC miners. Assuming the S9s are the latest model, their replacement cost from Bitmain is close to $30,000. The devices were seized for operating without a license from the country’s superintendent of cryptocurrency.
Before we conclude, this week’s “Bitcoin quick question” is what is Ethereum 2.0 and what are the updates it brings?
Ethereum 2.0 is to become the new, improved version of Ethereum. Ethereum has been confronting severe scalability problems that have led to network overload, high transaction fees and an exodus of developers.
Therefore, the remaining Ethereum developer community decided to switch from Proof of Work, which is the current network protocol, to Proof of Stake, and to implement a technique called Sharding.
The combination of proof of stake and sharding is meant to bring higher scalability and energy efficiency capabilities to Ethereum 2.0, but imposes potential risks of centralization and security.
Despite the hype, Ethereum 2.0 will be released gradually over the next 2-3 years, with Phase 0 set to roll out very soon. It will surely be exciting to follow. If you want to learn more about Ethereum 2.0, visit the link in the description below.
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That’s what’s happened this week in Bitcoin. See you next week.