Summing up the past week, we recall the new bitcoin price record, the upcoming launch of Ethereum 2.0, new mysteries around the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, and other key events.
The market rallied with the rise of bitcoin to $19 000
On Monday, November 23, Ethereum broke the $600 level. The last time the coin was traded at these levels was in June 2018. The next day, a new annual maximum was set by bitcoin — its quotes rose above $19,000, and its capitalization exceeded $350 billion.
Some other altcoins showed equally impressive growth, especially XRP and Stellar. The XRP price updated a two-year high above $0.70, while the XLM rate exceeded $0.22.
The market activity led to a revival in the derivatives market — open interest in options for bitcoin and Ethereum updated the historical maximum at $4.5 billion, and a day later exceeded $5 billion. The record trading volume in 2020 was also recorded on spot platforms — the indicator was ahead of the values of the March collapse of bitcoin.
Against the activity background, the number of large investors with more than 1000 BTC concentrated on their addresses has updated the historical maximum, approaching 2000.
A few days later, the first cryptocurrency encountered resistance. As a result, on November 26, the price collapsed by $3,000, at the moment reaching $16,200. The total volume of liquidations on futures reached $1.3 billion. Following the fall of bitcoin, the price of Ethereum at the moment fell below $500.
Nevertheless, on Saturday, the market growth resumed: bitcoin returned to above $18,000, Ethereum is trading above $550.
The required amount was deposited to the Ethereum 2.0 Deposit contract.
On Tuesday, November 24, the Deposit contract’s balance, which allows you to transfer ETH from the existing network to ETH2, confirming the authority of stakes, exceeded the required threshold of 524,288 ETH and 16,384 validators. This means that the launch of the zero stage of Ethereum 2.0 will take place as planned on December 1.
Over the weekend, the Deposit contract’s balance exceeded 50% of the required amount, after which the volume of deposits began to grow at an accelerated pace. The Celsius Network cryptocurrency lending service contributed the last 25,000 ETH.
On Sunday, November 29, the contract balance exceeded 800,000 ETH, and the number of validators exceeded 26,000.
Note that on the eve of the launch of the zero stage of Eth2, the complexity of mining the second-largest cryptocurrency by capitalization and its total computing power updated historical highs.
The Ethereum Classic network hosted the Thanos hard fork.
On Saturday, November 28, the planned Thanos hard fork took place on the Ethereum Classic network. Its goal is to increase the security of this cryptocurrency after a series of recent 51% attacks.
The Thanos update (EKIP-1099) will double the duration of the Et hash (Etc host) epoch from 30,000 to 60,000 blocks, effectively reducing the size of the directed acyclic graph [DAG]. This will allow miners with 3GB and 4Gb GPUs to resume mining Ethereum Classic.
In October, the Ethereum Classic Core and Ethereum Classic Labs teams implemented the Exponential Subjective Scoring (MESS) solution in the Mordor testnet. The new finalization algorithm has increased the cost of block reorganization by almost 31 times, removing what is claimed to be a 51% motive for attacks.
Investment Company Guggenheim Partners, which manages assets worth more than $200 billion, announced its intention to send part of the portfolio to the Grayscale bitcoin-trust.
The Wall Street Company plans to invest 10% of its Macro Opportunities Fund division in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). According to various estimates, the assets of the Macro Opportunities Fund amount to about $5 billion. Investments in GBTC will thus amount to about $500 million.
Besides that:
– The Swiss subsidiary of the Russian Gazprombank Gazprombank (Switzerland) Ltd has launched a test bitcoin trading.
– VanEck management company has announced physically-backed bitcoin exchange notes (ETN) to the list of traded instruments. Trading was launched on the German exchange Xetra, which is part of Deutsche Boerse.
– MicroStrategy earned nine times more on investments in bitcoin than in 2019 — the value of the purchased cryptocurrency increased from $425 million to $735.2 million.
– Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital bitcoin funds raised $58.7 million from institutions over the year.
– Coinbase reported that the volume of institutional assets held in its custody service has grown to $20 billion.
OKEx exchange resumed withdrawal of funds
On Thursday, November 26, the OKEx exchange restored the withdrawal of funds. The service has been unavailable since October 16, when the exchange reported a loss of communication with one of the holders of private keys.
An hour after the withdrawal was resumed, 5681.79 BTC was withdrawn from OKEx. Some of the coins went to Binance, Huobi, and other exchanges.
Cryptoquant CEO Ki Yong-Ju said that the resumption of withdrawals from OKEx could hardly affect bitcoin’s fall below $17,000 since 83% of the assets withdrawn at the first stage went to non-exchange wallets.
The Trump administration was suspected of preparing a “farewell gift” for the crypto industry
This week, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shared his concerns about the plans of the administration of US President Donald Trump to tighten control over cryptocurrency users.
According to him, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin presumably plans to speed up the introduction of some new rules for local cryptocurrency wallets before the end of his term.
In his opinion, the initiative will oblige Coinbase and other financial companies to verify the owners of non-custodial wallets before withdrawing funds. The initiative will oblige Coinbase and other financial companies to verify non-custodial wallets’ owners before withdrawing funds.
As a result, users will refuse to withdraw funds to their own wallets and start turning to unregulated platforms, Armstrong suggests.
“If such measures of regulation of the cryptocurrency industry are approved, it will be a terrible legacy and will have a lasting negative impact on the United States,” he stressed.
Presumably, the head of the US Treasury in the new administration of Joe Biden will be taken by the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen. Morgan Creek Digital co-founder Anthony Pompliano called it “great news for bitcoin.”
Media called the timing of the launch of the Libra stablecoin
The Libra project team is preparing to issue a digital currency in January 2021 in a “limited format,” the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the situation.
The stablecoin will not be linked in a basket consisting of several Fiat currencies, as the original concept suggested. Instead, Libra will launch a coin backed by the US dollar in a 1:1 ratio.
It is expected that the Swiss financial market supervision authority (FINMA) will issue the appropriate permission to work as a payment service in January at the earliest.
But the European Central Bank reacted almost immediately to the news. Fabio Panetta, a member of the ECB’s Governing Council, warned that Libra users would face higher credit, market, and liquidity risks. The stablecoin issue itself risks “potential systemic consequences” and could put the fate of Fiat currencies at stake.
ForkLog Exclusives
Why is bitcoin growing? ForkLog shed light on the most likely reasons for the current growth.
We published the article “Bitcoin: an unprecedented experiment with fair distribution.” Its authors — co-founder of Digital Asset Research Lucas Nuzzi and the Coin Metrics team-found that the first cryptocurrency is evenly distributed among many users.
In the history of Satoshi Nakamoto, there is a new version and riddles
This week, details of previously unknown correspondence between bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto and the first transaction recipient, Hal Finney, became known. Three letters are dated late 2008 and early 2009.
A study was also published, according to which Satoshi Nakamoto was developing bitcoin while in London.