Blockchain

Tuesday Trades: NVIDIA to Re-Enter Crypto Mining Market?

Published

2 months ago

January 19, 2021

Good morning. Today, NVIDIA considers re-entering the Bitcoin mining market. Meanwhile Joe Biden officially announces Gary Gensler as his pick as the next chairman of U.S. SEC.

Welcome to Tuesday Trades, part of our new series: BitPinas Daily. We will look at the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum and the major cryptocurrencies. Crypto is global, but sometimes news that matters happens while we sleep. So we bring to you what’s happening in our space here and abroad.

Market Price as of January 19, 2021:

Bitcoin	$36,598.11	+2.39%
Ethereum	$1,253.91	+2.00%
Tether	$1.00	+2.04%
Polkadot	$16.41	-3.13%
XRP	$0.284455	+2.67%
SLP	$0.015	+25%

Bitcoin closed January 18, 2021, at $36,598.11 per BTC. We’re up 3.1% in the last 7 days and up 26% since the year began. This is 12% below the previous all-time high of $41,940, which was hit on Jan. 8, 2021.

Bitcoin’s market capitalization stands today at $684,350,016,810 which is 64.99% of the entire cryptocurrency market. The entire crypto market, by the way, now has a market cap of $1,048,327,289,415 (+1.4%).

On the table above, there’s the cryptocurrency SLP. If you wonder what that is, check out this article: Playing Axie Infinity vs Minimum Basic Salary in the Philippines.

Table of Contents.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA considers re-entering bitcoin mining market

NVIDIA is a company and brand especially popular in the video game market for making graphics processing units. During the 2017 crypto boom, NVIDIA’s rigs were of course extremely popular and profitable but every quarter, the company would report that its gaming segment continued to grow and that its cryptocurrency-related revenue remained small.

However, the subsequent market crash hurt the company A LOT and NVIDIA forecasted a significant decline in revenue, which caused the investors to file a case against NVIDIA for misleading them about how much the company relied on its crypto-related business. For them, it made no sense that there would be a significant decline in company revenue if quarter after quarter NVIDIA would report that their crypto business are just a small portion of their revenue.

The legal battle between NVIDIA and these investors continues until now.

Any way, in a recent statement to shareholders, the company’s Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said if crypto demand continues to increase, they may revisit this segment and restart their CMP product line — think NVIDIA’s product without all the video elements and only capable of doing one thing – validating crypto transactions on the blockchain to earn crypto.

“If crypto demand begins or if we see a meaningful amount, we can also use that opportunity to restart the CMP product line to address ongoing mining demand,” Kress said in a statement.

“Decompose”

Coinbase will decompose its application server in wake of recent outage

“Coinbase to decompose its application server” is a really weird headline.

— Dave Van de Walle (@Area224) January 18, 2021

Coinbase has been hit by outages in recent weeks. Actually, it almost always crashes whenever the price of bitcoin reaches particular milestones. It always happens that it’s now a meme.

Last week, the Coinbase team said it is going to decompose its application server so that it would have different scaling profiles for the functions that its API serves. “Thus, if one surface is affected somehow, it will only affect the APIs or functionality that the particular surface is responsible for, instead of taking down the entire system,” Saniya More reported for The Block.

New U.S. SEC Head

Joe Biden appoints Gary Gensler

Gary Gensler, a professor at MIT and former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has officially been announced by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden to chair the powerful commission formerly led by Jay Clayton.

We have an entire column dedicated to Gary Gensler in this article on what his appointment would mean for the cryptocurrency industry as a whole.

Congrats to Gary Gensler! We’re ready to work with SEC leadership and the broader Biden administration to chart a path forward for blockchain and crypto innovation in the US. https://t.co/EEloq4lwrG

— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) January 18, 2021

Case in point, Brad Garlinghouse, head of Ripple, a company that owns a sizable amount of XRP, said in previous interviews that he expects the Biden administration to be open-minded about cryptocurrencies.

Before Clayton resigned, he did a power move. In his last day of office, he unveiled that the U.S. SEC has charged Ripple of illegal (and continued) sale of securities (XRP coins).

Gary Gensler is reportedly the new SEC Chairman.

Want to get a sense of how he thinks about crypto?

Go read his 28 pages of testimony from 2018.

TL;DR: regulate it the RIGHT way and it could be transformative. pic.twitter.com/DkcZrPFicu

— Nathaniel Whittemore (@nlw) January 13, 2021

While Gensler is very knowledgeable on blockchain and cryptocurrencies (he even teaches an online crypto course,) analysts expect him to be in favor of tougher regulation. I assume Ripple and everyone else in this game, including Coinbase, which is waiting SEC approval to go public, will be looking forward and planning ahead with regards to when Gensler finally takes the chair.

Institutional Adoption

Ruffer: We are in the foothills of institutional adoption for Bitcoin

According to institutional firm Ruffer Investment Company, which made headlines last year for putting $74 million into bitcoin, that they put up a portion of their money into digital currency is just a usual day at work for them because they have a history of using “unconventional protections.” Bitcoin, for Ruffer, is an unconventional protection during prolonged periods of low interest rates, Ryan Weeks reported on The Block.

Ruffer thinks they are relatively early into this, thus they are “at the foothills of a long trend of institutional adoption and financialisation of bitcoin.”

Of course, Ruffer said this is a bet and they could be wrong.

“As we move through the process of normalisation, regulation, and institutionalisation, the compression of this premium can have a dramatic effect on the price. If we are wrong, bitcoin will return to the shadows and we will lose money – this explains why we have kept the position size small but meaningful.”

#CryptoPH

If you are a crypto company or project in the Philippines or in the Filipino diaspora, let us know your story.

What else is happening

Bitcoin struggles to recover after biggest weekly price loss since September
Former Canadian Prime Minister lists bitcoin as possible future reserve currency
CoinShares is starting an exchange-traded bitcoin product
Crypto exchange Livecoin closes after alleged hack
Pantera Capital: This rally looks different than 2017
#23.94 billion total value locked in DeFi

This article is published on BitPinas: Tuesday Trades: NVIDIA to Re-Enter Crypto Mining Market?

Source: https://bitpinas.com/cryptocurrency/tuesday-trades-nvidia-to-re-enter-crypto-mining-market/

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Blockchain

Ethereum EIP-1559 Targeting Gas Fee Challenges to be Implemented in July

Published

3 hours ago

March 7, 2021

Republished by Plato

The contentious Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, will be included in its codebase in July this year. This became clear during the All Core Developers call today.

EIP 1559: What Does it Mean for Fees?

Ethereum’s Improvement Proposal 1559 is aimed at improving the overall Ethereum’s user experience when it comes to transaction fees.

Typically, a user would have to send a gas fee to a miner for their transaction to be included in a block. What EIP-1559 proposes, however, is to send that gas fee to the network itself. Called basefee, this is a sort of a “burn” and there would only be an optional tip that’s paid to the miners. The burnt fee would be set algorithmically, supposedly improving the UX.

The proposal was originally submitted by Eric Conner and its summary provides an overall outlook at what it attempts to achieve:

A transaction pricing mechanism that includes fixed-per-block network fee that is burned and dynamically expands/contracts block sizes to deal with transient congestion.

During today’s All Core Developers call, it was decided that it will be included in the so-called London hard fork coming this July.

Some Miners Disagree

Despite the potential improvements on the entire network that could come with EIP-1559, some of the largest Ethereum mining pools have openly displayed division on where they stand.

F2Pool, the third-largest ETH mining pool with over 10% hashrate share, shared a post, in which it supported the initiative, claiming that it would ultimately have a positive impact.

The publication says that “the general community along with core developers are siding with evolving Ethereum to include EIP-1559. It is important to side with the users and core contributors.”

F2Pool’s statement also argued that the potential EIP-1559 implementation could be factored in ETH’s price, which is more than 100% from the start of the year.

In contrast, though, the largest mining pool with nearly 25% share of the hashrate, Sparkpool, didn’t feel the same way about the integration as it could reduce the profits. They took it to Twitter to emphatically assert that the mining pool “opposes EIP-1559.”

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Source: https://cryptopotato.com/ethereum-eip-1559-targeting-gas-fee-challenges-to-be-implemented-in-july/

Blockchain

Uniswap, Crypto.com Coin, Compound Price Analysis: 07 March

Published

4 hours ago

March 7, 2021

Republished by Plato

Uniswap broke out past the $29.3 level of resistance, while Crypto.com Coin was in a phase of consolidation. Compound bounced off the $450 level of support to touch $500 but could see a pullback to $470.

Uniswap [UNI]

Uniswap, Crypto.com Coin, Compound Price Analysis: 07 March

Source: UNI/USDT on TradingView

UNI broke out and went past the $29 area of resistance, where the 23.6% retracement level and the $27.3 level of resistance lay. The upward move had extraordinary volume as UNI touched $31.54 but some selling pressure was seen in the subsequent trading session.

The Doji candle represented short-term exhaustion from the bulls, and the breakout could see UNI pullback to test the $29.3 level to confirm its flip from resistance to support.

The MACD showed strong bullish momentum behind UNI. Bearish divergence on the hourly chart between momentum (MACD) and the price could be seen in the coming hours, which would likely see UNI pullback to $29.4. This can be used to enter long positions, with a stop-loss just at $28.7.

Crypto.com Coin [CRO]

Source: CRO/USDT on TradingView

The Bollinger bands showed that CRO was in a phase of consolidation at and around its 38.2% retracement level at $0.152. The RSI moved back above neutral 50 to indicate that momentum was swaying towards the bulls’ side.

The defense of the 50% retracement level at $0.127 and the immediate bounce-off was a show of strength from bulls – the $0.146-$0.152 region can be used to accumulate CRO in expectation of another move upwards. The $0.173 and $0.189 levels are levels of resistance to watch.

Compound [COMP]

Source: COMP/USDT on TradingView

Compound saw a strong bounce-off at the $450 mark which represents a 23.6% retracement for COMP’s move from $205 to $573. At the time of writing, COMP faced some resistance at the $500 area.

Moreover, the Awesome Oscillator on the hourly chart displayed a bearish twin peak set up and gave a sell signal. This development, followed by the AO registering bearish bars on its histogram, is likely to see the price dip to $470. Bulls would need to show some strength at $470, or bears can drive the prices lower to $450 once more.

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Source: https://ambcrypto.com/uniswap-crypto-com-coin-compound-price-analysis-07-march

Blockchain

Pakistan: Arrests made in Bitcoin extortion case

Published

5 hours ago

March 7, 2021

Republished by Plato

The world of finance has never been able to protect itself from the fraudulent activities going around in the world. The cryptocurrency market, which itself is a growing space has also had its fair share of such fraudulent activity being associated with it. However, unlike traditional finance, regulators have been enforced stringent measures when it comes to tackling such offenses.

A recent case has been reported in Pakistan, where the police have arrested several people part of the country’s first extortion case via crypto. According to reports, the police arrested the owner of an outhouse where the complainants, two foreign nationals, were held hostage along with two other suspects.

One of the suspects was identified as Rana Irfan Mahmood and a case has been registered against him and an unidentified accomplice. The hostages were Swiss national Maria Spari and German citizen Stephen [last name remains unknown] who were kidnapped by three men in police uniform along with another person.

After threatening the hostages with a fake drug smuggling case, the victims paid 6,300 euros in cash and made an online transfer of 1.8 Bitcoin which was close to $9k. The suspects made a fake video demanding an additional Rs 300 million [$1.91 million].

According to SSP Investigation Abdul Ghaffar Qaisrani, the police have managed to recover the amount paid to the facilitator apart from the Bitcoin. The crypto has already been transferred to another account and the team was taking assistance from the intelligence agencies to recover it.

Although the regulators in Pakistan have been taking note of Bitcoin and crypto, illicit activities have been a growing concern in the region. In November 2020, the Central bank clarified that it was not banning crypto, contrary to the prevailing fear within many in the crypto-community.

In fact, Pakistan’s Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] published a paper on the regulation of cryptocurrency trading platforms. This paper outlined the regulatory approach to crypto and included recommendations given by the Financial Action Task Force [FATF], as well as regulations presented by Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the U.S.

However, the police in the country have warned users and the government about the rising cases of ransom and extortion related to crypto. Bitcoin has been at the center of these cases and such fraud activities will only instill fear with the lack of regulation among crypto users in the region.

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