Bitcoin is helping secure the truthfulness of Guatemala’s election results.

Thanks to OpenTimestamps, a tool created by bitcoin developer Peter Todd a few years ago, Guatemalan tech startup Simple Proof is able to safeguard key documents about the country’s presidential elections from fraud and tampering. Todd’s tool, which leverages hash functions and the bitcoin blockchain, is able to timestamp pieces of information and make it easier to spot attempts at fraud and manipulation.

The idea of timestamping documents is fairly old. Individuals and societies have relied on this technique for centuries to indicate when a document was signed, when a cheque was written, or when someone was born. Cryptographic timestamps, however, are much newer. They take the concept of human timestamping a step further by relying on math instead of a fallible and corruptible human being. Signatures can be forged by sophisticated actors, and authorities can be subject to different incentives, making them capable of being bribed or corrupted. Also, “to err is human,” while math makes no error if the correct algorithms are used.

An example of a good algorithm is a hash function, a type of mathematical function that takes a variable sized input to output a fixed length result. This result is called the hash of that input. Hash functions are used in the bitcoin network, notably in blocks that get added to the blockchain, as well as by OpenTimestamps.

OpenTimestamps leverages hash functions to cryptographically timestamp any piece of data into the bitcoin blockchain. In this case, math is being leveraged to improve upon the use of human signatures or attestation, and the bitcoin blockchain is being used as a decentralized digital ledger to anchor that information, linking it to a block. This ensures tens of thousands of nodes in the network can all independently witness the existence of the timestamp anchor and be able to verify that indeed that hash was added to a block which was mined at a certain time.

OpenTimestamps works by hashing the information submitted by a given user and adding it to a bitcoin block with a bitcoin transaction. Since the bitcoin block’s hash is calculated leveraging all the information contained in that block, the timestamping data is necessary for the calculation of that block’s hash. In other words, the assumption with the timestamping is that the miner must’ve necessarily started with that timestamp transaction –– along with the other transactions contained in the block –– to arrive at the block’s hash. This means that the information that was timestamped must have existed prior to the creation of that bitcoin block. Since every bitcoin block has a timestamp of its own, users can check the date and time that block was mined and be able to be assured with mathematical certainty that the document existed in a point in time prior to that block’s timestamp.

On its own, this assurance isn’t that valuable. Sure, it lets someone prove that a piece of data existed prior to a given point in time, but how is this useful? Well, combined with other types of information and evidence, many things can be deduced from this simple assurance. For example, one can deduce that since that information existed before that bitcoin block, any changes to that information were done after that time if its hash is different.

The pieces of information and evidence necessary for more sophisticated conclusions need to be handled by the user because, ultimately, all that OpenTimestamps provides is the proof of inclusion of the hash of that information in that bitcoin block. Therefore, users that requested the timestamp should keep the original information in hand in case they want to prove their data matches the timestamp. Given the properties of hash functions –– the same inputs always generate the same output –– the hash will be the same if the information hasn’t been altered. Thus, it becomes quite easy to tell if any alterations have been made to the original information because the hash would be different.

Under the hood, OpenTimestamps doesn’t put the hash of each individual piece of data being timestamped into bitcoin. That could be expensive, as it would require one on-chain bitcoin transaction for each timestamp. Instead, OpenTimestamps leverages Merkle trees to compact that information as much as possible.

Similar to how you can hash a large piece of information and arrive at a fixed length hash, you can hash two hashes further and get to a single hash. Likewise, you can start with four pieces of information, hash them individually, then hash them in pairs until you’re left with only one hash. The value proposition of Merkle trees in this context is all about scaling this setup, where you have a large number of individual pieces of information and you hash them until you’re left with one hash –– the root hash. OpenTimestamps takes this root hash and adds it to bitcoin, distributing the cost of a single bitcoin transaction to each initial piece of information that was submitted for timestamping and used to construct the tree.

Users can still check that their individual hash was added, and that ultimately their data was timestamped. They can leverage the OpenTimestamps website, or go full cypherpunk and hash all the data until they reach the tree’s root hash and crosscheck with the data that’s on bitcoin.

Guatemala has a long history of corruption and fraud amid its political circles. Simple Proof was implemented in that context by ITZ DATA as an immutable backup solution for the Guatemalan Supreme Elections Tribunal (TSE) –– the highest electoral authority in the country.

"The Simple Proof solution, named Immutable Backup, leverages the OpenTimestamps protocol to record proofs of documents in a tamper-evident manner on the bitcoin blockchain," Rafael Cordón, co-founder of Simple Proof, told Bitcoin Magazine. "TSE used Simple Proof to safeguard official election documents and protect critical information from artificial intelligence and disinformation, ensuring that any tampering of documents is made evident and any citizen can independently verify the information for themselves."

Guatemala’s citizens can check any given tally sheet and verify its proof of timestamp through a dedicated web portal. Each sheet contains the sum of votes for each candidate at a voting poll. Therefore, transparency is provided to the population regarding the tally sheets that were scanned and used to count the votes, as well as when each tally sheet was timestamped.

It is important to note that this setup can’t attest whether a given tally sheet is valid or not; there is still a trust assumption towards TSE. However, it is an improvement over just taking officials for their word, as it is, for example, easier to spot outliers among all the tally sheets. Rather than being able to tell voters specific validity information for any single tally sheet, OpenTimestamps allows an overview of the entire context of the elections.

For example, it arguably shouldn’t take more than an hour after voting ends to scan a tally sheet, upload it to Simple Proof’s solution, and get it timestamped into a confirmed bitcoin block. If the majority of tally sheets fall within that hour but a few were timestamped much longer after the closing of votes, it is reasonable to assume that those outlier sheets have a much greater chance of being fraudulent than the other ones. In other words, in the event that a tally sheet was entered much after it was supposed to, the timestamps are going to tell you that it is suspicious that it took that long to timestamp the sheet after the polls closed rather than less than an hour later.

This was and still is being specially important in the context of Guatemala’s elections because of the tension there was leading up to the race, as well as the outlier candidate who ended up winning it. President-elect Bernardo Arévalo wasn’t expected to even qualify for the main race months before it took place.

Once Arévalo won the presidential election, the outcry was massive. Officials from the office of the country’s attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, raided facilities of the TSE, opening dozens of boxes of votes, per AP. The opposing party, UNE, claimed the victory was fraudulent and demanded a vote recount.

UNE posted a thread on X explaining their rationale with some alleged evidence –– including a screenshot of one tally sheet on Simple Proof’s web tool that showed it was timestamped before the polls closed.

Either in an attempt to push their narrative or by mistake, the screenshot of that tally sheet was taken on a different timezone than the country’s capital official time, leading to the one-hour difference. In this specific case, bitcoin helped ensure the claims made by UNE were false, and any citizen was able to verify it by checking the timestamp on their computer. Notably, one did –– publishing a screenshot on X rectifying that the tally sheet UNE claimed had been tampered with had actually not been timestamped too early.

While bitcoin was designed and developed solely to solve the double spend problem and achieve electronic peer-to-peer money, its network of nodes and decentralized ledger can power other interesting use cases.

In this case, it’s evident how Simple Proof played an important role in protecting key election information. Had OpenTimestamps and bitcoin not been a part of the process of securing that information in a cryptographic, public and decentralized manner, there could’ve been a much bigger outcry and tumultuous procedures to try to ensure the information hadn’t been tampered with. Doubts would most likely still persist, and in a country with a history of fragile democratic procedures, the shaking of confidence could deter the president-elect’s ability to lead the nation as its rightful new leader.

Throughout the years, I have presented the case for Bitcoin to a lot of people from a wide range of backgrounds. The list includes curious cab drivers, financial advisors, young software developers, skeptical policymakers, voiceless activists, and once even an IMF employee.

Needless to say, most of these attempts ended up falling on deaf ears. So I started asking myself “why would this person in front of me care about Bitcoin?” and immediately realized that getting a response was particularly challenging because—even among Bitcoiners—there is no common understanding of what Bitcoin is in the first place. Is it “peer-to-peer electronic cash” as Satoshi originally defined it? Or should we consider it as “digital property” as Michael Saylor suggests? Or maybe listen to Gary Gensler and define it as a commodity?

As tempting as it is to look for a common definition for Bitcoin, doing so during a time when even the most simple linguistic choices are under scrutiny makes such a venture uninspiring and, frankly, pointless.

What I decided to do instead was understand what each of those people really cared about and how Bitcoin could fit into their view of the world rather than expecting them to understand a subject they are barely interested in. As the saying goes, “If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain.”

By doing so, I realized it was unreasonable to act like Morpheus and expect my interlocutors to take a big orange pill. After all, if that approach barely worked with Neo who was “the chosen one”, why would it work with my brother-in-law or with a stranger sitting next to me on the plane?

Because I’ve known for a while that Bitcoin’s nature is multifaceted, the very idea of one single entry point to a multifaceted concept did not sound right. Depending on where one lives, social status, professional background, set of beliefs, values, and environment, there will be a different (and smaller) orange pill that will be more appropriate for each person.

More categories may emerge in the future (Jason Lowery, for example, proposes a military interpretation of Bitcoin and the recent ordinals frenzy reminded us how valuable Bitcoin’s block space can be as its own use-case), but here are the four main buckets that I have identified so far—which represent four different set of problems that Bitcoin is solving for.

In this sense, it’s more typical of a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes —Satoshi Nakamoto

The first sets of problems that Bitcoin attempts to solve originate from a financial system that is broken in its most foundational aspects. For those not understanding, the problem can be described as having a similar nature (but, of course, different magnitude) to hyperinflation in Weimar Republic and Venezuela. The constant debasement of currencies (even the “mild” 2% inflation we all know about) has a tremendous societal impact, with those who are “close to the money printer” being the only winners—a phenomenon also known as the Cantillon Effect.

Unlike fiat money and commodities, such as gold, Bitcoin’s total supply is capped, which makes it the most scarce store of value in the history of mankind and, therefore, an ideal store of value in the long term.

For all those living in the half of the world that is experiencing double-digit inflation, this is a particularly interesting moment to understand how money printing and currency debasement can affect so many aspects of their lives. In fact, people who have lived through the 70s and those living in countries such as Venezuela, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Argentina, and Turkey will be more receptive to the idea of Bitcoin as a way to preserve their purchasing power in inflationary environments.

This is arguably one of the most difficult aspects of Bitcoin to understand given the number of assumptions it requires us to challenge (e.g. “controlled inflation is good for the economy” or “fiat currencies are stable”). Yet, it’s arguably the most powerful orange pill that one could take.

Humans have invented the best financial tool in our history, and it’s an exciting time to be alive and use it — Jack Mallers

For the first time in human history, money and a payment network are integrated into one open and global system. Not only can Bitcoin serve as a store of value in the long term as explained above, but it also functions as a global medium of exchange that does not require any third party.

In a few seconds, money can be sent anywhere in the world by only paying a fraction of a cent. Compared to bank transfers, credit cards, and remittances, sending money through Bitcoin is significantly cheaper and faster.

People who don’t like bitcoin as a store of value can just use it as a payment system by converting it to the local currency at the two ends of the transaction. Why do that instead of using legacy systems? Perhaps to quickly send money during earthquakes and wars. Or to bypass remittance companies that take weeks to transfer money and charge up to 10% in fees.

The potential of Bitcoin just as a payment network extends to the most unthinkable areas. Micropayments have the potential to boost the creator economy and or solve the problems that have been haunting social networks.

It would be a dark, dark world if Bitcoin didn't exist — Alex Gladstein

The two previous perspectives address the common criticism that “Bitcoin is useless”. But another common criticism—often paired with the former even though it directly contradicts it—is the fact that (just like cars, computers, and most technologies) Bitcoin is used by criminals.

As crazy as it might sound to many, that’s a feature, not a bug. Because in those instances where it’s ethnicity, religion, sex, or political views that determine whether one is a criminal, having a financial system that cannot be weaponized by the government is one of the best insurance policies you can wish for. That is particularly true for two-thirds of the global population that lives in backsliding democracies or autocratic regimes.

Those who care about freedom and human rights should be paying very close attention to this technology. Bitcoin has already provided lifeline support for individuals in need for over a decade. Wikileaks would have not been able to expose serious violations of human rights and civil liberties without Bitcoin. Similarly, many in North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Belarus, Nigeria, and Russia also use Bitcoin as a tool to escape the control and government censorship.

As we move away from physical money and the potential for financial surveillance and censorship increases exponentially, the world will greatly benefit an additional set of checks and balances to limit the power of governments and corporations. Understanding this is very important for all those that are active in promoting individual freedom and human rights in the most authoritarian corners of the world.

It is a win-win-win for everybody. It's a win for the environment and an inarguable win for the economy — Dennis Porter

Lastly, there is a relatively small crowd of people who might be able to appreciate Bitcoin for a very different set of reasons. Bitcoin constitutes an unprecedented opportunity to build a cleaner, more resilient, and more efficient energy infrastructure. Bitcoin can mitigate the problem of intermittency—the demand/supply mismatch that occurs with renewable energy—and help with the $13B problem of congestion of the electric grid in rural areas.

Bitcoin miners can strengthen these grids and incentivize the deployment of more renewable energy by adapting to the fluctuations of power generation schedules since their rigs can be turned off at any moment without notice. Commonly referred to as “energy buyers of last resort”, Bitcoin miners are perfect for Demand Response programs. Last year, Bitcoin miners in Texas “returned up to 1,500 megawatts to the grid, enough to heat over 1.5 million small homes or keep 300 large hospitals fully operational”.

Bitcoin miners are also finding very creative ways to utilize energy that was previously wasted and many are arguing that Bitcoin is “the only available, practical and scalable technology when it comes to tackling the world’s most deadly greenhouse gas: methane.”

There’s (at least) four orange pills, and people don’t need to take them all.

One of the things I learned during my Bitcoin journey is that this is not a mono-functional technology like a washing-machine or an elevator. Because Bitcoin solves many different problems, its perceived value and utility will change significantly depending on who you talk to.

Those living in South Carolina might not care about censorship resistance or privacy as much as the local jobs that are created by a new Bitcoin company. The Turkish population might have not cared about Bitcoin as an inflation hedge (given the country’s situation, it should) during the earthquake earlier this year, but just needed a way to receive money as fast as possible. North Korean defectors like Yeonmi Park are not really interested in how Bitcoin micropayments can support artists online while they are being sold for less than $300 as sex slaves.

Listening and trying to understand who you are talking to is the most important thing you can do when presenting an idea. That is particularly true with Bitcoin, given the negative bias most people have towards it, how complex it is to understand, and how difficult it is to challenge some of the greatest assumptions that most people have.

This simple framework is an attempt to strategically identify the areas of interest of people who are new to Bitcoin and avoid overwhelming them with a big orange pill they might not be ready for.

Instead, by choosing between hard money, payment system, freedom technology, and energy buyer, I am now able to better structure conversations and elevator pitches when engaging with people and answering the usual “Uh! Tell me more about this Bitcoin thing!” question.

So go ahead, choose your orange pill and remember the most important question for Bitcoin is “why would one care about it?”

This is a guest post by Jesse Colzani. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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“The special commodity or medium that we call money has a long and interesting history. And since we are so dependent on our use of it and so much controlled and motivated by the wish to have more of it or not to lose what we have we may become irrational in thinking about it and fail to be able to reason about it like about a technology, such as radio, to be used more or less efficiently.” - John Nash

Money is a technological tool that humans developed organically out of the necessity of bargaining axioms such as time and space. Many of the financial services that exist today have risen to meet the need of an evolving market, and yet at its most reductive, the modern banking system still represents supply and demand via sellers and buyers. This remains true even when looking into the complicated circuit of the U.S. banking system, including the regional banks providing mortgages for first-time buyers, to corporate debt obligations from large private American banks, to the issuance of government bonds by the Treasury. Only by examining the monetary flow in a logical manner within our current system can we begin to present coherent alternatives to the status quo of a select few holding the special privilege as a world reserve currency debt pardoner. At the center of the circuit of the U.S. banking system sits the Federal Reserve and the Treasury — a proprietary black box chip that controls both the current (short-term and overnight interest rates) and voltage (the issuances of U.S. Treasuries, “USTs”).

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.” - Satoshi Nakamoto

The reserve asset at the bottom of the stack of the U.S. economy is not the U.S. dollar, but rather U.S. Treasuries. Offshore dollar markets such as the eurodollar have long operated under the illusion of dollar creation by these European banks without hardly touching U.S.-issued government debt. The Treasury issues debt in the form of USTs to be sold to private banks, who later create credit via dollars in their customer accounts in order to finance the budget of the U.S. government, as well as service any outstanding national debt. The idea of issuing new debt to service old debt would seem illogical, and in many ways it is, yet becomes far more conceivable with the proper understanding that not all debt is created equal. Debt, at least in the Treasury issuance example above, is demarcated by both the percentage of profit generated as yield, and the duration until said bond reaches maturity. Historically, and perhaps logically, the longer the duration (twenty years vs one year), the higher the yield (2.4% vs 1.2%, using real rates from March 2022). The most liquid denomination of government debt are short-term Treasury bills, referred to as T-bills, which are any bonds with a maturity date less than one year; generally, the yields on those bonds are most directly influenced by short-term federal funding rates. When the government wants to sell more debt, it can increase the yield on these T-bills by increasing the short-term interest rate on offer, driving yield-seeking capital back into the U.S. banking system in search of profit. When rates rise, the cost to borrow increases and these new debt instruments soak up excess dollar liquidity.

Conversely, when rates fall, the cost to borrow decreases, and thus the demand for personal debt increases. To put it simply, if rates are at or near zero, more people will take on debt due to the negligible additional economic cost of eventually paying it back. When rates are higher, and there is market-high yield to be made on simply loaning dollars to the government by purchasing government-issued securities, there is little available supply to be loaned out, and even less demand due to the high costs of borrowing. The issue with this credit-debt boom-bust cycle is that it is levered by trusted third parties, culminating with a buyer and lender of last resort at the modern Federal Reserve — who are in fact actually limited in their ability to manipulate the short end of the yield curve. The yield curve demonstrates the different yields offered by the bond market, denoted by their duration. When there is unexpected and excessive relative volatility within short-term interest rates, the yield curve can invert, meaning short-term debt now pays a higher yield than long-term bonds. If simply held to maturity, sometimes as long as 30 years, Treasury bonds will never yield a material loss, but if short-term liquidity needs strike a bank in the form of depositors withdrawing, banks are forced to sell and realize a loss.

The health and efficiency of the U.S. banking system can be measured in how volatile short-term interest rates are, the state of the yield curve, foreign and domestic interest in government-issued bonds, and the discrepancy between outstanding liabilities and reserves — be it securities or cash.

The dollar has been digitized for a long time; be it the Zelle or Venmo credits in your retail account, or the dollar balance in your checking account at Bank of America. But generally speaking, the mechanisms behind the transfer of Treasuries and other reserve assets backing these numbers on a screen have remained at the technical agility of a fax machine. The dollar may be the world reserve currency, and can be transacted via intermediaries on obvious centralized banker rails, or less obviously on Ethereum rails via ERC-20 tokens in the form of popular retail stablecoins, but the U.S. Treasuries held by these novel credit creators remain the world reserve asset. The public has generally feared the direct issuance of some form of retail CBDC (central bank digital currency) due to surveillance concerns and currency seizure from a centralized issuer, but fewer realize both the level of financial surveillance already imposed by banks, never mind the ability for these trusted third parties to censor, blacklist and even expose retail to their counter-party risk. All of these actions are made increasingly possible via the digitization of the currency with an encroaching reliance on centralized payment rails, but up until this July, the communication network for interbank asset trades has remained lossy and slow.

FedNow, slated to launch next month, serves multiple purposes, but perhaps none as important as creating a much more efficient lever for the Fed to have 365/24/7 influence on overnight banking rates, such as SOFR, effectively setting the cost of borrowing short-term liquidity between fractionalized private banks attempting to meet their depositors’ withdrawals. You have probably heard the phrase “reverse repo” once or twice, but the underlying mechanic is often misunderstood. The “repo” stands for a repurchasing agreement; essentially a contract between two entities in which Bank A, with excess dollar liquidity, agrees to lend cash to Bank B, with overnight liquidity needs, via a short-term loan collateralized by Bank B’s assets such as USTs, with the conditions that Bank B will repurchase their securities, usually the next morning (“overnight”), plus a percentage-based fee that Bank A gets to keep. A reverse repo is essentially the same behavior, except that Bank A is bond-rich, cash-poor and thus asking Bank B for dollar-denominated liquidity. This exact scenario came to fruition within the recent regional bank failures in the U.S., and the Fed created new mechanisms to backstop the liquidity needs of the depositors. In the case of the ever-growing reverse repo market, Bank B is routinely the largest American banks, and sometimes even the Fed directly. FedNow is a digital lever, made possible via the internet, for complete centralized control on the overnight rate of borrowing dollars, the necessary transferring of Treasuries between banks, and thus the reshoring of dollar-denominated activity away from the Eurodollar market, and back to the United States within the scope of the Fed and the Treasury.

“It’s not all about payments. We will have exchanges forever. We will have banks forever.” - Calle

Did you notice that at no point above were payments even mentioned? Bitcoin in its current state is not necessarily ready to replace the dollar as a global medium of exchange, which takes advantage of financial services to scale over time and space, but it is potentially poised to replace USTs as a world reserve asset and an interbanking settlement network. For Bitcoin to service the many functions of a banking system, there needs to be further tooling beyond the peer-to-peer payment networks innate to the base layer and the Lightning Network, the most discussed second layer. Paper money represents dollars as cash, a physical bearer asset for settling debt obligations, yet the majority of U.S. dollars today exist solely as credit in a user’s account balance at a trusted third party such as a bank. In stark contrast, Bitcoin itself contains zero account balances, and instead relies on a UTXO model: Non-fungible unspent transaction outputs that when signed and spent can transfer fungible satoshis, the atomic unit of bitcoin, between wallet addresses. The address balance of your wallet is an aggregation of the multiple UTXOs associated with your private key. By sharing a UTXO between two or more parties, typically in the form of Lightning channels, Layer 2 payment solutions create near-instant, probabilistically trustless settlements allowing for account balances. By taking a UTXO and creating a shared channel with a peer, you create the functions of credit and debt within the Bitcoin network. Some instances of LN even allow sub-satoshi denominations such as “msats” — a literally unrecognizable unit on the baselayer, and thus only existing as a form of credit or debt. Due to the nature of Layer 2 solutions having the ability to simulate credit and debt, these services enable a trustless iteration of yield via routing fees, and trust-minimized financial services akin to the traditional banking system. Tooling built on top of Bitcoin can create analogs to legacy loan, yield, and liquidity-sharing services. Unfortunately, a large aspect of the trustlessness of Layer 2s being able to finalize and settle back to the mainchain is an open topological network and an ever-surveilled open ledger, significantly reducing the capacity for private financial exchanges.

“Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin-backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for Bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient.” - Hal Finney

Chaumian mints were invented by cryptographer and mathematician David Chaum in a 1982 paper titled “Blind Signatures For Untraceable Payments”. Chaumian mints utilize blind signatures to represent ecash in mint-specific denominations to create near-perfect privacy within the federation. This newly found privacy is at the expense of reserve asset custody and potential economic debasement depending on both the coding of the mint instance as well as malicious actions from mint authority signatures; this is a situation nearly identical to the downsides of using a legacy financial institution. Ecash uses a similar token mechanic to bitcoin in that while a single wallet can appear to contain an aggregate account balance, in reality the ecash wallet balance is actually distributed among many iterations of common denominations of ecash tokens issued by the mint. The mint itself is completely unaware of the account which funded the initial issuance of ecash, and at redemption merely sees that it had previously validated this token via a blind signature. When using any privacy-preserving payment protocol, there are always two anonymity sets: inside and outside the protocol. While a Chaumian mint can offer near-perfect privacy when transacting within the federated mint itself, an external settlement from the mint can be noticed with a low number of user withdrawals, unassuming metadata collection, and a multitude of poor operational security choices by users. A user could generate ecash from a Chaumian mint instance via a relatively private sender-side LN payment, take the newly generated tokens and fund another outbound sender-side LN payment with zero ability for the mint to generate user account balance information, nor associated metadata with proper external privacy technique. With cheap, near instant, and perfectly private payments, if authored correctly, Chaumian mints can bridge the gaps between Layer 2 balances and even base layer UTXOs.

Chaumian mint construction types differ mainly in two ways: the federation construction itself and the ecash token denominations it issues. A federation can contain a single signature with administrative access to issuing its ecash, as well as having the ability to sign for the mint’s reserve asset when processing withdrawals. A federation can also enable multisignature capabilities to similar mint duties, distributing responsibilities away from a single point of failure to a quorum of trusted third parties. Ecash token denominations are unique to the mint, but theoretically decided at launch of the instance. In lossy parallel to Bitcoin’s UTXO model, there are no account balances, but rather aggregates of ecash tokens that were issued as common denominations (think $5, $10, and $20 notes). These common denominations allow for greater fungibility and far greater anonymity sets within the mint, especially when combined with issuance validation via blind signatures. All of these decisions, including the relative issuance per reserve asset — say ecash token per satoshi — are to be made by the founders of the Chaumian mint, generally upon its genesis. Cashu is a popular, open-source, single-signature instance (created by open-source developer Calle) that is capable of being spun up quickly, leaning on tooling such as LNBits to create fast and easy operability with users already on the Lightning Network. Fedimint, a multisignature instance, allows for a more decentralized mint consensus among federation members, creating more administrative checks within the mint when minting ecash tokens, and when eventually redeemed, signing transactions to withdraw from the bitcoin reserve.

Coincidentally, the main user concerns when using ecash come from its privacy-preserving qualities. Due to there being no account balances, successfully auditing a mint to check its supposed reserves against its liabilities is rather difficult. And since there are no accounts, a trusted custodian must be responsible for holding enough of the reserve asset against the total supply of ecash held by unknown users of the mint. The mint itself is a trusted third party responsible for both appropriate monetary issuance and being able to make depositors whole at time of redemption. This is another prudent parallel to our current banking system, similarly true in both a regional bank and the Federal Reserve itself, of course, with none-to-little of the privacy benefits. These concerns can be theoretically met with clever proof-of-liability schemes such as the one proposed for Cashu by Calle, which publicly generates a monthly token burn list and a monthly token issuance list, rotating issuance keys after every monthly epoch. Both of these lists simply consist of the blind signatures representing their specific ecash denominations from their issuance, and users can check that their own transactions are present in their respective monthly list. The liabilities of the mint is the difference between the mint and the burn list, and thus should be similarly demonstrated within the reserve asset wallet. Proof of reserves is simple with a bitcoin-backed financial service (a public bitcoin wallet), but proof-of-liabilities is significantly more difficult. Concerns of economic debasement and associated custodial risk are nonnegotiable on the base layer of Bitcoin, and yet these real risks are easily mitigated depending on how you use the mint. If a Chaumian mint instance such as Cashu or Fedimint sees user volume at significant scale mostly for extremely short-term payment needs, proper usage of ecash — funding and withdrawing from a busy mint nearly instantaneously — leaves little time for monetary debasement nor reserve asset theft.

“I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the ‘high-powered money’ that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks, to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as… well, as Bitcoin based purchases are today.” - Hal Finney

Trust is a necessary component of many of the beneficial financial services employed by the U.S. banking system. This remains true now as well as during the gold window. Loans, fractional reserve banking, and counterparty risk is all possible on a bitcoin standard, much like it was on previous hard money standards. By decentralizing the manipulation of monetary issuance away from central pardoners, bitcoin has supplanted USTs as the ideal reserve asset for a new banking system. While it is perhaps seen as a failure to simply replace the instrument banks use to settle their reserves with bitcoin, the elimination of these special privileges from the Fed as reserve asset issuers — and the replacement being a disinflationary, censorship-resistant asset — will have profound effects on the current status quo of monetary manipulation. Bitcoin’s base layer simply cannot service 8 billion people, but proper tooling in layers can allow this scarce, neutral asset unfettered access to a stable monetary policy; a revolution in banking, financial, and economic reality as we know it. Layer 2s are delegated as such due to their trustless ability to settle back to the mainchain without any third party. But ecash enables an entirely new interoperability between Layer 2s and traditional financial services, with an innate ability to be created specifically and timely in accordance to customer demands and needs. Behind every online community that warrants certain privacy needs for their users could be another unique interaction of Cashu. In order to distribute mining rewards privately, mining pool operators can use tools such as FediPools to maximize anonymity sets derived from mining reward payments.

The future of banking is not stablecoin issuers providing opportunities for the Global South to buy U.S. debt; the future is every website, every digital community, threatening to run their own ecash instance, backed by bitcoin — the only neutral reserve asset — when their current financial counterparties are eventually cut off. David Chaum built the tooling and constructed the ideas needed for everyone to be their own bank in the 1980s, and yet those were the days of double-digit interest rates, and the largest onshoring of dollar demand in the modern economic era. Now, as the U.S. banking system is showing serious fundamental cracks — from UST markets marking unrealized duration risk losses, to increasing depositor centralization in the Big Four American banks, to literal government seizure of some of the largest regional banks in the country — it is no surprise that a second wave to the ecash revolution has begun.

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A PDF pamphlet of this article is available for download.

UTXOracle is a simple Python script [Attention: direct download link] that takes advantage of a surprising fact about the Bitcoin blockchain – by parsing on-chain data it’s possible to derive an approximate U.S. dollar price.

All of this is based on the chart above. The lines on the graph represent Bitcoin UTXOs of certain values.

If you look at the left-hand side at the BTC denominations, you'll see that straight lines match up perfectly. Those represent the creation of UTXOs in exact round BTC denominations. The wavy lines are UTXOs being created with round fiat denominations.

All this is to say that a large percentage of Bitcoin transactions (~15%) create outputs with round denominations in fiat currencies, an obscure data quirk that allows software to make derivative assumptions about the economic activity they represent.

By finding the points where these wavy and straight lines intersect, one can ascertain a point in time when the fiat price of BTC was a round amount, and extrapolate to other points in time.

But while this may sound highly technical, and it is, the immediate result is something useful for every Bitcoiner, especially those who want to harness its decentralization – with UTXOracle, users who run a full node no longer need to rely on third-party exchange price data.

UTXOracle allows you to track the fiat price average solely with on-chain data, not only giving new abilities to Bitcoiners, but to its product builders as well. In short, it’s a big breakthrough we expect to manifest itself further in the years ahead.

Released today after some months of work, I had a chance to ask creator and developer Steve Jeffress a few questions about the project. The following discussion sheds further light on the software he released, and what might lie ahead:

SHINOBI: What gave you the insight into UTXO set amount distributions having this relationship with fiat price?

JEFFRESS: I've been rendering heat maps of the UTXO set for like 8 years now. I've always known the USD price was a clear emergent property of output patterns. I've known I could write the program for several years and finally got around to doing it.

SHINOBI: What are the limitations of the accuracy of UTXOracle?

JEFFRESS: Right now, the limits are $1,000 to $100,000 for the price, and I've only tested it back to July 26th, 2020. It's also dependent on people continuing to transact in round amounts of US dollars.

SHINOBI: What kind of use cases do you see UTXOracle enabling?

JEFFRESS: I'm excited to see what people come up with. I'm happy if it encourages people to do more stuff with their own node. Anything that further decentralizes nodes is a super positive thing IMO. I just want to improve bitcoin.

SHINOBI: Can UTXOracle be gamed or manipulated?

JEFFRESS: Yes, certainly, however it would be costly to manipulate. You might even be able to estimate the price of manipulation. Clearly if this was used to settle contracts, the contracts would need to be far less than some estimated cost of manipulation

[One thing that Steve pointed out is the potential for delayed withdrawals to distort the accuracy of the model to a degree. For example, imagine you buy $50 of bitcoin on Coinbase and withdraw it. This type of behavior is a large driver of the data this model depends on. Imagine now if you buy $50 of bitcoin on Coinbase, but wait a week until you withdraw it. The price will be different than when you purchased it, meaning the on-chain output created will not accurately reflect the round amount in fiat it was when you purchased it.

This type of behavior could throw off the accuracy of the model, which is something to consider during a high fee environment when more people will adopt such behavior. The model could be adapted to account for this as long as larger value transfers that were economical still occurred in round fiat amounts on-chain. An algorithm could properly distinguish between those and lower value transactions that are throwing off the price model and weight the larger value transactions much higher than lower value transactions to account for the distortion.]

SHINOBI: Could this model be extended or made more accurate with other on-chain data?

JEFFRESS: Probably. though i think people should keep in mind trade offs between simplicity, accuracy, complexity, etc. For example, I've written the code to maximize understandability over efficiency. I could import libraries to make it more efficient, but I've chosen not to.

For a deeper dive on UTXOracle, read our feature guide.

Shitcoiners have fat bags, really fat bags, really, really fat bags. Two weeks ago I put nostr.com up for sale to see what responses I would get back. I imagined Roger Ver offering to sell bitcoin dot com in 2013, and what would have happened if another player had bought it. I had a few groups of shitcoiners offer to buy the domain (prob to do some Nostr ICO), but yeah, that wont happen. 

Almost 3 years ago I made the first twitter clone on Nostr, and started bugging the Nostr telegram group to buy nostr.com. After a few weeks of bugging I bit the bullet, sold almost 1btc and secured the domain. The domain festered for a few years with a poorly made splash page for Nostr projects. 

At the beginning of this year, with all the much deserved attention Nostr started to garner, it was clear we needed a better splash page. We hosted the excellent site created for nostr.how by jeffg on the site. To make use of the domain, Fiatjaf was given full reign to host great nostr projects on subdomains of nostr.com (thank you for that Fiatjaf). Being the most visited site for Nostr, it is clearly a very important gateway for the clearnet folks. 

Those Covid years were a productive period, as well as the creation of Nostr, a few of us, such as Fiatjaf, Eneko and myself created LNbits, an extension based lightning wallet accounts system, which would make it easy to showcase cutting edge bitcoin functionality. While Nostr was bubbling away and great contributors started building clients that actually worked, I focused all my attention on LNbits. Although not having time to develop on Nostr, I shilled the protocol as much as possible, talking about it in popular bitcoin podcasts and doing the first Nostr talk at HCCP in 2021. 

We had a few Nostr LNbits extensions in the pipeline from 2022, such as an easy one click relay, extension for selling NIP05 addresses, the Nostr-market extension (its predecessor Diagon Alley, being one of the influences to the creation to the Nostr protocol), and an always on Nostr-client extension that could multiplex relays and direct notes to different extensions in LNbits (needed for Nostr-market so the merchant can generate invoices without their client being “online”). 

LNbits was always a hobby project. but as the project evolved and was being used in the wild (even by a bank) it made sense to push hard to get the project out of beta. It was also weird that we were creating a useful accounting tool but not using it in a business context ourselves. With the blessing of the community, LNbits core devs created LNbits Inc, a for-profit arm that would help develop LNbits and provide some useful services, such as a one click launch LNbits software as a service (similar to launching WordPress on wordpress.com), a shop for selling all our DIY bitcoin hardware/swag, and a support service for people wanting to implement LNbits in their stack. We were given a pre-seed by the excellent Max Webster from Hivemind Ventures, which meant 6 of us could work on LNbits full time for a year, to create the services and push to get LNbits out of beta. 

All the Nostrcentric LNbits extensions were given momentum with the Nostrenaissance of early 2023, and we were able to get them ready(ish) to unveil at Nostrica, as well as a hardware Nostr signing device created by Myself, Vlad Stan, Fiatjaf and Stephan Snigrev.

It made sense to the development of our Nostr extensions that we used them to offer some services on nostr.com, similar to what we had done with LNbits Inc, so I planned to give LNbits Inc the right to manage the domain over the next 3 years, to maximize its usefulness, by offering relay services, NIP05 names, and selling DIY Nostr signing devices. 

Before LNbits Inc seed round, and “officially” passing the rights to the company, I decided to float the domain on the market see if there was someone out there willing to buy the domain. Within the first few days some folks reached out, but after some superficial digging it was clear their intentions might not be honourable. I have worked tirelessly for six years on free and open-source bitcoin software and hardware. All the engineers I have worked with during that period are here for bitcoin’s/Nostr potentiality to create greater liberty and freedom. Nostr WILL change our world for the better, and although I believe nostr.com can be made more useful, it is imperative nostr.com can not/will not ever fall into corrupt hands. Having a team managing the domain will help that not happen. I am happy to hand control over to LNbits Inc, and am extremely excited to see more wonderful tools/applications being delivered through it. 

Also check out the excellent Nostr-market update.

Pura Vida. Start wearing purple. 

This is a guest post by Ben Arc. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This is an opinion editorial by Daniel Hinton, the head of finance and operations for sFOX, a bitcoin prime broker and custodian, and Steve Jeffress, creator of Bitcoin UTXO set visualizer UTXO.live.

We now know how to infer the daily price of bitcoin within 1% by looking only at the unspent transaction output (UTXO) set.

With this, we can build decentralized applications that rely on the UTXO set — rather than on trusted third-party oracles — for the USD price used in discreet log contracts (DLCs) and smart contracts.

The possibilities for decentralized applications on Bitcoin using this “UTXOracle” are enormous.

There is no single price of bitcoin. Every second of the day, there are thousands of exchanges, brokers, OTC desks, payment companies and other market participants around the world quoting the price of bitcoin — and none of them is always correct.

In this article, we will explore a new way of interpreting the Bitcoin UTXO set that accurately reflects a bitcoin price at each block height and has the potential to serve as the foundation for a new era of trust-minimized, decentralized finance on Bitcoin.

What trust-minimized tools could you build if you could calculate an accurate price for bitcoin at each block height, using only your Bitcoin full node and an open-source model?

Any one of these concepts, successfully implemented on the Bitcoin blockchain in a trust-minimized way, could deliver tremendous value to both Bitcoiners — utilizing bitcoin for its superior monetary properties — and participants in the Bitcoin ecosystem who need to remain partially tied to USD but want to utilize Bitcoin as their settlement network.

During the 2016 to 2017 “Blocksize Wars,” the merits of not only running a fully-validating Bitcoin node, but conducting economic activity using your node, were convincingly argued in helping the network avoid a meaningful fork that could have delayed Bitcoin’s success.

For purposes of our current discussion, it can be said that this tumultuous time in Bitcoin’s history emphasized that, in the same way that someone can run 1 million “full nodes” on a cloud server that signal for a particular “upgrade” but not influence the network of economic actors in any way if they are not actively settling transactions, centralized exchanges can produce volume and price statistics that, in reality, do not carry economic weight, and which are not reflected in the UTXOs that are settled onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

You can temporarily give the appearance of having more bitcoin than you do within a closed system like an exchange, but as long as there is a credible threat of withdrawal for settlement to the Bitcoin base layer, any mispricing within the closed system will eventually resolve itself back to equilibrium with the external market.

For example, when Mt. Gox was insolvent in 2013 to 2014, but before it officially collapsed, the reported price of bitcoin on the platform was markedly different from other exchanges due to the fact that Mt. Gox did not have nearly as much bitcoin as it claimed. As a result, it needed to entice new users to deposit to the exchange in order to fulfill withdrawals from existing customers. Within the Mt. Gox system, the price could be manipulated, but when users attempted to arbitrage the price back to the market, Mt. Gox collapsed.

In contrast, the Bitcoin blockchain is the hardest ledger in the world to corrupt. It represents the entire history of economic settlement activity to have occurred and is the final arbiter of truth with regard to the status of all bitcoin in existence.

Transactions that matter are settled on the Bitcoin blockchain, not in closed systems. Final settlement is what matters.

People have a difficult time grasping Bitcoin, since it’s impossible for them to take a physical coin out of their pocket, point to it, and say, “This is a bitcoin.”

One analogy I’ve gravitated toward when describing a specific amount of bitcoin in a person’s possession is visualizing an individual bill in a physical wallet. These bills can represent any amount and are only good for one use. So, if you need to spend $3, and only have a $100 bill, you can’t rip off a corner of the bill. You would need to spend the entire $100 bill and get your change back. In Bitcoin parlance, each of these bills is a UTXO. Any time you send bitcoin, you are spending (and destroying) at least one UTXO while simultaneously creating at least one new one. If you run any version of the Bitcoin software, at any point in time you can count up all the bitcoin contained in existing UTXOs to determine exactly how much bitcoin currently exists.

In fact, when used together, the Bitcoin blockchain and UTXO set are perfectly accurate in determining the history and current state of the Bitcoin network. This never-before-seen capability in a decentralized system helped the 19 million bitcoin currently in existence grow to be worth several hundred billion dollars.

The Bitcoin software uses units of bitcoin (satoshis) for its internal accounting. While it may be obvious that 1 bitcoin equals 1 bitcoin, this also means that when someone wants to “send $100 of bitcoin,” the participants in this transaction need to agree on the price of bitcoin at the time of the transaction to know how much bitcoin this corresponds to.

Did you know that many people transact bitcoin in round USD amounts? Interestingly, because this is such a common occurrence, there are clearly-recognizable patterns that exist in the UTXO set that can be used to closely infer the price of bitcoin at any point in the past or present (see the chart below).

Imagine that you are buying bitcoin at an ATM (or buying a gift card online). Will you buy $100 worth or $39.27 worth?

Round USD values ranging from $1 up to several thousand dollars are very common denominations in the Bitcoin blockchain. In fact, since 2014, there has been a growing on-chain footprint of these round-USD-value bitcoin transactions which on some days can account for up to 25% of daily outputs created.

The United States has by far the largest installed base of Bitcoin ATMs globally. U.S. Bitcoin ATM operators have grown dramatically since 2019 and the Bitcoin UTXO set vividly displays this market’s growth as more people choose to hold or at least transact in bitcoin over USD.

Also, as seen with clients at sFOX, Bitcoin ATM flows are made of nearly all customer buys (putting cash into an ATM and receiving bitcoin), so the on-chain footprint of this activity consolidates signals at round USD values. Other large bitcoin markets, such as gift cards, peer-to-peer exchanges, and many other, less common use cases, also contribute to this pattern of USD-denominated bitcoin usage.

There is only one bitcoin UTXO set at any given block height. This picture depicts the entire, approximately 70 million UTXOs that comprise all 19 million bitcoin in existence, as of block 772,298.

With Bitcoin being truly permissionless, anyone running a fully-validating Bitcoin node has this exact same data on their computer and can independently replicate this exact same dataset for this point in time. A live version of this visualization can be seen and interacted with at utxo.live.

Zooming into the 2022 section of the chart highlights that there are consistent patterns in the UTXO set. We’ll focus on two such patterns: Horizontal lines and wavy lines.

Horizontal lines (the flat lines) represent:

Wavy lines:

The fact that horizontal lines exist isn’t all that impressive. People transacting in bitcoin often transact in round amounts of bitcoin.

But the fact that the wavy lines exist clearly and consistently is a big deal. It means that, given an open-source model, this could help bring about the ability to:

How can you easily test the hypothesis that the wavy lines represent movement of bitcoin denominated in USD? Simply pick a date when you know the BTC/USD price crossed a round USD value and see if the horizontal and wavy lines cross.

One such case is July 27, 2020. Bitcoin was recovering from the March 2020 mayhem and crossed over $10,000 per BTC.

The image below shows the wavy line (USD) crossing down below the horizontal line (BTC) at the same time that the price rose above $10,000 per BTC. This particular image is the 10,000 sat (0.0001 BTC) line, but the same pattern exists at many other BTC denominations as you progress up the UTXO chart.

Still don’t see it? Zoom in and explore a high-resolution image at utxo.live.

Clearly, the wavy lines on the chart show transactions denominated in USD.

This has enormous ramifications, since the wavy line pattern exists in varying degrees in every block, and is extremely consistent over rolling periods such as every 144 blocks (roughly 24 hours).

Seeing the horizontal and variable lines cross at round USD values is nice, but a majority of the time, the lines are not very close to one another. We need a way to prime a pricing model from these crossing points that will infer an accurate, current price at any block height after the model is primed.

Enter the UTXOracle model.

In this preliminary model, an input date of July 27, 2020, a day when bitcoin rose above $10,000, is used to prime the model to a best fit for that day’s price. Using only this single day’s UTXOs, and an input of that single day’s volume-weighted average price (VWAP), we are able to create a model that, when used with a future date’s UTXO set changes, infers the daily price of bitcoin with remarkable accuracy from this day forward, utilizing only the Bitcoin UTXO set with no reference to any external price data after July 27, 2020.

The red line is the daily VWAP from sFOX, an aggregator whose price encompasses the filled trades from dozens of exchanges and OTC desks.

The blue line is the UTXOracle daily price calculation based on each day’s UTXO changes.

For the measurement period of July 2020 to January 2023, the model performs exceptionally well, with daily median and daily average variances between the actual VWAP and the UTXOracle price of 0.65% and 1.04%, respectively, both of which are within the normal range of fees charged for bitcoin purchases at retail exchanges.

It’s been said that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. One key difference between the UTXOracle model and other models that output a bitcoin price is that the UTXOracle model does not seek to predict a future price. It merely attempts to infer an accurate current price based on recent blocks and corresponding changes in the UTXO set. Given that the current model has also not been fine tuned for a best fit and simply uses a single primer date for its input, the model is clearly wrong — hopefully it can be useful.

If Bitcoin has taught me anything, it’s that trade-offs exist. The UTXOracle model is no different.

The Bitcoin UTXO set is a beautiful, living monument to the human spirit but try as we may, any model created from it will not fully encapsulate the entirety of the underlying activity which it represents. A map cannot be as accurate as the territory it represents.

The UTXOracle model relies on several concepts to function correctly:

People may create UTXOs at amounts that would mimic the price being another level than reality.

On centralized venues, people have been known to “spoof” large buy or sell orders in an order book to make it seem as though there is a large buyer or seller in the market, only to later remove these buy/sell orders without actually having any trades filled. This can actually move markets on centralized venues, but you cannot spoof UTXOs. They either exist in a mined block or they do not.

It takes a long time to create a fake price signal and it’s obvious when someone tries to do so.

Currently, it looks as though using a daily UTXOracle signal, rather than a single block interval, achieves a price accurate enough to use in practice. This approach has the added benefit of greatly increasing the cost of attack in mimicking or censoring transactions which would be most useful in producing the UTXOracle price at any certain time.

Even if someone created many UTXOs at levels mimicking a different bitcoin price, there is no mechanism to remove the real transactions that reflect the accurate price. At best, an attacker would create an additional set of wavy lines.

UTXOs are expensive to fake. There is no such thing as “spam” in the Bitcoin blockchain. There are only transactions that pay a fee to be included in a block. This means that blockchain data is expensive to produce or censor and there is a real cost of capital in creating UTXOs to fake a price signal.

Current model accuracy diminishes after about two years, as is visible in the chart. In practice, it’s likely that a model will need to be recalibrated after some period of time. Changing the model to take into account different UTXO patterns carries much less risk than changing consensus rules in Bitcoin. Unless participants are transacting in multi-year options/futures contracts on chain, this is likely not a meaningful barrier to use.

The current model does not deal with extreme volatility well. Mempool variations and price volatility create situations where the UTXOracle price can temporarily vary from the centralized exchange price by more than 10%. While this can likely be improved upon with a more comprehensive model it does highlight a potential serious limitation of the practical use of the model. 

Then there is the AI echo chamber problem: If the model is very successful, it may become less effective. In a world where many people are settling economic activity using the price inferred by a UTXOracle model, there will be many additional UTXOs settled in round USD values. These UTXOs may diminish the model’s accuracy or distort it in other ways similar to how a large-language model (LLM) trained on LLM-generated content will not match the effectiveness of one trained on human-generated content.

Love it or hate it, you know the word “Ordinal.” Ordinals taught me that people can coalesce around a methodology of interpreting the UTXO set that is technically external to Bitcoin, but which can be solidified at the social layer as an additional protocol on top of Bitcoin.

It is my hope that a sufficiently-accurate UTXOracle model will be produced by someone which will allow people to use that version of the model as a schelling point in building decentralized applications on Bitcoin.

It is my further hope that Bitcoiners can develop a method of using these one or more competing models in a trust-minimized way to expand how Bitcoin is able to bring financial peace to the world.

A successful implementation would be one in which:

And one in which any of these security models is possible:

This would enable users to buy or sell contracts in an open marketplace where outcomes are administered by participants using a UTXOracle price.

For example: Alice deposits an amount of bitcoin to a DLC-governed address. Bob pays Alice an amount of bitcoin denominated in USD (as evidenced by the UTXOracle price). At the time of settlement, Alice or Bob may produce a signature from an oracle attesting to the price calculated under the UTXOracle model to determine the settlement flow of funds as expired or exercised.

Users can borrow or lend in an open marketplace where the loan life cycle is administered by participants using a UTXOracle price.

For example: I have 1 BTC (at a $100,000 value) and want to take a partial loan of $30,000 without selling my bitcoin. I can coordinate with a market-maker to deposit my 1 BTC and the market maker’s 0.3 BTC (at a value of $30,000) to an address governed by a DLC. Upon funding, I may spend the 0.3 BTC for my desired use case.

In this use case, the borrower has the option to sign a transaction granting the market maker $30,000 in value of the original 1 BTC or to deposit $30,000 in value (as evidenced by the UTXOracle price) and withdraw the original 1 BTC.

Upon liquidation, if the value of the 1 BTC in the DLC-governed address falls to somewhere near $30,000 (as evidenced by the UTXOracle price), the market maker can sweep out the entire 1 BTC to liquidate the loan and recoup their principal.

The UTXOracle model also offers an interesting use case around “stablesats,” referring to bitcoin-backed USD stablecoins or stable-value USD accounts denominated in bitcoin on Lightning.

For instance, imagine that you want to hold $1,000 worth of bitcoin for the next month. You do not want to or cannot hold the $1,000 in cash, at a bank, in Ethereum- or Tron-based stablecoins or on an exchange. You could enter into an agreement with a market maker on the Lightning Network to stream the daily net price change in value to you. You would be able to independently validate that the correct amounts are being paid by using the UTXOracle model you agreed to. At the end of the month you will have a different amount of bitcoin in your Lightning channel, but it will be worth $1,000.

As a seller in an online marketplace, it’s currently difficult to price items in bitcoin due to the volatility as well as the fact that your expenses are likely in USD. But accepting payments in USD means accepting chargeback risk, fraud and the fees and complexity inherent in modern payment systems. Pricing products in USD, but having the flexibility to accept a USD value in bitcoin via the UTXOracle model, could encourage more bitcoin-denominated commerce.

As outlined in this article, I believe the UTXOracle model could be a powerful tool in advancing Bitcoin use cases and extending financial freedom to more of the world. While it has trade-offs, I believe it represents an exciting frontier that can improve upon existing solutions that require more trust in third parties.

If you are excited about the prospect of UTXOracle, I encourage you to join the discussion on Telegram and Twitter.

This is a guest post by Daniel Hinton and Steve Jeffress. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Shinobi’s Strawman is a weekly series where our Technical Editor Shinobi challenges the Bitcoin community, aiming to stir up conversation around heated technical debates.

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Here is part two of the experiment. Last week I published a short prompt challenging readers to respond with their own defense or criticism of drivechains. The purpose of this was to instigate challenges to my own criticisms, questions, or even new criticisms I have not thought of or considered. Written form content is generally more thorough and easier to digest than real-time communication, as both parties have time to sit and think before formulating a response as opposed to needing to do so immediately. I think this can help to change the tone of conversations around contentious topics by trying to facilitate them in this format.

So that said, time to go through the responses to last week's prompt.

Paul Sztorc responded in long form on Twitter, the entirety of which can be found here. For formatting clarity in quote snippets, bold text is denoting which of my statements Paul is responding to.

> 1) Drivechains introduce a hodgepodge of new variables into miners’ incentives ... Drivechain is comparable to RIOT's use of "power curtailment credits". https://riotplatforms.com/bitcoin-mining It is just a new way for miners to make money. When I'm asked: "does drivechain affect miner incentives?" I say "no". I personally lived through the invention of: FPGAs/ASICs, heat-reuse, stranded natgas flaring, curtailment credits, and a whole lot else. Merged mining was invented by Satoshi in 2010, and is already in continuous use -- https://truthcoin.info/blog/security-budget-ii-mm/#c-its-too-late--mm-is-already-widespread . Same with the withdrawals -- miners do plenty of nice things, such as MASF activate soft forks or hold peoples mistaken fee money ( https://x.com/satofishi/status/1701042302238724512?s=20 ), or hire Bitcoiners to shill Bitcoin. So, to someone like me, getting revenues from merged mining, or overseeing 4 fully-automated withdrawals per sidechain per year, doesn't even register as a change. It's just business as usual.

Paul claims that power curtailment agreements are equivalent to the centralizing pressures of drivechains. This is a broken comparison for a few reasons, first of which is the wild difference in terms of scale. Something like operating infrastructure for drivechains, or the proportional advantage of pool size in doing so, runs on economies of scale. The larger an operation engaging in such a behavior is the more of a global advantage it gives them. Power curtailment on the other hand doesn't, it has diseconomies of scale. One mining operation engaging in power curtailment on Texas's grid has no impact at all on miners connected to another grid being able to engage in similar agreements. Combine this with mining actively being used to expand renewable energy production, which creates the need for these curtailment agreements, and the entire dynamic over time is guaranteed to decentralize and become more and more open to other miners. Also, the claim that miners being put in absolute control of custodying other people's funds and decide which withdrawals to process (somehow without knowing the current balances of legitimate users) is no change in their role is just patently false.

> 2) Existing Sidechains Have No Adoption Wait!? I thought sidechains were going to change miner incentives?? Not if they have "no adoption". 😉 Anyway... RSK/Liquid are federated, and the federated model is terrible. "federation vs PoW", is literally the only difference between Bitcoin (a success) and its failed predecessors. We can similarly expect BIP300 to outcompete Federated. Furthermore, they aren't even in the same league. Liquid does not provide us a website (for example) where we can paste in (for example) the zCash Altcoin source code, and get out of that a zCash federated sidechain. Instead we are stuck with just one piece of closed source junk that we cannot modify. That misses the entire point of sidechains. Comparing RSK/Liquid to Bip300 is comparing two handwritten books to the printing press. Liquid was completely closed source until very recently; no one knows who the federation members are (despite the model relying solely on their reputation); all of the Liquid txn fees go only to the corporation that created it. For a while (and still to this day, in my opinion), Blockstream engineers could abscond with the funds if they actually put five man-hours into it (see https://x.com/_prestwich/status/1277089486111817728?s=20 ). RSK aspires to be a drivechain -- so I have their vote, at least. They agree with me that they should be a drivechain, not federated. Finally, the fact that we have failed to build things that the end-user enjoys? That should only spur us onward, to invent new things. Not give up faster.

I don't know what to say here…essentially every claim here is false. Liquid/Elements the platform has always been entirely open source and possible to modify, only the code the federation members run to sign blocks and withdrawals was closed, but that is now open source. Paul pretending and trying to imply the entire project was closed source is not true. As well, the claim that "five man hours" could steal all of the funds is entirely false. The incident that he is referring to was a bug (that has been patched) in the federation member code. All Liquid coins have a timelocked recovery path using a 2-of-3 keyset in the event of catastrophic key loss by federation members that would result in all funds being lost. In order for these keys to be used, the Federation must fail and cease moving these UTXOs. That is not "five man hours" of work as Paul claims, it is attacking a globally distributed set of HSMs that are incredibly robust to remote attacks and almost certainly require physical access to compromise.

> 3) Drivechains Exacerbate The Risks Of MEV > MEV is something that is possible on Bitcoin already ... but ... Drivechains open the door to arbitrarily complex forms of MEV on sidechains, MEV = "miner side hustle". In other words, if I offer Foundry $20 to shine my shoes, then that is MEV. If Slush Pool sells t-shirts on the side, then that is MEV ( spoiler alert they already do: https://shop.braiins.com/products/braiins-polo-shirt ). Miner's main hustle is ordering transactions and blocks -- anything else they do, is a side hustle. Obviously we don't want the two hustles to conflict! I addressed such "cross chain MEV" long ago, in 2016, long before anyone had ever heard of shinobi (or MEV) ( https://youtube.com/watch?v=2OOKgTSrITs&list=PLw8-6ARlyVciMH79ZyLOpImsMug3LgNc4&index=2 ). I designed Drivechain to have something called "categorical control", to *defeat* cross chain MEV ...unlike for example Blockstream's simplicity which I believe could exacerbate it (see Part 5 / code obfuscation ; or see http://truthcoin.info/blog/contracts-oracles-sidechains/ http://truthcoin.info/blog/drivechain-op-code/ http://truthcoin.info/blog/wise-contracts/ for more). Truthfully though: MEV is a distraction. Could a smart contract pay miners to reorg, or censor txns?? Yes. But a human, could also bribe a miner to do those things. Ultimately it comes down to: $ from txn fees, vs $ the attacker pays. Best way to help miners is to make sure they are rich -- collecting lots of $ from the "main hustle". Ie lots of merged mining.

I don't know what else to say except that Paul continues to make absurd and extreme arguments here. Selling t-shirts requires new equipment, new services, new investments, whereas reusing your mining hardware doesn't. A miner picking up a penny on the ground does not have any relevant impact to miner income or incentives, whereas someone offering miners $10,000 a week to reuse their hashrate for a new purpose does. Comparing the two is absurd.

These are in reference to my reply https://twitter.com/Truthcoin/status/1699093434026406322 to his previous article. I stand by everything in that reply! > ...these just shove the liquidity requirements onto yet another party, assuming they will provide massive amounts of liquidity for almost nothing in return Both halves of this are wrong. First, on the L1 side of the trade, nothing is locked up -- EVERY coin on L1, is already "providing liquidity" (in this context). Second, they certainly don't get nothing! They charge a fee. The model would be: "buying 1 sidechain coin, for 0.99 L1 coins" (for example). > don’t think it's a foregone conclusion that enough liquidity to cover the “solution to the security budget problem”

I think Paul here is oversimplifying what is going on, and ignoring the dynamics of arbitrage, which is what is happening here. Yes, in an ideal scenario, all mainchain coins are available to swap for sidechains, but in reality that is not the case. That assumes everyone thinks drivechains are equivalently secure to the mainchain. In reality, there is a security and risk difference, and people engaging in this arbitrage are bearing that risk on behalf of people they swap with. Most Bitcoiners are not taking their bitcoin and arbitrage trading for yield with it, they just hold it. That won't magically change because of drivechains, and ultimately the people doing this arbitrage need to get the coins they have swapped into drivechains back out to the mainchain to close the arbitrage loop. This simply shifts that bottleneck directly from sidechain block constructors to arbitrage traders. Also at the end of the day, this adds another cut someone else is taking from the fee sharing, and is a margin that miners can capture by running a sidechain node themselves.

Anon idBrain on X (Twitter) posted the question what would I do if drivechains were activated. Well, in most situations nothing. A URSF (User Resisted Soft Fork) trying to go up against the entire ecosystem would be mostly futile, i.e. if most users, businesses, and miners all supported activating the proposal. If only miners activated it, with no users or businesses worth mentioning enforcing it, it might be worth it to continuously propose withdrawal transactions, looting the sidechain and paying it all out to miners. If 51%+ of miners defected from enforcing the rules all drivechains could be looted with no time delay in a single block. If it did successfully activate with wide support though, I would probably cease looking at Bitcoin as something that could realistically stand up to state and alter the dynamics of money and state. It would be simply a fiat denominated investment to me at that point on the road to state capture.

Mister Ticot sent in an email a question: 

You mentioned sidechains arn't being used and are only federated. What about Stacks? Doesn't it qualify as a permissionless side-chain with some level of success?

I would not qualify or describe Stacks as a sidechain at all. I would call it a para-chain, or a parasite chain. Stacks is an independent network with a native base token different from Bitcoin, and as such I do not qualify it as a sidechain. It interacts with Bitcoin in a similar way, and by that virtue can influence Bitcoin miner incentives, but it is not built on a foundation of BTC as the core native asset, which I think is the main requirement for a secondary blockchain to be considered a sidechain.

Micah Warren wrote in an email: Responding to your call to stir up technical conversation.

Responding to your call to stir up technical conversation.

My understanding is that the huge unavoidable havoc-wreaking problem with blind merged mining is that it's trivial to obtain as many blocks as you'd like simply by outbidding other 'miners'. It quickly degenerates into a bluffing/signaling game. It also create situations where you can create massive MEV opportunities by committing to longer reorgs, in addition to short term plays like fee-sniping. In proof of work, if someone tries to perform a longer reorg, the honest miners (provided there's 51%,) can just default to the same thing they always do. However in BMM, once you commit to winning the auction to carry out your shenanigan, there is no default mode that honest miners can retreat too. All bad stuff. In my opinion, this makes BMM not really a serious consensus mechanism.

HOWEVER, it probably can be fixed- you just have to slightly think outside of the PoW box.

Here's the thing, because the map from SC blocks to L1 blocks is injective, we obtain a linear, sequential, total ordering of all candidate sidechain blocks. So really, we're 99% of the way there as far as consensus goes - we've narrowed it down from trillions of possible blocks to a small discrete handful of candidate blocks and these blocks come with a clear total ordering. The only thing wrong with taking the first block at height N to be the canonical one is that such a block at height N might not be valid. So all you need is a simple mechanism to determine, within a short period of time, whether the block at height N is correct or whether it should be discarded. Clearly invalid blocks will eventually be discarded, the only question is how to enforce a time limit so that someone can't maliciously withhold a block for a long time in order to jam up consensus.

This doesn't seem like a hard problem. One solution: You could simply declare a jury of community-trusted sidechain nodes, say 5 of 9, who would wait 20 seconds after the block is mined, and if they can validate the underlying block, they say it's good, it's now in the canon. If they can't see the block or can't validate it, they declare it invalid.

Now the 20 seconds is arbitrary, the jurors are just calling balls and strikes, there doesn't need to be a correct answer - the only thing is that 21 seconds after the last L1 block has been mined, sidechain miners now know for sure whether to mine a new block or on top of the old one.

Problem solved. The only drawback (laser-eyed maxis might want to ear muff for this), you have to rely on something other than proof of work to resolve rare consensus disputes. Of course, such disputes would almost never happen, because the only reason they would happen is if an adversary was trying to create a schism point, and by breaking the tie instantly, you are obviating the schism point.

Of course what happens on a sidechain is the sidechain's business - but if I could argue that the best design of a sidechain would always involve some reorg protection, then all the concerns about chaotic reorging forcing the L1 miners to enter the game are no longer valid.

In response to this observation, I would say a different potential solution that is superior would be a Zero Knowledge Proof of correctness for commitments to new sidechain blocks. However, I think solving this issue undermines one of the core goals of drivechains architecture: to not introduce new reasons or incentives for miners to reorg the mainchain to accomplish a reorg on a sidechain. Micah's proposal for federating validity attesting to sidechain blocks would create the same incentive, but additionally ultimately backstop the entire trust model of the sidechain with a federation. I.e. nothing would be considered valid without the attestation of those chosen arbitrators. This defeats the purpose of drivechains design, which is to have miners fill the role as the ultimate backstop in the trust model.

Alright, so that is it for this week's Strawman. Next week I will try to be more triggering. 

A previously little-seen video of the late Hal Finney, a pioneering figure in the world of Bitcoin, has surfaced, shedding light on his groundbreaking work on cryptographic protocols, and giving a rare glimpse of his humanity.

In the video, recorded at the Crypto 98 conference, Finney is seen discussing zero-knowledge proofs, offering a glimpse of how many of the cutting-edge concepts still being tested for Bitcoin, are in fact, decades old.

"I want to prove to you that I know a message that hashes to a given hash value using the SHA-1 hash. I don't want to reveal anything about the message to you. It's a zero-knowledge proof, and I've written a program to do this that I'll tell you about," Finney says in the introduction.

From there, he proceeds to outline his motivation for this project, which was to explore the efficiency and practicality of zero-knowledge proof systems, particularly in handling complex and irreversible algorithms like SHA-1. 

By selecting SHA-1, a notoriously intricate cryptographic hash function, Finney aimed to create a benchmark for evaluating zero-knowledge proof systems' capabilities. He then highlights the zero-knowledge proof system he employed, based on the work of Cramer and Ivan Damgard, which had been presented at a recent conference. 

Still, what has struck most commentators, including noted Bitcoin Historian Pete Rizzo, about the video was the rare glimpse of Finney himself. 

Passing away in 2014 from complications with ALS, Finney is often depicted as he was after the launch of the Bitcoin project, needing the help of medical equipment in order to talk to others or even use a computer. 

Because of this, reactions to the video were sometimes emotional. Finney is, after all, known to have worked with Satoshi Nakamoto on implementing the code for Bitcoin, something he did after the white paper was first announced on the cryptography mailing list in November 2008.

All in all, this rare video offers a glimpse into Hal Finney's pioneering work, showcasing his dedication to pushing the boundaries of cryptographic protocols and laying the foundation for future innovations like Bitcoin.

In July a bitcoin-related topic was broached by Robert Kennedy Jr., which to my knowledge has not been addressed by anyone holding the top office of the executive branch or a notable candidate for the position of President. Of course, John Nash’s Ideal Money is a perennial topic, one I have explored conversationally in the past. It can be a controversial and divisive position, just like other opinions RFK Jr. holds, with a few proponents endorsing even more radical thoughts than the common consensus. How meta…

But to contextualize the totality of what RFK Jr. said regarding a Bitcoin-backed dollar requires us to do a little homework. Luckily, Bitcoin Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Mark Goodwin has done a lot of the informational legwork for us in a piece he published in 2021.

“I had understood the concept of the Nash equilibrium in regards to Bitcoin for a while, but it wasn’t until 2021 that I got really into his work and decided to read all his papers. Ideal Money was introduced to me by a couple of gentlemen on Twitter who had been writing about Nash and Bitcoin for years, Jal Torrey and Jon Gulson. I know the ultimate monetary showdown is between the U.S. dollar and Bitcoin, and the Ideal Money concept really outlines an articulate path forward for monetary policy and inflation targeting as political and apolitical money collide. Money is just a technological tool for bargaining, and no one understands the axioms of bargaining better than John Nash. I recommend reading The Essential John Nash by Kuhn and Nasar, Parallel Control, as well as the various iterations of his Ideal Money lectures to begin to grok the Nashian Orientation.”

Mark Goodwin - Editor-in-Chief of Bitcoin Magazine

In the past, we covered the concepts of inflation, Nash’s Equilibrium, and Breton-Woods with enough depth to point to these conversations as milestones along the path to giving Ideal Money the attention it deserves.

So why is this concept important now?

Motion images created via Pika Labs 

Well, there are plenty of cultural and social angles but I think an important one regarding productivity and value erosion is the international uncoupling of gold and the US dollar that occurred during the Nixon administration.

While not all of the zealots advocating for the ideas in John Nash’s final white paper agree on how to interpret everything in the eight total pages, it is a short read and you are welcome to make your own conclusions about it.

One constellation that is critical to grasp is how a “basket of goods”, referred to by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as “special drawing rights” (SDR), is fairly congruent to Nash’s Industrial Consumer Price Index (ICPI). Let’s keep this simple: imagine a scale. On the left side is an amount of fiat currency of your choice, on the right, is a collection of goods, assets, or commodities (I use these terms very loosely) in all the various combinations you can imagine that would be equivalent to the dollars on the first side at a given rate that is publicly recognized. The right side could even be a collection of currencies. There are those that believe Bitcoin is enough in itself, operating as both the fulcrum and the right side of the scale. This implies an understanding of token mining and, by extension, the value of energy - I am unqualified to expound on this in a way that I believe is satisfactory so I will leave that topic to those more experienced and more knowledgeable about the idea.

“The ICPI concept was used by Nash to illuminate a vector of quality for money we can dub ‘Idealness'. The asymptotically 'ideal' nature of Bitcoin derives from the apolitical and invariant nature of the cost to produce a valid block. Bitcoin is asymptotically (rather than perfectly) ideal because it (self-)adjusts the cost to produce blocks (aka difficulty) to the previous period's mining computational expenditure and it is invariant in that the adjustment is pre-defined (constitutionally) at Genesis and locked in as such by the ever-increasing entropy of the totality of each of the network participant's utility functions.

Any major currency that (constitutionally) pegs to Bitcoin thus necessarily inherits the benefits of this quality of idealness.”

Jal Torrey - (Nash’s #1 Ideal Money Evangelist) 

Over the last three and a half years we have watched as central banks have flooded the markets with currency. The cost of goods has increased in the wake of trade route bottlenecks and the excess liquidity available to outbid the competition. We are still seeing commodity price spikes occurring globally, such as in the European energy markets.

Now imagine, if you will, that the scale embodies the concept of Ideal Money. This tool offers a more complete view of the price inflation occurring on the fiat currency side of things because it can be possessed as an asset itself in an effort to pursue a more conservative monetary policy, riding out the surprise shocks that occur when people pile into an attractive market (the things they really want on the right side of the scale).

And that’s why the US needs bitcoin in its treasury, though it does not explicitly need to back the dollar with bitcoin - whatever that might mean. This creates a situation similar to how corporations can hold Bitcoin on their books while issuing common stock to trade and raise capital from the market.

Economic satirists might seem to be endorsing Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) but their positions lack conviction, we see grand announcements of leaving behind triple-ledger accounting only to flirt with the concept most devotedly. Or worse, embittered positions that seemingly reflect the chanters missed opportunities. Disingenuous at the least, it’s probably an integrity issue.

It’s important to note that these ideas aren’t particularly “modern” in the 21st century, they have been championed by Keynesians since the early 1900s. While the macroeconomic ideas are attributed to John Maynard Keynes, it is worth adding that Nash felt Keynes’ intent was more grounded than the bastardized forms they have taken under the wings of the advocates that affiliated their efforts to Keynes’ original framework.

Elasticity, the capacity for expansion and contraction of the money supply, accommodates opportunity when it arises, to provide a platform for credit and creativity as well as to reign things in when the velocity of a currency is becoming overheated. It’s important to realize that liquidity is what lights up a market’s opportunity. Sure, social capital can potentially do that, however, that doesn’t always translate into the urgency required to execute against the conditions within the timeframe needed for meaningful gains to be produced.

That’s why it is excellent that RFK Jr. has put Bitcoin into the public economic discussion, though the implementation he is recommending lacks the nuanced understanding of how it operates as a balancing mechanism for the equation.

Of course, there is room for everyone’s ideas to be tested in the market. If you like efficiently sized blockspace, or would prefer a more cashlike experience, or want to store data on-chain - the various forks of Bitcoin offer dedicated functionality for the use cases listed here. Still don’t see one that meets your requirements? Fork it! Put it out there and see if it gains traction with users and miners.

This is where the waters get murky…

Any particular chain could be the right one for a time and a location, circumstances determine that. I’m not convinced that we know right now how all of these experiments will play out, it’s only been fourteen years since blockchains were introduced. We wouldn’t give it a driver’s license yet. However, his ideas about how blockchain creates transparency are spot on.

“The opportunity is the prospect of [bitcoin] being used as a medium of exchange. RFK Jr. wants to reduce capital gains tax for bitcoin, which would be good but we should get rid of the capital gains tax entirely. Bitcoin eliminates the need for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) [and] ensures that everyone is accountable, including governments. Forking could be good but there is no provision to handle that legally. Right now if there is a chain split, you have to treat [the new coins] as income.”

Daniel Krawisz - Bitcoiner

To me, forking enables customization. As open as the Bitcoin network is, our internet networks are not. In addition to the discussion of security is jurisdiction. Creating dedicated subnetworks of Bitcoin has already occurred for functionality and I believe that we will see more that are akin to fashion (such as we see in the cryptocurrency industry at large) as well as legal boundaries in accordance with governments.

So, how does Robert Kennedy Jr. know this is the direction we should go regarding US monetary policy? Sure, there is a latent interest in returning to metal-backed currency and some would conflate this idea with what he is saying in regards to a bitcoin-backed dollar. However, they should not. As the asymptotic model implies, it is a pursuit - a platform to expose low-integrity economic policies and to increasingly reduce the space it has to grasp additional mindshare.

The short of it is: he doesn’t. The position is flawed from the outset but that is all right. In totality, the Bitcoin experiment is flexible, and while fifteen years in, the concept has established itself, that doesn’t mean every application has been explored through each potential iteration. Users must continue to test its viability and we are the government. There is room to run, to see how much territory exists beyond the map, whether that be through forks or merely holding Bitcoin on balance sheets. Inevitably, our politicians will have to grapple with these issues and if Nash has anything to say about it, we will shift toward equilibrium.

For more on John F. Nash Jr.

Nash Chat

Hello Nashimoto

Mark Goodwin’s “The Birth of The Bitcoin-Dollar”

This is a guest post by Michael Finney. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

In September 1943, a character whose name nowadays covers the newscasts of half the world was put in charge of what would become a bastion against the offensive tactics from the rest of the European countries. The Second World War counted tens of millions of dead at that time in Europe and other war scenarios around the world, little was known about the Holocaust but it was probably at its peak, after the victory at Stalingrad communism in Russia threatened to respond to Hitler and expand its doctrine throughout Eastern Europe. At that time, in Madrid, the capital of Spain, a little known person, perched on a pulpit, pronounced the following words: "Gentlemen, we need a bigger soccer field and we are going to get it". It was Santiago Bernabéu, who as soon as he was elected president of Real Madrid soccer club, harangued the troops with that phrase that sealed the way for his name to go from referring to a person to identifying a place of worship.

By the middle of the 20th century, soccer stadiums were already a common feature of the skyline of many cities. The period between 1890 and 1910 marked the construction of those first stadiums, 50 of them were created in England in those years, all very close to the center, mainly because there was no means of transport that would allow a large number of fans to travel to the outskirts easily for matches. And by "large number of fans" I mean a huge crowd, there is evidence of a match at Crystal Palace Stadium in 1913 which was attended by 120,000 people, almost 40,000 more people than enter a major stadium today. Thus, there was a demand to watch soccer and this was something that Santiago Bernabéu did not fail to notice when he became president of the club. His plan to create a large stadium was not out of mere megalomania, but for business reasons: a larger stadium would accommodate more people, sell more tickets and with that money he could sign better players, the better players would bring success in the form of cups and trophies, which would attract more people to the stadium, thus increasing the money raised. He sought, as we can see, to create a virtuous circle.

To start that wheel, he needed to find a site to build his new stadium. The considerations to take into account when looking for a site are size and location. When the decision was made to look for a new stadium site for Real Madrid, the means of transportation had evolved a lot since the beginning of the 20th century, which made it possible to choose a location that, although central, was not in the historic center of the city, which is usually expensive and difficult to acquire. The size of the stadiums is another problem, since a medium-sized stadium already occupies a huge area, some 40,000 square meters, slightly less than the Palace of Versailles in Paris, an area that could house a large number of smaller buildings or structures and which, due to its main function, it is only useful for about 2 hours a week, less if we take into account the periods without soccer. Thus, Santiago Bernabeu and his team set out in search of a huge plot of land in an accessible area of Madrid for which they expected to get a low return compared to what could be received from commercial and residential rental income. With these constraints, they finally settled on an area slightly south of the Chamartín neighborhood, which at the time was a large plot of land surrounded by incredible esplanades (boardwalk or plaza) where football fans could park their car, bus, donkey or bicycle, depending on the individual.

In the USA, for example, many stadiums have been built in former industrial or port areas where factories, influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the position of the dollar as a reserve currency, became less competitive and eventually emptied, leaving a logistically well-supplied large plot of land at a good price, ideal for building stadiums for the exotic

sports practiced there. In Europe, many stadiums were built next to what used to be the city center, and as it grew, it became common for many of them to end up in the new center, thus greatly increasing their latent value and the incentive to sell that space and build a new, modern stadium on the outskirts. In the same city of Madrid, this happened recently with a historic rival of Real Madrid, the club Atlético de Madrid, which in 2019 sold the land of its old stadium and received about 180 million euros.

Bernabéu paid for the land to build Real Madrid's new stadium for about 18,000 euros in 1943. Today, the average price per square meter of apartments for sale in the center of Madrid is 5,292 euros. Exactly 80 years ago, it was paid at 40 cents. This calculation is interesting because according to an extrapolation of the consumer price index of the Eurozone, the average inflation figure for the period 1943-2023 was 6.8%, however here we can see that the average annual inflation of the price per square meter of real estate has been 8.84%. A deviation of 2 percentage points may not seem much but, to demonstrate that it is, let's see what your final capital would be if you had invested 1000€ in that same period and obtained those types of returns. In the first case, with a yield of 6.8% you would have 38,200 euros; at 8.84%, it would be more than double, 80,600 euros. When people tell you that 2% inflation is not that bad, remember this exercise.

Today, the money that Real Madrid would get for the sale of its land would be in the hundreds of millions, at that price per square meter we are talking specifically 228 million, better than investing in bitcoin for the last 10 years. What has influenced this incredible rise in the price of land? As cities grow, they get dangerously close to their natural limits. In Madrid, almost nothing remains of those vast forests that convinced Philip II to move the capital to this territory. As space is depleted, the cost of using it rises. To solve this problem, second layer solutions are being tried, third layer, fourth, and as many layers as possible. Floors allow for greater occupancy for the same amount of land space. However, the ground does not always support an unlimited number of upper layers, nor do the logistics around the site. For one reason or another, space within a city is limited and the demand for access to it increases as the city offers more professional opportunities, which usually comes with that increased concentration of people. Again, a virtuous circle. The cost of using the limited space in the city increases as the expected value of the use goes up because people are willing to pay more for the use of the land, this is the so-called gentrification process that is so disliked by the people who are displaced from their lifelong neighborhoods. People who are not able to obtain a sufficient return for their activity to cover the cost of using that space in the city and are eventually expelled by someone who is willing to pay more for that use because they expect to be able to make it profitable.

Santiago Bernabeu seized the moment and was able to gain access to a space that would eventually be in high demand for a cost that today would be considered derisory, while his bidding caused the surrounding land to rise in value and no space would ever be sold at such low prices again, giving rise to what we now call gentrification. Are we witnessing this same fact in the Bitcoin network?

The Bitcoin Blockchain until early 2023 was like the Madrid of 1947, an empty plot of land. Yes, there were populated areas where some demand was apparent, but by and large the types of uses of space on the Bitcoin blockchain was anecdotal. Between October 2020 and June 2021, the cost to enter transactions on the network was about $15, peaking at $60 in April '21 when the price of bitcoin was at a record high. This had been the usual pattern of the transaction cost on the bitcoin network, it only went up when the price exploded. Between mid-2021 and early 2023, it was back to the average cost of one dollar per transaction on the bitcoin network. Then, with the bitcoin price still near cycle lows, the cost per transaction started to rise, first slowly to $3 on average, then easing a bit to $2 again to quickly resume the upward path and reach $20 on average within a few weeks.

What has changed? The terrain, that is, the Bitcoin space has remained the same. If anything, the logistics, the access to that space, has changed. Taproot, so to speak, has brought the streetcar to the bitcoin network and brought it closer to the masses.

Three bitcoin developers, Gregory Maxwell, Andrew Poelstra and Pieter Wuille were looking for an enhancement to the Bitcoin code that would allow for better privacy and offer greater ability to program over its network. By early 2021, this enhancement, presented as a softfork, an update to the code, was ready. As Eric Wall describes, the timing of this was relevant. Any kind of code upgrade that enables greater capability or utility for the Bitcoin network opens the door to new attack vectors. The risk was there, but the crypto industry at that time was completely on fire, DeFi protocols made Ethereum shine while Bitcoin had not been updated for more than 3 years. Taproot could be that upgrade that showed the world that Bitcoin also adapts, in fact, when the upgrade finally took place, it was reported as a successful execution by the community.

Eric Wall explains Taproot's effect: "What Bitcoin developers Maxwell, Poelstra and Wuille had assumed was that any sufficiently capable developer could devise a clever scheme to insert arbitrary data en masse into Bitcoin, with or without Taproot. What they didn't take into account was that with Taproot, developers, from novice to mundane, would soon find ways to do it as well. This was the origin of Ordinals and Bitcoin registrations. In their aspiration to marginally advance Bitcoin for the craft developer, they had also made it substantially easier for a developer of limited ingenuity and talent to turn Bitcoin into a dump."

A glance at the bitcoin mempool, the space through which all transactions pass before being chosen to enter a block and become part of the chain, shows a very different picture in early May 2023 than it did just a few months ago. What was once a wasteland is now an orchard. Among this number of transactions waiting to enter the blockchain, some very particular ones stand out. These are small transactions of 546 sats (546 sats is the smallest amount of bitcoin an individual can send on the chain without being recognized as "dust" by the nodes running Bitcoin Core) paying many multiples in fees to get the transaction confirmed. Marty Bent did a monetary analysis on this: "At the time of this writing, 546 sats is worth just over $0.15. 546 sats is about as small as a UTXO can be on the bitcoin ledger. Those issuing these tokens are creating UTXOs that likely cannot be spent in the future and are paying, in this particular case, 77.2 times more in fees than the value of the UTXO they are creating. My guess is that the token issuers are looking for the least amount of bitcoin needed to embed their token data in the chain and paying to do so in the hope of getting it back when they find someone else dumb enough to buy it from them." These small transactions, therefore, would be flooding the Bitcoin mempool, competing with other transactions to get into the next block and thereby putting upward pressure on the cost of getting information into the Bitcoin blockchain. As if overnight, a city street had become extremely popular and everyone wanted to live there.

Behind this phenomenon is a new protocol created on the Bitcoin network. Eric Wall explained that the Taproot change opened up the network to developers with the wildest ideas. Well, one of them is this protocol, the so-called BRC-20. In Eric Wall's words: "What this protocol offers is what is called a fair mint. A shitcoin is created over the Bitcoin network and its issuance is run over a number of blocks, those who offer to pay the most commission for the block space get an allocation (a share of the tokens). This proof of commissions paid is a mechanism that cannibalizes cheap block space" Thus, Eric continues, "The market for block space will harmonize as, if arbitrary systems can be run within Bitcoin, there is no reason why space on its blockchain should be cheaper than on Ethereum's."

Today, around the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, we find tall office buildings and shopping areas, even a supermarket where the inflation in food products so fashionable today was felt from its very opening. However, I bet that when the stadium was inaugurated almost 80 years ago, what you found in its surroundings were street food stalls, a few ramshackle bars, houses of ill repute and other activities of little added value. The land on which it was located was not in demand, which is why it was so cheap to obtain. That is why the activities carried out in that area were not highly profitable. If they were, they would move to better areas of the city, paying what was necessary to occupy that space. It was the creation of wealth derived from value-added activities that led to an increase in the demand for space in Madrid and the necessary price increase for using that land. Higher value activities began to displace those unprofitable land uses to create the image of Madrid today.

What we are seeing in the bitcoin network is an unprofitable use of space that bitcoiners consider valuable. We do not consider those tokens that are created on Bitcoin to be worthy of occupying that space. It is as if we were transported back in time to Madrid in 1947 to see the activities of little value taking place in places that are now the nerve centers of the city and criticized the poor use that is being made of streets and squares that we know offer much more value.

Faced with this situation, some people hope that this possibility is eliminated outright, that all these people be removed from there and that Bitcoin is not used for what we do not believe it should be used for. Asking for the bordellos to be put somewhere else, basically. This option does not seem feasible. Poelstra, one of the Taproot developers, explains it this way, "Unfortunately, as far as I understand it, there is no sensible way to prevent people from storing arbitrary data on the network without incentivizing even worse behavior and/or breaking legitimate use cases. If we ban "useless data", then it would be easy to introduce it inside "useful" data such as fake signatures or public keys. Doing so would incur the cost of having to pay twice as it is twice as much data, but if paying twice as much is enough to disincentivize storage, then there is no need to have this discussion because they will be forced to stop doing it anyway due to competition in the fee market (And if not, it means there is little demand for Bitcoin block space, so what is the problem with paying miners to fill with data that validators don't even need to perform real calculations [for]?). On the other hand, if we were to prohibit "useful" data, e.g., by saying that a signature space can have no more than 20 signatures, then we are in the same problem we had before Taproot. We deliberately replaced those limits with having to pay per signature. You can argue that this kind of data is toxic to the network, because even if the market is willing to bear the cost, if people were storing NFTS and other crap on the blockchain, the Bitcoin market would become entangled

with pump&dump markets, undermining legitimate use cases and potentially preventing new technologies like LN from taking hold. But from a technical standpoint, I don't see any way to stop this." It looks like the bordellos will have to stick around until another use displaces them.

On the other hand, voices are starting to emerge calling for increased space to allow more data to enter the Bitcoin network, a debate that takes us back to 2017 and the blocksize war. This is always the argument of those who are displaced by the gentrification process. If using space, whether on the Bitcoin blockchain or downtown, becomes prohibitively expensive, there is a demand to expand that space or control prices. Since controlling prices is not possible because Bitcoin is a free and open market oblivious to the wet dreams of populist politicians, then there is a call to expand the space. Fortunately, this debate has been settled in the past and I doubt it will be reopened.

A city, like the Bitcoin network, can go through phases where it is more fashionable and phases where it is more depressed. What a city experiences over decades, in the case of Bitcoin is seen in days. That ability to respond to ups and downs in demand is what allows Bitcoin to be so resilient and, at the same time, so difficult to predict and take advantage of. At a time when miners were in over their heads, an increase in fees like this gives them a line to hang on to. A massive investment in capital to monetize it through mining risks these ups and downs that can cause the company to go bankrupt, which favors the decentralization of this activity. At the same time, the increase in fees, such as the demand for land in a city, has motivated investment in second-layer solutions like Lightning. On the other hand, an attack on the network consisting of massive use of space would see the cost of the attack increase exponentially until it gets virtually unaffordable for any bad actor. Running out of resources to continue the attack, the network would continue with business as usual. Bitcoin's security budget, the minimum necessary for it to survive, is not known and cannot be known, because it varies with the circumstances of each moment. Finally, we could highlight from this episode that it is proof that the Bitcoin network can be self-sufficient when the subsidy to miners runs out. As Gregory Maxwell said in 2017 when Bitcoin network activity was such that commissions were even higher than today, "I for one am bringing out the champagne to celebrate activity in the market that is producing levels of commissions that can pay for security thus avoiding having to revert to inflation."

When Santiago Bernabéu decided to go for those plots of land in the village of Madrid, his vision was not of the impoverished Madrid that lay before him, but of a city that would grow and carry the club of his life on its wings. Madrid, like any other city, is not perfect. Its history has been full of ups and downs. Wars have been fought over its land, the last one being the cause of the desire to create a new stadium. It has very disparate areas, questionable uses of space, but it is a scarce and highly demanded land for the added value it offers to those who can make use of it. Likewise, the vision of Bitcoiners is not the image of half-empty blocks or a mempool full of shitcoins that we see today, but one in which Bitcoin blocks are the basis of the economy of a disparate, imperfect world, one that sustains the creation of wealth for its inhabitants. A vision also, in which not everyone will be able to access the Bitcoin base layer, just as not everyone can access Madrid.

Moonbeam’s native token, GLMR, has surged by an impressive 56% in the last 24 hours, currently trading at $0.2601 on various spot trading platforms. This remarkable price action is generating significant buzz within the altcoin market.

What’s driving this surge is the recent announcement that GLMR is set to be listed on Upbit, one of South Korea’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges, known for its pivotal role in token expansion.

Upbit’s decision to list GLMR has far-reaching implications, given South Korea’s stature as a major hub in the digital currency trading world. This listing has ignited excitement across the crypto industry, as it opens doors to a vast and influential market.

Moonbeam, as a prominent protocol within the Polkadot ecosystem, has been on a mission to onboard highly functional decentralized applications (dApps) and establish unique reward mechanisms for early supporters. Its strategic collaborations have contributed to its rising prominence. Competing head-on with the Astar Network, Moonbeam’s listing on Upbit is expected to amplify its reach and bolster its long-term sustainability.

For Moonbeam enthusiasts and investors, this surge comes as a breath of fresh air. GLMR had languished below the $0.2 mark for weeks, making this sudden leap a welcome development that recovers a substantial portion of its recent losses.

GLMR’s spectacular 50.2% surge is a testament to the growing interest in Moonbeam’s potential. The forthcoming Upbit listing has ignited optimism within the cryptocurrency community, offering Moonbeam a valuable opportunity to strengthen its position in the highly competitive blockchain landscape.

As Moonbeam pushes forward with its vision of facilitating decentralized applications and rewarding early supporters, its listing on Upbit marks a significant milestone in its journey towards achieving broader recognition and adoption.

The post Moonbeam (GLMR) token rallying on news of listing on Upbit appeared first on CoinJournal.

In the ever-evolving world of cryptocurrencies, hidden gems often shine the brightest. Today, we dive into the realm of crypto gems, those digital assets priced under $5 that have the potential to make a significant impact in 2023.

Among the finds, we’ll explore Borroe.Finance ($ROE) is a standout candidate for the best crypto investment opportunities, making it essential not to overlook.

Amidst the search for a good crypto to buy, Borroe.Finance ($ROE) stands out as a beacon of innovation. Priced at a mere $0.0125 per token, Borroe.Finance has swiftly gained recognition through its ongoing presale event. 

This project boasts an extraordinary concept of an advanced AI-powered funding marketplace that empowers content creators and Web3 participants to access immediate cash by trading their future earnings. The unique model encompasses various income streams, including subscriptions, invoices, royalties, etc.

LunaX has emerged as a promising cryptocurrency, represented by the LX token. Its primary objective? To revolutionize cross-border payments. The crypto world has witnessed LunaX’s low transaction fees and lightning-fast processing times, challenging conventional banking systems and remittance services. 

With the continued growth of global commerce, LunaX positions itself as a formidable player, facilitating secure and efficient international transactions. Indeed, LunaX stands as one of the top crypto coins to watch in 2023.

Solis (SOLI) is a blockchain platform with a noble focus — sustainability and environmental responsibility. By employing a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, Solis minimizes energy consumption, making it an eco-friendly choice in the crypto space. 

Given the rising concerns about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies, Solis has garnered attention from environmentally conscious investors. Its potential for substantial growth in 2023 is notable, driven by its eco-friendly approach.

ThetaEdge (TED) serves as the native token of the ThetaEdge network, a decentralized edge computing platform. Edge computing is rapidly gaining traction due to its ability to enhance the speed and efficiency of data processing, a critical component for emerging technologies like IoT and AI. 

As the demand for effective edge computing solutions continues to soar, ThetaEdge’s TED token stands poised for increased adoption and potential value appreciation throughout 2023.

MetaverseCoin (META) is among the best metaverse coins. It spearheads the metaverse revolution, powering transactions within virtual worlds. This cryptocurrency empowers users to acquire virtual assets and experiences within these immersive digital realms. 

The metaverse concept is gaining immense popularity across various sectors, including gaming, entertainment, and even business. In light of this, META exhibits undeniable potential for explosive growth in 2023, serving as a gateway to the future’s immersive digital landscapes.

As we explore the world of crypto gems, LunaX, Solis, ThetaEdge, and MetaverseCoin shine as tokens with untapped potential. These digital assets, priced under $5, offer unique value propositions and are well-poised for growth in 2023. 

Alongside them, Borroe.Finance emerges as a groundbreaking project that should not be overlooked. In the fast-paced crypto landscape, the quest for the best crypto to buy today for long-term gains takes us on a journey filled with hidden treasures and innovative opportunities.

For investors actively seeking the best cheap crypto investment opportunities, Borroe.Finance’s presale offers an enticing proposition. With over 90 million $ROE tokens, each priced at just $0.0125, this presale provides an attractive entry point into the crypto market. 

In a realm known for rapid changes and market unpredictability, staying informed and vigilant is essential. Timing often plays a pivotal role in the crypto success and Borroe.Finance ($ROE) has positioned itself as a compelling prospect for savvy investors who recognize the potential of its innovative funding marketplace.

To learn more about Borroe.Finance ($ROE) visit Borroe.Finance Presale | Join The Telegram Group | Follow Borroe on Twitter

The post The 5 best crypto to buy now for under $5 appeared first on CoinJournal.

Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham has reported that Coinbase holds Bitcoin (BTC) worth about $25 billion, making the cryptocurrency exchange the world’s largest entity holding the flagship digital asset.

Arkham’s announcement on Friday was that it had identified nearly 1 million BTC on-chain for Coinbase reserves, with this making the US-based crypto behemoth “the largest Bitcoin entity in the world on Arkham.” The holdings account for about 5% of all bitcoin in existence and means the exchange’s BTC is nearly as much as that attributed to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

Arkham has now identified $25B of Coinbase Bitcoin reserves (~1M BTC) on chain.

This makes Coinbase the largest Bitcoin entity in the world on Arkham, with almost 5% of all BTC in existence – about as much as Satoshi Nakamoto. pic.twitter.com/7sDOczS7WT

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) September 22, 2023

Coinbase is also reportedly home to 36 million deposit and holding addresses for BTC, one of which is a cold wallet with 10,000 BTC. There could be millions of other untagged assets, the intelligence platform noted.

“Arkham has identified and tagged over 36 Million BTC deposit and holding addresses used by Coinbase, with their largest cold wallet containing ~10K BTC. Based on their most recent financials, Coinbase likely has thousands more BTC not yet labeled,” Arkham posted on X.

Other than Bitcoin, the Coinbase portfolio also has 1.68 million Ethereum (ETH), 68.6 million Chainlink (LINK), nearly 223 million USD Coin (USDC) and 921,000 BNB (BNB). These assets contribute to Coinbase’s crypto portfolio of over $29 billion, according to data on Arkham as of September 22.

Arkham’s report comes as Coinbase expanded its services further with a regulatory approval in Spain. As CoinJournal highlighted earlier today, the company has secured registration with the Bank of Spain to offer services as a crypto exchange and crypto custody wallet provider.

Official entry into Spain adds to Coinbase’s regulatory milestones in Italy, Singapore, the Netherlands, Brazil and Canada. The exchange is also battling for regulatory clarity in the US.

The post Coinbase is largest Bitcoin (BTC) holder in the world: Arkham appeared first on CoinJournal.

This year had two distinct parts for financial market participants – one characterized by the dollar’s weakness and one dominated by the dollar’s strength. 

The US dollar runs the show both in the traditional and cryptocurrency markets. EUR/USD is the best example of the correlation between the two markets. 

It opened the year at 1.06, rallied to 1.12, where it peaked during the summer, and then gave up its gains. The same dollar cycle may be seen in many cryptocurrencies. 

For example, Ethereum rallied from the start of the trading year, peaked at $2,000, where it met resistance, and then corrected. Therefore, cryptocurrency traders may want to focus on the dollar’s direction in order to position on the right side of the cryptocurrency market. 

On Wednesday, the United States Federal Reserve released its monetary policy decision. It chose to keep the funds rate unchanged as the latest inflation news is encouraging. 

Market participants wildly expected the decision, so the focus shifted to the press conference. Jerome Powell was hawkish during the conference in the sense that it kept all the options on the table, including further rate hikes. The hawkish part was that he implied that future rate cuts may not be as many as in the past. In other words, interest rates would remain higher for longer. 

Naturally, the dollar rallied. 

Ethereum is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies. Also, it is very liquid compared to other cryptocurrencies. 

Before the rally that started in 2023, Ethereum formed a contracting triangle. The good news is that such triangles appear at the end of complex corrections. 

Ethereum chart by TradingView

It means that if they act as reversal patterns, as is the case here, the new move that follows is part of a different pattern. 

The chart above shows that Ethereum corrected 50% from its highs but remains in a relatively tight range. By tight, one should refer to the historically high volatility in the cryptocurrency market. 

Bulls may want to wait for Ethereum to close above $2,000 before going long. Also, they would want to see Ethereum holding above the $1,400 support area. 

On the other hand, bears may want to see the market dropping below the support area provided by the $1,400 level. A drop to $1,000 might be in the cards on such a move. 

The post Ethereum remains under pressure as the dollar strengthens appeared first on CoinJournal.

Coinbase’s layer 2 network, Base, has witnessed an astounding surge in its Total Value Locked (TVL), hitting approximately $397.32 million within just a month and a half since its August launch.

This meteoric rise has propelled Base ahead of Solana, whose TVL currently stands at $358.96 million. In the past 30 days alone, Base’s TVL surged by a staggering 97.21%, as evident on DeFiLlama, while Solana experienced a 9.64% decrease in TVL during the same period. Interestingly, the surge comes even after Base suffered an outage at the beginning of September.

Screenshot from DefiLlama

Within Base’s TVL, two native projects have played a pivotal role. Leading the charge is the decentralized exchange (DEX) Aerodrome Finance, boasting a TVL of $97.83 million. In a similar vein, the decentralized social media (DeSo) app Friend.tech secured the second spot with a TVL of $36.53 million.

Aerodrome Finance, launched on August 28, allows users to deposit liquidity and earn AERO tokens. Its TVL saw an explosive growth spurt on August 31, with an influx of $150 million in a single day. However, it subsequently witnessed a decline of approximately 51% from its peak.

Friend.tech, introduced on August 11, enables users to tokenize their social networks through the exchange of “Keys.” Despite initial concerns regarding user activity and fees in late August, the platform staged a remarkable comeback in September. DeFi Llama reports that Friend.tech’s TVL skyrocketed by a staggering 540% over the past month, primarily driven by increased daily trading volume since September 9.

Further down the list, Base’s TVL is predominantly attributed to multi-network DeFi platforms such as Compound, Curve, and Uniswap.

Notably, Base recently achieved an all-time high in daily transactions, reaching 1.88 million on September 14. This accomplishment firmly positions Base ahead of rival chains like Optimism and Arbitrum, which collectively managed almost 880,000 transactions on the same day.

While daily transactions have dipped to around 908,000 as of September 22, Base’s transaction ATH remains unbroken.

The post Base ecosystem expands by 97.21% as TVL surpasses that of Solana appeared first on CoinJournal.

Have you had the itch to watch some movies about crypto? Maybe you like to learn a few things watching crypto documentaries, in either case this list has plenty of stuff to check out that should keep you entertained for quite some time.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4654844/
From the days of bartering in early societies to today's modern highly-digitized money, this documentary looks at what exactly money means and how Bitcoin could be an alternative to currencies backed by little more than debt. While only coming in at around an hour, this brief yet informative film provides an interesting overview of bitcoin and how it could affect the concept of money in the world today.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2821314/
Growing obsessed with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin after discovering it in 2011, a 35-year-old computer programmer takes you on a journey to explore this incredible technology and its impact on the world. Investigate this new technology through various stories from startups, entrepreneurs, and other colorful characters who make up the Bitcoin community together.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8563452/
If you’re looking for a little fictional crypto action, you may find it with the film Crypto from 2014. A banker becomes involved in an investigation of corruption and fraud after being demoted and transferred back to his hometown. You might enjoy this thriller with some action, drama, and cryptocurrency themes, including crypto mining.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9203586/
Award-winning producer/director Torsten Hoffmann takes a closer look at Bitcoin and the evolving blockchain industry. He sets out to explore whether this technology, designed to operate without trust or centralization, can provide a viable alternative to the Internet as we know it. Through interviews with leading experts in the field, Hoffmann uncovers the potential of blockchain technology and its implications for the future.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=W15A7Lf0_fI
ColdFusion is a great source for science, technology, history, and business content. It's an independently run Australian media company that offers calm, relaxed coverage of any and all topics you're interested in. Where Did Bitcoin Come From explores Bitcoin, where it came from, and why it all matters.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7407496/
Trust Machine is a documentary exploring blockchain technology's potential to change the world for the better. Featuring insights from some of the leading minds in the field, the film covers a wide range of topics related to cryptocurrency, blockchain, and decentralization. Whether it's solving world hunger or income inequality, Trust Machine showcases how this cutting-edge technology can make a real difference in people's lives.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8414186/
Explore the exciting world of Bitcoin! Here, people are in control of their own money for the first time ever – no banks or governments are required. But how did this digital form of currency come to be? How does it work? And is it here to stay, or just a passing fad?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5033790/
Find out about the players who are bringing Bitcoin and blockchain technology into the mainstream. Furthermore, explore the clash between different factions who care about this new technology for their own reasons.

https://watchdocumentaries.com/the-bitcoin-gospel/
While early on, Bitcoin was dismissed by many as a novel concept that was unlikely to go anywhere, times have changed as people around the world started to pay attention to this growing enigma. This documentary is a great look into the earlier days of Bitcoin and many of the people that were involved early on and shared Bitcoin with the world.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dktBrlikweo
If you enjoy a comedic short, Hodl is a great little watch, and it’s concerningly relatable to some of us in the cryptocurrency space while also holding a useful lesson or two presented in a fun way. It’s a quick one, but it’s worth your time.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6467152/
Magic Money is another interesting documentary exploring the mysterious origins of Bitcoin and the questions still surrounding it alongside its potential roles in society. Will it shape the future in unforeseen ways? Is this the revolution for which we've all been waiting?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6835836/
Is the concept of blockchain the modern equivalent of the invention of the airplane? Listen to interviews with software developers, researchers, cryptologists, and many more from a range of places on their thoughts about this intriguing technology. Use this documentary to start a conversation of your own or at least provoke more than a few thoughts on the subject of blockchain.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3312868/
While not purely about cryptocurrency, Deep Web covers the story of the well-known Ross Ulbricht, and the Silk Road is one that catches the attention of many. Whatever your thoughts are on the topic, it's an interesting part of history that is worth understanding.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12363788/
The banking system is something many of us take for granted, but for many people in Africa, this isn't the case. However, many in the region are turning to cryptocurrency not only as a potential solution but to take back even more control than traditional banking could provide.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7503072/
Have you ever felt confused when trying to understand the key principles involved in cryptocurrency, perhaps Crypto Rush could be the answer. This film attempts to explain crypto in an easy-to-understand way, making it approachable to just about anyone.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4911780/
A film from Vietnam, BItcoin Heist is a fast-paced action film with a comedic twist. If you’re looking for something fun, this one might just be your ticket. Follow special agents taking on a team of thieves and the chaos that ensues.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15387768/
A fantastic documentary film covering the disaster that was QuadrigaCX and its questionable founder Gerald Cotton. It’s got mystery, outrage, and even a few familiar faces you may have seen around the cryptocurrency scene. It’s a great option if you’re looking for a cryptocurrency-related documentary to check out!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11763296/
If you’re a fan of dark comedies, you may enjoy Decrypted. The story involves a mismatched NSA team that somehow manages to kidnap the creator of Bitcoin to attempt to gain information to put an end to the cryptocurrency revolution.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18375626/
Also known as CryptoHorrors in some regions, NFT is a movie about a group of friends buying into an NFT collection that just so happens to be cursed. If you’re feeling like some crypto-related horror, this might just be what you should watch.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11232496/
Agent X is a movie about a former military contractor who has become a secret agent and is sent on a mission. However, things are rarely that easy, and he ends up tangled in a mess involving cryptocurrency, bitcoin mining, and much more.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4554360/
In Virality, four stories intersect with a Bitcoin heist, each involving different characters dealing with their own struggles in a developing society.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4654844/
Looking for a crash course on Bitcoin, money, and cryptocurrency more broadly. Well, check out this one for some insights to help you get up to speed if you’re new to the cryptocurrency scene.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5028002/
While not a movie or a documentary, this TV show ran for several seasons and has moderately high production values, so if long-form productions are more the thing for you, check out StartUp, where cryptocurrency plays a significant role in the storyline. Better yet, you can likely find this crypto show on Netflix or other streaming platforms in your region.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17999542/
Another interesting documentary exploring the economic impact Bitcoin can have on society, money, and how we exchange value with one another in the future. As the gold standard has begun to feel like stone-age technology, is Bitcoin the way forward?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12109930/
Are you a privacy advocate with an interest in cryptocurrency or someone already excited about the potential for Monero? In either case, this crypto documentary could be a great watch for you. Spend a little time with this one and find out why fungibility matters.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15479902/
Another deep dive into the chaos surrounding the QuadrigaCX collapse and its extremely questionable founder. Should you believe everything you hear? Or is there much more to the story than meets the eye?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10930912/
If you don’t mind delving into the odd low-budget movie, this cryptocurrency film could be worth your time. Coming with some mixed reactions, it’s likely you’ll either love or hate this one, but why not find out for yourself? In either case, it’s always great to support these sorts of lower-budget adventures in film.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5322294/
An attempt to find the ever-mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Have they found the man himself, or is he still just as elusive as ever? While you likely know the answer, sometimes you can still enjoy the journey even if you already know the destination.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14849234/
Follow a man looking for answers after a cryptocurrency investment goes wrong. In a mockumentary format, this one is sure to provoke a few laughs and may even feel a little relatable at times if you’ve ever been in the same situation.

https://vimeo.com/369661301
There are a few quirky short films where the subject and cryptocurrency, and this is one of them, it’s a pretty light-hearted affair that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it is good for a quick laugh and will only snag a few minutes of your time.

We hope you enjoyed this list as much as we did putting it together. Did we miss any of your favorites? Let us know! If you’re considering diving into crypto after checking out some of these, be sure to check out LocalCoinSwap if you aren’t already part of our great community.

In the early days of cryptocurrency, it was challenging to find many books to soothe your thirst for more information. However, as cryptocurrency has grown into such a vibrant and thriving ecosystem of ideas and exploration, so have the options for good books on the topic. So, whatever you’re looking to learn about Bitcoin, blockchain, or cryptocurrency in general, you’ll find something on this list to add to your shelf.

One of the most well-known Bitcoin books is Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos, and for a good reason. It is designed to help you navigate the world of Bitcoin and understand everything you need to dive in headfirst and start embracing Bitcoin. It starts off with a broad introduction that is suitable for almost anyone and later delves into the more technical aspects of Bitcoin. So if you’re looking to increase your foundational knowledge or get a friend or family member excited about Bitcoin, this book is for you.

Author: Andreas Antonopoulos

Cryptocurrency and blockchains can be intimidating to those beginning to learn for themselves, but books like The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains are a great place to start. Start with the history and the basics of Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies and move on to more advanced topics as you progress with what you’ve learned. Many topics are covered, including avoiding scams, risk mitigation, digital wallets, crypto regulations, and even the basics of using cryptocurrency exchanges.

Author: Antony Lewis

The book Cryptoassets gives you a range of insights into investigating and valuing digital assets, improving your portfolio management techniques, managing risk, and providing practical guides on various parts of the industry. While focused on the investment side of cryptocurrency, it may be a helpful way to see the cryptocurrency space from an investment perspective.

Author: Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Blockchain is an incredible technology shaping the world, and with Blockchain Revolution, you can see how this game-changing technology could affect the global economy. Blockchain has the potential to change how we deal with finances, health-care records, voting, insurance claims, and so much more. It’s a book that is approachable while still providing valuable insights. So if you’re worried about getting left behind by the revolution, jump into Blockchain Revolution yourself and learn more.

Authors: Alex Tapscott, Don Tapscott

Bitcoin has grown from a niche project to something that is affecting the global economy. Yet, while you can use it to purchase a range of goods and services and exchange value with others around the world, few understand what it is and why they should genuinely care about it. The Age of Cryptocurrency helps you navigate a cyber-economy and think about what the world will look like as further adoption of cryptocurrency continues.

Authors: Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

When Bitcoin first came onto the scene after an announcement on a small mailing list in 2008, no one had any idea of what it would go on to become. However, it has grown to be an economic and technological force that is shaking up the world in incredibly interesting ways over the years. Explore how humanity's most significant achievements have come to those with sound money and why Bitcoin helps to provide this security.

Author: Saifedean Ammous

The creator of Bitcoin is a mysterious figure, one that to this day has never been truly identified or proven to be any specific individual or group. The Book of Satoshi delves into the mystery surrounding this enigmatic character and helps piece together the available information about them. Satoshi Nakomoto launched the Bitcoin revolution and disappeared from the internet altogether. If you want to learn why this may have happened or just explore the mystery, this book may be an excellent fit for you.

Author: Phil Champagne

The world has moved to a digital standard for just about everything. However, relying on these aging systems has put us in a position where we are less in control of our data than ever before. As a result, many are looking to move away from the legacy systems that control our data and regularly leak our valuable personal information. The Truth Machine explores how self-empowerment and much more is possible with the help of blockchain technology.

Authors: Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

The concept of a new currency that didn’t follow the rules of traditional systems that existed before it started out as a bit of an oddity, yet it has grown into a technology that spans a multi-billion dollar industry. People of all kinds from around the world are throwing their support behind Bitcoin as it has shown the potential to free its users from the restrictions and roadblocks that can result from relying on the legacy financial system. Digital gold starts by following the rise and early growth of Bitcoin through the eyes of many of the eccentric members of the community that took to this technology in its early days.

Author: Nathaniel Popper

While many know of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss from their involvement in Facebook in the early days, many in the cryptocurrency space know them for their participation and support of Bitcoin. However, after diving into the venture capital space and soon discovering that their past at Facebook was a roadblock, they found themselves faced with a new proposition of a technology that could be the biggest thing to come or nothing at all, and they bet big that there would be something to it, and were rewarded for their gamble. Learn more about how these brothers found themselves at the forefront of the early Bitcoin boom.

Author: Ben Mezrich

Many books on Bitcoin approach it from the angle of how, but not as many focus on the why, which is just as crucial to understanding the actual value of Bitcoin. Bitcoin affects more than the financial world, and Andreas explains why this new evolution is more than a digital currency. There are massive implications for Bitcoin, and perhaps it can grow to be just as powerful a technology as the internet has been for recent generations. If you’re open to exploring the more significant value propositions of Bitcoin, The Internet of Money is a book you should definitely pick up.

Author: Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Is cash being left behind due to the convenience of digital, or is there more to this push to remove cash from your wallet and have you filling your pockets with cards and phone with digital accounts that track every purchase? Cloudmoney tells the story of how cash has been under attack by big money lobbyists fed by tech and finance forces with an interest in moving the world to new forms of money. So what happens when we leave cash behind, is privacy doomed, and is the possible end goal of cloud money closer than we think?

Author: Brett Scott

While Bitcoin is often known as the first attempt at creating a digital currency, it’s actually only the first to catch on. However, behind this Bitcoin phenomenon, there is a range of exciting stories and even more interesting people who, through the years since the 1970s, have been exploring this concept in a range of curious ways. If you’re looking for something a little outside of the usual Bitcoin or blockchain books, this one might be worth a look.

Author: Finn Brunton

There are a lot of claims made when it comes to cryptocurrency, but the best way to discern for yourself where you stand is to look at both the strengths and weaknesses of this technology. By leveraging real-worth case studies, Blockchain Bubble or Revolution looks to cut through the hype and provide a more balanced and understandable analysis of what exactly is going on with cryptocurrency. Learn about everything from public to private blockchains and even what you should be prepared for as we move forward with blockchain into the future.

Authors: Parth Detroja, Neel Mehta, Aditya Agashe

In the early days of cryptocurrency, if you wanted to create your own, you usually had to create your own blockchain, and standing out when Bitcoin was a growing behemoth was challenging. However, with the launch of Ethereum, suddenly, things became a little more interesting. Tokens have become a standard part of the average crypto user’s vocabulary. This was made possible with Ethereum enabling developers to leverage an existing blockchain without having to bootstrap their own and attracting enough user base to sustain and secure itself. As a result, Ethereum pushed the cryptocurrency space into a new world where almost anyone could launch a token. This book attempts to show the struggles of the crypto market to adapt to the struggles for power, money, and culture.

Author: Laura Shin

If you’ve heard of cryptocurrency and want to learn more about the potential for investments in the crypto market, this book is for you. Find out what exactly all this crypto stuff is, why it exists, and where the industry might be moving in the near future. In addition, it covers many common mistakes made by new crypto investors and attempts to educate you on safely exploring investment opportunities in the crypto market.

Author: Siam Kidd

Want an introduction to the often misunderstood world of crypto? This self-contained book might be a good starting point as it explores crypto and what some are calling the new global money for the internet age. As a newcomer to crypto, you’ll likely have many questions. This book covers a lot of areas that will hopefully help you better understand important aspects of crypto like decentralization, altcoins, Bitcoin, blockchain, and a lot more. It is supported by a website that enables you to take what you’ve learned to the next level by providing companion videos for each chapter and even problems for you to go off and solve as you learn.

Authors: Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Steven Goldfeder, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller

If you’ve been looking for a fun and easy-to-follow introduction to digital assets across a broad spectrum of the blockchain ecosystem, you may find yourself being drawn to The Truth About Crypto. Explore the difference between cryptocurrency and other types of digital assets that provides a broader perspective on what precisely these assets can do and why they might be appealing to you as an investor in the space.

Authors: Ric Edelman

We often take money for granted regarding how it actually works. What Layered Money attempts to investigate is how money has evolved over time to become layered. From gold to digital currencies, the lines begin to blur as to what exactly money can mean. If you want to investigate for yourself how Bitcoin has started a massive shake-up of our international monetary systems to the stage where central banks are exploring creating their own blockchain assets and digital currencies.

Author: Nik Bhatia

Depending on how you learn, you may find that breaking down a concept like a blockchain technology into a series of digestible and approachable steps is a fantastic way to increase your knowledge. You can skip the jargon and complex math; instead, just work your way through this book which makes an effort to bridge the gap between highly-technical explanations and the business side of blockchain. Start with the core knowledge needed to understand what a blockchain is all the way through to major application scenarios that can have you well on your way to being an informed and active member of the crypto community.

Author: Daniel Drescher

Between 2015 and late 2017, there was a lot of commotion in the Bitcoin community, something that is now often referred to as the Blocksize War. While it was easy to look at this from the outside and assume it was simply a passionate debate about the amount of data that should be allowed in each Bitcoin block, it raised a lot of questions. With some prominent players throwing their weight around and conflict spilling out beyond the Bitcoin codebase, there is a lot to explore when it comes to who was making noise, their motivations, and where all this went in the end.

Author: Jonathan Bier

While the “for Dummies” series of books has become somewhat of a meme, many of them provide easy-to-approach information that is easy to understand and digest. The book Cryptocurrency Investing for Dummies allows you to go from a passing interest to have a grasp of some of the things you’ll need to navigate the cryptocurrency markets. Find out how to speculate on the top cryptocurrencies no matter the market conditions or sentiment and navigate the new thriving cryptocurrency markets that never sleep.

Author: Kiana Danial

If you want an introduction to crypto that takes you beyond the rudimentary and touches on interesting topics like DeFi, NFTs, and many other curious topics, The Book of Crypto could be your answer to scratching the surface. The crypto ecosystem is growing in complexity as new and experimental ideas are playing out on the center stage. It’s easy to feel like you’ve been left behind as the crypto space pushes forward, but you can get on top and start understanding the potential impact on the future of money and how cryptocurrency can take us there.

Author: Henri Arslanian

Again Andreas enters the list with another high-quality offering that you shouldn’t miss. Start with learning the basics of running an Ethereum client and progress all the way through to building your own decentralized applications that leverage multiple P2P aspects. Companies worldwide are exploring Ethereum and EVM compatible blockchains, and now you can use Mastering Ethereum as your gateway to becoming a part of that yourself.

Author: Andreas Antonopoulos

Suppose you’re interested in gaining the information to make informed decisions about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. In that case, Understanding Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency may help you achieve more awareness and understanding of this new phenomenon. Furthermore, the blockchain scene is constantly growing, and if you decide to start checking out books like this, perhaps you can start growing your knowledge of blockchain.

Author: Martin May-Clingo

Blockchain development is becoming increasingly in demand. Suppose you are one of the few that understand how to build with blockchain technology and build your own scalable blockchain projects. In that case, you’ll be well-positioned to become an integral part of the blockchain community. Find out how you could use Bitcoin, Ethereum, NEO, EOS, and Hyperledger to begin your own projects and immerse yourself in what it is to be a blockchain developer.

Authors: Elad Elrom

While we’ve touched on many Bitcoin and blockchain books in this list, many intriguing books are jumping into Ethereum that are worth your time. One to consider is The Infinite Machine, as it starts with the creator Vitalik Buterin and follows the ideas as they unfold and the chaos that sometimes results. Step through the technology and innovation to see what was unleashed as Ethereum grew to the point where it now supports thousands of independent projects and is considered one of the biggest blockchain projects in the world.

Author: Camila Russo

Many people become curious about the business potential of blockchain, and this book aims to quench that curiosity. Find out some of the new business models and possibilities that blockchain brings to the table, and perhaps inspire your own ideas for this innovative space. Then, progress through seven chapters to get a grasp on why blockchain matters for business and where it could take you.

Author: William Mougayar

While this is the 2nd entry to this list from this range of books, it should be no surprise given how broad the topics this series strives to cover to see more than one about cryptocurrency. While many beginners to crypto are quick to jump in and start performing transactions, others find themselves enamored with this so-called “mining” used to generate new cryptocurrency on many blockchains. With this book, you can find out what this actually means, how you might be able to do it yourself, and whether or not you’ll need a pick and shovel to get started.

Authors: Peter Kent and Tyler Bain

Have you wanted to broach the concept of Bitcoin with your children, or maybe you want a gift for a Bitcoin-crazy friend that has children? In either case, Bitcoin Money could fit the bill. Explore different kinds of money in a story suitable for all ages, and you never know, you might just learn something new yourself about this magical internet money.

Author: Michael Caras

If you’ve been in crypto for a while, you’ve likely heard about these cryptocurrency debit cards doing the rounds but simply don’t know where to start looking. While there’s a range of options, crypto debit cards aren’t a one size fits all solution as most of them only support specific regions and cryptos. So it’s time to find out if adding a crypto card to your wallet is a plus or a bust to add to your trading toolkit.

While P2P trading is often a far better option as it provides you extremely high flexibility to get paid or send payment in whatever way suits you, it’s always good to know what options are out there for expanding your ability to trade your crypto in and out of the markets. None of the following should be considered endorsements and is based on publicly available information. Always do your own research before putting your cryptocurrency somewhere new or handing over personal information.

One of the older players in the crypto debit card space, Wirex, has been around for some time now. So If you’re looking to spend money on one of these cards, having a company that has been around a little longer is a good way to ensure you aren’t likely to face a sudden shutdown or discontinuation of service in your region.

Wirex cards are supported in 130 countries, enable you to use over 150 cryptos and fiat currencies, and boast several million customers.

You can earn up to 2% cashback on in-store or online purchases via their Cryptoback rewards program that pays out in their token WXT, which is a great value add to users of the Wirex cards. Top-ups can be performed several ways using crypto but can also be performed via your other debit or credit card if that’s something you’re interested in doing.

With no monthly maintenance fees and even some free ATM withdrawals up to $400 a month, the Wirex card can be one of the best crypto debit cards to consider. Just be sure to investigate your specific spending habits to ensure that you won’t get caught out by any unexpected fees, as pricing lacks a little transparency. In addition, you’ll likely find that some additional costs are creeping into the spreads on conversions between crypto or traditional fiat currencies, so that’s something to consider.

Want a crypto debit card with broad support for a wide range of currencies and locations? Then, Wirex might tick your boxes.

A newer entry to the cryptocurrency debit card list is the Crypto Card from Unbanked. Unlike many others that rely on apps to support their card with few other options to fund the card. The Unbanked debit card enables you to fund your card using the Visa Readylink program via direct deposit or cryptocurrency transfer. So while you may be looking for a bitcoin debit card or something specific, the Unbanked card offers you more options.

One of the things to be aware of when looking into the debit cards offered by Unbanked is that funding your account results in the funds being converted to their token UNBNK. The main concern with this is that you’re exposed to the volatility of the cryptocurrency, which may be something that you consider outside your risk profile.

Unbanked offers support for several different cryptocurrencies when funding your account, including some less common options like Uniswap (UNI) and Basic Attention Token (BAT, alongside staples like Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT), and USD Coin (USDC). Currently, it appears that cards are available to customers in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, which covers some notable areas but won't be suitable for everyone.

Like the flexibility of having multiple ways to fund your card and live in a supported region? It could be that the Unbanked debit card catches your attention.

If you’ve been checking out using bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies online, you’ve likely been face-to-face with Bitpay in the past. While better known for their payment processing solutions for merchants, they also offer a popular crypto debit card. Like Wirex, Bitpay has been around a long time and is very much well-established, so it is less likely to just fall off the map suddenly as can be the risk with some of the latest options.

Boasting fast reloads, flexibility, high security, broad access, and rewards, the Bitpay card can be an excellent option to investigate when searching for the top crypto conversion cards. Bitpay relies heavily on their app, which, to be fair, these days is not uncommon but is something that may irk the more hardline users looking for a more traditional experience.

On the other hand, with the app, you can get set up with a wallet quite fast, have it loaded, and be on to ordering your card in just a couple of minutes. So if you’re looking for a prepaid MasterCard that can enable you to spend your crypto backed by one of the older companies in the crypto space, Bitpay could be the answer.

Want a debit card to convert crypto from a reputable brand in the space? Then, the Bitpay crypto debit card could be the answer.

If you’re looking for something a little flashy with all the bells and whistles, the crypto.com crypto debit card might be for you. While one of the newer entries to the market, this card is already one of the most popular and is also one of the most competitive options in terms of fees.

While cashback has been offered on spending there are report reports of rewards changing for the worse recently, so be sure to check for official announcements before looking further. No annual fees, and their card is actually made of metal, something you likely know if you’ve seen any of their abundant marketing since their card launched. Like some other cards, such as the card offered by Wirex, you can also top up your card with fiat, alongside a range of cryptocurrencies. There’s also a range of “tiers” of cards, so if you’re considering this one take a close look and be sure to check the fine print to understand exactly what you’re getting yourself into.

Again the app is very strongly connected to the card, with the card acting more as a secondary product, albeit a well-rounded one. The crypto.com app features a range of features, including paying interest on some cryptocurrencies stored in the wallet, though this appears to require you to stake some of their token Cronos (CRO).

If you’re looking for one of the newest entries to the market, check out the crypto debit card offered by Crypto.com

For those of you that like to leverage the value held in your cryptocurrency without having to sell them, the Nexo card is an interesting offering. Using your Nexo card, you can spend the value of the crypto stored in your Nexo wallet; this offers a more unique alternative that feels more like a credit card than it does just another crypto debit card.

Rewards are also quite good with a Nexo crypto card. For example, you can receive an instant 2% cashback on purchases. In addition, using Nexo, you can earn quite good interest with claimed rates of up to 17% of annual interest. Unlike most other companies with similar offerings, Nexo offers a daily payout and enables you to withdraw your funds at any time. However, like all of these lending and rewards programs, it’s crucial you take the time to understand any downsides or potential risks associated with them. It's not something you should jump into without adequate understanding.

If you think Nexo might be a good choice for you, we have some great news! You can trade Nexo tokens P2P over on LocalCoinSwap, enabling you to experiment with all that Nexo offers while trading Nexo tokens on the most popular non-custodial marketplace.

If you find crypto lending an interesting idea and want to access the value in your assets without selling them, perhaps the crypto debit card available from Nexo may suit you.

While there's a range of cryptocurrency debit card options they all have their pros and cons, and many are only available in specific regions. The best thing to do when trying to decide on a crypto card you may be interested in is to first decide what's important to you, which cryptos you want to use, and continue on by investigating the many options available with these things in mind.

If you do decide to get yourself a debit card that supports crypto exchange, be sure to check back in now and then to ensure you're still getting a good deal, don't be afraid to mix things up if a better option comes along in the future!

Many of us have had the opportunity to be exposed to such rapid growth in the crypto community; in some cases, it’s even been life-changing for many people. So if you feel like you should share some of what you’ve gained from crypto, or maybe you just have a little more than you need, donating to charity is an excellent way to help others.

Donating to a charity that accepts cryptocurrency can be a way to give while supporting something important to you already, cryptocurrency. Thankfully, a growing number of charities are now realizing that accepting crypto donations can really make a difference, and so can you.

A charity that provides sleeping bags and backpack beds to those in need, Backpack Bed for Homeless offers practical help to those in need. Providing shelter enables those in need and sleeping rough to stay warm and receive at least a hint of comfort. In addition, you can donate multiple types of crypto and help make a difference to homeless people. If you are eligible, you may even be able to receive a tax deduction, which is always a welcome bonus that can be even better when you’re helping someone.

If you want to help someone struggling even to stay warm, Backpack Bed for Homeless is a way you can do just that and help people feel just a little bit safer.

Working to protect children in desperate situations from starvation, diseases, and other disasters, Save the Children helps kids in 116 countries worldwide. They also help produce resources to help spread essential information about health, education, child protection, and humanitarian issues. With a mission to prevent preventable causes of death in children while ensuring they also have the essentials like education covered, Save the Children is an easy cause to get behind.

Save the children has been accepting bitcoin donations since 2013, so if you want to support their efforts, check out Save the Children, you can donate with a range of cryptos.

Having a home of your own is an incredibly powerful thing, and this is something that Habitat for Humanity strives to provide. As a not-for-profit housing provider for low-income families and other vulnerable people, Habitat for Humanity helps access safe shelter, water, sanitation, and some of the essentials we need as humans to thrive. They’ve helped over 39 million people, and over a million people have volunteered for their projects.

For many of us, a home is something we take for granted; for many others, the idea of a home is a dream that seems too far away. So maybe it’s time to see if Habitat for Humanity can help you spread some kindness with a crypto donation.

Water is essential for all of us to survive. Yet, access to clean drinking water is still not available to everyone. Access to clean water sources can make or break a community, and the results can be devastating. It’s impossible to focus on education, work, and supporting your family when your most basic needs like water aren’t being met, which is a massive problem The Water Project is trying to solve. When donating to this charity, you can even choose directly to contribute to specific communities, which can help you feel better connected to where your donation is going.

The challenging work performed by The Water Project affected hundreds of thousands of people, and you can help them affect more people by donating some of your cryptocurrency.

If there’s a charity that almost everyone has heard of before, it’s definitely the Red Cross. The goal of the Red Cross is to relieve causes of suffering around the world. Whether through blood drives, responding to natural disasters, and so much more. Another area where the Red Cross places a lot of effort is training people with life-saving skills, be that CPR, swimming, or other potentially life-saving training. The charity relies heavily on donations and volunteers to perform the work they do, so your donations can help this charity reach more people and affect their lives in positive ways.

For those interested in putting their crypto to work, the Red Cross may be an excellent solution the next time you’re looking for a worthy cause to support after.

Healthcare is important for all of us, yet many people don’t have access to public healthcare solutions or have the ability to afford medical insurance. Watsi allows you to directly affect the lives of others by funding life-changing surgeries for people around the world. It’s hard to argue that everyone should be able to get the medical help they need, and should you choose to donate, you can help make sure someone is getting the treatment they need.

If a direct cause and effect are important to you when donating to charities that accept bitcoin or crypto in general, Watsi might just tick some boxes for you.

Supporting indigenous and traditional communities that inhabit the world's rainforests helps protect the people who live there and enables them to better foster these beautiful parts of the world. Sustainability is the key to the future of rainforests, and with the changes happening to the world around us, sometimes it’s important to remember the massive value they provide.

If you’re interested in supporting important cultures and isolated communities while helping to protect the lands they inhabit, the Rainforest Foundation could be perfect for your next crypto donation.

While this charity has an interesting name, it’s also a strong meaning. In Swahili, the word means ‘we are growing. Tunapanda runs technology and other educational courses in struggling parts of East Africa. With a goal to train lifelong learners, Tunapanda helps people empower themselves in ways that can change their lives.

Education, collaboration, and building stronger communities are possible through education, and your donation may just be able to help with that at Tunapanda.

If you have a charity that you love, consider suggesting they consider accepting crypto the next time you donate. It shows that demand is there and helps grow the options for the cryptocurrency community to donate directly in a way that feels right for them.

For all of us who have more than we need, there are always many more people who don’t even have enough help to get themselves the necessities or people trying to change the world in powerful ways that could use our support.

Celo is one of the most inclusive cryptocurrency projects around, and more people are beginning to take notice due to its thriving community. So let’s explore this project bringing dApps to everyone and enabling anyone with as little as a smartphone to participate in the cryptocurrency space.

Celo is an open-source blockchain project that supports a native cryptocurrency called CELO and other tokenized assets like the stablecoin cUSD. Celo aims to be accessible to anyone by leveraging technology that has become commonplace among most of the planet, smartphones.

Suppose you are looking to experiment with blockchain technology and learn more. In that case, Celo is an excellent choice given its inexpensive transactions and ecosystem containing many projects focused on ease of use.

As Celo comes with its own blockchain and token support, tokens on Celo are absolutely something you should check out. One of the most interesting is cUSD, a stablecoin that aims to be tied to the value of the US Dollar (USD) that is transferable on the Celo blockchain. The value of cUSD is maintained by a mechanism that algorithmically adjusts the cUSD supply using crypto-only reserves to ensure transparency and a reliable level of price stability.

Thanks to very low transaction fees on the Celo network, it opens up many opportunities for engaging with dApps and various types of smart contracts using tokens on Celo. As a result, many projects are popping up on Celo that range widely from NFT collections to experimental economic protocols.

The Celo network supports itself by relying on several different types of contributors to the network. Firstly, light clients are a form of software that operates on a user’s device; one great example is the official Celo mobile wallet which enables a low barrier to entry for the use of Celo on mobile devices. Furthermore, light clients allow users to interact with the network efficiently without operating more demanding software or needing access to anything higher-end than a cheap android phone.

As an alternative to using a light client, you can also use the non-custodial wallets provided by LocalCoinSwap, where you remain in complete control of your funds and can access your wallet on just about any device with a modern web browser.

Full nodes are also are vital parts of the network and provide a valuable service. These nodes help support the network and enable the use of light clients. Full nodes on the Celo network act as bridges that pass transactions and other necessary data between different network participants and help keep everything running smoothly and in sync.

Unlike many blockchains that currently use proof of work consensus to secure them, Celo opts instead to use proof of stake with the help of validator nodes that require staking of CELO tokens to take part in the validation process while incentivizing positive and honest contributions to the network. Validator nodes are essential as they provide validation for transactions and produce new blocks.

Together, these different types of participants form an active and efficient network that supports a flourishing and growing ecosystem of users and use cases.

CELO holders can stake their CELO tokens and gain the ability to drive the project. The more CELO tokens you hold, the more voting power you can muster. Staking is rewarded and encourages participation as a validator. If the total amount of tokens staked drops below a certain threshold, rewards increase to encourage more holders to begin staking and ensure the network is well supported.

Combining staking rewards with governance helps the CELO tokens form a valuable part of the project and help provide a strong foundation for a range of tokens and dApps to operate on top of the Celo blockchain. As the supply is also limited, this helps provide value as long as there is enough demand for the tokens.

Thanks to the support of non-custodial CELO trading on LocalCoinSwap, traders around the world have access to this increasingly popular digital asset. You can trade CELO instantly with other buyers and sellers from around the world in your local currency while choosing from hundreds of popular payment methods.

The Benefits of Buying CELO P2P on LocalCoinSwap Include:

Earn free CELO by trading on LocalCoinSwap!

Centralized exchanges tend to support minimal payment methods, resulting in a vast number of people simply not having access to trading on these platforms. However, a P2P marketplace like LocalCoinSwap enables you to trade with a massive range of payment methods, including cash.

Buying CELO with cash is easy, with just a few simple steps:

If you can’t find a trade offer that matches your preferences, you can create your own trade offer or explore alternative payment methods that may be more commonly available. As you’re trading P2P, you can explore various payment options, including things like local bank transfer, gift cards, PayPal, Skrill, and Zelle, just to name a few.

Have you checked out all that Celo has to offer yet? Then, why not start by exploring P2P trading and see why so many people are interested in this cryptocurrency project that reduces barriers to using cryptocurrency and takes advantage of the modern technology in our pockets that we often take for granted.

Have you ever wondered if your wallet address could be more readable? Perhaps a little like a website URL than a string of chaotic characters meshed together in a stream of incomprehensible madness, well this is where the Ethereum Name Services (commonly called ENS) can make things a lot more interesting.

ENS is a naming standard that takes advantage of blockchain technology. Ethereum Name Service touts itself as being the most widely integrated blockchain naming standard, and given its proliferation among the cryptocurrency community, it's hard to argue with that likely being the case.

At its core, ENS is an extensible, open, and distributed naming system that leverages the popular Ethereum blockchain and enables the use of addresses that are actually human-readable. So when you're using an ENS address, there's no need to be awkwardly copying and pasting your address when a friend asks for it; instead, you can opt for an ENS domain that is not only far easier to read but also far easier to error check.

While you don't necessarily have to fully understand how Ethereum Name Service works merely to use it, it can still be an interesting thing to explore to help expand your understanding of how blockchains can be used.

If you're somewhat familiar with how the internet works, the concept of ENS domains is in a sense remotely similar to how DNS (domain name service) works. However, for those that aren't, in the simplest sense, when typing the name of a website into your browser DNS is used to help find the actual IP address that is serving the actual data for that domain. So instead of typing a series of numbers and dots that are even less intuitive than a phone number, you can instead type in an easy-to-remember, often very readable URL.

While on the internet, a top-level domain (like '.com') is managed by a registrar with domains available on request; in the case of ENS, the traditional registrar is replaced by smart contracts which control top-level domains like '.eth' and provide and manage the rules for registering one yourself. If you own a domain name, you can even create subdomains attached to it as you already control the higher-level ENS name.

For a far more in-depth explanation of how ENS works, as well as some further technical detail, the official ENS documentation is a fantastic place to learn more about this impressive service.

If you've been looking into ENS, you may have noticed a token by the same name, and this is associated with the project. The token is actually for us in the form of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance token to help push support of ENS forward while enabling it to remain an open, decentralized service.

A quarter of the entire ENS token supply was distributed in the form of an airdrop to those that had held NFTs representing ownership of ENS domain names. The amount of time someone held an ENS domain alongside other factors decided the actual amount received. A significant amount of Ethereum Name Service tokens were also held for their community treasury, for core contributors, and other parties in much smaller amounts.

Receiving tokens was also rather interesting in that claimants were required to vote on several ENS proposals using these governance tokens as well as choose an applicant to offer the voting power of your tokens to a chosen delegate that had applied to take part in the process.

ENS domains are purchased with a small subscription fee. While at first thought this may seem off-putting, it helps to ensure that only those using or having an active interest in a specific domain are likely to maintain holding it long term.

For those wanting to buy an Ethereum Name Service domain, you can head over to the ENS domain app and get started. The process will require you to have the relevant subscription fee and some extra funds to cover the gas cost of the transaction involved in the form of Ethereum.

The search function present as soon as you open the app enables you to find out which ENS names are available quickly. Then, using MetaMask or other supported wallets, you can quickly purchase a domain for yourself.

Alongside popular ethereum wallets like MetaMask and MyEtherWallet supporting ENS, LocalCoinSwap does as well! Using your non-custodial ethereum wallet that is generated when you create your account, you can easily withdraw ethereum or other ERC-20 tokens directly using an ENS domain name in place of other ethereum addresses.

So the next time you buy ethereum/sell ethereum with LocalCoinSwap, why not take advantage of the awesome human-readable names provided by ENS and experience how nice it can be to personalize your cryptocurrency wallet with an ENS domain of your own.

The concept of the metaverse has been a colossal topic recently. With even Facebook suddenly jumping into the mix, there's a lot out there to explore and many projects working on their own visions for the future of the digital universe. So perhaps it's the perfect time to start exploring what exactly this idea is and look at some of the places we may go as we move into the future.

The metaverse is a conceptual or hypothesized view of how the internet and technology could evolve in the future. This idea encapsulated things like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and even 3D space and virtual environments where ownership, community, and building things beyond the physical world’s limits can be possible.

The actual phrase is said to have come from a well-known sci-fi novel from the year 1992 called Snow Crash. The book described a dystopian world where the main character can escape his difficult day-to-day existence into a virtual realm. This book is said to have even influenced The Matrix and some other films delving into more abstract concepts and alternative reality.

As with many new forms of technology and especially on the more experimental side of things, naturally, the metaverse is something that fits nicely alongside crypto, and a range of projects are popping up to explore and grow inside this new space. Through crypto and things like NFTs (non-fungible tokens), ownership of assets and virtual real estate becomes far more practical. While we're still adapting in many ways to using more niche forms of digital assets, when you look at the digital space, things suddenly can become not only more straightforward but practical.

Is the metaverse going to be the next big thing in crypto? Time will tell, and if the current growing hype is any indication, it may indeed start making some waves that ripple beyond the bounds of the typical cryptocurrency ecosystem.

With this being a concept that has only started to gain significant traction recently, there's already a lot of things that are either doable today or are already being actively developed.

Some of the biggest companies in the world have not only explored virtual reality but are beginning to embrace a more embodied internet where the virtual world and real world can intertwine. For example, Facebook has recently taken to the idea of the Metaverse so strongly they have changed the name of their company with a recent announcement and complete branding overhaul. The company is now known as Meta as they are already beginning to promote the future of the virtual universe and how that could look.

Even Disney, one of the more conservative companies that almost everyone is familiar with, has stated they want to "connect the digital and physical worlds" with animation and storytelling. So perhaps in the not too distant future, some of the most well-known Disney characters will get a Metaverse rethink or even make their way into the blockchain space in an official capacity.

Nvidia is working on building what it is calling an "Omniverse" that they have stated is intended to connect 3D virtual worlds. In addition, they appear to be interested in digital assets and their ownership in persistent virtual worlds, which seems to bode well for Metaverse cryptos, projects working on an NFT marketplace, and other blockchain projects that complement the Metaverse theory.

Microsoft is another big name that isn't new to the Metaverse; after releasing their mixed reality headsets in recent years while exploring both VR and AR, you can expect to see more of this from them as demand for these technologies increases along with the development of software to interact with virtual spaces is further enhanced. Already Microsoft has announced they are creating a Metaverse product for their popular Microsoft Teams platform to increase collaboration and allow things like customizable digital avatars, novel forms of communication, expand collaborations into open virtual spaces, and develop more exciting video chat experiences.

While VR and even AR have been strongly connected to gaming in most people’s minds, this is starting to change. With a large part of the world exploring work-from-home options and how to embrace socializing and collaboration in the digital space, more people than ever are starting to understand the potential for the Metaverse to bring many types of interactions into a new world.

With products like the HTC Vive Pro 2 and Meta Quest 2 (formally Oculus Quest 2) making their way into homes worldwide, VR is becoming much more commonplace. With tech enthusiasts digging around for software and games to take their VR devices for a spin are finding their way into virtual worlds through VR Chat and VR Virtual Desktop, which touch on the potential for these technologies as the hardware to make them practical has started to reach the mass market with Google even releasing "Cardboard" a few years ago which when combined with your phone could provide a relatively immersive VR experience while primarily being made from, as you may have guessed, cardboard.

Even a growing landscape of blockchain and crypto Metaverse gaming-related projects is blooming with some of the best Metaverse projects for gamers, including The Sandbox (describing itself as the open Metaverse), Decentraland, Axie Infinity, and Star Atlas, just to name a few.

The increased interest in the Metaverse points to the future being launched into other realms of digital spaces where what things exist and what context they are owned in the future could look much different from their traditional counterparts today. Will your avatar in the future be far more than the profile pictures of today? Maybe you'll even find yourself offering or receiving services or digital goods in ways that today may seem like science fiction. With VR and other technologies associated with the Metaverse blending with the crypto space and even affecting how some people are playing games, there's a tremendous amount of potential, and things are only just now beginning to be touched on as so many bleeding-edge technologies are starting to mesh together.

It's hard to argue the way we see the web, data, or just the internet, in general, isn't evolving. So maybe the Metaverse will become a big part of how all of this is shaped in the future as the physical and digital collide and it reverberates through the network that underpins our life and world.

Whether you're looking to start trading, mining, or simply want to try your hand at buying a few bitcoins in order to see how it all works, it's easy to get started and even easier to begin learning with this bitcoin cheatsheet.

Bitcoin allows transactions to take place peer-to-peer without a third party such as a bank or government. The "coins" themselves exist only in digital form - they have no physical form and are not printed or minted like traditional currency. In essence, they represent a unit of account for trading goods and services, much like conventional currencies. The coins are made - or mined - by solving complex mathematical problems.

Bitcoin was created by a still-mysterious figure going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2009. Satoshi Nakamoto was a secretive person or a group whose true identity has never been confirmed. Because no one owns or controls bitcoin, it is considered a decentralized digital currency.

Bitcoin has been described as "cash for the Internet." What separates it from other currencies is that bitcoin isn't subject to any one country's rules, regulations or policies. As a result, it can be used by anyone who knows how to access the Bitcoin network - typically through a wallet application downloaded on a PC or mobile phone or online via a web wallet.

Because it's not centralized, bitcoin can't be bought from a central organization like a bank. Instead, you typically need to use an exchange to buy or sell bitcoin. Before you open an account and purchase your first coins, you need to think about what type of exchange you want to use; the most flexible option is a P2P marketplace like LocalCoinSwap.

The wallet can be seen as your personal interface to the Bitcoin network. It allows you to receive bitcoins, store them and then send them to others. A wallet is like a bank account; however, it is more decentralized and under your control. Therefore, you are not required to submit any identification or other sensitive information when creating a bitcoin wallet.

On a fundamental level, Bitcoin wallets consist of two cryptographic keys (one public and one private key) - the public key being your wallet address, which people can use to send money to, and the private key is for signing transactions (moving your funds).

Keeping your bitcoins safe is of utmost importance, as this digital currency has a lot of value attached to it. There are three main types of wallets available for you to use: online wallets, offline wallets, and hardware wallets - each with their advantages and disadvantages.

The blockchain is the technology behind bitcoin. It's a data structure that stores blocks of items in a linear, chronological order. The 'chain' represents the entire history of all transactions made since the network began. Every transaction is stored in blocks and mathematically encrypted to create an irreversible record - hence the term blockchain.

Miners keep the blockchain consistent, complete, and immutable by repeatedly verifying and collecting newly broadcast transactions by using large amounts of computer processing power (energy). Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block (unique signature), using the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, which links it to the previous block, thus giving the blockchain its name.

For companies wishing to accept bitcoin, many different types of software, services, and platforms can be used - or even none at all. For example, some smaller merchants may accept direct bitcoin payments to their wallets, while others may opt for third-party services designed specifically for businesses.

Since bitcoin's inception in 2009, it has witnessed rapid growth and appreciation in its value. In this relatively short period, people have come to see it as a haven for their wealth due to it being entirely digital, not influenced by any central bank or authority. However, many naysayers still stubbornly believe that bitcoin is built on unproven technology and isn't ready to be used in the real world just yet. Yet, over a decade later, the network is still producing blocks and processing transactions.

Even though it's not quite mainstream yet, you can still use your bitcoins to purchase products or services from vendors across the world. You could buy anything from web hosting, plane tickets, furniture, tech, or even book a hotel room thanks to the growing number of companies accepting bitcoin.

SegWit stands for segregated witness. If you've ever used (or at least heard of) a wallet that supports SegWit, then you've likely seen it in action already. However, not all wallets support SegWit just yet - but it's a step towards the future capacity upgrade for bitcoin as it enables blocks to contain more information without directly increasing the 1 Megabyte block size.

The bitcoin network is completely decentralized, so there's no need for any central authority to oversee its operations. This means that anyone can participate in the network by simply downloading the software required.

Many people who have purchased bitcoins as an investment are seeing significant returns on their initial investments. In December 2017, a single bitcoin was valued at over $19,000 USD, and in 2021, Bitcoin has traded for over $50,000 USD. As bitcoin is speculative and at times highly volatile, whether it is a good investment is something you should research yourself and assess against your risk tolerance.

Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million coins. That means that there can be no inflation in the network, which is one of the ways it differs from fiat currencies.

If you somehow lose access to your wallet or it gets stolen, you should consider these funds irretrievably lost in most cases. That means it's important to secure any wallet you own, safely store your private key or seed phrase, and ideally use a quality hardware wallet.

Every single bitcoin transaction that ever takes place requires a public address and a private key - which work together to authorize the transaction. A public address is enough information for you to be able to send funds to another bitcoin user. The private key is what someone needs to have so they can spend money from their wallet. However, if they lose the key, they will never regain access to the bitcoin inside of it again.

Bitcoins faucets are websites that dispense a small amount of bitcoin for free of performing a task (often a captcha) that were quite common in the early days of bitcoin. While these have become far less popular in recent years and pay out a lot less, they still exist.

The average block time refers to how long it takes for a block to be confirmed on the blockchain. It's usually around 10 minutes per block, but it can take more or less time. However, the bitcoin network is programmed to add a new block every 10 minutes, so each block is expected to take an average of 10 minutes.

The lightning network is a second layer protocol built on top of bitcoin that allows for super-fast and inexpensive transactions. These are especially useful for smaller-scale payments where transaction fees would be larger than the cost of the product or service you're purchasing, but they can also make most bitcoin transactions instant. This technology is still in its early stages, but it's already supported in some wallet software and is growing more popular as adoption is starting to increase more rapidly.

The price of bitcoin constantly varies since it's traded on various exchanges all over the world. It can go up or down depending on what people are willing to pay for it, but that value has been trending upwards for years now when looked at on a longer time frame.

A satoshi is the smallest fraction of a bitcoin and represents 0.00000001 BTC (one hundred millionths of one bitcoin). Since bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal points, you could always buy a fraction of a bitcoin if you didn't want a complete one.

Bitcoin transaction fees vary based on several factors. When there is more competition to get a transaction into a block, you will pay a higher fee if you want your transaction to be processed quickly. Additionally, the size of any given transaction also determines how much it will cost to send or receive bitcoins. While you can send a fraction of a bitcoin or thousands of bitcoins for the same price, specific transaction types can cost more than others based on numerous factors (such as the type of wallet address used).

A halving is when the rate at which new bitcoins are created halves. This happens once every 210,000 blocks or roughly every four years. When that happens, the block reward per block is cut in half until it eventually reaches zero.

Bitcoin is seen as a deflationary currency because there's a finite amount of bitcoin that can be mined. In all, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins produced which makes for an interesting economic experiment that all bitcoin users are participating in, and only time will tell where it goes.

There is so much to learn about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If you want to learn more be sure to check out the LocalCoinSwap Academy where there is a large amount of free bitcoin guides and tutorials that is growing all the time.

Bitcoin starts the week with a trip to $26,000 — can BTC price strength overcome sellers and a weekly “death cross?”

A wallet associated with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was flagged sending 400 ETH, worth around $600,000, to Coinbase.

The North Korean hacking collective has at least $47 million in cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, Ether, BNB and various stablecoins, including Binance USD.

In the wake of the ongoing JPEX scandal, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission says it will issue a public list of suspicious crypto trading platforms.

The newly created fake APT token called “ClaimAPTGift.com” made its way to 400,000 Aptos wallets, which was mistakenly recognized by crypto exchange Upbit as the real deal.

Blockchain projects should learn from Google and Facebook by monetizing users without directly asking for their money.

The Miss Universe Organization said no Miss Universe cryptocurrency or blockchain offering is involved with the Miss Universe or Miss Universe Philippines.

BTC price action stays firmly within an established range, while analysis shows that overall Bitcoin investor composition is changing.

The community strongly backs stopping TerraUSD Classic (USTC) minting and reminting in favor of burning tokens to restore its U.S. dollar peg.

The Anti-Money Laundering registration will allow cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to offer its services to retail and institutional investors in Spain.

The Terra Luna Classic (LUNC) community has voted overwhelmingly, with nearly 60% in favor, to cease the minting and reminting of Terra Classic UST (USTC) tokens. The drastic decision, in a decisive move aimed at rescuing the beleaguered Terra Classic stablecoin, comes in the wake of Terra’s collapse in May 2022, which had sent shockwaves through the crypto market, leaving USTC’s value in shambles.

The proposal to halt USTC minting and reminting is part of a comprehensive plan to facilitate the re-pegging process of the stablecoin. To accelerate this process, members of the Terra Classic community are actively encouraged to participate in the burning of USTC tokens, effectively reducing the token’s circulating supply.

Before the catastrophic events of May 2022, Terra’s blockchain network allowed users to seamlessly swap between USTC and LUNA, Terra’s native cryptocurrency. However, as the network crumbled and USTC lost its peg to the US dollar, the system began minting LUNA coins in a desperate attempt to restore stability. 

This emergency measure led to an oversupply of LUNA tokens and a cascading effect on its price, dragging USTC’s value far below its intended $1 mark.

The community’s primary objective with this proposal is to expedite the burning of LUNA tokens, ultimately driving up their value. The burning process, where tokens are permanently removed from circulation, has been sluggish so far, with only 75 billion LUNC tokens successfully incinerated. This leaves the circulating supply at approximately 5.9 trillion LUNC, out of a total supply of 6.84 trillion.

As more LUNA tokens were minted to restore the USTC peg, the oversupply put immense downward pressure on LUNA’s price. Consequently, USTC’s value suffered a steep decline from its initial $1 valuation.

Despite the tumultuous journey thus far, there are positive indicators that offer a glimmer of hope for the Terra Luna Classic community. According to CoinGecko, the current price of LUNC stands at $0.00006150, reflecting a 2.9% increase in the past 24 hours and a promising 6.6% surge over the past seven days.

Key momentum indicators observed within a 24-hour window show signs of approaching overbought levels. LUNC’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) stands at 53, indicating moderate strength, while its Money Flow Index (MFI) is at 76, suggesting robust accumulation. This shift in sentiment indicates that the community’s efforts to restore value may be gaining traction.

The Terra Luna Classic community’s bold decision to halt USTC minting and reminting signifies a concerted effort to revitalize the ailing stablecoin. With a renewed focus on burning LUNA tokens and correcting the supply-demand imbalance, the community aims to steer USTC back on course towards its $1 peg, providing a glimmer of hope amidst a challenging journey of redemption.

(This site’s content should not be construed as investment advice. Investing involves risk. When you invest, your capital is subject to risk).

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Tron price is holding gains above $0.0825 against the US Dollar. TRX is outperforming Bitcoin and could rise further toward $0.095.

In the last Tron price prediction, we discussed how TRX outperformed Bitcoin against the US Dollar. TRX remained stable and was able to settle above the $0.080 pivot level.

There was a decent increase above the $0.0825 and $0.0832 resistance levels. A high was formed near $0.0849 and the price recently corrected lower. There was a minor decline below the $0.0835 level. However, the bulls were active near the $0.0830 support.

The price found support near the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the upward move from the $0.0770 swing low to the $0.0849 high. TRX is now trading above $0.0825 and the 100 simple moving average (4 hours). There is also a short-term contracting triangle forming with resistance near $0.0844 on the 4-hour chart of the TRX/USD pair.

On the upside, an initial resistance is near the $0.0844 level. The first major resistance is near $0.0850, above which the price could accelerate higher. The next resistance is near $0.088.

Source: TRXUSD on TradingView.com

A close above the $0.088 resistance might send TRX further higher toward $0.0920. The next major resistance is near the $0.095 level, above which the bulls are likely to aim for a larger increase toward $0.095.

If TRX price fails to clear the $0.085 resistance, it could slowly move lower. Initial support on the downside is near the $0.083 zone. The first major support is near the $0.082 level or the 100 simple moving average (4 hours).

The next major support is near $0.080 or the 61.8% Fib retracement level of the upward move from the $0.0770 swing low to the $0.0849 high, below which the price could accelerate lower. The next major support is $0.0770.

Technical Indicators

4 hours MACD – The MACD for TRX/USD is gaining momentum in the bullish zone.

4 hours RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI for TRX/USD is currently above the 50 level.

Major Support Levels – $0.083, $0.082, and $0.080.

Major Resistance Levels – $0.085, $0.088, and $0.095.

Bitcoin price is again moving lower below the $26,500 support. BTC remains at risk of more losses below the $26,000 support in the near term.

Bitcoin price failed to clear the $27,500 resistance and started a fresh decline. BTC traded below the $27,000 and $26,500 support levels to enter a bearish zone.

There was also a move below the $26,200 support level. The price tested the $26,000 zone. A low was formed near $26,026 and the price is now consolidating losses. It is trading just above the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $26,711 swing high to the $26,026 low.

Bitcoin is now trading below $26,500 and the 100 hourly Simple moving average. Immediate resistance on the upside is near the $26,350 level. The first major resistance is near the $26,500 zone, a connecting bearish trend line, and the 61.8% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $26,711 swing high to the $26,026 low.

Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

The next key resistance could be near the $26,700 level, above which the price could gain bullish momentum. In the stated case, the price could even rise toward the $27,000 resistance. Any more gains might call for a move toward the $27,500 level.

If Bitcoin fails to start a fresh increase above the $26,500 resistance, it could continue to move down. Immediate support on the downside is near the $26,050 level.

The next major support is near the $26,000 level. A downside break and close below the $26,000 level might send the price further lower toward the next support at $25,400 in the coming sessions. Any more losses might call for a test of $25,000.

Technical indicators:

Hourly MACD – The MACD is now losing pace in the bearish zone.

Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI for BTC/USD is now below the 50 level.

Major Support Levels – $26,000, followed by $25,400.

Major Resistance Levels – $26,350, $26,500, and $26,700.

Coinbase’s layer 2 scaling solution, called Base, has seem a meteoric rise in popularity recently. In just six short weeks since its launch, Base’s total value locked (TVL) has skyrocketed to nearly $400 million. This rapid rise in use and popularity has even seen it recently overtake the Solana blockchain in TVL. 

Base operates as a layer 2 network on Ethereum launched by Coinbase in collaboration with Optimism to offer a safe, low-cost, developer-friendly way to build on-chain. Since its launch, Base has managed to find a strong market fit, allowing it to quickly penetrate the crypto market. However, this hasn’t been without some hiccups.

Before its public launch, Base had some glitches, which developers were able to rectify quickly. Earlier this month, the network faced another setback as block production unexpectedly stopped for 45 minutes. According to DeFi TVL aggregator DefiLlama, Base’s TVL has risen +111% in the past month to now holding more than $370.29 million. 

Last week, Base’s growth saw it blow past the Solana blockchain in terms of transaction volume. This growth has continued, and the Layer-2 network has now moved ahead of Solana whose total value locked (TVL) dropped by 12.22% in the last month to $310 million. Also, this places Base’s TVL ahead of other popular chains like Cronos, Bitcoin, and Cardano.

Base’s growth kickstarted with Aerodrome, a decentralized exchange, which deposited $190 million on the network after its launch. Base’s growth can also be attributed to the popularity of Friend.tech, a decentralized social app. With a current TVL of $38.6 million, Friend.tech is one of the projects native to Base with a the largest stake. Other projects with a considerable stake in TVL include Stargate, Curve DEX, and Compound V3.

At the moment, Ethereum continues to lead the pack in terms of TVL. However, the coming months will be crucial in determining whether Base can sustain its momentum and continue gaining mainstream traction. At its current trajectory, Base could surpass $500 million in TVL in the coming weeks and solidify itself as a leader in layer-2 scaling networks. 

According to BaseScan, the number of daily transactions on Base reached a new high of 1.88 million on September 14, as reported by BaseScan. The layer-2 network has now processed more than 40.31 million transactions at the time of writing.

(This site’s content should not be construed as investment advice. Investing involves risk. When you invest, your capital is subject to risk).

Featured image from iStock

XRP has maintained its position within the confines of a symmetrical triangle pattern, with today’s modest surge doing little to alter its trajectory.

This symmetrical triangle pattern has exerted significant influence over XRP’s price movements for the past month, indicating that it may continue to dictate the coin’s fate in the near future.

The symmetrical triangle pattern is a technical analysis chart pattern characterized by converging trendlines, with one representing the coin’s lower highs and the other symbolizing its higher lows. 

This pattern suggests a period of consolidation and uncertainty in the market, as traders weigh the potential for a breakout in either direction.

Analysts suggest that a breakout from either side of the symmetrical triangle pattern could set the stage for a significant directional rally in XRP. Should the coin break above the upper trendline, it could potentially surge to a price of $0.55.

As of now, XRP is trading at $0.512876, according to CoinGecko. Over the past 24 hours, it has recorded a modest increase of 1%, while its seven-day performance shows a 2.5% increase.

The report notes that the recent pullback in XRP marks the third instance where the price has retraced from the triangle’s upper trendline, underscoring the pattern’s dominance over this asset.

Daily charts further emphasize this bearish sentiment, revealing an “Evening Star” pattern at the resistance, often seen as a precursor to potential downtrends.

If sellers continue to dominate the market, XRP’s price may decline by approximately 6%, potentially pushing it down to the $0.485 level, which would serve as a retest of the triangle’s lower boundary. As long as XRP oscillates within these trendlines, its price is likely to remain range-bound.

Meanwhile, the XRP community is eagerly anticipating several exciting developments, including the launch of the Xahau network and the associated Evernode airdrop. The Xahau Ledger, which serves as the proposed Hooks sidechain and smart contract sidechain for the XRPL ecosystem, plays a crucial role in these innovations.

In a recent tweet, Evernode, the Layer-2 blockchain behind these innovations, announced that its new website is now live. To safeguard its users against Twitter scammers, Evernode has implemented strict protective measures.

New Website: https://t.co/YuFpmwCGbA

To mitigate Twitter’s scammers, we’ll: 1. Only tweet links to website articles. 2. Never DM you. 3. Never offer support.

Anybody claiming to be our “Help Desk” or “Customer Support” or “Dev Team” is a scammer trying to steal your coins.

— Evernode – No Trustline & No Support (@EvernodeXRPL) September 22, 2023

It will only tweet links to website articles, avoiding direct messages (DMs) to users and refraining from offering support, thus ensuring the safety and security of its community.

XRP’s current positioning within the symmetrical triangle pattern suggests that a breakout could be imminent, with both bullish and bearish scenarios on the horizon.

As the XRP community eagerly anticipates upcoming developments, maintaining vigilance against potential scams remains paramount for all participants in the cryptocurrency space.

(This site’s content should not be construed as investment advice. Investing involves risk. When you invest, your capital is subject to risk).

Featured image from Pexels

Given the recent news and market volatility in the digital asset industry, we felt it is timely to reiterate to our valued customers, bitFlyer’s commitment to protecting their account and digital assets. We also wanted to inform our users that bitFlyer is in no risk of facing any liquidity issue.

Since 2014, bitFlyer has always been at the forefront at shaping the regulatory environment within the crypto industry. In Europe, bitFlyer is a regulated entity with a payment institution license from the Luxembourg Ministry of Finance and is the first Luxembourg based company to receive the Virtual Asset Service Provider registration with the CSSF.

Since its establishment in 2018, bitFlyer Europe has adopted a customer first approach by prioritizing regulatory compliance and industry-leading security practices. At bitFlyer, institutional and retail customers benefit from:

Funds deposited on bitFlyer Europe (both FIAT and crypto assets) are completely segregated from bitFlyer company funds. No qualifications, asterisks, or fine print. Tokens are safeguarded in a cold storage wallet, ready to be sent back at the click of a button. Multiple physical and logical security measures are in place to ensure that our customers' assets are kept safe and we operate in compliance with these segregation rules.

We will continue to provide services that satisfy our customers, aiming to be a trusted platform where customers can trade safely and securely. bitFlyer remains active in helping shape the future of crypto and remains confident in its future.

About bitFlyer EUROPE S.A.

bitFlyer EUROPE S.A., a wholly-owned subsidiary of bitFlyer Holdings – a leading cryptocurrency exchange based in Japan – is a regulated entity with a payment institution licence from the CSSF, passported to all EU member states. bitFlyer EUROPE S.A. also holds the first VASP registration in Luxembourg.

Website: https://bitflyer.com/en-eu/

(The ETH/BTC trading pair is currently unavailable)

Today, we are launching our new pair on Lightning: ETH/BTC.

Individual and institutional traders in Europe will now be able to trade on bitFlyer's ETH/BTC market, which has only been available to bitFlyer Japan customers until now.

This is another addition in our cross-border offering which gives traders access to the unique liquidity of the Japanese market.

What is bitFlyer Lightning? - Check out our Lightning guide here.

The launch of our first cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency pair on our trading platform opens new possibilities and opportunities to our users and we are excited to see how this new feature will be used by all of you.

To celebrate this launch, we are also running a “zero fees” campaign on this newly added pair. You can find some details about it via the link below.

Zero fees for ETH/BTC trading campaignTo celebrate the launch of ETH/BTC, we are also running a “zero fees” campaign on this newly added pair.bitFlyer EuropebitFlyer Europe

What is Bitcoin? How does BTC works? A guide for BeginnersLaunched in 2009, Bitcoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency, also known as “Digital Gold”. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder, introduced Bitcoin as ‘Open Source Peer-2-Peer Money’ for secured, verifiable digital transactions without involving intermediaries like banks.bitFlyer EuropebitFlyer Europe

What is Ethereum? (ETH) | Its token, features and capabilitiesEthereum is the second-largest blockchain-cryptocurrency platform after Bitcoin, in terms of market capitalisation. It was conceived by Vitalik Buterin—then 19 years old—and formally launched in 2015.bitFlyer EuropebitFlyer Europe

As of today, our "Recurring Buy" feature is available on our Web Platform, which means our users can now purchase crypto automatically with as little as 10 EUR directly from their browser.

Recurring Buy is available on the left hand side menu after you log into your account.

Recurring buy can be used with all 7 types of cryptocurrencies currently handled on our platform:

You can select from daily, weekly, biweekly and monthly.

It can be set from as little as 10 EUR.

There is no additional fee for Recurring Buy. Click here for details on other fees.

Apart from Web, our recurring buy feature is also available on our mobile app "bitFlyer wallet" (iOS, Android).

Important notes :

*Please ensure that there are sufficient funds in your bitFlyer account before the scheduled day of purchase. If there is an insufficient balance, the purchase will not be executed.

*Unless a purchase is not executed, the automatic purchase scheduling will not be cancelled.

*The time for purchase cannot be specified. bitFlyer will decide the time of purchase on the designated date.

*The rate used at the time of purchase will be based on the price on our Buy/Sell service.

*System troubles on the bitFlyer side may cause the purchase not to be executed. In that case, no automatic purchase will be executed until the next scheduled purchase.

Today, we present you our new portfolio screen of the bitFlyer App for iOS and Android! Let’s take a look what changed:

If you’re curious to check the improvements by yourself, download now the bitFlyer App:

Go further with the bitFlyer with our App, as you can setup recurring purchases and earn BTC with our referral program.

Set up regular crypto purchases with Recurring Buy, now live on our App!Today, we are launching a new “Recurring Buy” feature, which means our users can now purchase crypto automatically with as little as 10 EUR by a simple set up. You can use it from our mobile app “bitFlyer wallet”, available on both iOS and Android.bitFlyer EuropebitFlyer Europe

bitFlyer Referral Program - Invite friends, get free BTC!Today we launched our new Referral Program where you and your friends can earn rewards! Both you and your friend will get €10 worth of Bitcoin each when your friend creates an account and trades €100 of crypto or more.bitFlyer EuropebitFlyer Europe

Today is May 22nd, which means it's Pizza Day for the Bitcoin/Crypto community!

On May 22nd 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Pizzas for 10,000 BTC, which was worth around €33.00 back in 2010. This payment now acts as a milestone for the digital currency, and is acknowledge to be one of the first purchases of a product with Bitcoin.

In case you are new to Bitcoin, here is a quick guide to get you up to speed:

What is Bitcoin? - A bitFlyer Academy Guide for BeginnersLaunched in 2009, Bitcoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency, also known as “Digital Gold”. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder, introduced Bitcoin as ‘Open Source Peer-2-Peer Money’ for secured, verifiable digital transactions without involving intermediaries like banks.bitFlyer EuropebitFlyer Europe

As of today, and for the 11th birthday of Pizza Day, 1 Bitcoin is worth around €30,000, which means Laszlo bought two Papa John's Pizzas, for €300 Millions if it happened today. Just wow.

Have a look at our blogpost from last year, when we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Pizza Day with this jaw-dropping infographic:

From two pizzas to your own private island: Tracking the value of 10,000 Bitcoin to celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day 2020We have done a bit of research to find out what you could have bought with 10,000 bitcoins on Bitcoin Pizza Day in 2010 all the way up to today. So what might those bitcoin millionaires amongst you choose to buy to celebrate ten years of Bitcoin Pizza Day?bitFlyer EuropebitFlyer Europe

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bitFlyer Referral Program - Invite friends, get free BTC!Today we launched our new Referral Program where you and your friends can earn rewards! Both you and your friend will get €10 worth of Bitcoin each when your friend creates an account and trades €100 of crypto or more.bitFlyer EuropebitFlyer Europe

Commonly known as the first successful altcoin, Litecoin is one of the early spinoffs of Bitcoin, started in 2011 as an attempt to make a cryptocurrency more appropriate for use as digital cash.

Created by developer Charlee Lee, Litecoin has some advantages over its other cryptocurrency competitors. For instance, compared to Bitcoin, Litecoin offers much lower transaction fees. It is consistently ranked in the top five and top ten cryptocurrencies, holding ground with a stable market share of around 5% since its creation, even as other coins rise and fall in popularity.

Despite introducing new possibilities for the world of finance and technology, Bitcoin’s core came with significant usability and scalability shortcomings Litecoin (LTC) was created as an alternative solution to these problems.

Litecoin emerged out of a Bitcoin fork, proposed and developed by Charlie Lee, a renowned computer scientist. The project’s primary vision was to become the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold”, thereby widening people’s access to cryptocurrencies. Prior to incepting the Litecoin Foundation in 2017—a non-profit backing the Litecoin project—Lee worked at Google and Coinbase, among other firms.

In general, Litecoin’s primary ‘competitor’ is Bitcoin, although the two networks complement each other in several regards. For one, Litecoin inherited Bitcoin’s code, enhancing the same with many novel implementations.

On the other hand, Litecoin pioneered technologies like the Lightning Network and Segregated Witness (SegWit), which have eventually been adopted by Bitcoin.

In terms of transaction settlement, Litecoin is nearly four times faster than Bitcoin. To achieve this, Litecoin implements a modified version of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, namely Scrypt.

The implementation aligns with Litecoin’s agenda of addressing concerns related to ASIC-based mining, in which it has been partially successful. Instead of using highly expensive ASIC hardware, Litecoin miners can work with more affordable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

Thanks to Scrypt, Litecoin successfully reduced the block confirmation time, the time taken to finalise new blocks, to 2.5 minutes, as compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. As a result, while Bitcoin settles roughly 7 transactions per second, Litecoin completes around 56 transactions per second.

Blockchain-based transactions are cryptographically encrypted, meaning that they include ‘signatures’ of the sender and/or receiver to ensure authenticity and so on. In the original Bitcoin Core, these signatures were included in the transaction, so to say, thus increasing the size of each transaction.

In 2017, Litecoin implemented Segregated Witness or SegWit, a solution proposed by Blockstream co-founder, Pieter Wuille. To put it simply, SegWit separates signatures from transactions, putting them into the associated input rather than in the transaction.

This effectively reduces the transaction’s size, and consequently, more transactions can be added to each block. Combined with Scrypt, SegWit imparts a heightened scalability to Litecoin, which in turn, makes the network more relevant for large-scale usage.

Similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin is an open-source, peer-to-peer digital currency, based on the network’s native cryptocurrency, namely the LTC token. It can be used for a range of financial purposes and has a maximum supply of 84 million.

Litecoin’s fully decentralised payment network supports near ‘zero fee’ for transactions in LTC. Moreover, the token’s code architecture facilitates optimum efficiency in terms of storage. It also provides greater security against malware, viruses, and hacks.

Rewarding miners to incentivise desirable behaviour is one of LTC’s primary internal functions within the Litecoin network. Initially, the block reward was 50 LTC. However, the algorithm halves the amount every 4 year (roughly, after every 840,000 blocks). At the time of writing, in early 2021, miners receive 12.5 LTC tokens for each block.

Backed by the network’s functionalities and inherent value, LTC’s market performance has progressed steadily over time. To know more about Litecoin, as well as to buy, sell, and trade LTC, join bitFlyer and follow our blog.

Disclaimer:

The information contained in this article is for general information purposes only. bitFlyer EUROPE S.A. is in no way affiliated with any of the companies mentioned herein. Neither does bitFlyer assume any responsibility nor provide any guarantee for the accuracy, relevance, timeliness or completeness of any information provided for by these external companies.

You accept that you are responsible for carrying out your own due diligence when investing. bitFlyer shall in no way be responsible for any acts taken on account of this article nor does bitFlyer provide any investment advice for its users.

Today, we are launching a new “Recurring Buy” feature, which means our users can now purchase crypto automatically with as little as 10 EUR by a simple set up.

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Amazon has reportedly agreed to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup, as the e-commerce giant ramps up competition with Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia in the burgeoning AI sector. According to TechCrunch, the massive investment underscores Amazon’s aggressive expansion into generative AI.

Initially, Amazon will inject $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic. Like Google’s Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic has developed its own AI-powered chatbot called Claude 2.

Anthropic was established in 2021 by former researchers from OpenAI after raising $124 million in initial funding. According to reports, the founders were motivated by concerns surrounding the safety and ethics of advanced AI systems. As such, Anthropic aims to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) with rigorous safety practices.

Claude features a simple conversational interface akin to ChatGPT. However, Claude has a substantially larger context window of over 25,000 words per conversation compared to ChatGPT’s 2,500-word limitation. With an official context capacity of 100,000 tokens, Claude can ingest extensive written information from users for analysis and feedback. This expanded context enables more nuanced conversations grounded in broader background information.

As TechCrunch reported, Anthropic aims to build an even more advanced “frontier model” tentatively named Claude-Next, which would be 10 times more capable than today’s top AI systems. However, developing this technology over 18 months could require over $1 billion.

The collaboration with Amazon grants Anthropic vital cloud infrastructure and chips to advance its research. Anthropic will utilize Amazon Web Services for critical workloads and to deploy future models.

In return, TechCrunch reported that AWS customers will gain early access to Anthropic’s proprietary capabilities for customizing and fine-tuning models. Amazon’s Bedrock platform will also integrate future Anthropic models to enable generative AI applications.

The multi-billion dollar deal signals Amazon’s intent to aggressively compete in generative AI, an emerging sector dominated by Microsoft, Google, and startups like Anthropic. With cutting-edge research and Amazon’s cloud resources, Anthropic now has tremendous potential to shape the future of AI.

Amazon recently revealed its upcoming ‘Let’s Talk’ feature for its Alexa home assistants, allowing users to interact aurally with an AI model similar to Anthropic’s Claude.

The post Amazon invests $4B in OpenAI alumni Anthropic, launching AI cloud war with Microsoft and Google appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Decentralized protocol Mixin Kernel reported a loss of approximately $200 million in digital assets due to a security breach at an unnamed cloud services provider. The breach occurred on Sept. 23 and was confirmed in a Sept. 25 post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

The network’s team said it had engaged Google and blockchain security experts at SlowMist to investigate the incident. SlowMist confirmed that it was assisting in the investigations in a separate post on X.

In response to the incident, Mixin Kernel temporarily suspended deposit and withdrawal services on its network. These services will resume once all vulnerabilities have been identified and successfully addressed, while asset transfers within the network remain unaffected.

The protocol has yet to determine a course of action regarding the stolen assets, with the final decision contingent on the successful recovery of the funds.

Meanwhile, the protocol said its founder, Feng Xiaodong, would provide further updates about the incident in a public Mandarin livestream at 13:00 HKT.

The breach has sparked significant community interest and concern, as the compromise of a decentralized network’s database raises questions about its security level and “decentralization.”

Prominent blockchain analyst ZachXBT expressed surprise at the scale of the hack, highlighting this as another nine-figure security breach where hackers absconded with all liquid assets.

In response to the breach, Mixin’s native XIN token experienced an 8.1% drop in value over the past 24 hours. Currently trading at $194.98, this represents a substantial decline from its all-time high of $2,095. The token’s future value is uncertain and may further depreciate if the stolen funds are not recovered.

Besides that, data from DeFillama shows that the total value of assets locked on the protocol experienced a sharp decline during the early hours of today. The data aggregator’s dashboard shows Mixin’s TVL fell to $351.9 million from $383.54 million.

The post Mixin network loses $200M in attack of its cloud provider appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Financial authorities in South Korea intend to initiate stringent eligibility reviews for major shareholders of cryptocurrency exchanges, mirroring the standards upheld within the banking sector, local media reported on Sept. 22.

The move comes amid increasing legal turmoil involving shareholders of prominent domestic exchanges such as Bithumb and Upbit.

The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) under the Financial Services Commission has assembled a task force to reform coin exchange reporting requirements. This revised mandate will be integrated into the coin exchange renewal reporting items for implementation in Oct. 2024. It will serve as a cornerstone for future operations of existing exchanges in the country.

According to the Enforcement Decree of the Specific Financial Information Act, all virtual asset business operators, including exchanges, must file a renewal report every three years post initial report acceptance. This process will recommence in Oct. 2024, beginning with Upbit, which finalized the inaugural report acceptance in Oct. 2021.

The task force will primarily concentrate on scrutinizing major shareholder eligibility, a procedural safeguard allowing the government to periodically assess whether the majority shareholder retains the qualifications requisite to operate a financial enterprise.

The initiative by FIU aims to curb illicit activities by major shareholders who wield significant influence over the coin exchange businesses and to mitigate user damage.

Previously, major shareholders operated in a regulatory grey area, with current legislation under the Special Financial Services Act mandating only exchange representatives and registered executives to report and undergo review when declaring a virtual asset business.

According to media reports, the involvement of major shareholders of domestic exchanges in fraudulent and market-manipulative activities has spurred the examination of major shareholders.

The two most prominent cases involve major Bithumb shareholder Jong-hyun Kang, who is embroiled in a primary criminal trial for alleged fraudulent trading, and Dunamu Chairman Song Chi-hyung, the predominant shareholder of Upbit, who is currently facing a Supreme Court trial for purported market manipulation.

Representative Yoon Chang-hyeon of the People Power Party has proposed a legislative amendment to the Special Financial Services Act, advocating for incorporating a review system for major shareholders of virtual asset business operators.

The amendment dictates that virtual asset business operators, including coin exchanges, must report information pertinent to major shareholders, enabling the FIU to examine the company’s primary shareholders’ economic and financial crime history.

The post South Korea to screen major shareholders of crypto exchanges over eligibility concerns appeared first on CryptoSlate.

OpenSea, a prominent NFT marketplace, has issued a warning to a subset of its users, urging them to rotate their application programming interface (API) keys. The warning comes after a security breach involving a third-party vendor potentially left their keys exposed.

The company addressed the situation in an email sent to its customers, stating, “One of our vendors experienced a security incident that may have exposed information about your OpenSea API key.”

As of May 2023, OpenSea held the second-largest share of the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, accounting for 36.5% of trading volume. While OpenSea used to be the market leader, it trails behind Blur, which launched nearly a year ago and boasted 56.8% of the market in May 2023.

OpenSea has instructed affected users to promptly cease using their current API keys and replace them with new ones. These existing keys are set to expire on Monday, October 2, according to the email.

While OpenSea assured users that the security breach isn’t expected to have an “immediate effect” on their platform integrations, the company cautioned that unauthorized third-party access could potentially impact users’ allocated rate and usage limits. The company added, “The newly generated API keys will have the same permissions and rate limits as the expiring keys.”

OpenSea has not disclosed the exact number of users affected by the breach or whether any other data besides API keys may be at risk.

This security incident follows a similar breach involving Nansen, an on-chain analytics platform. Nansen disclosed that one of its third-party vendors had been compromised, leading to the exposure of users’ blockchain addresses, password hashes, and email addresses. Approximately 6.8% of Nansen’s user base was affected by the breach.

While OpenSea did not identify the affected vendor by name, Nansen indicated that the vendor is “used by many Fortune 500 companies.”

Notably, this isn’t the first time OpenSea has faced security challenges. Last year, the platform had customers’ email addresses leaked due to an employee’s error while working with its email delivery partner, Customer.io. Such email compromises are often exploited by attackers to execute phishing scams. Additionally, OpenSea’s Discord server was hacked in May 2022, with hackers promoting a fake NFT mint claiming to be in partnership with YouTube.

The post OpenSea’s third-party security breach leaves API users vulnerable appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The following is a guest post from Rajagopal Menon, Vice President at WazirX.

India’s crypto ecosystem finally has something to smile about following the conclusion of the G20 summit. The G20, representing the world’s most influential economies, fully endorsed the recommendations from the IMF and FSB as a Synthesis paper.

These guidelines aim to chart a clear path for the policy and regulatory framework for crypto assets and clarify key issues that many governments are concerned about. The paper not just advises against a blanket ban on crypto assets but also emphasizes several key principles to guide regulatory approaches in this rapidly evolving landscape.

A critical aspect addressed by the FSB Synthesis paper is the excessive capital flow volatility caused by crypto assets. To mitigate this risk, the paper recommends clarifying the legal status of crypto assets and ensuring that capital flow management laws comprehensively cover them.

In addition to that, monitoring the impact of crypto assets on the International Monetary System has been addressed. The paper stresses the need for unambiguous tax treatment of crypto assets to prevent evasion and ensure fair contributions to national revenues. The Synthesis Paper also provides detailed recommendations for crypto assets and Global Stablecoins (GSCs) to mitigate potential risks and foster innovation simultaneously. This addresses some of central banks’ and regulators’ concerns about crypto in many countries, including India.

The Synthesis Paper distinguishes between crypto assets and traditional fiat currencies, indicating that this will prevent overlap or sovereignty issues in monetary systems. However, in 2021-22, many multinational organizations adopted crypto as payment. Many of them still continue to accept it for goods and services.

While integrating crypto in traditional payment systems will be tedious, if the ecosystem becomes less volatile, it can be considered in niche B2C/B2B businesses before becoming mainstream. Before that, the utility of the tokens to be used and their underlying assets should be clearly established, and enough liquidity should be ensured so that no stakeholders are at a disadvantage. It is important to note that crypto’s core technology will influence the payment systems in the coming years, globally, directly or indirectly.

As India’s watershed moment was marked by its collaborative approach with other nations, the country also hinted at formulating its domestic regulations on the same lines.

During the G20 leaders’ summit, the Secretary of India’s Department of Economic Affairs mentioned that India’s stance on crypto would be well-established in the coming months. He highlighted that India would base its decisions on the risk assessment framework developed by G20. India’s G20 presidency prioritized global crypto regulation and welcomed the IMF-FSB Synthesis paper’s recommendations for adopting virtual digital assets. India is actively working on its domestic regulations, which already include anti-money laundering rules and crypto taxation.

Private players look forward to a higher frequency of dialogues between the industry, consumers, and regulators for a holistic approach toward bringing together a regulatory framework in the Goldilocks zone – effective, pragmatic, and thriving. The industry anticipates an improved atmosphere of innovation, support for local talent, and investments in Indian Web3 projects without any local regulatory hindrances.

The FSB is expected to actively promote the implementation of the recommendations from its joint Synthesis paper in collaboration with the standard-setting bodies or SSBs. By 2025, the global ecosystem may look forward to a comprehensive review of the status of these recommendations at the jurisdictional level, following which the need for additional guidance or recommendations will be assessed within international standards.

This gives the industry hope for a high level of interaction with SSBs to jointly monitor the implications of how their standards apply to crypto-assets, making necessary revisions to existing recommendations and strategies. Additionally, the pros and cons related to asset-backed stablecoins and their potential impact on financial market infrastructures will be closely monitored, where private stablecoin issuers may look forward to assuming an active role.

Most importantly, the issue of fiat on-ramp is set to improve considerably as there will be measures to introduce a global prudential standard for bank exposures to crypto-assets by 2025. The stakeholders, such as domestic regulators, would expect sufficient assistance in capacity building to ensure fair implementation of all policy recommendations.

Transitioning from the global stage to a more regional focus, India’s evolving stance on crypto assets offers a fascinating case study. The nation’s journey with crypto, marked by regulatory hurdles and policy shifts, has been a roller-coaster. The global leaders will continue to engage in fruitful dialogues about the next course of action in the coming months as the policy implementations unfold under the supervision of the IMF.

The post Op-ed: India’s dalliance with crypto ends in a win-win situation appeared first on CryptoSlate.

After the relatively silent weekend, bitcoin started to lose value hours ago and slumped to a 12-day low at just over $26,000.

Most altcoins are in the red as well today, with XRP and Toncoin dropping by about 3%.

Bitcoin’s price went on the offensive at the start of the previous week, surging past $27,000 and going all the way up to $27,500 on Tuesday. After a day of trading sideways there, the asset lost most of its momentum and started retracing.

This culminated in a price drop to $26,400 on Thursday, around the same time the US Federal Reserve announced a change to its monetary policy – refusing to hike the interest rates once again.

Nevertheless, bitcoin recovered some ground in the next few days and spent most of the weekend at around $26,600. However, it was rejected when it tried to pump higher, and the subsequent decline pushed it down to $26,000 for the first time since September 13.

As of now, BTC has managed to defend that level, but its market cap has slumped below $510 billion, and its dominance over the alts has dropped to 48.9% on CMC.

Most alternative coins are also in the red today. Ethereum, Binance Coin, Dogecoin, Cardano, Solana, Litecoin, and Shiba Inu are with losses of up to or around 1%.

Further declines are evident from Ripple and Toncoin. Both assets have retraced by approximately 3%. As a result, XRP has slipped below $0.5, while TON is at $2.2

Polygon, Bitcoin Cash, LEO, HBAR, XLM, FIL, and CRO are also in the red today.

Aptos is among the few exceptions, having surged by over 6%. Consequently, APT trades close to $5.5.

The total crypto market cap has seen another $10 billion gone in a day and is under $1.050 trillion on CMC now.

The post Bitcoin (BTC) Dumps to 12-Day Low, Ripple (XRP) Slips Below $0.5 (Market Watch) appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The little-known Calcium (CAL) token has exploded 7,400% after being abandoned by the developers of the world’s second-largest meme coin, Shiba Inu (SHIB).

Traders dissatisfied with SHIB’s unfulfilled promises have turned the dummy token into a serious project, pumping its price and creating real demand.

Meanwhile, the new meme coin Wall Street Memes (WSM) is being touted as the next meme coin that could explode as it gears up for Tier-1 exchange listings this week.

Calcium is a token initially created by the developers of Shiba Inu as a “dummy token” and purely for testing purposes.

CAL was minted by Shiba Inu’s developers solely to renounce the Bone ShibaSwap (BONE) token contract.

Notably, the developers specifically stated that CAL was not intended to be traded – yet this didn’t prevent some opportunistic investors from buying tokens and adding liquidity.

Initially, CAL was only available on the ShibaSwap DEX, yet it is now actively available on other top exchanges, like Uniswap and LBank.

According to CoinMarketCap, CAL racked up over $10 million in daily trading volume in the past 24 hours – a 64% increase from the previous day.

This rise in trader activity has helped push CAL’s price to $0.0517 at the time of writing, which is over 7,400% higher than its Uniswap listing price from September 21.

Data from Etherscan.io reveals there are now nearly 4,200 unique wallet addresses holding Calcium, indicating growing interest from the retail trading community.

However, this growing interest isn’t going down well with Shiba Inu’s developers.

SHIB community member Prince of Poverty tweeted a screenshot from Shiba Inu’s official Telegram channel, where Shytoshi Kusama, the lead developer of SHIB, urged those buying CAL to “stop it.”

Shytoshi’s appeal has had the opposite effect, as the attention received by the tweet only fueled more interest in Calcium.

This attention has even led to the #CalciumArmy hashtag becoming popular on Twitter, with hundreds of users supporting CAL and sharing their belief that the token could “moon.”

Ultimately, Calcium’s rapid rise is another example of the power that meme coins and community sentiment can have in the crypto market.

As the crypto community witnesses the exponential rise of Calcium, attention is now turning to the new meme coin Wall Street Memes (WSM) as the possible next underdog primed for a price explosion.

Wall Street Memes is based on the popular WallStreetBets subreddit, which made “meme stocks” like GameStop and AMC famous in 2021.

The creators of the Wall Street Memes brand have already tasted success in the digital assets market, thanks to the launch of Wall St Bulls NFTs, which sold out in 32 minutes and raised $2.5 million.

Now, the creators look to translate that success into the crypto space via the launch of WSM – an ERC-20 token currently in presale.

Given that the Wall Street Memes brand already has the support of over one million “degens” worldwide, the WSM presale has received colossal attention, raising over $25 million since launching in May.

However, the presale is now set to end in just 10 hours – meaning prospective investors must act swiftly to snag WSM tokens at the low price of $0.0337.

WSM will be listed on “multiple” top-tier exchanges on September 27, with some Wall Street Memes Telegram community members speculating that major platforms like Binance or Coinbase could be among them.

While no official confirmations have been made public, the anticipation surrounding these potential listings has fueled further interest in WSM – making it a token worth watching in the days ahead.

Visit Wall Street Memes Presale

Disclaimer: The above article is sponsored content; it’s written by a third party. CryptoPotato doesn’t endorse or assume responsibility for the content, advertising, products, quality, accuracy, or other materials on this page. Nothing in it should be construed as financial advice. Readers are strongly advised to verify the information independently and carefully before engaging with any company mentioned and do their own research. Investing in cryptocurrencies carries a risk of capital loss, and readers are also advised to consult a professional before making any decisions that may or may not be based on the above-sponsored content.

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The post Calcium Token Pumps 7,400% After Being Dumped By Shiba Inu Devs, Is WSM the Next Underdog Coin to Explode? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Google Cloud announced that its BigQuery service expanded its data warehouse capabilities by incorporating a total of 11 blockchain networks.

These newly integrated networks are – Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, Ethereum’s Görli testnet, Fantom, Near, Optimism, Polkadot, Polygon’s mainnet, Polygon’s Mumbai testnet, and Tron.

“Having a more robust list of chains accessible via BigQuery and new ways to access data will help the Web3 community better answer these questions and others, without the overhead of operating nodes or maintaining an indexer.”

The post Google Cloud Expands BigQuery with 11 New Blockchains, Including Ethereum’s Görli Testnet appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Polygon Labs has suggested that the Celo blockchain community consider utilizing its Chain Development Kit (CDK) to streamline the intended layer-2 migration on the Ethereum network.

The proposal comes after cLabs, the primary development team behind Celo, unveiled an alternative strategy in July to transition its layer-1 into an Ethereum-compatible layer-2 solution by utilizing Optimism’s OP Stack. OP Stack is a similar customizable toolkit that leverages Optimism’s “optimistic” technology.

Polygon Labs’ co-founder Sandeep Nailwal presented a proposal to the Celo community this week recommending that the blockchain ecosystem consider implementing Polygon’s Chain Development Kit, which is a codebase enabling developers to build customized layer-2 chains leveraging zero-knowledge (ZK) technology.

The proposal on the Celo governance forum stated,

“Polygon Labs is excited to welcome Celo home to Ethereum in the chain’s transition from an independent EVM-compatible L1 to an Ethereum L2. As Ethereum devotees obsessed with scaling, we are beyond excited to see Celo expand into an emerging and thriving Ethereum ecosystem and help extend Ethereum blockspace.”

Nailwal explained that this shift would enable Celo to fully leverage the benefits of operating as an Ethereum layer-2 solution while preserving the fundamental traits that initially propelled the chain to success.

The exec further emphasized that the transition represents a significant technical enhancement, “that should come with built-in Ethereum alignment and as-close-as-possible developer experience, without compromising security.”

The Polygon CDK toolkit was released in August, designed to allow developers to build blockchain networks with the help of ZK proofs. This open-source codebase offers developers the ability to interconnect chains through a ZK-based bridge, creating a unified ecosystem referred to as the “Value Layer.”

Subsequently, Cosmos-based layer-1 blockchain, Canto, announced migrating to a zero-knowledge layer-2 on Ethereum via Polygin CDK. The platform explained that this transition is in line with its objectives to build a blockchain dedicated to real-world assets(RWA).

Besides Canto, pther projects such as Astar, Gnosis, and IDEX, have already announced plans to build ZK layer-2 solutions utilizing the toolkit.

The post Polygon Labs Pitches Plan to Streamline Celo’s Move to Ethereum Layer 2 Using CDK appeared first on CryptoPotato.

 Conventional cryptocurrency mining methods have become unsustainable due to high electricity and hardware management costs.

Amid this scenario, CGMD Miner positions itself as a leading cloud mining platform that stands out as a beacon of opportunity for users seeking a seamless entry into the mining arena.

The cutting-edge platform is designed with a mission to make acquiring cryptocurrencies easy and fast for everyone. With CGMD Miner, users can step into the world of crypto mining without the need to purchase and maintain expensive hardware devices or possess technical expertise.

Cloud mining, the cornerstone of CGMD Miner, is a revolutionary mechanism that harnesses rented cloud computing power to mine cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It enables individuals to participate in cryptocurrency mining remotely, eliminating the need for complex hardware installations and ongoing maintenance. This approach democratizes mining, making it accessible to every individual worldwide, regardless of their technical knowledge or financial resources.

Beginning the journey as a crypto miner through cloud mining on CGMD Miner is quicker and can be done swiftly in the simplest steps with zero complexities and delay.

CGMD Miner sets the gold standard in cloud mining. The platform boasts an advanced deployment technology that provides 5% -13% of global cloud mining computing power. They uphold a user-friendly platform that opens the doors to cryptocurrency mining for everyone. By joining CGMD Miner, users become part of a trusted community that empowers them to earn burgeoning income without any strings attached.

CGMD Miner not only streamlines the mining process but also provides a seamless opportunity to generate income. It offers a free Bitcoin mining program, allowing users to earn BTC. Once the user has mined 12 USDT worth of bitcoins, they can transfer them to their account for trading. Any profit they generate is entirely theirs, available for withdrawal to their personal wallet.

Features of CGMD Miner

Signing up and completing registration on CGMD Miner is quicker than most would think. All users need to do is simply provide their email address and create an account. Once registered, they can immediately begin their cryptocurrency mining journey.

CGMD Miner offers a range of mining contract options, each with its unique contract period. As another option, users can earn income the day after the purchase, and when their earnings reach $100, they can choose to withdraw to their encrypted wallet or reinvest in additional contracts.

In an era defined by digital intricacies that often deter newcomers from entering into crypto mining, CGMD Miner emerges as an interesting project. It’s not just a platform; it’s the gateway to effortless cloud mining.

CGMD Miner is a groundbreaking cloud mining company that has won the trust of over 385000 users worldwide. Our mission is to provide everyone with access to cloud mining, providing access to cutting-edge technologies and large industrial data centers from any device, anywhere. As a leading cloud mining platform, it contributes 5%-13% of the world’s cloud mining computing power.

With a team of seasoned professionals, including experts from top dotcom companies, there’s a strong focus on R&D and extensive technological expertise. The vision is to expand the business across the entire cryptocurrency industry chain, delivering technological innovations and exceptional services worldwide.

Website: http://www.365miner.com

Disclaimer: The above article is sponsored content; it’s written by a third party. CryptoPotato doesn’t endorse or assume responsibility for the content, advertising, products, quality, accuracy, or other materials on this page. Nothing in it should be construed as financial advice. Readers are strongly advised to verify the information independently and carefully before engaging with any company mentioned and do their own research. Investing in cryptocurrencies carries a risk of capital loss, and readers are also advised to consult a professional before making any decisions that may or may not be based on the above-sponsored content.

Readers are also advised to read CryptoPotato’s full disclaimer.

The post CGMD Miner Redefines Cloud Mining in the Simplest Way appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Today, we announce an exciting new chapter in the history of our business - and we wanted you to be the first to know. Cake DeFi is now Bake. Along with that, Bake will transition to be one of four verticals under Cake Group. We will now be known as Cake Group, and our retail business, including our mobile Apps will be renamed to Bake.

When we first started out 4 years ago, the name Cake DeFi was a great fit. We were a small team with a big vision: to make DeFi accessible to everyone. Since then, we  have rapidly grown and evolved.

Today our business has verticals across not only retail, but also institutional, R&D and venture capital. So the natural evolution is to elevate the name Cake to represent our group - as Cake Group - which we believe better reflects the nature and scale of our operations today.

Bake is a verb that implies action. It symbolizes our commitment to building and creating new products and services that will help you achieve your financial goals, empowering you to feel confident and in control of your financial destiny.

We are excited about the future of Bake, and the renaming is the catalyst for lots of exciting developments to come.

Beyond getting used to a new name and wordmark, over the coming days, you will notice that our website, mobile app, social media and community channels will all get new names and handles. We will be making these changes progressively, so be extra vigilant during this time to ensure that you are interacting with the real Bake. We’ll do our best to guide you during this transition period.

Much more exciting, however, is the upcoming launch of our new mobile app which we’ve built from the ground up to provide you with an improved user experience and interface to give you more control and transparency over your financial destiny. We’ll release the first version of the new app very soon, and you can anticipate exciting releases over the coming months.

What’s more, supporting our multi-chain ambitions to offer you more services based on the blockchains and projects you love, we’re excited to launch staking services for DOT, the native token of Polkadot in July 2023. And we won’t stop there.

There is so much to look forward to, this is just the beginning for Bake.

Control your financial destiny. Bake it, make it. Love it.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that the information on this blog and in any articles posted on this blog is for general information only and should not be relied upon as financial advice. Cake Pte. Ltd., Cake DeFi, UAB, and its affiliates (the “Cake Group”) are not licensed financial advisers. You may wish to approach your own independent financial advisor before making any decision to buy, sell or hold any product and/or digital assets mentioned in this blog.

Any views, opinions, references, assertions of fact and/or other statements are not necessarily the views held by the Cake Group. The Cake Group disclaims any liability whatsoever that may arise out of or in connection with such statements. Always do your own research before investing in any financial assets and consult a qualified financial advisor if necessary.

In the fast-paced world of finance, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has emerged as a transformative technology that is driving financial democratization. Built on blockchain technology, DeFi operates devoid of intermediaries, opening doors to passive income opportunities that were once inaccessible to most individuals.

In this article, we'll discuss how you can harness DeFi’s potential to generate passive income using Bake — the most secure and transparent DeFi platform on the market.

DeFi is the disruptive innovation  that is now challenging conventional financial norms. It has enabled financial management on a peer-to-peer basis, making intermediaries redundant and facilitating a more efficient, transparent, and accessible financial system.

DeFi operates on certain core principles that distinguish it from conventional finance:

To appreciate the potential of DeFi, we must delve into the technologies that underpin it:

DeFi's allure lies in the numerous benefits it offers over traditional finance. It hands individuals control over their finances, reduces costs, enhances security, and promotes financial inclusion.

DeFi

Traditional Finance

Financial Control

Places total financial control in the hands of the user.

Requires a financial institution (such as a bank) to manage user assets and make transactions.

Accessibility

Can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, regardless of location.

Have geographical and economic barriers which limit access for many individuals.

Cost-Effective

Significantly reduces processing costs by removing intermediaries.

Involves fees for intermediaries, transaction costs, and even hidden charges.

Transparency and Security

The underlying blockchain technology ensures all transactions are transparent, traceable, and secure.

Are not always transparent, and security depends on the institution's integrity.

Innovation and Flexibility

Open-source nature encourages continuous development and innovation.

Innovation is often slower and less dynamic due to strict regulations and resistance to change.

Bake provides multiple services that allow users to harness the power of DeFi to generate passive income:

Bake embodies the spirit of decentralization. It is on a mission to enable users leverage DeFi to generate passive income. By providing a user-friendly interface and a secure platform, Bake encourages you to dive into DeFi and discover the potential it has to offer.

As DeFi continues to evolve, it brings with it the opportunity for individuals to enhance their financial independence. Bake is committed to empowering its users to maximize  these opportunities by helping them navigate the DeFi landscape with ease and confidence.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that the information on this blog and in any articles posted on this blog is for general information only and should not be relied upon as financial advice. Cake Pte. Ltd., Cake DeFi, UAB, and its affiliates (the “Cake Group”) are not licensed financial advisers. You may wish to approach your own independent financial advisor before making any decision to buy, sell or hold any product and/or digital assets mentioned in this blog.

Any views, opinions, references, assertions of fact and/or other statements are not necessarily the views held by the Cake Group. The Cake Group disclaims any liability whatsoever that may arise out of or in connection with such statements. Always do your own research before investing in any financial assets and consult a qualified financial advisor if necessary.

Do you want to enjoy more premium benefits and privileges as a Cake DeFi user? If yes, then you’re in luck. Introducing cakeELITE - an exclusive membership plan that helps you unlock special platform features, incentives, bonuses and other amazing perks that regular users can only dream of.

Here’s how it works.

As a member of cakeELITE, you’ll receive a multiplier on the crypto rewards that you earn from our services. That means more passive income and even greater growth of your cryptocurrency holdings over time.

For example, if you’re already earning $10 worth of crypto rewards per month, you can get a $15 booster on top of that amount by simply joining the cakeELITE monthly membership.

Do you have any requests or concerns that need immediate attention? Don’t worry. As a member of cakeELITE, you’re assigned with exclusive email and WhatsApp channels that allows you to receive priority support from our customer service team.

Get to enjoy your rewards and withdraw your funds from the Cake DeFi platform without having to worry about withdrawal fees. That’s right. As a member of cakeELITE, you’re entitled to free withdrawals from the Cake DeFi platform - making it easy for you to withdraw funds as much as you're allowed under your monthly or yearly membership, without worrying about withdrawal fees.

With cakeELITE, you not only get to enjoy premium benefits but also exclusive access to new product releases, limited edition swag items and a range of tools and features that aren't available to regular users, giving you an edge in the market.

As a cakeELITE member, you're eligible to get a discount on the normal  DEX swap fee which is 0.5%. The exact discounts depend on whether you're a monthly or yearly member:

We understand the importance of quick access to your crypto assets. As a cakeELITE yearly member, you can enjoy peace of mind with priority withdrawals, allowing you to receive your assets urgently when needed. Please note that this only applies to same-network withdrawals (for example, BTC to Bitcoin network withdrawals).

Don't settle for the status quo as a regular Cake DeFi user. Choose to be a member of cakeELITE and enjoy all the exciting benefits it has to offer! To be a member, click here.

If you want to know more about cakeELITE, click here to visit our FAQ page. If you want to join cakeELITE but haven’t signed up for a Cake DeFi account yet, click here.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that the information on this blog and in any articles posted on this blog is for general information only and should not be relied upon as financial advice. Cake Pte. Ltd., Cake DeFi, UAB, and its affiliates (the “Cake Group”) are not licensed financial advisers. You may wish to approach your own independent financial advisor before making any decision to buy, sell or hold any product and/or digital assets mentioned in this blog.

Any views, opinions, references, assertions of fact and/or other statements are not necessarily the views held by the Cake Group. The Cake Group disclaims any liability whatsoever that may arise out of or in connection with such statements. Always do your own research before investing in any financial assets and consult a qualified financial advisor if necessary.

Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, is not only one of the most popular cryptocurrencies available today, but it’s also become increasingly easy to make money with it. So, if you’re just getting started in the world of crypto investing, here are common tips and strategies for making money with ETH.

How does lending help you make money with ETH? Well, instead of just storing it away in a crypto wallet (which doesn’t earn you any yields), you can lend it out instead to borrowers who are in need of cryptocurrency financing and generate yields from the interest.

This method works similar to traditional forms of lending. The main difference is that ETH lending is done through decentralized platforms - eliminating the need for a middleman institution like a bank or credit union.

Getting started with ETH lending is relatively straightforward and doesn’t require much technical knowledge to get going. That said, it’s important to understand how the process works before getting involved. Here are just some basics on how you can begin:

ETH lending is a straightforward way to earn passive income with your ETH holdings. The process is simple: lend your ETH and earn interest payments later on - which is why it is, generally, perceived as suitable for beginners. However, it's essential to review the terms and conditions of your preferred lending platform carefully. By doing so, you can be aware of any potential risks involved and protect yourself and your assets.

Trading is, arguably, the most popular and lucrative way to make money with ETH. It involves buying and selling ETH, and taking advantage of its price fluctuations in the market to make a profit.

To make money with ETH by means of trading, you first need a platform from which to buy and sell this cryptocurrency. Some of today’s most popular platforms not only provide liquidity but also offer advanced features such as margin trading. That said, you must ensure you use a platform that provides optimum security and transparency.

After setting up an account with your preferred platform, you’ll then need funds in order to buy and sell your preferred amount of ETH. Some cryptocurrency exchanges allow direct deposits via bank transfer while others require you to first purchase other cryptocurrencies before exchanging them for ETH on their platform.

Once your funds are ready, you may choose to start engaging in short-term trades. This approach is more suited for day traders who speculate and take advantage of price movements within a single trading day or scalpers who wish to make frequent small profits from small price movements during the day.

If you choose to make money with ETH through trading, it is important to be aware that this method can be risky and can result in significant losses. This is due to the fact that the crypto market is extremely volatile and can be very unpredictable at times.. Therefore, trading should only be considered by investors who are willing to assume a high level of financial risk.

Trading is, arguably, the most popular and lucrative way to make money with ETH. It involves buying and selling ETH, and taking advantage of its price fluctuations in the market to make a profit.

To make money with ETH by means of trading, you first need a platform from which to buy and sell this cryptocurrency. Some of today’s most popular platforms not only provide liquidity but also offer advanced features such as margin trading. That said, you must ensure you use a platform that provides optimum security and transparency.

After setting up an account with your preferred platform, you’ll then need funds in order to buy and sell your preferred amount of ETH. Some cryptocurrency exchanges allow direct deposits via bank transfer while others require you to first purchase other cryptocurrencies before exchanging them for ETH on their platform.

Once your funds are ready, you may choose to start engaging in short-term trades. This approach is more suited for day traders who speculate and take advantage of price movements within a single trading day or scalpers who wish to make frequent small profits from small price movements during the day.

If you choose to make money with ETH through trading, it is important to be aware that this method can be risky and can result in significant losses. This is due to the fact that the crypto market is extremely volatile and can be very unpredictable at times.. Therefore, trading should only be considered by investors who are willing to assume a high level of financial risk.

Staking is the process of locking up an amount of ETH for a specified period of time in order to contribute to the security of the blockchain and earn network rewards. This approach is more suited for long-term investors who wish to make money with ETH by generating passive income rather than smaller profits via trading.  

Making money with ETH through staking isn’t always straightforward. The most common options available today are:

Staking to make money with ETH can be complex and difficult, even for experienced users. For those who are new to staking, the most common challenge that they encounter is that they lack the necessary skills, knowledge or resources to purchase the appropriate software and reach the required minimum amount of funds. That said, staking is a great choice for those who want to build up their financial wealth in the long run, as opposed to seeking out short-term returns.

Do you want to make money with ETH and generate passive income in an easy, secure and transparent manner? We offer a variety of options to suit different investing approaches, expertise levels, financial situations, and risk tolerances.

What is YieldVault?
YieldVault is an easy-to-use tool that enables users to effortlessly generate crypto rewards with just a few clicks, while also experiencing the benefits of greater transparency. For more information, click here.

Who is YieldVault for?
YieldVault is highly-recommended for beginners or intermediate users.

How to use YieldVault to make money with ETH?

1. YieldVault is only available on the Cake DeFi mobile app. If you want to use YieldVault but haven’t downloaded the mobile app yet, click here.

2. Once you’re logged in the mobile app, go to the main page and select YieldVault

3. Select ETH and click “ALLOCATE”.

4. To generate rewards at an even more competitive rate, you can choose DUSD as your preferred  payout.

For more information about YieldVault, click here.

What is liquidity mining?
Liquidity mining rewards users who provide liquidity for decentralized finance projects. To participate, users must allocate a pair of crypto assets (e.g., ETH and DFI) and maintain the predetermined ratio between the two. Rewards usually consist of the same types of crypto pairs allocated by the user.

How to use our Liquidity Mining Service to make money with ETH?

1. Go to our Liquidity mining page. If you prefer using the Cake DeFi mobile app, you may download it here.

2. Choose the ETH-DFI cryptocurrency pair and click “ADD LIQUIDITY”. If you don’t have DFI, note that a portion of your ETH will be converted automatically into DFI.

3. Rewards are generated every 12 hours and are automatically available on your Cake DeFi wallet.

For more information about our Liquidity Mining service, click here.

Join our new membership plan, cakeELITE, and substantially boost the ETH rewards that you generate from our YieldVault, Staking and Liquidity Mining services.

To join, click here. For more information, click here.

And that’s it! For more information about our services, click here. Also, if you want to use our services to make money with ETH but haven’t signed up for a Cake DeFi account yet, click here.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that the information on this blog and in any articles posted on this blog is for general information only and should not be relied upon as financial advice. Cake Pte. Ltd., Cake DeFi, UAB, and its affiliates (the “Cake Group”) are not licensed financial advisers. You may wish to approach your own independent financial advisor before making any decision to buy, sell or hold any product and/or digital assets mentioned in this blog.

Any views, opinions, references, assertions of fact and/or other statements are not necessarily the views held by the Cake Group. The Cake Group disclaims any liability whatsoever that may arise out of or in connection with such statements. Always do your own research before investing in any financial assets and consult a qualified financial advisor if necessary.

Although Solana (SOL) offers a variety of passive income opportunities, staking is by far the most popular choice among crypto investors - and there are many good reasons why.

In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at what Solana (SOL) staking is, how it works and why you should consider getting involved. We’ll also dive into some of the key benefits of staking with Solana and discuss some important facts that every investor should know about generating passive income from Solana staking rewards.

Simply put, staking is the act of committing your cryptocurrencies to support and secure a blockchain network. By doing so, users can receive rewards in the form of the same cryptocurrency they’ve staked. Today, staking has become increasingly popular among crypto investors as it provides an opportunity to generate passive income with their crypto holdings.

For more information about staking, click here.

Generating passive income with Solana staking has several advantages over other forms of passive income generation. First and foremost, it’s a relatively low-risk way of earning money. The risk associated with staking is significantly lower than crypto trading or liquidity mining. Additionally, staking provides more flexibility with respect to withdrawing funds anytime without additional penalties or fees. Finally, there’s no need for complex tools or knowledge when getting started in Solana staking. It’s possible to start earning passive income simply by holding SOL tokens in a compatible crypto wallet.

If you have the technical know-how and resources to spare, you can set up your own validator node to directly validate transactions on the blockchain. To get more support, you can encourage others to stake their SOL tokens with your node. Alternatively, if you don't have time or access to the necessary tools and system infrastructure, there are a variety of staking pools and services available that let users join existing networks to take advantage of shared services.

To find out more about the requirements that you'll need to meet in order to become a validator, click here.

You can also start earning rewards and help secure the network by staking your SOL tokens to one or more validators on Solana's Mainnet Beta. Additionally, any user holding SOL tokens can stake with a wallet that supports staking through SolFlare.com.

If you want to generate Solana staking rewards but have limited resources or technical expertise, don’t worry. With our SOL Staking service, you can easily stake your SOL tokens with just a click of a button and start generating passive income in a secure and transparent manner.

1. Click here to go to our Staking service page. If you prefer using our Cake DeFi mobile app, click here.

2. Select Solana (SOL) and click ALLOCATE.

3.  Solana staking rewards are generated every 12 hours and are automatically available in your Cake DeFi wallet.

Do you want to increase the Solana staking rewards that you generate from our SOL Staking service? Join our new membership plan, cakeELITE, and boost your Solana staking rewards up to 2.5X.

To join cakeELITE, click here. For more information on cakeELITE, click here.

And that’s it! If you want to generate Solana staking rewards using our SOL Staking service but have not signed up for a Cake DeFi account yet, click here.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that the information on this blog and in any articles posted on this blog is for general information only and should not be relied upon as financial advice. Cake Pte. Ltd., Cake DeFi, UAB, and its affiliates (the “Cake Group”) are not licensed financial advisers. You may wish to approach your own independent financial advisor before making any decision to buy, sell or hold any product and/or digital assets mentioned in this blog.

Any views, opinions, references, assertions of fact and/or other statements are not necessarily the views held by the Cake Group. The Cake Group disclaims any liability whatsoever that may arise out of or in connection with such statements. Always do your own research before investing in any financial assets and consult a qualified financial advisor if necessary.

Dear Cake Customers, Partners, Team Members and other Readers,

It is my pleasure to unveil our company’s 2023 Q1 transparency report, providing you with valuable insights from a broader perspective. Before delving into the details, allow me to briefly reflect on the crypto market in the previous quarter, which witnessed a series of unanticipated outcomes. We observed three distinct phases that shaped the crypto markets:

In January, the markets experienced a bullish correction as they bounced back from the downturn observed in Q4 2022. This recovery period showcased revitalized investor confidence, laying the groundwork for the months that followed. Interestingly, the industry sectors and assets that underperformed the most in 2022 experienced the strongest rebounds, suggesting a potential change in market sentiment and a renewed interest in previously struggling sectors.

As February unfolded, the market transitioned into a phase of stagnation, characterized by minimal price fluctuations. This sideways phase offered a brief respite from the price volatility witnessed in the months before and after, with investors carefully monitoring the evolving landscape.

During March, the crypto world was shaken by two significant events occurring simultaneously: a banking crisis and a crackdown on major cryptocurrency platforms, such as Coinbase, Kraken, BUSD, Silvergate, USDC, Binance, and Paxos. The confluence of these events led to a massive sell-off in stablecoins, primarily BUSD. This, in turn, sparked a price increase for cryptocurrencies, with bitcoin primarily reaping the benefits as it was perceived as a safeguard against the beleaguered banking sector. This did affect us dramatically, prompting us to adopt an even more cautious approach concerning regulatory compliance.

If I had told you at the beginning of Q1, how wild the events would turn out, I’m not sure you would have predicted that crypto markets would have experienced one of their strongest quarters ever, with bitcoin surging by a staggering 70%. With the bullish sentiment making a comeback in the markets, it comes as no surprise that we as a group did well from a financial standpoint. Yet, it wasn’t merely the favorable circumstances that helped us; we also delivered extremely well on all fronts, as evidenced by our progress on our Q1 OKRs!

On a GROUP level (CDH), we managed to achieve all our OKRs:

On the RETAIL (CDF) side, we performed exceptionally well, particularly on the product front:

On the open-source RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT side (OSS), we have also achieved our OKRs:

ENTERPRISE (CDE), the latest addition to the Cake Group, has made significant progress in Q1:

Naturally, the above-mentioned thoughts and goals for Q2 depend highly on the general crypto market sentiment in Q2. I do see 10 things that we need to watch closely:

Once again, our Q2 targets are ambitious, and while we may not accomplish them all—particularly if market sentiment turns bearish—I believe it's better to aim for the moon and land with the stars, than to never reach escape velocity. It is an immense privilege to embark on this journey alongside you, empowering you to take control of your financial future with us. Your trust, support, and patronage mean the world to us. Thank you.

Julian

CEO & Co-Founder Cake DeFi

On 28 March 2023, Ethereum core developers announced in a blog post that the highly-anticipated Shapella network upgrade will take place on 12 April 2023 at 22:27:35 UTC. But what exactly is this upgrade? And why should you – an ETH investor or someone who has previously staked their ETH – care about it?

In this article, we'll cover all the basics that you need to know about the Ethereum Shapella upgrade, its implications for both the future of the Ethereum network and for ETH investors like yourself.

Ethereum staking is the process of locking up Ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, in order to receive rewards. It allows users to earn passive income without needing to actively risk their capital by trading or other means. This process is greatly facilitated by smart contracts on Ethereum’s network which enable secure and decentralized interactions between decentralized apps (dapps) and users without the need for an intermediary - allowing for users to maintain full control over their funds at all times.

When the Ethereum blockchain upgrade known as The Merge took place on 15 September 2022, the unstaking of ETH was made temporarily unavailable.

Moreover, it combines changes to the execution layer (Shanghai), consensus layer (Capella) and the Engine API - hence, the term "Shapella."

In short, no. The team at Ethereum simply advises ETH investors to check if there are additional steps required by the exchange, wallet provider or platform that they’re using.

Unlike other platforms, where the time it takes to process unstaking and withdrawal requests is reliant on the network withdrawal queue, we've made it hassle-free and worry-free for our users to unstake and withdraw their ETH.

This is well- aligned with our goal to provide DeFi services that are not only easy-to-use, secure and transparent, but are also the perfect choice for generating passive income on your ETH and other cryptocurrencies.

And that’s it. If you want to use our services but haven’t signed up for a Cake DeFi account yet, click here and take control of your financial destiny!

Though all Cake DeFi services are tailored to help you generate passive income on your crypto in an easy, secure and transparent manner, it's important to find the right one that fits your financial situation, needs and strategies to maximize the chances of success with your crypto investments.

In this article, we provide clear and easy-to-understand information on our key services: Crypto staking, YieldVault and Liquidity Mining. We also analyze the pros and cons of each service, so you can make an informed decision on which one is best for you.

So, are you ready? Let’s dive in.

DeFi services, or Decentralized Finance services, are a new way to access financial services without reliance on centralized entities such as banks and brokers. These services are powered by blockchain technology and offer users access to financial products such as loans, savings accounts, exchanges, investments, and more - all in a peer-to-peer fashion that is faster and cheaper than centralized systems.

There are numerous advantages to DeFi services including increased privacy and anonymity for users, the ability to maintain control over funds at all times, fewer fees and commissions than with traditional banking options, no need for credit checks or bank accounts, automated smart contracts that execute as intended without manual oversight or risk of fraud or error.

DeFi also has potential implications in terms of democratizing access to capital markets and creating greater global economic inclusion. Ultimately DeFi serves as an exciting addition to the existing range of financial services available today by providing people with improved access to wealth creation opportunities.

One potential disadvantage of DeFi services is the still nascent and evolving state of blockchain technology. Although this innovation has shown tremendous promise, it is still in its early stages and in some instances, may not be a reliable or secure enough system to trust with financial transactions.

Additionally, there are concerns about the levels of decentralization among DeFi projects which could lead to issues related to censorship resistance. There have also been reports of rug pulls and exit scams within foreign trading platforms that offer DeFi services, leaving users with no recourse for recovering lost funds.

Finally, regulatory uncertainty surrounding this type of service model means there may be limited protection for customers from fraud or loss due to third party actions.

For more information on DeFi and DeFi services, click here.

Crypto staking is a process in which crypto holders volunteer to participate in verifying transactions on the blockchain. When you participate, you need to stake your crypto for a specific period of time. In return, you will receive crypto staking rewards based on the type and amount of crypto you have staked during that period.

For more information about our Crypto Staking service and how to start using it, click here.

Simply put, YieldVault is a tool that allows users to easily generate crypto rewards with just a few clicks, while also enjoying the added-value of transparency.

For more information about YieldVault and how to start using it, click here.

Simply put, liquidity mining is an innovative way to reward users that have allocated a pair of crypto assets in order to provide liquidity for decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. This pair consists of two different cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and DFI (e.g., 1 BTC = 1,000 DFI). As such, it is important to maintain the predetermined ratio between these two currencies in order to maximize the rewards given. The rewards typically consist of the same type of crypto pairs that were initially allocated by the user.

For more information about our Liquidity Mining service and how to start using it, click here.

Still not sure which Cake DeFi service is the best fit for you? Check out the explainer video featuring our CEO and Co-Founder, Julian Hosp, below.

And that’s it! We hope that by giving you simple explanations and non-technical descriptions of our Crypto Staking, YieldVault and Liquidity Mining services, you will be able to determine which service works for you best.

Also, if you want to use our services but have not signed up for a Cake DeFi account yet, click here to start generating passive income on your favorite crypto.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up now and take control of your financial destiny!

Are you wondering how to choose the right crypto exchange for you? 

Well, you’re not alone. Choosing the perfect crypto exchange is like finding the right key to a treasure chest – it can unlock incredible opportunities, but it’s no one-size-fits-all solution. 

Now, here’s the kicker: There’s more to it than meets the eye. It’s not just about signing up and trading; it’s about making savvy decisions that can make or break your crypto journey. 

Imagine this: the lower your trading fees, the better your chances of growing your crypto wealth. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In this guide, we’re about to help you understand how to choose the right crypto exchange, how to avoid pitfalls, and many interesting bit that you would not know if you miss out on reading this guide.

From understanding jurisdiction complexities to maximizing your VIP status and even tackling liquidity challenges, this guide is your compass through the crypto wilderness.

This guide on selecting the right crypto exchange for you will help to understand all the factors needed when selecting a crypto exchange.

One of the biggest factors when selecting a crypto exchange for any user should be their jurisdiction. These days, all the crypto exchanges ask you to go through a process called KYC where you share your personal details like passport or government ID. This is to ensure that the person using the crypto exchange is legit.

A crypto exchange that supports your local jurisdiction will help you in the following ways:

To be honest, local crypto exchange is not a norm in the world of cryptocurrency. A crypto users (beginner or advanced) usually prefer an exchange that offers maximum liquidity, trust, low fees, and security, as all these features add up to give an outstanding investing or trading experience. 

However, I would suggest you work with a crypto exchange that offers direct or indirect integration with your crypto taxation tool so that you are compliant with your local laws. 

Often users from certain countries use crypto exchanges thinking it would be okay to use a foreign established exchanges without declaring the same in their tax-resident country. In our opinion, this is a big mistake, especially if you are someone who is planning to make six to seven figures income from crypto investment or trading. Choosing a crypto exchange that is friendly to your jurisdiction will help you avoid future headaches.

At this moment, a few no-KYC exchanges do exist, but lately, we have seen that many exchanges like Bybit, KuCoin, or Bitget which used to be either no-KYC or reluctant to KYC norms, have made this process compulsory.

Based on our current understanding of cryptocurrencies, you should pick the exchange that caters to your needs. For example, if you are an investor looking to buy and hold, you can use an exchange that offers a simple interface. A newbie-friendly exchange is what you need. 

Similarly, if you are a trader or an advanced user, you should use an exchange that offers advanced tools for trading, such as Binance, Bybit, and Phemex which will help you make more money as you hone your trading skills and strategies.

Some of the above-mentioned exchanges do offer advanced tools like trailing stop loss, derivatives trading, and bot trading to name a few.

Crypto exchanges make the maximum money when you trade or invest with them. Some exchanges offer zero-fee trading, while others take up to 0.4% of your trading amount as fees. These fees add up over time and put a huge dent in your wealth-building process.

Usually, exchanges with zero fees are good to have, but many of them are not ideal for long-term holds, and in the past, we have seen many such exchanges like Hoo(dot)com and others shut down.

In my experience, it’s best to find an exchange that offers low fees, a high-quality trading experience, and at the same time, is trusted.

A lot of exchanges like Binance and Bybit have a feature called VIP levels, which are awarded based on your trading volume, the value of assets you have on the exchange, and so on. The higher your VIP level is, the lower your trading fees will be. So it’s often better to use no more than one or two exchanges at a time to improve your VIP level and lower your trading fees.

Fees of major US exchanges: 

Note 1: The fees for simple swap (which investors need) and the fees for trading (Traders) is often different.

Note 2: The 0.0% fee above is usually for maker fees. 

When you are starting out your journey as an investor or crypto trader, you may be looking at the top 20 cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH, SOL, and so on. However, as you march ahead, you will realise that there are often more possibilities of making money with altcoins. 

This is why you need a crypto exchange that not only supports all good altcoin projects but also who are proactive in adding new hot projects. 

Often tier-2 exchanges like MEXC, and Phemex are more proactive than top-tier exchanges to add new projects. 

One of the sweet aspects of the cryptocurrency market is it runs 24/7, and to make the most out of these amazing features of the cryptocurrency market, you will need crypto trading bots, trading terminals, and similar trading tools. Now, if you are simply a beginner, you don’t need to worry about this particular factor, but as you move ahead, you would want to pick the one that works with all popular trading tools. Most of the best crypto exchanges do work with popular trading tools like Bitsgap, Cornix, or 3Commas, to name a few.

If you plan to trade spot or derivative markets, you would want to pick an exchange with higher liquidity. Working with a crypto exchange that has low liquidity might cause you substantial losses, as the slippage would be high. Especially if you are into derivative trading, exchanges with low liquidity could cause your stop loss to be taken out quickly, and thus, you will be out of your trade-in time and often at a loss.

Here are the top spot and derivative exchanges based on the volume.

Note: If you are trading small caps, you may not find them being listed on many exchanges, and take the help of something like Coinmarketcap or CoinGecko to check the liquidity of these tokens on various exchanges.

We are also building a tool on CoinSutra, which will help you check everything here.

It is well-known that cryptocurrency is still highly unregulated, and this often causes a lot of new exchanges to sprout, and they do marketing of their exchanges on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter X to get new users. These unsuspecting users do not really care for security because of marketing lures such as welcome bonuses, and free bitcoins, which often cost them their entire savings.

While no exchange is 100% safe or secure from hacking, however, you should prefer exchanges that have a proven track record, have backup funds, have audited code, and have maximum user satisfaction.

When dealing with finance and crypto, the need for customer support is often urgent at an emergency. Some of the most common reasons why you would need customer support on an exchange are:

Having live chat support will help you resolve these issues in real time; else, the stress and panic of losing funds could cost you many days or hours if you are dealing with an exchange that does not offer excellent support.

Food for thought is: that not all best crypto exchanges have the same quality of support. Only a few of them work like Amazon, where they go above and beyond to resolve the user’s query in real-time.

Some of the most common ways you can get customer support from an exchange are:

I have had a great experience with Binance and KuCoin when it comes to outstanding and instant customer support. Even though I advocate Bybit a lot, but I often found their support to be a little slower in comparison with Binance or KuCoin. At the same time, Phemex seems to be doing reasonably good when it comes to customer support.

If you are a derivative trader, you might want to pay special attention to how much leverage a particular exchange offers. At the same time, combine it with the tips I have shared above, such as liquidity and fees, to find an exchange that fits your requirements.

Also, you should pick an exchange that offers products that you are interested in, such as perpetual futures trading, options markets, and so on.

Here are the top derivative exchanges with allowed leverage and available products.

There are exchanges that let you add funds using your bank account, and then there are exchanges that allow you to add only cryptocurrencies like BTC or USDT. When it comes to fiat deposit, you have multiple options such as bank transfer, SEPA, Add using Visa or Mastercard, PayPal, and so on. Different deposit methods have different costs, and you should be aware and mindful of it.

My suggestion for you here is to pick an exchange that supports adding funds via the banking route. An exchange that offers deposit funds via bank often is more reliable than an exchange that does not have a partnership with existing banks or credit/debit card providers for adding funds. More over,

There are two very popular types of exchanges these days, and they are centralized and decentralized exchanges. Based on your jurisdiction and requirement, often decentralized exchanges are good. Thanks to layer 2 blockchains like Arbitrum, Optimism, and likes, the trading fees on these exchanges are becoming lower.

However, this is not recommended for an absolute beginner, as a user is responsible for handling their funds. Whereas on a centralized exchange, the operator of the exchange ensures all the security features like KYC, 2FA, strong password, and so on to ensure the security of your funds.

Again, if you are interested in trading permissionless and without sharing your KYC, you should check out my earlier guide on top decentralized exchanges.

A while back, there used to be a crypto-exchange called “FTX,” which was the #2 exchange of its time, and one day FTX went bust as the founder of the exchange was using the user’s funds to trade via one of their companies. After this fiasco, exchanges have started publishing proof-of-reserve, which adds significant trust.

The reserves stay on the blockchain, so if there is any significant crypto movement happening, we all know there is something going on in real-time, and it could help avoid future catastrophes like what happened with FTX or Hoo(dot)com.

Also check: Crypto exchange hacks (A history)

Proof of reserves is one of those features that a good crypto exchange must have. At the same time, work with an exchange when we know who are the people behind it, where the headquarters are, and all those trust and transparency-related features that we expect from a reliable crypto exchange.

The world of crypto exchanges is complicated, and here at CoinSutra, we do our best to bring and share the latest news and features of the top crypto exchanges. However, due to the fast-moving nature of the crypto world, challenges can arise unexpectedly, which we have seen in the past with Mt. Gox, FTX, Hoo, and many known and unknown exchanges.

Choosing the right exchange should be your crucial priority, and instead of creating an account on a random unknown exchange, it could result in the total loss of your funds. I hope the above checklist will help you pick the best one for your needs.

As a beginner, you should be okay working with one or a maximum 2 exchanges, as you learn how to use them, how to do tax accounting of your trade, and so on. Once you have moved from beginner to intermediate or advanced level, you should have more exchanges from tier-2 level such as MEXC, and Phemex so that you can quickly take a long or short position on new projects. 
You don’t want to end up using too many exchanges, as it might create an accounting and management headache for you. But if you live in a country like Dubai where there are no personal taxes and reporting, you can sign up for a few good exchanges and be ready to use them when a hot project is listed on it. 

The biggest mistake is not doing enough research about the exchange, founders, and proof of reserves. Without these, you might end up signing up for an exchange that may cease to exist one day and might cost you lose your entire investment and savings.

Do not use a crypto exchange as a wallet. Keep only those funds that you are trading, else move it to a cold wallet like Ledger Nano X, Metamask, or anything that is secure and you have complete control over. This way even if an exchange goes belly up, your funds are safe with you, and the only risk is the amount that is on that particular exchange. 

Here are some of the resources that will help you in your selection:

Looking for the best Crypto trading bots for trading?

We all know the Crypto industry never sleeps, and if you are already a part of the cryptocurrency industry who indulges in buy/sell, here is your chance to trade like a pro.

Crypto trading bots are the answer to all the busy and futuristic individuals who understand how bots could help them in trading.

Before we dive deep into some of the best crypto trading bots, let us understand the basics:

Crypto trading bots are autonomous software program that automates all the manual process needed to trade.

As the crypto market is on 24*7, a crypto trading bot could help you make money even when you are sleeping.

The software works tirelessly every second to make a profit from crypto market volatility. Panic selling and greed buying are just some of the ways that turn your profitable trade into a loss.

These trading bots are designed to be emotionless, which in turn removes biases and emotional risks associated with personal trading.

Depending upon the crypto trading bots and strategy you use, you could make money in bull and bear markets alike.

If done right, one can automate the process of making money from crypto trading using Crypto bots.

And this is not all..

Crypto trading bots connect with your crypto exchange like Binance, Bitfinex via API, and they perform trading based on pre-defined strategies.

Concerned about funds security?

These crypto trading bots are secure as they don’t have permission to withdraw funds. Since the API feature is available via exchange (This is easy to configure), and by default, they don’t allow fund withdrawals.

Moreover, all the bots that are listed below are time-tested and have an excellent track record.

An experienced trader can easily quadruplet their earnings using a bot. At the same time, a beginner could level up the trading game by using these bots.

But do remember…

All of these Crypto trading bot tools offer free training modules, make sure you spend 1-2 hours to learn the features and how to use it properly. When in doubt, join their community on Telegram or discord and clear your doubts before you start trading with a big amount.

The short answer is yes and no!

If you are impatient and think it will always make money, well these bots are not for you.

However,

If you have patience and zeal to learn, these bots could do wonders for your financial growth.

Crypto trading bots help you in automating most of the boring manual parts, however, at the same time, they also contain inherent risks associated with any kind of trading.

The key to making crypto trading bots profitable depends upon your approach.

If you are coming from fiat/forex or commodity trading, you need to understand the crypto market is way more volatile than the usual market.

If this is the first time you are planning to trade on crypto using a bot, it would be better to do paper bot trading (I have listed the software below) or test strategy using the backtesting tool before making a live trade.

Make sure; you take time to understand the software before you increase your trading amount and start trading like a pro.

Note: In crypto-trading, invest only that amount you are ok to lose and always use stop loss to minimize the risk.

Features to look for in a crypto bot:

These are just some of the must-have features of a crypto-trading bot.

And now, it’s time to find some of the top bots for crypto trading.

3Commas is an idle crypto trading bot for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and professional traders. It supports all notable popular cryptocurrency exchanges, and you can trade in altcoin pairs.

Another feature that makes 3commas widely popular among beginners is its paper trading feature. With paper trading, you could test your strategy before you put the real money into trading.

3commas offers a Smart trading terminal to trade on multiple exchanges (including your clients, family, or friends’ accounts) and enjoy the trailing take profit (TTP) feature.

Many pre-configured bots are available on 3commas. You can also create your bot. If you have never used a trading bot before, you could use 3Commas to get the hang of bot trading.

Popular features of 3Commas trading bot are:

The power of 3Commas is in its simple to use interface. You can learn more about 3commas in our earlier post:

Pricing:

They also offer 3 days free trial account which gives you access to all of their pro plan features.

Cryptohopper is the most popular cryptocurrency trading bot in the market. The company is registered in Amsterdam and has been continuously adding new trends and features since late 2017.

The interface is beginner-friendly, and you can follow some of the popular indicators like moving average, Bollinger bands to automate trading on all popular exchanges.

The Cryptohopper lets you trade unlimited cryptocurrency pairs in autonomous mode. Cryptohopper also offers a marketplace where many pro traders sell their strategies, and you can copy them to make money.

Another highlight of the Cryptohopper is the Arbitrage bot, which lets you make a profit from the price difference of the same pair between two exchanges.

Cryptohopper has taken Arbitrage to the next level by offering sophisticated triangular Arbitrage, which helps you make money from the price difference between multiple pairs on the same exchange.

Read: Cryptohopper review

The Cryptohopper mobile app lets you monitor your trade and portfolio. If you are connecting your existing exchange account with Cryptohopper, you can set the start amount to calculate the profit accurately. This removes the point of setting up a new exchange account for your bot trading.

At the time of writing, Cryptohopper supports the following exchanges:

Popular features of Cryptohopper:

Cryptohopper Pricing and fees:

Cryoptohopper offers three plans, and the base plan starts at only $19/month. The monthly subscription ensures you are not locked in for a long time, and you can upgrade/downgrade or cancel your subscription anytime.

The seven days of free trial gives you ample time to enjoy all the premium features of Cryptohopper before you start paying.

Paypal, bank transfer, and crypto payments are supported to buy Cryptohopper subscription.

Use coupon “NEWSDISC” to get 30% discount.

Bitsgap is a cloud based tool that offers various crypto automation bots to help you make money while you sleep. The platform has been around for last 3 years, and they are constantly adding new features, and making the automated trading enjoyable.

At the time of writing this resource, here are some of the top features of Bitsgap:

Bitsgap connects with your crypto exchange account using the API method, and this your funds stays on your exchange only. I do miss seeing a dedicated Bitsgap mobile app which is something all the competition of Bitsgap offers, but overall Bitsgap is a crypto trading bot that you should not ignore. Read a detailed review of Bitsgap here.

Bitsgap pricing:

From the pricing perspective, Bitsgap is costlier than 3Commas, and may not be the best for beginners. However, often users find Bitsgap UI to be simpler than 3Commas and other alternatives, and that justifies the price.

When it comes to an affordable Crypto trading bot, Cornix wins the hands down. It may not be as popular as 3Commas, Bitsgap and others, but the kind of features it offers, it may make other feels shy.

Here are features of Cornix –

There are more features of Cornix, but the above features are good enough for you to try and test it out.

One of the least talked-about, and in my opinion, remarkable features of Cornix, is that it allows you to automate trading from the Telegram signal group. This way, you can automate your entire Telegram signal group trading experience. I will discuss this in detail in the upcoming review of Cornix, but for now, I’ll let you try this on your own.

BitUniverse is a free (currently) crypto trading bot that offers both AI based trading and manual trading option.

Using BitUniverse, you can connect with your popular exchanges like:

They support more than 22+ exchanges, so chances are, your favourite exchange might be supported by BitUniverse.

BitUniverse seems to be very interesting, as it offers a few popular bots which are mostly paid on other platforms. One of my favorite bot “Grid trading bot” is available on BitUniverse, and is completely free to use.

Here is list of all available bots on the BitUniverse platform:

Again, I don’t think this platform will be free for long, so you better take advantage of BitUniverse to practice crypto trading bots for free. Also, BitUniverse is recommended for the intermediate level of trader, but beginners should consider the top 3 bots listed above.

Hassonline is one popular crypto trading bots that work with almost 22 exchanges. However, its superpower is a variety of bots like Flash crash bots, Arbitrage bots, which helps you make money in every situation.

This is a desktop-based bot that gets easier to use once you are done watching their free bots training videos. The downloadable software is available for Windows, Linux and Mac as well.

Every bot serves a unique purpose, and for example, rather than selling your bags on loss, you could use Flash crash bot to profit from the high movement.

Watch this video to understand how Flash crash bots work:

A few of the many bots offered by HaasOnline:

Here are Haasonline supported platforms and exchanges:

Haasonline Fees and plans:

HaasOnline accepts payment via Bitcoin only. You could save a significant amount by pre-paying for one year in advance.

They have three plans at the time of writing this guide, and you could choose any based on your requirements. You can always upgrade your subscription anytime by contacting the support.

Haasonline doesn’t offer a free trial, but they do have a 2-week discounted trial.

Use 20% Haasonline discount Coupon code: Coinsutra20.

Quadency is primarily a trading terminal that let you trade on multiple exchanges from a unified platform. This feature is something common among all crypto trading bots, as it makes trading easy for us when we are dealing with multiple exchanges.

What makes Quadency different than all other bots listed here is the pre-defined automated trading strategies and backtesting feature.

At the time of writing, following bots are available on Quadency platform:

They offer a free plan which is idle for beginners or passive investors of digital assets. The pro plan starts at $49, and allows monthly trading limit of $100,000 USD.

All the bots are available in the free plan, and you can always upgrade to pro plan for advanced features.

3Commas is the best beginner-friendly crypto trading automated bot that you can use. Cryptohopper is the best crypto trading bot that offers all the basic and advanced features that a trader would need. The features like backtesting, and social trading make it ideal for hobbyist and pro traders alike.

However, since each of these trading bots has a unique interface and offers distinct features, you should try all of them. You never know which one fits the best with your trading style.

I’m also testing more bots that are around for a while and have excellent community support. Currently, these are the bots that I’m testing and will be added in the near future:

As I discover more worthy Crypto bots, I will keep updating this to make the best resource for finding top crypto bots for trading. Make sure, you bookmark this page so that you could re-visit again. If you would like to recommend any other bot, do let us know in the comment section below.

Here are a few frequently asked questions about crypto trading bots:

Hassonline and Cryptohopper are two arbitrage crypto bots that you can use for arbitrage trading.

It is highly recommended that you use one bot at a time. It is best to master one bot rather than using multiple bots. However, if you want to use two different crypto trading bots, you should connect them with different exchange accounts. This way, you will be able to calculate profit, and your trade reserve amount will not overlap.

Since most of these bots are on Cloud, you don’t need to keep your computer on or stay connected to the internet all the time.

A crypto bot is as smart as you are, and they automate a lot of repetitive tasks. Once you have a strategy in place, you can use trading bots to run 24*7. A good example of this is grid trading bots, which work great in the sideways market.

There is no one answer to it, as It all depends on the strategy that you have deployed.
Some trading bot strategies require you to monitor bot once in a week, and some of them may require you to keep an eye on price moment, and make changes as necessary.

Crypto trading is lucrative to many. If you are reading this, chances are you have indulged in crypto trading too.

While profitable, it can be highly pernicious to your financial health if not done properly.

By properly, I mean doing it with the right mindset with the right set of tools such as market watcher, portfolio manager, Crypto trading journaling tool, low-cost trading exchanges, charts, crypto news aggregator, and finally, reliable exchanges where you can trade.

Here is the list of cryptocurrency trading tools listed below:

That is why, to make the crypto world a safer, more profitable space for all our readers, we have compiled a list of 13 highly recommended crypto trading tools.

3commas offers a lot of features and the most liked one is the Trading terminal.

You can connect to cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex through a single interface of 3commas and make your trading decisions on each of them simultaneously.

Plus, you can get smart trading features such as trailing stop-loss and trailing take-profit which enables one to maximize their profits in real-time.

Apart from these,

3commas is a modern-day crypto trading bot and portfolio balancer which helps crypto traders like you and me make the most out of their trades.

Also, with 3commas you can do social trading by copying portfolios of already successful traders who are consistently having decent portfolio growth.

Koinly is a crypto portfolio manager for beginners and advanced users alike.

We have been using this manager for quite some time now and are really impressed with its features.

With Koinly you can track your cryptocurrencies on various exchanges and be perpetually aware of what coins you have in your portfolio.

It also provides intuitive graphs and charts based on your portfolio holdings and market movements so that you can make educated decisions.

It is a paid tool that is available on the web.

Now that you have seen portfolio balancers, portfolio managers, crypto wallets, it makes sense in looking at one of the most prominent crypto exchanges that have set a new benchmark for the whole trading exchange industry.

Binance is one of the world’s top three exchanges. And to your surprise and mine, it is not even two years old in the business.

The team behind Binance is amazing and heavily focused on serving its trading customers. That’s why they launch innovative airdrops, competitions, and prizes regularly for their traders.

Plus, their trading fee is the lowest in the industry at 0.1%, on which also you can get a 50% discount if you use their native BNB tokens to pay the trading fees.

Altfins is a crypto-screener app and market analyzer tool that will help you identify highly profitable trades in record time. It could help you save 30% of the trading time and assist by identifying chart patterns in your selected crypto assets.

Many of you might not have heard about Altfins, as the platform might not seem that appealing at a single glance. But, as you start learning and using the platform, you will be surprised by the features it offers.

For example, have a look at the below screenshot of Altfins homepage, and in a single glance you can find a ton of trading opportunities.

However, if you are like me; and prefer to trade in the coins that are on our watchlist, you can do that too with Altfins.

You can create your own watchlist of coins, and use this tool to quickly identify profitable trading opportunities.

There are more features that you will find this tool worth your time investment, and I would not be surprised if it becomes one of your go-to tools for crypto trading.

Here are some of the things you could do with Altfins –

And a lot of more features which I let you discover of your own.

Overall, I highly recommend you spend 1-2 hours learning the features of Altfins, and if you end up using it, do come back to say thank you.

I guess if you are using Binance and Bitfinex then you have almost covered more than 50% of the crypto market.

But if you are someone who wants to dig deeper and increase their reach as well as reduce their risk by using several exchanges then Altrady is for you.

Using Altrady one can trade on multiple exchanges from a single account and trade hundreds of currencies from their palm with Altrady’s mobile app.

You can access real-time updates, alerts, and charts from various exchanges from where you can buy different cryptocurrencies.

In this way, you will diversify even your exchanges by buying/selling different cryptocurrencies at different exchanges, therefore reducing your risk of being exposed to one or two exchanges.

Featured of Altrady:

These features don’t come for free as there is a standard fee for monthly and annual subscriptions but the trial version is available for a month free of cost.

TradeSanta is a Crypto trading bot that automates crypto trading and helps you make a profit even when you sleep. Another interesting thing behind TradeSanta is it is suitable for newbies as all you are doing is creating a long and short position.

Getting started is easy, and all you need to do is connect TradeSanta with a supported exchange using API and then you can start with minimum investment. Even $50 is a good start to test out this free Bot.

At the time of writing, the following exchanges are supported:

The following exchanges will be supported soon:

The help guides and videos will help you understand how to use TradeSanta and you can get started with automated crypto trading within less than 30 minutes.

Ledger Nano X is the most popular cryptocurrency hardware wallet in the market.

If you are someone who is serious about cryptocurrencies and its long-term value, you MUST have Ledger Nano X at your disposal.

Ledger Nano X currently supports more than 150000 cryptocurrencies. Plus, it is an HD wallet that is quite popular in the cryptosphere.

We have covered extensively about Ledger Nano X in the past and can’t recommend it enough. That’s why I am leaving you with this guide to see it for yourself:

CoinMarketCap needs no introduction unless it is your first day in the world of crypto.

This is one of the most visited websites in the cryptosphere and that’s because it tracks prices, market cap, volume, listings of coins and tokens in this space.

Furthermore, it shows prices, volume, and other data in 13 languages and 28 national currencies. It also saves historical price charts of crypto markets and provides you with real-time charts for BTC and the whole crypto market.

It has APIs and widgets, social, and markets section for each coin/token which makes things easier for traders to make decisions quickly

Also see: 5 Best Alternatives To CoinMarketCap 

CoinGecko is another price and volume tracker website that does the same job as CoinMarketCap.

Well, why use it when it is the same as CoinMarkeCap, you may ask.

That is because it is not a good practice to rely on centralized systems like this for decentralized markets.

With CoinGecko you can see and track prices of 100s and 1000s of cryptocurrencies in fiat and BTC with appealing charts of different intervals. One can also see CoinGecko UI in 15 different languages apart from English which is a huge plus point for any website in this niche.

CoinMarketCal is a valuable tool in your armory if you are trading futures.

Here are top features of CoinMarketCal

It is a must-have tool to be used while making your crypto strategy and the good thing is that it is totally free to use.

CryptoPanic is another favorite tool of mine that helps me stay on top of the news from the cryptosphere.

Crypto is a relatively a small market which is highly influenced by news. That’s why it becomes important to know the news and then gauge the sentiments of the market.

This helps in solidifying your crypto strategy.

With CryptoPanic’s free version, you can follow highly customized news according to the coins you are interested in.

Plus, you can get the feature to follow your chosen YouTube channels, Reddit thread and Twitter accounts to accurately gauge the sentiments of the market.

You have the option to do these things on your mobile also as CryptoPanic provides apps for both iOS and Android. (Download CryptoPanic Android App, Download CryptoPanic iOS App)

CoinMarketMan is the most sophisticated crypto trading journaling app you can use now. It works with almost all the popular crypto derivatives trading exchanges, such as Binance, Bybit, to name a few. It also works with spot, margin, and future markets.

Coin Market Manager automatically imports the trades from connected exchanges and helps you analyze your trading setup and your overall win and loss. For a serious crypto trader, this tool helps in understanding which setup is working best for you, and helps you in improving your overall crypto trading setup.

If you are a beginner, you may not realize the importance of trading journaling, but this is something that you should use, and once you are accustomed to journaling, you will understand the benefit of it.

Note: In the V2 of CoinMarketMan, they removed the automated journaling option for spot exchanges. For now, this platform is ideal only for derivatives traders.

Here are the top exchanges supported by CoinMarketMan:

CoinMarketman is a paid tool, however, they do offer a free trial which is good enough for you to understand the benefit and test all the features offered by this sophisticated crypto trading tool.

TradingView is a highly-rated charting software that is quite popular in the world for showing accurate market charts for commodities, stocks, derivatives, and now crypto also.

So if you are someone who likes technical analysis of coins by looking at charts of different intervals, this tool is for you.

Moreover, to aid you will find all the latest and traditional patterns analysis tools inbuilt in trading view software.

Here are the top FAQs related to crypto trading tools:

Binance is the widely used software for trading crypto. It is available in almost all parts of the world except the USA, the UK, and a few more sanctioned countries. Users from the USA and UK can use Kraken, another popular crypto trading app.

Yes, you can automate crypto trading using one of these automation apps such as:
3Commas
Bitsgap
Pionex

Upcoming Crypto trading tools & Software:

These are some of the tools which are upcoming, and they are worth watching. Some of them may develop into a mainstream tool or some of them may shut down. Either way, these projects are doing something significant and would help you in picking better trade:

Well, I am sure no one would have access to all the tools. Don’t worry. When I started off, I didn’t have all this either, but with time you can start adopting one thing at a time to take your crypto trading skills to the next level.

Now, it’s your turn to try out these tools and share your experience in the comments section below

Here are a few other hand-picked guides for you to read next:

Here is a consolidated list of the best cryptocurrency exchanges with my comments:

Slowly and steadily, Bitcoin and altcoins are getting attention from more investors all around the world.

And why not? These cryptocurrencies are time and again proving themselves to be a safe haven against the government’s inflationary policies.

Not only this, but now people have a variety of products to earn substantial passive income on their crypto assets. Moreover, some people make good money by pure speculation with short-term trading (i.e., buy low, sell high).

And for those who are just starting and need answers to some basic questions like:

But before we talk about the best exchanges out there, I need to tell you that it’s not too late to get invested in cryptocurrencies. At the time of this writing, the Cryptocurrency market is at a market cap of $1.18 Trillion.

Note: This list starts from easy-to-use exchanges and moves towards some of the advanced exchanges.

Binance is the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange that concluded its ICO on 21st July 2017 and raised $ 15 Million. In addition to being a blazing fast exchange, The platform is designed for traders of all levels, i.e., from a beginner trader to an advanced trader. 

The platform offers an inbuilt crypto wallet which is ideal for storing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for a short time. In addition, Binance has an Earn feature to deposit your crypto assets such as Bitcoin or USDT, and earn interest on your holdings.

Since its ICO to date, it has grown tremendously. It has become the leading cryptocurrency exchange globally in trading volume and availability of pairs of a token. It now has over 370+ cryptocurrencies listed on it, which are further provided in over 1300 pairs. Additionally, coin listing is increasing with every passing month.

Binance being a centralized exchange has taken a unique take to expand its business and provides a decent discount for day traders if they use BNB coins. BNB is the native currency of this platform, saving money on buying/selling any coin.

Binance is a global crypto exchange that is ideal for everyone and has the highest liquidity. Users from the USA can signup for Binance.us. Use the table below to pick the ideal Binance exchange for your jurisdiction:

Binance’s fee structure is also unique.

It has a 0.1% standard trading fee that is already relatively less than its peers. You can even reduce your fee further if you pay your trading fee in BNB according to the below-shown structure.

To get started with Binance, you need to register using phone number or email and then follow the steps. Binance is one of the few exchanges that offer mobile apps for iOS and Android, and also an app for Mac.

Read: Binance Review: Features, Fees in 2023 (Beginner’s Guide)

Being using it for a while, I find it too easy to trade cryptocurrency while on the move. However, you can watch this video to learn how to use its mobile app.

They also have aggressive plans like multi-lingual support, mobile apps for both iOS and Android users, the Binance lending program,  and the Community Coin Per Month, etc for more adoption of their platform.

Bybit is a specialized spot and crypto derivatives market exchange. Established in March 2018, Bybit is one of the fastest growing cryptocurrency exchanges, with more than 3 million registered users.

Further, the exchange offers a margin on the Crypto Futures market upto 100x. In case you are looking for an exchange for spot and derivatives trading, then Bybit is the best bet.

The platform is adding quality and trending coins every other day, and it might become the fastest growing crypto exchange of 2023. It is one of the best crypto exchanges which is secure and easy to use. It has an interactive web application and a mobile application for Android and iOS users.

Here are other top features of ByBit –

For beginners, Bybit also has a feature of paper trading.

Read our full review on Bybit here.

KuCoin is another easy and hassle-free cryptocurrency exchange. KuCoin offers many popular and unique coins such as CHR, $KCS, and many others. Just like Binance, they offer a fully functional mobile app for Android and iOS.

To get started with KuCoin, you can deposit any crypto of your choice, ex: BTC, and start trading. I have been using KuCoin for the past two years, and they have constantly been adding extra features.

You can use Kraken to deposit and withdraw funds to any bank account globally. In my experience of using Kraken, bank transfers are quick, and support is excellent.

Overall, Kraken is one secure and trustable exchange that you should check out.

Founded in 2017 and registered in Seychelles, OKX is a reputed and innovative crypto exchange that is available for all users around the globe. Due to regulations, certain jurisdictions like the USA, Singapore, North Korea, and Syria are not allowed on OKX. You can find a complete list on their website homepage.

Here are some of the notable features of OKX :

Many more features of OKX make it one of the best Binance alternatives. If you are a novice or experienced trader, you will find many tools and features to help you maximize your returns. 

Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Singapore, Bitget is an exchange with huge potential. It offers all the bells and whistles you could expect from a global crypto exchange that targets investors and traders. 

Here are notable features of Bitget –