Category: Cryptocurrency News

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Marathon Digital Holdings’ (MARA) Fred Thiel said that Bitcoin price would need to drop 80% for the coin to stop being profitable for the company thus entering a challenging situation. Marathon is not worried about the past week’s dip. During a Bloomberg QuickTake Stock interview, Fred Thiel, Las Vegas-based company’s chief executive officer of Marathon, expressed assurance for Bitcoin’s future and stated that Bitcoin mining is “obviously a very profitable business”  and the company can “ride this market for quite a long time.” Thiel expressed that, factoring operational mining costs (energy plus hosting), Bitcoin’s breakeven rate is roughly $6,500, meaning that the digital coin would need to drop at least 80% for Marathon to face challenging difficulties, so the price of Bitcoin plunging under $60,000 still translates into profits for them. What’s not in that cost, if you would, is the depreciation in the miners that we buy. We depreciate our miners over five years, so the payback on that is less than a year at today’s margins. (…) We are a very small team from an operational overhead perspective, so that gets covered very quickly. Thiel stated those costs are a very comfortable place for the company to be at and believes that Marathon is “one of the most efficient miners in the industry today” because of their agile model that focused on investing in “the miners that produce the maximum return”. Related Reading | Marathon Digital Holdings Reported A 17% Spike In Bitcoin Mining Are Miners Selling Their Bitcoin? Amidst Bitcoin’s bumpy week, speculative comments on social media say that many miners have been selling their BTC the past few days. Bloomberg reporters asked Thiel about the company’s own decision after seeing that the coin dropped below 60k. Thiel responded that they are a long-term holder of Bitcoin and are not planning on selling. We went into the market in January and bought $150 million of Bitcoin and investment has paid off very handsomely for us. We bought it at an average price of $31,000. So Bitcoin where it is today has paid off very nicely. But we intend to be a long-term holder. Thiel shared the company is optimistic about Bitcoin’s future. They firmly believe that “as a limited supply asset” its value and popularity will keep on rising, and the daily headlines “about new use cases and more uses” backs that optimism. He also called the U.S. “a very interesting center for Bitcoin mining” because of its excess of energy, opposed to Europe’s situation, and explained that “Some Bitcoin miners need to sell their Bitcoin holdings just to cover their operations”, not worried about the speculations. Related Reading | Bitcoin Mining Raises Marathon Digital’s BTC Holds To $457M What’s The Future Of Marathon’s $650M Offering After Marathon’s debt increase of $150 million that aggregates to the previous $500 million offering size, Thiel shared the decision was taken in order to have “cash on the balance sheet” and stay in “a position of liquidity” so they can potentially take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace that could accelerate their growth, like buying more miners, miner companies that could grow their mining capacity, or invest on improving their mining operation’s energy efficiency. He further stated that the company is not interested in using the bonds to buy Bitcoin in the open market because they produce it, “unless there are some pricing opportunities” like a $10,000 drop, but they would still be carefully looking into the projections since they want to be “very good custodians” of their shareholders’ capital.

Bitrefill, the startup that offers Bitcoin-funded prepaid cards for different services worldwide, launched a new bill-payment service that allows Salvadorans to pay for multiple basic needs using Bitcoin. The company made the announcement during the three-day conference Adopting Bitcoin carried in El Salvador, which brought together “the Bitcoin and Lightning community”. Bitcoin has been a legal tender in El Salvador since September 7th, but many businesses were not sticking to the requirement of accomodating the digital coin as a payment method into their operations, Bitrefill’s CEO noted. Some have even stated they rather lose sales. Bitrefill aims to offer a solution for businesses so they can easily adapt to using Bitcoin and ease their current worries. Related Reading | There Are More People Using Bitcoin Wallets Than Bank Accounts, Says El Salvador President Bitrefill’s bill-payment method will allow Salvadorians to pay for 150 different services using Bitcoin, including internet, water, insurance, loans, taxes, mortgage, social security services, university expenses, and others. They also allowed payments overseas. 12 services are available at the moment on the website, and they will be adding the rest over the next few weeks. The platform will be using Bitcoins Lightning Network and on-chain transactions, which allows low fees. “El Salvador can now live entire on Bitcoin”, stated the company. The feature is offered in alliance with Puntoexpress, a local payment platform. The payment process was simplified for the users so they only need to provide an email address to redeem a voucher code and receipt. El Salvador, A Bitcoin Land Bitrefill reported they have processed 187,000 purchases in El Salvador during 2021, and 88% come from the country’s capital, San Salvador. There was a peak of 20,000 payments in September when the ‘Bitcoin law’ went into effect. The majority of Salvadorians reportedly use the Chivo digital wallet, an app created by the government, as the preferred payment method for Bitrefill purchases. Bitrefill’s CEO, Sergej Kotliar, stated that they now have headquarters established in El Salvador, a manager in the country, and they are hiring for all roles to cover the company’s needs. He shared his strategy is to be directly involved in the country by being present and maintaining contact with people who provide him with different approaches and information that the company can use to design other services. The CEO thinks El Salvador could become an example model that other countries could follow. The company also stated in a tweet: The most important part is that the 80% of unbanked people can now pay for almost everything online, products, services, bills, from the comfort of their home (or their relatives in the USA). El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin has been a bumpy road. However, the Chivo Wallet surpasses 2.2 million users a few weeks after its launch, gaining around 8,500 new users per hour and reaching 3 million later on. The citizens received $30 each as an incentive for downloading the app, but some reported to Reuters they had problems using it and making withdrawals. The government remains optimistic, although challenges lay ahead. We are yet to see if innovation and good strategies can help close the gap between the government’s vision and the tension around Salvadorians. Related Reading | El Salvador Calls Another Bitcoin Dip With $25 Million Purchase

submitted by /u/AD1AD [link] [comments]

I'm wondering if someone has any insight into what's happened here. I sent an NFT with opensea, here you can see the tx went through. But the NFT never left my wallet and never entered the receiving address. When I try to send it again, it doesn't work. Any idea what happened? submitted by…
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Payment giant MoneyGram International continues to cement its partnership with the Stellar ecosystem. Via an official post, the company announced a new stage for its collaboration by deploying a live cash-in and cash-out pilot initiative in the United States. Related Reading | Stellar To Launch New Europe-Africa Payment Corridor With This Partner After ending its relationship with payment solution company Ripple due to the U.S. SEC lawsuit against its executives, MoneyGram established a collaboration with the Stellar Development Foundation. In a little under 2 months, the partners have taken important steps to improve the company’s payment settlement capabilities. According to MoneyGram, their newest pilot initiative has allowed them to deploy “one of the quickest, most seamless integrations yet”. As of now, participants in the U.S. can make dollar deposits into their wallets at certain MoneyGram establishments and leverage Stellar-based USDC Coin (USDC) to send instant payments abroad. In addition, participants will be able to exchange Stellar USDC for “any cash currency supported” on MoneyGram. The official post claims: With Stellar, MoneyGram enables consumers to seamlessly convert USDC to cash, or cash to USDC – all without requiring a bank account. Since USDC is the world’s fastest growing digital dollar currency, the utility and liquidity of this versatile digital asset will only grow as more wallets and companies join the Stellar ecosystem The company added that this program has made MoneyGram’s payment settlement “instantaneous”, for the first time since its inception. In that way, the company believes that consumers will be able to benefit from an increase in payment efficiency, less risk, and a speed-up fund collection. Unlike its competitor, MoneyGram believes that cash money will be a part of the future as a tool for the unbaked. In that sense, they attempt to create alternatives to cash and expand the access to financial opportunities to everyone. How Does The MoneyGram And Stellar Pilot Solution Works? Per the post, MoneyGram has used Stellar’s resources and documentation for their developer kits and its “well-designed set” of ecosystem protocols (SEPs) with various APIs to create their pilot solution. Related Reading | How Stellar’s $40M Investment In Tala Will Give Millions Access To Financial Services Expected to be publicly available in 2021, Jake Urban, Senior Software Engineer at the Stellar Development Foundation made a step-by-step demonstration on how users can exchange and send money via the MoneyGram solution, as seen in the video below. The company said: By integrating with Stellar, MoneyGram is offering its millions of users a local fiat entry into blockchain, providing those in emerging markets easier access to digital assets than ever before. This pilot is just the first of many steps to create greater access to the world’s financial system for everyone, regardless of where they are. As of press time, XLM trades at $0,32 with a 6% loss in the daily chart.

So is there a service I can safely buy ethereum with usd and be able to transfer to a wallet in less than 24 hours? Some like metamask have that but are limited to $500 a week. ACH’s to exchanges work as you can buy right away but cannot transfer it for 7-10 business days.…
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submitted by /u/frank__costello [link] [comments]